Xoom with QR code by Barcode Scanner

And #2: it allows me to take a picture of a barcode or QR code and it tells me whatever it represents. For barcodes on books, it will take me to Amazon or Librarything, for DVDs it can take me to IMDb and for QR codes that represent a URL, it opens them in the browser. So, like this:

Shooting a QR Code on the Xoom with the Desire

Of course, I would not have this problem if Android devices simply supported multiple logins, instead of being strictly personal devices. I even considered getting a Windows 7 tablet instead of the Xoom (I was considering the Acer Iconia) but the battery life is dreadful and frankly, Windows 7 isn’t quite there for tablet use. Another way to avoid the problem would not to pick a geek for a wife, or not have a wife at all, but how would I have taken that picture above, then?

Shooting shooting the Xoom with the Desire with the Desire S

(don’t ask)

At any rate, I like QR codes and the Barcode Scanner app, since it beats all the alternatives for speed and ease of use. I don’t like tablets being personal devices. Come on Google, get with the program and make sure the next version of Android allows me to simply select my identity when using the device.

Oh and sorry to Monty Python, for stealing their joke from the excellent Lost World of Roiurama sketch.

Getting PostgreSQL up and running on the virtual machine works the same as doing it on a real machine, so I’ll assume that’s not a problem. The tricky part is getting to the PostgreSQL server on the guest from the host (and the rest of the network). To get that working, you need to follow these steps:

Now, you can just start up the virtual machine whenever you need a PostgreSQL server and just access it from the host as if it were running locally. No services installed on the host, no files cluttering your file system and if you need a PostgreSQL server elsewhere, or you just want to bring the whole thing over to another location (data and all), it’s a simple as moving the .vdi file.

One more tip: before installing anything else on a virtual machine, but after installing the OS, clone the VirtualBox. That way, if you decide to do things differently, or if you need more virtual machines, you don’t have to go through the OS setup process again.

When I drop my properly standardized ID3-ed MP3’s and FLACs into my player, I get all sorts of interesting effects. And before you start, we’re talking about my own CD’s here. Ripped to FLAC for playback on my media center and MP3-encoded for convenient use on my smartphone and other devices. Depending on where you live, that may be illegal or borderline illegal, but where I live, it’s legal - at least at the time of writing. At the worst, we could be having a discussion about the legality of mp3-encoding.

For example, Android has no trouble finding and indexing the files. But the database it constructs decides to ignore the albumartist field (or any of the many variants of it, I filled all of them with the correct values). So, a “Various artists” album will be assigned some random artist that happens to be on there as the album artist. Also, Android happily ignores any sorting metadata your added and will sort Kate Bush under ‘K’ for ‘Kate’, unless you don’t mind seeing her name rendered as “Bush (Kate)” everywhere, which would also mean searching for “Kate Bush” gets you nowhere. Wonderful.

Windows Media Player is no better. It doesn’t have the two problems Android does, but Media Player can’t deal with anything that Microsoft didn’t invent, with (thank heavens) the exception of MP3. But FLAC, Ogg, Ape, you can just take that and you know what. Luckily there’s some third party plugins that help out a little but if you like to be able to see how long a track will run, you’re still shit out of luck. Another nice one that WMP pulls is it’s inability to read the disc number or act on it. So, if you have an album that consists of two discs (or worse, an audio book that consists of 12), WMP will sort all the #1 tracks to the top, followed by all the #2’s, etc. Awesome, right?

I’m not even going to waste more than two words on iTunes. Network shares. You know what I’m talking about and Steve Jobs should have whatever klutz is responsible for that piece of junk shot at the next Apple conference - I guarantee most thumbs up for the video ever.

Now Songbird is better in all these ways. But Songbird breaks if you run it on anything other than a standard desktop box. And I’m talking about Songbird for Windows/Linux here, because Songbird for Android just uses whatever Android hands it, so no need to try that. I did; I wept; I uninstalled. Try running Songbird on a system with enlarged fonts however (almost required on a system that runs 1920×1080 on a TV 10′ from your face) and the interface completely goes to hell. Of course you can scale the interface of Songbird itself, but that means it becomes the only legible application on the box and I’d like to be able to use some others too.

I’m aware of the possibilities I’d have if I turned my entire media box to Linux, but I don’t have a way to view BluRay on Linux, so there’s that - I’m stuck with the (legal) copy of Windows I have running and I still need a decent solution for my smartphone, tablet, desktop PC and laptop as well. Apparently, the time of developers is best spent writing glass-simulating bling for desktops, rewrites of the Control Panel, spinning cover art and other essentials. Actually doing something that would help find and organize your music is an afterthought at most, makes sense, right?

Now, if you try to change the password for your own account, you have to enter the old password before you can change it into a new one. But here’s the thing: for other users, even admins, there’s no such requirement. Of course it makes sense that you don’t have to enter their old password, how would you even know? But it doesn’t require you to enter your own either.

So, anyone at your PC, while it’s logged in under any admin account, can go and change the password of any other admin account. They can then go and log off, log on as the other admin with the new password and change the password of the account they were logged in as before. Log off again, log on as the original admin and you have total control of the machine. Of course, there’s some tracks left behind - for one, the other admin account no longer has its original password and there’s no easy way to fix that.

But it’s even worse, you don’t even need two admin accounts on the PC to have this problem. Any logged in admin can just go and promote any old user to admin. And creating a new user is trivial too. And by doing that, you can just clear your tracks by removing the temporary new admin once you’ve changed the password of the logged in original admin.

So, finding a PC logged in as an admin allows you to assume total control over it and the requirement to enter the old password to enter a new one is nothing but a wax nose… Just add that to the list of why Linux is more secure. The only good news here is that you can fix losing your password as long as you’re logged in as an admin, any admin.

Not exactly a quote, more like plagiarism if you ask me. Especially considering they don’t mention the source or the name of the author of the original. And I seriously doubt Randall Munroe ever saw a kickback. But of course Rik van Schagen is welcome to drop me a line if I’m wrong (or who knows, the joke wasn’t an xkcd original either, though I was unable to find older versions of it).

Interestingly, they didn’t even seem to quite get the joke. The point of the comic seems to be that, if you repeat a test twenty times and you compare their p-value to a (common) significance level of 0.05, you’re likely to get about one result causing you to reject the null hypothesis. Or, the E-value of the series is 20 x 0.05 = 1. If you’re interested, Wikipedia has an explanation in more detail. By moving the (p<0.05) result to the end instead of having it sit somewhere in the middle like in the xkcd original, they suggest the scientists stop as soon as they get a positive, but the joke is about the total number of colors tested combined with the general misunderstanding (or simple omission) of the scientist's qualification of p>0.05.

What’s frustrating in all this, is that it’s really hard to get any good facts to base an opinion on. Am I pro or con? Not quite sure. But very recently, I read an interesting editorial (Dutch paper newspaper, NRC Handelsblad) with a viewpoint that changed my outlook.

Clearly, we need to move away from fossil fuel, that’s a given since it’s starting to run low. We could move to burning biomass, but with the whole carbondioxide situation that doesn’t seem like the way forward either. Such technology is great to keep other technology around that depends on it, like airplanes and other machines that require combustion engines and won’t run on hydrogen - for now. But for our other (mostly electrical) energy needs, I think we need to look elsewhere. So, nuclear or truly renewable sources like wind, wave or solar. Or possibly not quite as renewable but seemingly endless sources like hydro or geothermic? Or even invest in exotic and futuristic like fusion or space-based solar?

Since I prefer my feet on solid ground, I’ll leave fusion and spaced-based energy sources up to futurists and those willing to spend their fortune on projects that pursue it. I don’t mind some tax money going to ITER or ESA for research, but I’m not counting on them to solve our energy crisis anytime soon. And hydro, wave and geothermic won’t provide sufficient energy for all of us, so they’re only partly a solution. And in the case of hydro, some complex humanitarian and ecological issues come into play.

To me, the choice is mostly between nuclear and renewable. Or rather, between using nuclear until we perfect renewable energy on the one hand and skipping nuclear altogether on the other. And then problem is back to arguments about nuclear. Nuclear is bad because of the dirty mining of uranium. Nuclear is bad because energy plants are a really nice cover for producing the most horrific weaponry known to mankind. Nuclear is bad because of the radioactive waste, transport, the (im)possibility of safe storage and the time it will be around for are all serious issues. Nuclear is bad because of the vulnerability to disaster, like we’ve seen in Japan. Even though the effect on most people in the area will be little worse than the added risk of cancer of a secondhand smoker, it’s not a risk they chose for themselves.

But for all those arguments, fairly convincing counterarguments exist. One could argue that with a little research, we should be able to take uranium (and therefore plutonium) out of the mix in the long run. You have to invest in technology to perfect it, right? And transport, storage, disaster safety are all problems that can be solved if we throw enough money at it. Also, nuclear disasters are terrible, but are they really unacceptable when you look at the bigger picture? It’s not like coal or oil don’t hurt and kill thousands on a yearly basis.

But this is where an important argument enters the discussion. Due to its complicated nature and the high risks involved, nuclear energy is likely to remain a technology that can only be succesfully exploited in the hands of either governments or extremely large, international corporations. And even if you live in a democracy, or hold some of the shares, we all know that organizations of that scale tend to have a will of their own. And even if you manage to downsize the technology itself, the means for producing it will always be in the hands of the few.

Personally, I’d prefer a means of generating energy that would not require a government of multi-billion euro corporation to run it for me. I don’t have to run it myself per se, but knowing anyone could start a small company tomorrow and start producing energy with readily available technology and resources is a very safe idea. Also, it gives me greater confidence that a capitalistic approach will actually work, since issues like “too big to fail” and limited access to very limited resources do not play into it. Same goes for fusion using He3 from the moon, for that matter. Or solar on the moon.

I don’t see nuclear evolving to a scale where you or I could start an energy plant tomorrow, but with solar and wind, this is already a possibility and it will only get easier and better from here on out. So, instead of getting lost in endless discussions about the ecological and security issues, I prefer to make choice based on a far more important principle: I prefer energy technology that is most freely available and is likely to be the most democratic in its nature. And right now, wind and solar seem to have all the right cards, with some support from hydro, waves and geothermic wherever that works.