T500+ubuntu 11.10 = slow wifi network access

News, November 2012: 

The problem described below went away with the upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 (Linux kernel 3.5).  Thank goodness, and high time.
 
--

There's a bug between the Thinkpad T500 and wireless n transmission.

Bug discussion here, fix here, thanks to Damon:

sudo rmmod iwlagn
sudo echo "options iwlagn 11n_disable=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/disable11n.conf
sudo modprobe iwlagn

Timpanaro

Last year some time (2011), I read the first chapter of Timpanaro's The Freudian Slip (another tr. available here).  At the end of the chapter, I let out a roar of spontaneous laughter, because of the sheer absurdity and over-learnedness of Timpanaro's writing.  Let me explain.

Timpanaro is examining the opening episode of Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life.  In that justly-famous work, Freud narrates a meeting in which a young jewish man fumes about anti-semitism in Austria, ending with a citation from Virgil (Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor (Aeneid, IV 625)) that he gets slightly wrong.  In a virtuoso display of cleverness and psychological interpretation, Freud shows that the error, or slip, was not as random as it seemed, and that all sorts of things about the young man's suppressed hopes and fears can be deduced by careful thought about these errors.  Freud's account is hugely entertaining, real Sherlock Holmes stuff.

What Timpanaro does, at  e n o r m o u s  length, and with staggering erudition, is to argue that the young man's error can be explained by the mechanism of banalization, just like some of the slips of scribes copying manuscripts.  Timpanaro's display of erudition is truly gob-smacking.  (And I use this crude characterisation as a deliberate counterpoint.)

But what is Timpanaro saying, finally?

Timpanaro is saying what Freud himself is thought to have said so very much better: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Timpanaro's display of intellectual fireworks is not just hors de nécessité
in my view.  It is otiose.  The cigar comment makes exactly the same point.  It makes it concisely, clearly, and with humour to boot.

Furthermore, the whole point of Freud's Psychopathology and the Virgil misquotation story is that things one might think are banal may, through analysis, be shown not to be banal at all.  For Timpanaro to say "yes, yes, it's banal" is to miss the most essential point of what Freud is saying.  Whether or not this particular episode was banal or not, Timpanaro is being obtuse in asserting that it was.

Burning the Library of Alexandria, again

The website formerly known as http://library.nu used to provide free downloads of PDFs of published academic books, often in violation of copyright. A few days ago, a consortium of publishers aggressively closed down the site and is seeking to bankrupt the people who ran it, and possibly send them to jail.

At the request of 17 publishing companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, a Munich judge on Monday granted injunctions against illegal posting or sharing of online book files by two websites. Library.nu is alleged to have posted links to hundreds of thousands of illegal PDF copies of books since December 2010, Ed McCoyd, an attorney for the Association of American Publishers, told The Huffington Post. The majority of these uploads allegedly went through the website iFile.it, he said.
The coordinated legal action came after seven months of private investigation and was led by a German publishing association, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, and the International Publishers Association.

The Munich court served Library.nu and iFile.it 17 separate injunctions, representing 10 book titles from each of the publishers. One of the injunctions, which The Huffington Post viewed in a translation from the original German, states that every Web link -- either on iFile.it or Library.nu -- leading to an illegal online copy of one of the named books would result in a fine of 250,000 euros or as much as six months in jail.-- from the Huffington Post, which gives more detail. See also The Verge, Indie Bookspot, etc.

The maxium fine would thus be 17 publishers x 10 books x $250,000 = $42,500,000. 

Instead of going after the library.nu guys, the publishers' coalition should have hired them, and monetized the site as a subscription service for e-books, like iTunes for music.  Shortsighted publishers, locked into yesterday's world-view, a discipline-and-punish approach, and an eagerness for excessive profit.  Predictably enough, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels is amongst the strongest supporters of the pernicious and controversial ACTA legislation that has been widely opposed in street demonstrations across Europe this year (WikiPedia).

It is particularly hypocritical that in their press release, the publishers' conglomerate cites as the first reason for their action, "the interest of the authors who depend on fair compensation for their work."  Academic authors are routinely exploited by commercial publishers, who drive down royalties to single-figure percentages (normally only paid after the publishers have first recouped their own investment), and impose binding contracts on authors that deny them even the basic right to make a single photocopy of their own work, or to pass on their copyright to their legal heirs after death.  Many academic publishers pay no royalties at all.  If academic publishers wanted to offer authors "fair compensation for their work," they should look to their own practices first.

What has annoyed the publishers most, according to their own statement, is that library.nu earned an estimated ten million dollars in advertising revenue.  The period over which this money was made is not mentioned, and one has to query the method by which this estimate was made.  Nevertheless, if it is even partly true, it provides a stinging indictment of the publishers themselves, that they have not had the imagination or creativity to create a business model that could generate this kind of revenue and share it with their authors.

For example, a service like library.nu could be operated as an educational charity, with subscription revenue being shared between authors and charitable educational purposes like research and writing fellowships.  The platform could be used to advertise hard-copy copies of the PDFs, at prices competing with technologies such as the Expresso Book Machine (1 cent per page).  It is a long-established research finding that the distribution of electronic texts frequently boosts the sales of hard copy editions, especially if the advertising is done right (e.g., here, here, and Michael Hart's 1997 report "Electronic Monographs are Great Advertising").

As one commentator has noted, the library.nu archive, estimated at about 400,000 books, still exists.  You can't put the genie back in the bottle.  The whereabouts of the archive is not easily discovered (I don't know it), but it may be in Russia somewhere.  Suing it's creators will not solve the problem in the longer run.

We need to learn two lessons from this:

1. Anyone systematically archiving in-copyright publications needs to watch out!
2. In the modern, networked world, the true price of a publication is the value to a person of a clean conscience. 
   In principle, all books, films and music are and will be available for free download, for anyone willing to break the law of copyright.  But many people do not wish to live like that, and would willingly pay a reasonable price in order to have a clean conscience.  THAT is the future market value of an electronic cultural asset, not a figure calculated on the basis of production costs, shareholder returns, or authors' royalties.  

So, what is the price of a clean conscience?  It's hard to say, but on a per-book basis, I would say it is quite low.  It seems to me that Netflix has it about right: $7.99 per month in the USA, £5.99 per month in the UK, for unlimited online streamed film watching.  Lovefilm.com in the UK is offering unlimited streamed films at £4.99 per month.  

There are two interesting things about Netflix and Lovefilm's business model.  First, the low prices.  Second, the subscription model.  The subscription gives the company a steady, predictable income from month to month, which is a major gain.  A more-or-less captive group of customers, most of whom will not frequently change their subscriptions.

It has been rumoured for quite a while that Amazon is thinking about a subscription service for downloadable books, and with their Kindle service they certainly have the infrastructure for this.  The kno.com service for academic course books does something along these lines: e-textbooks for about 50% of the hard-copy prices, but with content enrichment (online features for note-taking, etc.).  It's not subscription - nobody is there yet - but it's close.

See also:

• http://e-library-free.blogspot.com/
• http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html

Scribal abbreviation 2

Here's another instance of the same abbreviation from the same scribe, proving HI's conjecture about it being a ring.

Scribal abbreviation in Sanskrit manuscript

Here is an extract from folio 4r of MS Baroda 12489 (includes the Carakasaṃhitā), showing इति iti followed by a ह ha with a loop to the right of the glyph.  A bit like the loop on the syllable ॐ oṃ. This is probably an abbreviation for the phrase इति स्माह भगवानात्रेयः iti smāha bhagavān ātreyaḥ that occurs as the second phrase in most chapters.

Here is the phrase from the next chapter, f.5v of MS Baroda 12489.


Baroda 12489 dates from AD 1816/17.
 
Scribal abbreviations are not as common in Sanskrit manuscripts as they are in medieval European ones.

colophons, names of text portions in Sanskrit manuscripts

I believe that David Pingree introduced the term "post-colophon" into Indian manuscript studies when he wrote his catalogue of the Bodleian Chandra Shum Shere jyotiṣa collection.

Am I right that nobody outside Indological circles (and those influenced by indologists in the last few decades) uses the term "post-colophon"?

Here's a grid of usages:

Key: Pingree (various catalogues, starting 1984)
Tripathi: C. Tripathi, Cat. of Jaina MSS at Strasbourg
Wikipedia: see here and links.
X: no special term


Description      Pingree       Tripathi         Wikipedia (and non-indologists)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Final verse
of text                       X                     X              explicit

iti...samāptam        colophon      colophon       X (or colophon?)

saṃvat phrase       post-            Scribal           colophon
                               colophon       Remarks

after saṃvat
phrase                    X                  post-             X
                                                     colophon

 

Pratapaditya Pal uses "post-colophon" in his 1978 Arts of Nepal book
(http://tinyurl.com/37n8f2z), in the same sense as Pingree.  Perhaps
that's where David got it?

Copyright and Open Access

[Links updated 2018]

Never sign away the copyright of your own writings.  Instead, grant the publisher a license that gives them what they want, and assigns to you the rights that you want.  Here are such licenses, in several languages:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20170704083507/http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/

For background on the Zwolle principles, see here:

• http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/crews/01crews.html
• http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/zwolle_principles.php (fetched from the waybackmachine)

and see also the SURF initiative, on Copyright Management for Scholarship:

• http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/ (fetched from the waybackmachine)

[Added 2018:]

• Author Rights & the SPARC Author Addendum

ibus bug fix

Typing Sanskrit in Ubuntu Linux is normally very convenient, using the built-in ibus and m17n systems.  You can write देवनागरी or romanisation (devanāgarī) with just a switch of the keyboard input method. (Thansiang's input method for romanisation input is effective and convenient, but has to be added manually because it isn't included in the main m17n distribution.)

However, with the update to Ubuntu 11.10 in October 2011, a bug was introduced that spoiled typing for several Asian languages, for users of the standard Ubuntu Unity and Gnome windows managers.  The symptom was that as you typed a space, the letters around the cursor jumped into the wrong order. 

The November solution by fujiwarat fixed things.  But it hasn't yet made its way into the standard Ubuntu updates.  At the time of writing, you have to update your ibus installation to version 1.4.0 manually. One way to do it is here, kindly provided by Alex Lee.

March 2012 Update (gnome-shell)

Brandon Schaefer has fixed this ibus/unity bug (thanks!), but the fix will only be released in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Panglin.  Schaefer asks Oneiric users to wait a couple of months, since,

The changes would be to large and would require changes 

in both unityand nux. 

This is good for the future, but isn't great news for anyone who needs to type in an Asian language during the next two months.

And since ibus and the patch have moved along since the posting above, on 14 Jan, Alex Lee's instructions don't work any more.

The deb files that I made for myself in January, following Alex Lee's instructions are available here for a few months:

•  ibus1.4.0 for Oneiric 

Fetch the six files, put them in a directory, and run the following two commands in a terminal, in the directory containing the deb files:

• sudo apt-get remove ibus 
• sudo dpkg -i *.deb
• sudo apt-get install m17n

Log out and in for good measure, though it may not always be necessary.

Hope it works for you.  No guarantees, and no further help available from me, I'm afraid.   There has been a post suggesting that this does not work under unity (see here).  More testing required.  But it works fine for me under gnome-shell, and probably the other non-unity interfaces.

April 2012 update

All the above problems are solved in the 12.04 Precise Pangolin release of Ubuntu.  Just go with the defaults.

Furthermore, Pangolin's release now includes the input of Sanskrit roman transliteration as standard, using the IAST standard.  It's very nice.

Oneiric Ocelot upgrade woes

My main desktop machine got in a terrible mess during the Oneiric update.  Could have been my fault - I started the update and then left the machine for two days.  When I got back to it, it was frozen, and on hard reboot it wouldn't boot.  Finally, I got it back by booting from a USB stick and then using chroot to get a pseudo-login as root on the hard disk.

• http://karuppuswamy.com/wordpress/2010/06/02/how-to-chroot-to-ubuntu-using-live-cd-to-fix-grub-rescue-prompt/

Having a network connection, that enabled me to clean up the system with dpkg and apt-get, so I fetched all the latest versions of everything and updated and upgraded tidily.  But still couldn't get a boot because of an obscure network problem with connecting to the bus.  Finally solved by these (weirdly written) instructions:

• http://journalxtra.com/2011/10/upgrade-oneiric-ocelot/

Now up and running, amazingly.


--

and another thing...

The compiz grid feature developed a fault about putting a window on the top-right of the screen.  Solution is here: https://launchpad.net/~lbrulet-8/+archive/ppa

Ubuntu Evince menu fonts turn to garbage

Grr, recurrence of the old, old problem that the Evince menus turn to little squares like this:

Solution:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8216711&postcount=4, 
  that says:

sudo mv /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince ~/
sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor restart

Simplest Sanskrit XeLaTeX file

Input:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainfont[Script=Devanagari]{Nakula}

\begin{document}
Your Devanāgarī looks like this:  आसीद्राजा नलो नाम and your romanized stuff looks like this: āsīd rājā nalo nāma.  
\end{document}

Output:

You can get the Nakula font (and its twin, Sahadeva) from John Smith's website, http://bombay.indology.info

Guṭkās

Sanskrit booklets, or guṭkās, contain several works collected between one set of covers.  They were presumably copied sequentially by their owners as a vade mecum of useful knowledge.

Biswas 0891 (available digitized, no. 090393 at http://www.jainlibrary.org/menus_cate.php) is a series of catalogues of MSS in Jaina libraries in Rajasthan.  Volume 2 (1954), 73 ff. has a section that describes 222 such booklets, and lists their contents in detail.  A study of these particular collocations of texts would provide a valuable insight into reading habits, the circulation of texts and knowledge, and the personal tastes and obsessions of pre-modern Indian readers.

printer driver

Ubuntu, HP LJ 1300 - use the Gutenprint or the Foomatic/pxlmono driver.  Not CUPS or HPLIP.

Greedy grepping

to make a regular expression not greedy, append ?

Gleick

I'm reading Gleick's The Information.  Very enjoyable and interesting romp through loosely-connected stories in the history of science from Babbage to Shannon and beyond.  I've very much enjoyed all of Gleick's books.

Viruses and bacteria

Why computer "virus"?  The metaphor would surely work better with the image of a computer "bacterium," wouldn't it?  A bacterium can be eradicated, unlike most viruses.  Bacteria can be contagious, and can multiply cells and colonize a particular location.

Yes, "Computer bacterium" from now on, I think.

Natty tweaks

Essential tweaks for 11.04, from Webupd8

Ubuntu / dropbox

 If you get the warning

Unable to monitor filesystem
Please run "echo 100000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches" and restart Dropbox to correct the problem.

here's one way to increase the default value of /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches at startup, so one doesn't have to do it manually at every boot.

As root (or with sudo), create a file

/etc/sysctl.d/30-inotify.conf

with the contents

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100001

Reboot, or run "sudo service procps start".


That's it!

devanagari.sty / xelatex clash

devanagari.sty uses the LaTeX2e font conventions (of course).  Today I had an old document using devanagari.sty that I'm just converting to XeLaTeX and UTF8.  It was fine, except that the document's English parts were in the chosen polyglossia font, while the table of contents was in cmr.

That was because of a statement

\def\DNrmdefault{cmr}

used by \NormalFont in devanagari.sty

The answer was to define \englishfont

\newfontfamily\englishfont{IndUni-P}

and then redefine \NormalFont as follows:

\DeclareRobustCommand\NormalFont{\dn@penitshape\englishfont}

In the end, this is all transitional nonsense, of course, since I will get rid of devanagari.sty and use XeLaTeX's internal facilities for the Devanagari in a day or two.

Hyphenating Sanskrit in roman transliteration

%!TeX program = xelatex
%
% Thanks to Yves Codet for the first version of this test file, and to Yves
% and Jonathan Kew for the hyphenation tables
% for Sanskrit (hyph-sa.tex):

%

% This file exemplifies the case where some Sanskrit is embedded in a
% mainly-English document, but the Sanskrit words are appropriately
% hyphenated. The Sanskrit words are in the argument of the
% \textsanskrit{} command.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}

\setdefaultlanguage{english}
\setmainfont{Charis SIL}

\setotherlanguage{sanskrit}
\newfontfamily\sanskritfont{Charis SIL}

\textwidth=0.5cm
\parindent 0pt

\begin{document}

Sanskrit hyphenation:
\par\smallskip

\textsanskrit{manum ekāgram āsīnam abhigamya maharṣayaḥ |\par}

\bigskip

English hyphenation:
\par\smallskip

manum ekāgram āsīnam abhigamya maharṣayaḥ |

\end{document}