Alex Radzishevsky homepage

…yeah, I heard many stories about how Linux has improved during last N years, and how user-friendly it is now, and that it will soon rule the world (and of course that Windows sucks and must d1e).

Wanna the real world story? Here we go.
I installed a fresh copy of the brand new Ubuntu 10.04 64bit. Right after install, I copied a small Linux program and tried to run it in the terminal. Look:

aradzish@ubuntu:~/Desktop/linux$ ls -la
total 13584
drwxrwxrwx 2 aradzish aradzish     4096 2010-08-31 02:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 aradzish aradzish     4096 2010-08-31 02:01 ..
-rwxrw-rw- 1 aradzish aradzish      212 2010-02-16 07:43 awt2_gui
-rwxrw-rw- 1 aradzish aradzish   212117 2010-08-30 06:13 awt2_gui-bin
-rwxrw-rw- 1 aradzish aradzish  2542140 2010-08-28 07:05 libQtCore.so.4
-rwxrw-rw- 1 aradzish aradzish 10494484 2010-08-28 07:22 libQtGui.so.4

aradzish@ubuntu:~/Desktop/linux$ ./awt2_gui-bin
bash: ./awt2_gui-bin: No such file or directory

What??? WTF?

I immediately discussed this issue with someone experienced in Linux and I was told that it’s natural since the program I try to run uses 32-bit libraries, and that I need to install a special package ‘ia32-libs’ to be able running 32-bit applications. So I did, I run

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
and got my app working.

Now tell me, do  you seriously think that normal user can know this? Do you seriously think that with all this crap Linux is really ‘user-friendly’?

P.S. I was additionally told that Ubuntu is the least crap of all existing Linux craps… Funny, huh?

Today I had to deal with a device that can be connected to PC via Linux only (as there is no drivers for Windows). So, to be able working with it first I installed VMWare Virtual Machine under my Windows 7 host PC, then installed Ubuntu under this VM. However, to conveniently access the device using SCP protocol I was recommended to use WinSCP that is Windows tool. So, I installed Wine under Ubuntu and then installed and run WinSCP under Wine. In a conclusion, what I actually did is: I run Windows utility under Windows emulator running on Ubuntu which itself run under virtual Machine on Windows 7 host PC.

…Isn’t that crazy?

Kiwi

Audio Watermarking Tools (AWT) of www.audiowatermarking.info are shareware utilities for embedding (and extracting) short data payload within audio streams (wave files). The tools are distributed as a package of Win32 console utilities running on Microsoft Windows 7/Vista/XP/NT/2000/Server; x86 and x64 versions of the binaries are available. The package does not require any installation and is ready to use right after unpacking. The package consists of encoder (watermark embedding tool) and decoder (watermark extraction tool).

AWT package is free to try. Evaluation (demo) version of AWT with limited functionality is available and can be downloaded absolutely free. Despite its limited functionality, the demo package offers enough flexibility to perform a variety of performance tests so that you can decide whether AWT suits your needs before buying a fully functional version.

New photos  from travels to Greece and USA (Chicago) have been published in the photoalbum

I was visiting Korea during short business trip (3 days).

My impressions: very technologically developed country (WiMax, DVB, computerized toilets everywhere), very dense populated, a lot of cars and very tight traffic with many jams, very polite people.

Here is a photo made in one company office.

Toilets room, one Korean company office

By the way, here is a cutting I made from a magazine “Weekend Journal”, that I found in my seat in plane from Korea. Sweet.

If you need to make a request via HTTP from Windows/*nix command line and obtain server response (example: you want to run some remote script via HTTP and then process its answer), there is a special utility exactly for this purpose. The utility called WGet:

http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

In command line run: wget.exe http://somesite.com/script.php
As a result, server response will be stored in file. You can download files via HTTP in the same manner. Very convenient and useful tool.

It’s my pleasure to announce a preview stage of free music recognition service – AudioTag.info.

AudioTag.info — is a free music-recognition service. It allows you to identify almost any unknown piece of music quickly and easily. Its use is very simple: you upload a short audio fragment or an entire song, the robot analyzes it and provides you with the information about the track title, artist name, album title, etc. Your audio fragment can be in almost any file format and of almost any quality (aurally recognizable, of course) — it can be an MP3 file downloaded from the Internet or a short recording made with your old tape recorder and stored as a low-quality .WAV-file.