Bluetooth issues

When I bought my Dell Studio 17 laptop, I got this nice little bluetooth mouse with it. At least it looks nice. The mouse self-identifies as a "Dell BT Travel Mouse", but from what I've been able to dig up, it is a rebranded Logitech mouse.

Unfortunately, the support for Logitech devices in Linux is spotty at best. You'd think that something as basic as a mouse would just work, but if there is any constant throughout the history of computing, it is the unending failure of hardware drivers.

I can't get it to connect to my laptop.

Currently, I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) on this machine, and I'm pretty sure I did have it working on some older version. So it'd seem that there has been some regression in the bluetooth stack since then. As it is, I can browse devices and try to connect to the mouse, and after a long wait the laptop claims to have bonded successfully. The mouse is still in discovery mode, though, and any further poking yields a cryptic error message.

Somewhere I found a link to the Blueman project, and it does provide a much nicer and cleaner interface to the bluetooth devices. Since it's also using the same BlueZ backend as the regular bluetooth applet, I'm not having any more success.

The most helpful thing I've gotten out of it is this error message:

error (/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/blueman/gui/manager/ManagerDeviceMenu.py:523)
err (DBusException(dbus.String(u'Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.'),),)

I'm guessing that the problem is with Logitech not following standards (not sure there are standards for bluetooth mice, though). Either way, it's frustrating. Perhaps one day the driver support for desktop devices will catch up in Linux, but right now using Linux on a regular desktop machine is still a very frustrating experience...

If there is anyone out there with ideas for how to get this thing working, I'd be happy to hear from you.

On Spotify

Here in sweden, we have this new service for streaming music called Spotify. The basic idea is quite genial: Instead of slowly building a music collection, you simply pay a monthly fee, alternatively listen to occasional ads, and get access to a large collection from which to stream music on demand.

First of all, this is something that should have been created when Napster first showed up. It's easier to use from the consumer perspective, and it is a way to monetize music that actually seems to work.

Unfortunately, after using it for a few months, I don't like it.

Now, I still think the basic idea is a good one from the record companies' perspective and I am somewhat surprised that they are not all over it. The fact that they aren't underscores how dead the industry of manufacturing music really is. There's just no way they will be able to find a business model now, since they are so wedded to their current one, and that one has been dead for years.

Buying CDs is inconvenient. No one listens to music directly from a CD now, everything has to be moved to MP3 or something equivalent to be played back from pocket devices or media centers. The only reason to buy a CD is the lack of a viable alternative. Buying overpriced singles online a la iTunes clearly isn't that alternative: So now, we have cheap, unlimited reproduction of music enabling someone to actually have a music collection containing all music, yet the asking price for music keeps going up. Sorry, but the value of copies of music has gone down, drastically, and will never go up again.

Back to Spotify. So, this software solves the problem of charging for single songs: you don't. What you charge for is access to the service, and through the service, any music you are interested in is available. In theory. And this is the first area where Spotify breaks down. See, since the record companies don't understand that the world has changed, they don't understand Spotify. They are horrified at the idea of single songs losing their value. They don't want monthly subscriptions. They don't want their songs on Spotify. Right now, since they are desperate, they are allowing some songs to appear on the service. Not understanding that the whole point is to have everything available. Thus, the value is lost: Sure, there is some music on there, but most of the time when searching for an artist, all you find is one or two songs off some compilation album, and the rest of the time you either don't find them at all or just a few of their albums.

The second problem with Spotify is that it's still part of the old model. These days, since distribution is simple, music is abundant. You can find a new artist every day, online. And none of them need to be connected to a label. But on Spotify, all you can find is label artists. Most often only the most trite and commercialised of them, as well. What Spotify ought to do (in a perfect world) is let anyone upload their music to them. That way, everyone has instant access to a perfect index of all the world's music, as it is being created. This is what the technology dictates should happen, and I am sure we will see it happen eventually.

A third problem with it is that the software simply isn't very good. It's a lot worse than last.fm at dealing with the metadata and its category system is laughable. Hopefully these are problems that will be fixed eventually, but the best solution would be for them to open up their API to third parties, so that there will be several clients with different interfaces and features to choose from.

Spotify is good for showing what is possible, that the only value of music is in one gigantic collection of all music, and that there still are viable business models in connection to music. It fails because of the old industry which refuses to die.

After having access to Spotify for a few months, I barely use it anymore. I'll turn it on occasionally to look for some piece of music I've heard about, but most of the time it turns out to not be available. The software is useless for discovering music in its current form, and all the toplists and recommendations are terrible. Plus, it really detracts from the experience when music you've listened to and put into playlists disappears for no apparent reason beyond the compulsive need of the record companies to assert their power.

I'm looking forward to the inevitable Bittorrent client which downloads music on demand, connected to the last.fm service for recommendations and metadata.

Introspection

There is the question of what to write here. I'm not really sure there's much I want to say, or am qualified to talk about. I mean, it's easy to have an opinion, but actually mustering a coherent essay on a topic takes more energy than just saying something sucks.

I guess that's the rub: I don't want to just be adding to the noise out there. I want to write something original, something interesting. Something I would like to read myself.

This is certainly not it. First entry, and already I'm off to a bad start. See, now I'm about to erase this, and of course that won't be the first time I've done that. Clearly if I set my standard too high, there won't ever be anything here since everything will have been erased before reaching the stage where it's actually worth reading. Can it really be true that I need to write something mediocre in order to write at all? That is a depressing thought.

There are so many topics to write about! How about writing about facebook culture and what a strange phenomenon it is that I'm now spending a not insignificant amount of time reading about the boring life of some girl I knew in first grade, or the divorce of some colleague at a former workplace, or some other piece of information that I don't need and don't want. I could write an article about the alchemist I met at a party one time, who grew up in the same tiny town as me. Or about intellectual property and how software patents are destroying the world. I could write about how the hunt for child pornography has become the witchhunt of our age and how difficult it is to even have a rational discussion about the balance between privacy and surveillance because as soon as someone brings up child pornography, the discussion is over. I could talk about religion, and how much I dislike it (and why). Maybe I should talk about racism and the cultural clashes in swedish society? Then there's popular media, I could write pages about movies I liked or the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica. Maybe I should write about programming, or open source? That, at least, is a subject with which I am familiar. I could write about learning new languages (as in, natural languages), such as my current attempt at learning enough Cantonese to carry a conversation. There's always politics and economic theories, though I'm no expert and probably terribly wrong most of the time.

Of course, what I most yearn to do is simply write; not about things but actual new content. By that I mean, short stories. Novels. Fiction of varying sorts. Little tales that don't speak about reality and the now, like most of the content out there. So much of what you read online is simply documenting the now, that I'm not sure there's much I can add to it that hasn't already been said more eloquently by someone else.

One problem I have with writing online is that it is so easy to publish. Write, write, write, and then click! Published. The first draft ends up being the finished work. No editing, no thinking, no independent review before it's all out there, dangling free for everyone to see. Who can produce something worth reading without any revision? Yes, I know. I could hit 'Save Now' instead of 'Publish Post', but that would require some form of discipline, and I have none. Once I'm done with a session, I'm done with that article. Of course I'll probably look at it again later, but mostly to scoff at my own rambling idiocy. The few times I've actually ended up saving instead of publishing, it has been because what I've written is so terrible there's no way I'd ever actually publish it. So I just end up deleting it some time later.

This kind of shit is exactly the stuff that I want to avoid. Fuck. I guess I'll just hit 'Publish Post' since there's nothing else on there right now, and go back and delete this crap once I've written something actually worth publishing.