iOMeGa!

I've been digging through my shite recently and among other things found a box with my old Iomega Zip-100 drive in it. This thing is relatively ancient. I mean this is pre-USB. It connected to the computer via parallel port. In the box also was about a dozen zip disks. And what's more, there was stuff on it that I had absolutely no clue if I had backed up or transferred to any other hard-drives. What to do, what to do. I did NOT want install drivers on my Windows system which is polluted enough as it is. Well, my freshly minted Ubuntu install was up and the computer it was on had a parallel port, so why not? I began looking up info about these parallel port zip drives for use with Ubuntu. I recall a decade ago getting it to work with my Toshiba running Red Hat (I think it was 5) and having to do some insmod's and ppa's and using mtools and the like; basically I remember it requiring some work. After finding an appropriate page I hooked it up.

OMG! Without doing anything else, up pops the ZIP-100 icon on my desktop and a Nautilus window with the contents. I utterly did not expect that. That rocked. I mean, who uses parallel ports to attach devices these days, outside of perhaps a legacy printer much less a block device? It's not so much that I expected it to not work easily but even with Windows I expected having to download some drivers or installs or something. Way to go Ubuntu!

It's amusing to consider how my stack of zip disks and the reader fit can all fit on my keychain via a USB key now. Those things were destined to go the way of the floppy; in fact I think the floppy outlived them. I don't think I ever liked them but for a few years I must admit that they were indeed practical. In light of the MiniDisc, I still think zip disks should never have existed. But for now, I'm just stoked that practically no effort I got it connected and was able to move all of that data off. I now look forward to getting rid of the beasties. The fact that it worked so effortlessly almost made me want to keep it around for amusement. Almost. Now to figure out the most consciencious way to purge it from my possessions.

Linux Layout

Over the course of my life in the Unix/Unix-like world it's every so often occurred to me that there's just gotta be a better directory layout for the beast. 2 things about that: 1) it's messy with items belonging to the same program spread all over the place and mixed in with other applications making it hard to keep track of; and 2) the places programs want to install to are root-owned so adding new programs on my own as a non-root become more work, if not downright frustrating, to put it somewhere else.

WHY!!! is it standard operating procedure in the Linux community to assume that everyone has root?

Anyhow, one of the frustrating things is wanting to try out new packages and having to jump through hoops to get it to work in place without installing files into X different directories. I'd envisioned many times a system where applications were self contained in their own sub-directory tree that can be easily maintained and deleted if desired. There would of course be a convention for searching and sharing dependent libraries and items. I guess this is how it's done in the new OS-X world, good for them.

I recently read about a Linux distro that does exactly that: GoboLinux. It's nearly exactly what I was thinking of and I strongly suspect that it has occurred to the minds of a LOT of Unix/Linux users.

Reading the forums and talkbacks and comments though, it seems like there are a lot of people that are against the idea of re-organizing the Unix layout of /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/lib /opt /etc etc. etc. They seem to fall into 3 camps:

1. Too Windows like... dumbing it down for the n00bs... things of that nature
   
2. There are good reasons for the layout, aint-broke-don't-fix
3. Too set in our ways

Number 1 I dismiss outright... partly because I don't find it really true (being more Windows like) and partly because I think they just like being "in the know" of some esoteric stuff and want a barrier to entry.

Number 2 probably has some valid points but I don't fully buy it. They seem to think Unix was designed to be sensible. There were indeed decisions for the layout but by and large I'm convinced that it grew organically from a day when there were far far fewer applications and when memory and space and speed were at a premium. IMHO, there was really no long-term plan for this organization and this directory structure just doesn't scale well to the number of users and applications now. It's created a mess and all the work on packaging and dependency tracking were grafted on and only serve to obfuscate the basic underlying cause being this antiquated file tree.

Number 3 is probably why we're forever going to be stuck with complicated system management.

Thing of it is, there are already good examples to refute the reasons not to have an alternate organization scheme for applications and files. OS-X is one example it's a BSD based system. But there are other sub-examples in the typical Linux world. Rubygems comes to mind immediately. It's relatively simple (only 1 command organizes the whole thing), gracefully handles multiple versions of the same package, and casual inspection of the tree proves it to be fairly logical.

I may try out GoboLinux at some point, they even have a Live CD which I find impressive. They made a couple of design decisions that I find practical and interesting and possibly even better than what I was originally imagining. The linking of pertinent files to the old tree structure is sensible. I had imagined turning the includes, paths, and library finding features into more of a device such that any attempted access to /usr/local/lib/xxx.so would be handled by the system as a redirect, like the way web pages are. It was just a thought experiment. Links (and the possibly clever use of hiding) seems more practical. I just fear that dependence on the old tree structure will remain if one always assumes it's there.

But again there's the inertia problem. Not enough people would conform to the new layout. The spark of hope is that if developers would make their program installs well enough to easily allow installation to non-standard places, then this may become less and less of an issue. I'd certainly welcome a system where the organization is implicit and not reliant on a myriad of package handlers where there are as many as there are distributions.

Open formats reaffirmation

I very nearly got burned by a proprietary format again. In my recent mission to collect, collate, and back up my data, I stumbled upon an old collection of .SNG files that I had long since thought I had lost (with sadness). These were recorded a DOS Midi sequencing program from back in the day, circa Windows 3.0's intro, when I was a bit more into music and had a Midi box to connect my digital piano to my computer. I used it to record and later transcribe some songs I learned and even managed once to capture some of my dad's old songs he knew from his more serious piano playing days (sadly, didn't record enough of them).

Well, I found these song files and discovered that they are completely obsolete, undocumented and unsupported. I started to sweat a little and spent a good solid night looking for something, someone, anyone(!), to convert them to normal Midi files. Nothing, nada, zip. I checked the Voyetra site the company that made the sequencer and thankfully they're still in business. Posted in their help/faq/support area was a notice that the format was completely unsupported... along with this note:

NOTE:
We understand that a lot of SPG users have created libraries over the years (some with thousands of SNG files) that they need to use in newer systems. These users had a good chance to purchase the discounted. Upgrades that we offered for almost a decade. Unfortunately, at this time "Digital Orchestrator Pro" is a Discontinued product that is no longer available.

I read that to mean "you didn't keep shelling out for our software so tuff shitz for J00". Incidentally I was using a program much older than the one they mentioned here. I was furious and almost fired off a little former customer "feedback". But instead I kept searching and finally found a solution to my problem which ended up being their solution. They basically said I had to install my old DOS program version of the program, get it up and running, load the SNG files in (one by one) and re-save them. WTF! I don't even know where that stuff is from 15 years ago and countless moves. Heck, it came on 5.25 inch floppies and I don't know anyone that has one of those drives anymore. They didn't even have a simple program available that would simply convert or extract the Midi track items out of their own file format. No, you had to use the full blown DOS program, get it working, load the file in, then export it within the program. This blows my mind. As some consolation though, they did at least provide a version of the program (Sequencer Plus Gold) for free on their FTP site, with no manuals.

So I downloaded it and went through the paces to get it installed. Get this, I had to find some 3.5 inch floppies to copy the disk images too because it would only install from disk. Luckily I keep some around and even luckier that I had the foresight to a 3.5 inch drive added to my new computer (combo drive with the little media card readers, pretty cool). Installation wasn't a problem, but getting it to run was a little tricky with the whole WinXP compatibility mode stuff. Eventually, and after some scares, it ran. I spent even more time figuring out how to work it (this was pre standard menu interface) and then correcting for the fact that it was a "newer" version of the program I used and I had to figure out a correction to some of the differences. (It did something special with track 1 and the output Midi files would be incomplete or just empty.) After figuring out the right tweaks to make to the imported songs files, I was finally able to save all the tracks individually to Midi. At last. They even play in Windows Media Player. Hallelujah.

I guess I should have had some kind of inkling back then that I should have taken some steps to future-proof my data. I've lost a lot over the years due to negligence. But back then, the stuff was still relatively new. I was young and foolish and still of the opinion that so long as I kept the data, I'd be in good shape. Hah. Hindsight 20-20. I know that i still have a bunch of Wordstar, Word Perfect, DBase III, and a slew of other stuff sitting in my collection waiting to be salvaged before it really gets too late. Sadly, it will have to wait, because they're all on 5.25 inch floppies. I'm sure I'll find one of these drives somewhere, right? I'm having a similar problem with my zip disks, though I'm less worried about that at the present moment.

Anyhow, the (obvious) lessons to be reaffirmed are:

1. Use open, documented formats, or at least industry standard ones.
2. Always migrate your data (ALL of it) to newer media.
   

Final notes for anyone who happened to have used Voyetra Sequencer Plus:

1. download their Sequencer Plus Gold (sp_gold.zip), unzip it and copy each disk image to a separate 3.5 floppy.
2. the floppies are labelled disks 1, 2, 3, and 4 but this is wrong, it should be "install" disks 1,2 and "driver" disks 1,2. take this into account when going through the install.
3. when installing, select just the sequencer option, not the midi equipment drivers.
4. on WinXP, I set the install and the programs to Windows 95 compatibility
5. When firing up the program, there would be a loading message and then it would just hang there. I thought the bloody thing was broken and did several re-installs... but once unintentionally I let the window sit there and some 15 minutes later or more it actually run.
6. experiment with how to work their menus, eventually you'll get the hang of it. basically to load: F for filemenu; M for mode (click until mode is SNG); highlight .sng file (best to move the .sng files to their song directory beforehand); L for load. To save: same except put it in MIDI mode and S for save. I used the default options when saving to .mid.
7. Prior to saving the songs, make sure you have no real song information in Track 1. Use "J" to "jump" the track to another number
8. For my files, I would delete all tracks but one, and save each track separately, but you not need to do this.