Amazon has come out with an update for their Linux downloader.

Ze file: amazonmp3-1.0-3-i686.pkg.tar.gz

Use pacman -U file if you previously installed the other version, pacman -A file if this is your first one.

The Backstory:

I am a huge fan of the Amazon MP3 store. In order to buy complete albums in one go, however, you need to have their Amazon MP3 Downloader application. When they launched the MP3 store they only had Mac and Windows versions of the client.

Shortly after they announced a linux version and I was overjoyed. Well, the linux version has launched and is only officially available for certain versions of certain distributions: Suse 10.3, Debian 4, Fedora 8, and Ubuntu 7.10. Obviously they don’t get the whole linux thing.

After downloading and digging into the different packages I found that really the only issue is that the application uses some Boost libraries. Since different distributions have different versions of the boost libraries as a standard package, and different naming conventions for the libraries on top of that, they need to distribute them specifically for the platforms.

Arch and Ubuntu are currently on the same rev of Boost (1.34.1) but they name the libraries differently. A few symlinks however and the Amazon mp3 application runs just fine. So I whipped up an Arch pacman package for it.

The file:

Right-click, save as:

amazonmp3-1.0-3-i686.pkg.tar.gz

then pacman -A amazonmp3-1.0-3-i686.pkg.tar.gz as root or sudo it.

It will automatically grab Boost and other dependencies as needed.

Updated 3-10-2008 to version 1.0.3

Today is January 19, 2008 and just when you thought we were safe from Y2K and the horror was all behind us, another computer problem is starting to show itself.

You see Unix-based computers calculate time based on a thing we unix computer people call “the epoch”. The epoch started in January 1970 - just like me. Why they didn’t name it after me I’ll never know, but the way that our computers keep time is by knowing the number of seconds that have passed since January 1970. Its kind of cool to know your age in seconds by typing a command on a computer.

Every time calculation that the computer does relies ultimately on this foundation. So what’s the problem?

Well computers have a limited amount of memory for any one given piece of information. The current generation of computers can handle 32-bits of information. So the highest number that they can count to is 2147483647.

2,147,463,647 seconds from January 1970 is January 19, 2038. When that happens the computer will roll over like an odometer and will show a date of Friday December 13, 1901.

We have 30 years to fix it right? Turns out that we don’t. Computers that do calculations for future dates - such as calculating your 30 year mortgage - will start to have issues today.

There is a nice Wikipedia article that explains this here and even details a problem that cropped up due to this issue in 2006.

I used to think that it would be fitting if I died in January 2038 with the end of the unix epoch - but anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m an 8-bit guy at heart and I should be dead already. They will also tell you that we try get together and celebrate whenever Friday falls on the 13th because we are odd like that.

2038 Bug Web Site

Like may people I have been waiting with baited breath for KDE 4. The release date is upon us but before you decide to jump on the bandwagon I recommend listening to the TLLTS show from Jan 2.

In that show there is an interview with Aaron Seigo and he goes through what is working for the release and what is not. What set the big red flag for me were his comments on Kontact which I rely very much on. From this it sounds like I will be waiting for 4.1. D’oh!

I have switched over to Kontact as my personal PIM and using IMAP resources for calendar and task list. This solution works great for me because I have 3 computers all synced up with tasks via IMAP.

I love dropping emails into the task list. But suddenly that had all stopped working.

After some frustration I finally searched the google for a solution and found this thread. It contains a workaround that worked for me, adding TheIMAPResourceAccount variable to the kmailrc file.

to summarize the workaround, find this section in the kmailrc file:


[IMAP Resource]
Enabled=false
HideGroupwareFolders=false
TheIMAPResourceEnabled=true
TheIMAPResourceFolderParent=.1709087027.directory/INBOX


That big long number there is the account handle. Take that number and add another line in that same section:


TheIMAPResourceAccount=1709087027


Do all this with kmail completely closed of course. Then when you start kmail its all back!

Problems with config files in KDE is nothing new to me. In general I have seen a lack of consistency with KDE application config files. They seem to lose options or change them in a non-gracious manner. On my 3 computers, the kmail config is the same but the kmailrc files are no where near alike.

Now I can drag and drop tasks again, until the next rev!

For work I still use Outlook and I have to say that Outlook 2007 rocks. I wish it ran in KDE.