In a word: Moof

Ulysses is a long book. It takes about a year to read, at least when you’re trying to take classes, work, and read a few shorter books in between. But it’s not at all a bad way to spend that much time.

It’s been said by too many intelligent people that “The only reason one reads Ulysses is to say they’re reading Ulysses.” I think this comment is outrageously disparaging of the nature of literature itself. It would be no different if it were “The only reason one reads Shakespeare is to say they’re reading Shakespeare”, or Dickens, or Melville, or any other major author. It suggests that these authors are no better than any other random writer, and that one only reads their works for the pretentiousness. This argument is completely ignorant of the fact that these “great writers” are so named because their works are better than the vast majority of English literature! These authors wrote ambitious, innovative, rich books, and they have been read and enjoyed by countless people. They would never have lasted out of their sheer pretentiousness, or the efforts of some secret literary-cabal, or any reason other than their own merits as works of art.

So ignore these pedantic criticisms, and read Ulysses for whatever reason you want. It’s difficult and it’s long, but with some effort it is readable and quite enjoyable. Just remember that, as Vladamir Nabokov put it, “the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense”. And lots of time.

1. höfði is probably the most difficult single word to translate. I can’t even conclusively determine what part of speech it is. As a noun, it seems to be “headland, promontory, cape”, while as a verb it is more complex and idiomatic. Some other translations favor the simpler meaning of just “head”.
2. Massey Ferguson is Canadian manufacturer of tractors and farm equipment.

The story of my experiences with the ADS Medialink left off in my last post with an excellent solution for streaming music with a 100 line ruby script. The problem remained, though, of how to stream video. The Medialink didn’t like straight avi’s served from the Webrick server, and casualy presents the most unhelpful error messages (”Out of memory”) when you attempt to watch a movie this way. Seeing no obvious reason for why this would be, I kept searching for more information on the device.

It turns out that the ADS Medialink is outstandingly obscure, and is barely mentioned on its manufacturer’s website at all. But in my search I came across a number of similar devices which all seemed to have the same features and this “Syabas middleware”. This, apparently, is the software that runs on the Medialink and many other similar devices. Syabas created this software with fairly complex capabilities, and left manufacturing the actual devices to a handful of electronics companies. A somewhat odd strategy I must say, and certainly the cause of much of my confusion when trying to find information on the software, but once you realized that all these devices are the same they become much easier to deal with.

So with this issue sorted out, it becomes fairly clear that all I needed was software that supports these Syabas-middleware based devices. The first one of these I found for Linux was called wizd, so I pulled it from cvs (they don’t seem to have actual releases put together), fixed a few build problems, and let it run. Streamed a movie to my TV just perfectly. Now if only the computer in my room at school was running, so I could download a movie from it to watch …