I've been trying to figure out how to get a perfect CD rip on my mac. The problem in a nutshell is that ripping CDs is "unreliable", in other words, it is impossible to be sure when you rip a CD that you have the correct digital data. How good a copy you get depends on your drive and the software you use.

Why care? In the most extreme cases you can literally get blips and pops in your MP3 file. This might occur even with a totally unscratched disc. But more likely you will get a subtle degradation of quality which will be noticeable if you have a good sound system, and that sucks. So.

The gold standard in secure ripping is Exact Audio Copy, a Windows-only program and likely to stay that way forever. Why? Because you can run it in boot camp or Parallels or whatever. If you want to use EAC definitely follow a how-to guide such as Exact Audio Copy Guide. EAC does not come preconfigured properly.

If you must use a Mac-native program, check out Max, and have look online in how to set it up for maximum secure mode, because it doesn't come in that mode by default. Max was originally written more as a transcoding program (converting between formats) but now supports a linux-originating cd ripper called cdparanoia. Audiophiles still prefer EAC to cdparanoia, and I'm not going to tell them they're wrong, even though they are occasionally insane and overly conservative, so I would say stick with EAC.

Oh yeah, and I would also say, rip into FLAC format. Then, use something like Max to convert from FLAC to MP3 320 Kbps (using LAME "insane" mode) for import into iTunes, use on your ipod/phone/mp3 player, etc. In practise it's unlikely you will be able to hear the difference between a lossless format and a 320 mp3. If you REALLY need to you can use Apple Lossless until Apple supports FLAC, but I like FLAC better as it's the open standard and everyone uses it. Archive the FLAC files for the future. You get to keep a perfect copy but not waste GBs of space on your mobile device.

And by the way, if you download music from BitTorrent, you might as well get FLACs, and they are almost always ripped with EAC.

UPDATE: Actually X Lossless Decoder looks like a good replacement for Max. It has the added ability to split a single huge FLAC/CUE combination into multiple MP3s (or any other format) automatically. Just drag the .cue file onto XLD and you're away.

Yet another BarCamp in Waterloo came and went. Phun. Saturday we talked about Windows 7, what's the best platform for mobile development, and a wide ranging debate on programming languages. Learned more about Haskell. A little bit. Was possibly only person to have heard of Scala or Groovy. Wild. Also there were other discussions too, including a nice chat I had with Ali A. (missed a presentation for that one).

Myself and Jesse Rodgers run BarCampWaterloo totally on a voluntary basis, we don't get any money, and the sponsors pay directly for whatever they are buying for us. In this case, Gary Will's WatStart bought lunch (pizza—good quality too). Waterloo Accelerator Centre donated the space! And, Tech Capital VC bought us snacks and drinks (non-alcoholic) in a wide variety of persuasions.

What I love about BarCamp is that it's totally in the hands of the people that show up. Jesse & I and the sponsors merely provide a forum and a teensy tiny bit of structure, everything else is in the hands of the participants. You arrive, if you feel like talking about something, showing something, or just raising a discussion topic (e.g. programming languages) you just write it on the whiteboard at any time. It's so freeing and wonderful.

As for who was there, we went around the room and I didn't have paper to take notes with. There was the usual ~ 30 people, including a few peeps from AideRSS (current darling of waterloo tech startups :-), other startups such as FossFactory (cool idea, and we talked about how they will make the business model work a bit), Well.ca, CastRoller, and a couple others I missed.

In addition one of the students from VeloCity, UW's experiment in high-tech oriented student residence (or else, a new metropolis for bicycle fanatics). A smart and lucky fellow. And other students, professionals at larger firms, and other authentic techies. And we had in the audience both an eeePC and the latest macbook pro, made from a single solid block of diamond.

And if all of that sounds like fun, make sure to join our BarCampWaterloo FB group to find out about the next one (or if you hate Facebook, look at the wiki page).

One of my biggest dislikes with touch-screen devices is the total lack of tactile feedback. There are other things I don't like about them, but that's a biggy. So when I played around with the BB Storm's clickable screen. I liked it. I only played with the browser, which was competent, actually quite good, and very close to as good as the iPhone. So I can't provide an overall review of the Storm. But the clicking, that's good.

What the hell is the Loudness War? It's music business, baby. Put it this way. Everything is getting LOUDER.

IF YOU'RE LOUD YOU GET NOTICED PEOPLE READ YOU FIRST BUT EVERYTHING STARTS TO SOUND THE SAME.

That's just a simple "visualization" of what the loudness war is doing to music (recorded music anyway).

You could perhaps lay the blame on 5-CD changers. If you had one back in the 90s, you probably noticed that whenever it switches discs, you had to adjust the volume. And then MP3 players didn't help, although now the software will automatically adjust the loudness of tracks to match each other. And car CD players, where everything has to be loud to even hear it. But really, it's the fault of computers, and in particular a device called a digital compressor.

Basically here's the problem in a nutshell. Music has variations in volume, between the quiet parts and the loud parts. If you're in a movie theatre, concert hall, or at home with a good stereo, this is exciting, it's dynamics. The music can start out quiet, and then build up and then reach out and grab you by the throat in the exciting bits. This is GOOD.

But psychological studies have shown that people subconsciously think that louder is better, and the problem comes in when you are moving from one song to another. If you go from a loud song to one that starts out really quiet, your subconscious brain is going to tell you that the quality of music just went down, and you're going to hit the skip button or change radio stations.

So the producers use the compressor to "compress" (yeah, that's why it's called a compressor...) the dynamic range so that the difference between the quiet parts and the loud parts is minute. Basically, they make everything LOUD.

A few years ago Rolling Stone had an article called The Death of High Fidelity, it's about the Loudness War, and you can see a sort-of good video about it on YouTube. 

There also a a great article from IEEE Spectrum magazine: Tearing Down the Wall of Noise. Good reading.

All in all these stories demonstrate without a grain of doubt that (a) the Loudness War is real and (b) it's causing damage to the music. Constantly loud music makes you tired and ultimately isn't satisfying or good. The subconscious thing is temporary, but the damage to the music is permanent.

What can you do about it? Buy music that isn't compressed, for starters. Some artists are fighting back, like Norah Jones with Not Too Late and Dylan's Modern Times. Or, just buy OLD albums, like CDs from the 80s, the time before compressors existed. Or buy vinyl, which for physical reasons doesn't really allow compression, but to me, having to go back to old tech like that is just silly. The music industry needs to fix this on the new technology. Even if they can crank up the volume, they shouldn't turn it into pure noise.

PS: Seems that you can use "Average RMS Power" to get a rough idea of the dynamic range of a tune. And you can measure that using various tools, e.g. Amadeus Pro (Analyze > Waveform Statistics). Here are some values from my library:

• Norah Jones, Feels Like Home, Sunrise: -13.5 dB .... that's not great but it's not as bad as it could be ... I don't really listen to this much any more though, and I think it's partly because it's tiring to listen to.
• Decca Georg Solti Nibelung, Walkure Act I: -25 dB... I have no trouble with ear fatigue listenging to this one.
• Beatles, Revolver, Taxman (no idea what edition): -16 dB ... I find it a bit loud, but I guess partly that's intentional?
• Cowboy Junkies, Trinity Sessions, Blue Moon: -21 dB .... what can I say? niiiiice.

OK, so I guess pretty much everything in my collection is OK at least. Probably because I delete anything that has crap dynamics. For comparison here's some stuff I wouldn't listen to.

• Coldplay, Viva la Vida:-12.3 dB ... well, it could be worse.... a bit... this would be a lot better with better dynamics.
• Rihanna, Disturbia: -11 dB ... just looking at the waveform for this makes my ears hurt in advance.

Yeah, those are fairly hard to listen to.

Someone ought to make an average RMS database.

In order to get around Bell Sympatico's bittorrent throttling I recently switched to Azureus (aka Vuze). If you switch to the "classic" UI mode, it has some stunning visualizations of what's happening with your torrents.

The main screen contains a bit more information than you might need, but if you play with the columns that are visible (right click on the headers) you can get something like this:

What you've got there is downloading torrents at the top and finished ones at the bottom. Green happy faces are currently in progress. Gray ones are queued. In the bottom right corner you can see that my total download speed is 311 kilobytes per second, and total upload is 50kB/s (I'm on ADSL).

Suppose I want to zoom in on one particular torrent — double click on it. This shows each of the peers I'm connected to. What pieces of the file do they have? How far complete are they in total? Bittorrent downloads files in chunks and it does the chunks randomly, not from start to end, so this information can be interesting.

The above shows me EVEN MORE details if I really want it (OK, some of this stuff is really excessive). It shows which of the pieces I've got (blue) and which ones are downloading (in red). Just in case you wanted to know...

Swarm (above) is an actual animation of the pieces of the file as each of your peers around the edges send the bits to you in the middle. And it also shows the reverse as well. And the pie charts show how much of the torrent each peer has. Wild stuff.

So, that's if you want to know what's happening with one particular torrent. But what if you want to know about your overall connection with all the different peers and torrents? Well, Azureus gives loads of graphs and charts for that as well.

This one is your overall bandwidth monitor:

Nice. I love staring at this one. It's a really good example about how to cleanly show multiple related variables in a time-based chart (aka histogram). For the top one, the blue filled area is your download speed. Really interesting is the gray line, which is the average download speed of the SWARM. In other words, what is your average peer getting? If you're below this line, then you're getting screwed — or there's something wrong with your configuration. If you're above it, you're doing well. It's a good way to get a quick fix on the health of your downloads as compared to other users. It also makes it really easy to see if you're being rate-limited by your ISP.

On the bottom half, you can see that I've enabled Auto-Speed and it's automatically cranking the max upload speed up and down based on measuring my bandwidth and other factors that I'm not too clear on.

There's other visualizations but those are my favourites. Some of them aren't really documented and I don't really understand exactly what they mean (transfers and vivaldi for example). Still, obviously one of the azureus open source developers is a data viz keener and s/he's done some fine work.

UPDATE: new more comprehensive post on this subject: Closures with return values in Java.

In Java, closures/first-order functions are not a language feature. However, as everyone knows, you can effectively get a first-order function by using an anonymous subclass instead. Something like this:

class MyClosure {
  void run() {} // override this
}
void doSomethingClosureLike() {
  MyClosure closure = new MyClosure() { void run() { System.out.println("We're inside a closure!"); }};
  runTheClosure(closure);
}
void runTheClosure(MyClosure closure) {
  closure.run();
}
// will print We're inside a closure!

Anyway, it's simple enough, you pass the class instead of the function and there's a little extra verbage but it works!

Also you get closure-like functionality, because inside run() you can access variables from outwhere where you created it. E.g.:

void doSomethingCooler() {
  final String myString = "Foo!";
  MyClosure closure = new MyClosure() { void run() { System.out.println("The string is: " + myString); }};
  runTheClosure(closure);
}
// will print The string is: Foo!

You can also access global variables that change over time, and the closure will use whatever is the current value WHEN THE CLOSURE RUNS.

There's just one small annoying thing, which is this particularly annoying compiler message:

local variable (WHATEVER) is accessed from within inner class; needs to be declared final

If you were do change myString to not be final, you'd get that error. Bummer. You could make myString a global variable and that would work, but that's stupid. There is a better way. Try this: UPDATE: This doesn't work, see new version at the bottom, thanks commenter the.d-stro.

void doSomethingCooler() {
  String myString = "Foo!";
  final String myStringFinal = myString;
  myString.concat(" Bar!");
  MyClosure closure = new MyClosure() { void run() { System.out.println("The string is:" + myStringFinal); }};
  runTheClosure(closure);
}
// will print Foo! Bar!

Now you can even change myString after you assign myStringFinal, because Java, although they say it doesn't use pointers, really does use pointers. I.e. it passes by reference. So, myStringFinal is actually just a reference to myString, and keeps pointing to it even when you change the contents of myString.

You can CHANGE it (like using concat()) but you CAN'T reassign it. That will break the pointers. It makes sense if you think about it—myString will have a new memory address, and myStringFinal will still be pointing to the old memory address (and the old string value). So, this won't work:

myString = "won't work"; // breaks myStringFinal

You can use this technique with any object (but not primitives like int).

UPDATE

The last source block is wrong because java Strings are immutable. Here's an example that will work as advertised:

  void doSomethingCoolest() {
    StringBuffer myString = new StringBuffer("Foo!");
    final StringBuffer myStringFinal = myString;
    myString.append(" Bar!");
    MyClosure closure = new MyClosure() { void run() { System.out.println("The string is: " + myStringFinal); }};
    runTheClosure(closure);
  }
  // will print The string is: Foo! Bar!

Wow, WYM Editor is so cool that I can just like type in a new blog post whenever I want to. Wild!

So anyway, I've been saving up a whole load of links and stuff for months until I had this new site all sorted out. So here's something.

Hmm... where did my "stuff to blog about" folder go?

Oh, here's an awesome one. Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad. These guys kick ass. Watch as they take apart a MacBook Air and declare "No Waste Outside, Nothing but Waste Inside".

About 30 screws were used to attach the keyboard alone. "The total number of screws in the MacBook Air was several times the number used in a PC we make," one of the engineers said.

Burn, baby, burn!

OK, here's another one from the files. Nathan Fawkes Art. He's part of a network of film animators and illustrators and concept artists who all have their stuff up on blogspot.

And I'd like to remind myself particularly about this post about science fiction.

OK, here's a test of how WYMeditor works, because I'm going to try to copy/paste some code in here. I just had a little foray into my past with XSLT. I had 344 old blog posts (starting year 2000!) to convert from XML to SQL. Nothing better than XSL for the job! Here it is.

NB: I haven't restored images as of this writing.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="no" omit-xml-declaration="yes" encoding="ASCII"/>
  <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
  <xsl:variable name="ucletters">ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ- </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="lcletters">abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-_</xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="allowed_letters">ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-_ </xsl:variable>
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:text> USE `sw-blog-dev`;
    </xsl:text>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="weblog/entry"/>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match="entry">
    <xsl:text>INSERT INTO `sw-blog-dev`.`posts` (`author_id`,`created_at`,`modified_at`,`permalink`,`title`,`synd_title`,`summary`,`body_raw`,`extended_raw`,`body`,`extended`,`is_active`,`custom_field_1`,`custom_field_2`,`custom_field_3`,`body_searchable`,`extended_searchable`,`text_filter`,`comment_status`) VALUES
    </xsl:text>
    <xsl:text>  (2,</xsl:text> <!— author_id —>
    <xsl:text>'</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates select="date"/><xsl:text> 12:00:00',</xsl:text> <!— created_at —>
    <xsl:text>'</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates select="date"/><xsl:text> 12:00:00',</xsl:text> <!— modified_at —>
    <xsl:text>'</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates mode="PERMALINK" select="title"/><xsl:text>',</xsl:text><!— permalink —>
    <xsl:text>'</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates mode="XHTML" select="title/text()"/><xsl:text>',</xsl:text><!— title —>
    <xsl:text>'</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates mode="SYND_TITLE" select="content"/><xsl:text>',</xsl:text><!— synd_title —>
    <xsl:text>'',</xsl:text><!— summary —>
    <xsl:text>'</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates mode="XHTML" select="content"/><xsl:text>',</xsl:text><!— body_raw —> 
    <xsl:text>'',</xsl:text><!— extended_raw —>
    <xsl:text>'</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates mode="XHTML" select="content"/><xsl:text>',</xsl:text><!— body —>
    <xsl:text>'',</xsl:text><!— extended —>
    <xsl:text>1,</xsl:text><!— is_active —>
    <xsl:text>'',</xsl:text> <!— custom_field_1 —>
    <xsl:text>'',</xsl:text> <!— custom_field_2 —>
    <xsl:text>'',</xsl:text> <!— custom_field_3 —>
    <xsl:text>'</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates mode="TEXT_ONLY" select="content"/><xsl:text>',</xsl:text><!— body_searchable —>
    <xsl:text>'',</xsl:text><!— extended_searchable —>
    <xsl:text>'markdown',</xsl:text><!— text_filter —>
    <xsl:text>1);
    </xsl:text><!— comment_status —>
  </xsl:template>
  <!— must remember to backslash all single quotes —>
  <xsl:template match="date">
    <xsl:value-of select="translate(.,'/','-')" />
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template mode="PERMALINK" match="title">
    <xsl:value-of select="substring(
                            translate(
                              translate(., translate(., $allowed_letters, ''), ''),
                              $ucletters,
                              $lcletters
                            ),
                          0,42)"/>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template mode="SYND_TITLE" match="content">
    <xsl:call-template name="escapesinglequotes">
      <xsl:with-param name="arg1"><xsl:value-of select="normalize-space( substring(.,0,42) )"/></xsl:with-param>
    </xsl:call-template>
    <xsl:text>...</xsl:text>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template mode="TEXT_ONLY" match="content">
    <xsl:call-template name="escapesinglequotes">
      <xsl:with-param name="arg1"><xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/></xsl:with-param>
    </xsl:call-template>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template mode="XHTML" match="content">
    <xsl:apply-templates mode="XHTML"/>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template mode="XHTML" match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates mode="XHTML" select="@*"/>
      <xsl:apply-templates mode="XHTML"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template mode="XHTML" match="text()">
    <xsl:call-template name="escapesinglequotes">
      <xsl:with-param name="arg1"><xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/></xsl:with-param>
    </xsl:call-template>
    <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template mode="XHTML" match="@*">
    <xsl:attribute name="{name()}">
      <xsl:call-template name="escapesinglequotes">
        <xsl:with-param name="arg1"><xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/></xsl:with-param>
      </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:attribute>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template name="escapesinglequotes">
    <xsl:param name="arg1"/>
    <xsl:variable name="apostrophe">'</xsl:variable>
    <xsl:choose>
      <!— this string has at least on single quote —>
      <xsl:when test="contains($arg1, $apostrophe)">
        <xsl:if test="string-length(normalize-space(substring-before($arg1, $apostrophe))) > 0"><xsl:value-of select="substring-before($arg1, $apostrophe)" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>\'</xsl:if>
        <xsl:call-template name="escapesinglequotes">
          <xsl:with-param name="arg1"><xsl:value-of select="substring-after($arg1, $apostrophe)" disable-output-escaping="yes"/></xsl:with-param>
        </xsl:call-template>
      </xsl:when>
      <!— no quotes found in string, just print it —>
      <xsl:when test="string-length(normalize-space($arg1)) > 0"><xsl:value-of select="normalize-space($arg1)"/></xsl:when>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Niiiiiiice.

Hi there.

Well, I'm back. I was running this site on really ancient technology — AxKit — so 2001. Now I'm running it on modern technology, i.e. Rails 2. And doesn't it rock. Now I have a cool GUI editor to type into, I have easy programming in ruby, and I have of course polished both my design and my CSS/XHTML skillz considerably in the mean time, hopefully making this all easier to look at and navigate.

So I'm running on SimpleLog here, but it's not "stock". Oh no. Stock SimpleLog right doesn't run on Rails 2, but this one does. Also, I made it even MORE simple than it used to be:

• Support Rails 2.0 (no need to freeze an old rails)
• no themes—annoying to use anyway, and no one was publishing themes either
• replaced the editor/preview panel with WYM on Rails, which is by FAR the best WYSIWYG / GUI editor I've ever found, and the end of a long search for me

...and so on.

What do you get when you mix HTML, CSS, Javascript, Asynchronous Javascript, a web server, a web browser, interprocess communication, and native application views?

I was on "vacation" during August. I only got to have 5 days of "real" vacation because some stuff cropped up for work but I did do some sort of recreational programming. And I had this idea that seemed like a good idea, and my programmer buddies didn't immediately shoot it down as being completely stupid, so, I did up a demonstration in Objective-C and it's called Bottlenose.

Bottlenose is a way to enable graphic designers, and HTML/CSS/Javascript designers, to directly create the interface for a native application. Where a "native application" is something that runs right on the computer, like a work processor (not a web app, ASP, or applet).

I might have used pure java but (a) there's no good web browser API available for free and (b) Apple's WebKit is sooo easy to use and well documented. But still - Bottlenose could easily be ported to other platforms. In fact, I want to see it especially on Linux. Because I think that on Linux it could make a big improvement in the UIs if the graphics people could write it themselves. That is, after all, the Linux philosophy.

Anyway, I have this idea of running a contest to develop UIs for the demo that are better than the one I made. I'll probably even throw in a valuable prize of some sort (some books?) for the winner, and post all of the good entries.

If you have any comments at all, or think it's a good/bad idea, feel free to contact me .

OK, I've been waiting for four long, long years to tell you this. My "Secret Project" at Apple was Marklar aka OS X on x86, finally announced today! I'm not going to say today whether I think it's a good idea or a bad idea, or what, but I will say this. In 2001, my job at Apple was Program Manager for the Marklar project. When I started, Marklar was relatively moribund, being nursed by a handful of Core OS engineers. Lots and lots of new code had been introduced in OS X from the old Mac side, and new code written, since the last release of Rhapsody worked on Intel.

My job was to get the system working on x86 again and that's what I did. I traced dependencies like there was no tomorrow. I worked with engineers in a dozen different divisions, each time making first contact with the division manager, then finding just the right person for the job. Each time the same drill: "I'm going to tell you about a project that is Need To Know only. You can't tell anyone about this, even inside Apple. I'm not even going to tell you everything, just the minimum that you need to know in order for us to continue. If you're wondering who the hell I am and why you should listen to me, ask you manager who will just tell you to do it."

I went on leave in fall 2001 after the WTC thing, but by the time I left the Marklar team gave a demo to something like the top 100 managers of the company with a working Marklar system complete with Finder running and a whole range of apps. I kicked ass!

Obviously such an important part of my professional history, but until TODAY I haven't been allowed to breathe a word. A very SENSITIVE project, of all sensitive projects! But now, tell everyone, tell your friends!

Massive Change is a web site + travelling museum exhibit (currently in Toronto!) about ... well ...

They say it's the Future of Global Design but a lot of what's in there I wouldn't say falls under design. They talk for example about dealing with internalization in manufacturing and they also take a walk through the light spectrum and what different kinds of images are good for. The whole thing is very scientific.

More to the point, while it at first appears superficial, it rewards a deep look at any of the subjects.

I was dreaming about Apple again last night (which I often do, since I worked there in my capacity as a busybody). If I were in charge of apple, here's what I would do.

• their core business is selling computers. the main competition to computers is smartphones but apple is safe because smartphones have small screens. until roll-up large screens are made, apple is safe.
• they pick small markets with low-hanging fruit. Easy pickings. what's next? a video camera is next. the video cameras on the market suck. apple already has experience with optics from the iSight. they'll make a video camera
• they lose tons of money on Mac OS X. they spend upwards of $100 mil a year on it, but make almost none of it back. instead they make money from the computers. OS X is a loss leader.
• they aren't doing squat with weblogs. that needs to change.
• they will not make a cell phone. cell phones are fine, there's lots of good cellphones already on the market

How to properly use the kick-ass ffmpegX (for OS X, a wrapper for all kinds of open source tools) to encode your iMovie movies.

It is very important, that you do NOT choose the "Full Quality DV" Setting when exporting from iMovie. This just makes iMovie glueing the 2GB chunks together in which it records movies. Mencoder can't handle that. Here's what to do: Choose "Expert settings". Click "Export". Choose "Movie to Quicktime Movie". Click "Options". In "Video Settings" choose "DV PAL" (or NTSC, if you are on that TV System). In the Audio settings, choose uncompressed 48khz Stereo. Uncheck "Prepare for Internet streaming". Make sure the output file has .mov as extender. Now the recording is reencoded as a single movie which Mencoder will encode completely as AVI.

I just downloaded the Myst IV Revelation demo (it's free there) and it's very cool. It brings back memories of Myst and maybe (I can hope) it will be as good as Riven was. Anyway, I guess I'm going to buy it as soon as I'm done writing this, but first, some obligatory info on hacking the sound files out of the demo.

We're talking about the OS X version here, presumably the PC version is analogous. Go into the .app package and look for sound/data. Ignore the .snd files, they are metadata. Inside "data" you will see files with three different extensions. Here's my guide to what they are.

• .LS0 - inside the "English" folder - these are easy, they are straight OGG vorbis, just rename them with the .ogg extension and play in your favorite player.
• .SS0 - music and some backgrounds. Three of these are straight OGG vorbis files, rename as above. Some of them are ADPCM - see below.
• .SB0 - many of these are 44100 Hz, 2 channel (stereo), 4-Bit 4:1 IMA DVI ADPCM files (a common format in WAV/wave files). You can listen to them using SoundHack a free program for OS X and there's probably similar soft for PCs. Open as unknown format. Set the format to the above. Save Info. Save as. The resulting file should be listenable. NB: Many of these files contain multiple sounds. NB2: Some of them won't work using this technique, I don't know why.

Have fun.

Update: Revelator will extract just the ogg files automatically.

PS: Why all the work? They're probably just trying to make it difficult to extract the audio by stripping the normal headers from these files. They could have left the WAV headers in place and made it a lot easier.

Check out this sunset picture I snapped with my Nokia 7610. Not bad eh? The large sized image is HUGE... it's amazing that megapixel really does mean big. Now, it has artifacts in the dark parts of the image which I attribute to low light. I can't remember if I had night mode on or not (I think not, it seems to be geared towards REALLY dark shots). For the small sized one here, I applied some blur before I shrunk the image to make the house look better.

First, it's nowhere near as simple as I thought. Second, it's nowhere near as complex as I thought. Well, here's how it works. MPEG-4 is a way to define a codec. So, when you go into quicktime and it says, save as MPEG4, you're not saving as MPEG4, you're saving as "Apple's MPEG-4 codec". Which, by the way, sucks compared to basically any other option . There's actually a whole bunch of MPEG-4 codecs, including Divx, Xvid, 3ivx, and a whole bunch of high end professional codecs that cost a lot of money. In theory, any MPEG-4 player can play any MPEG-4 codec. In practice, not so much. But also, in practice, VLC and MPlayer can play them all.

Following all that, here's an enlightening discussion thread comparing various formats and explaining MPEG-4 .

The word on the street says subversion is finally ready for prime time . You may recall some bizarre IP disputes—apparently these have been resolved at this point. Apparently it's much like CVS, basically designed to be "a better CVS" and they've kept the CVS syntax except in areas where it really needed to be fixed. They've fixed versioning to work across file renames, directories, binary files, improved merging and branch support. Comparisons to the best commercial products come out favorably.

There's an OS X gui client as well : svnX from la chose interactive.

Why lisp .

I don't know Lisp, ever since the middle years of my CS degree. I was forced to learn Scheme in a week, and it didn't take. I failed miserably. I never understood it, and generated a program that looked to me like a sea of parantheses that did I didn't know what.

But every once and a while I hear people who seem to be great programmers say that Lisp is the best thing ever. I've never heard good reasons why this should be so, but I was sucked into reading about Lisp because of this article Revenge of the Nerds about pointy haired bosses (PHBs) vs. programmers.

This Scopetime is a nifty flash gizmo. It's like a new way of displaying time. I like the presentation as much as the idea. I don't think we really need new ways of displaying time, but on the other hand, I think this idea does actually work, which is pretty unique in this category of "inventions". In other words, I could actually see having a clock that works like this. Anyway, I like the flash.

ACCESS ... check this out! by Marie Sester

How Mail.app's LSA-based spam filter works . Finally an explanation I was able to comprehend. It's data mining after all :-)

I found a solution to my long-standing VPC problem today. The trick was to add "airport" to my google queries. That quickly turned up this useful posting on macosxhints. It's a little bit complicated. You have to remember to go into VPC preferences and specify "built-in ethernet" for the network connection. For me, it's worked perfectly for both Windows 2000 and Linux (debian). I run smbd on linux, mount_smbfs the share onto the mac side, load up an XCode project for my symbian development projects, open an SSH window into the debian virtual machine to run 'make' and I'm all set with an environment that's almost like having everything on the mac.

I just got off the phone with "Daniel M."* from Microsoft technical support. I called them because I was having trouble setting up a network connection between VPC and the host Mac OS X machine. Specifically, Windows 2000 and Panther. But I also had the same problem with a Linux (debian) system I also set up on Virtual PC.

I figure Daniel is second-tier support because he called me and he doesn't have any way for me to call him back. I asked because my cell phone has a new area code and a lot of PBX systems are unable to dial it. I wanted to call him back from the cell phone so I could use the speaker-phone support it has but—no, this was not possible.

What Daniel told me is that networking is not supported by Virtual PC. "Virtual PC", he said (this conversation took place just a few minutes ago) "was only originally designed to connect to the web, the internet. Virtual Switch, for local networking, was just something added by Connectix but when Microsoft bought it, it's not really supported any more. We just left it in as a convenience. But it's not within our support boundaries. There's too many different possible network configurations."

I said, "so are you telling me that Virtual PC does not support local-area network connections?" His answer, "Yes."

Daniel is not the first tech support person I talked to. First I spoke with Michael, yesterday. Michael gave me my case number, SRX 0403 22605 XXX. For about an hour I tried to explain my problem to Michael. What I wanted to do, I said, was to do networking between the "guest" and the "host" computer. The "host" is my powerbook running OS X. The "guest" is Windows 2000 running inside Virtual PC. It seems (to me...) that it's a no-brainer that you should be able to connect between the two. But you can't. Even with Virtual Switch, you get two different IP addresses, and VPC fakes out the system with a fake ethernet address, and other computers (such as the iMac) see them as two separate machines. But you can't connect between them on my powerbook.

In fact currently in order to ssh between OS X and VPC I have to ssh first to my iMac, then back to VPC.

Not that anyone at Microsoft technical support has ever heard of ssh. They've heard of telnet though, and it just happens that Windows 2000 comes with a built-in telnet server. I could prove to Michael that it wasn't working because I could telnet from iMac to Windows 2000, but I COULD NOT telnet from powerbook OS X to powerbook Windows 2000.

Eventually, after about an hour, Michael tried to punt me to the Windows networking team. Now, I already know this is not a windows problem. Why? Because I tried the same thing in Linux and had the same problem. I knew he was trying to get rid of me and Windows people would not be able to help so I asked to speak to his supervisor. He connected me quickly. Finally, I thought, I was getting somewhere.

The supervisor's name is Kal "manager for support". Kal had the mistaken impression from Michael's write- up, that all I wanted to do was telnet. No, I patiently explained, I want to be able to do full networking back and forth between guest and host — file sharing, telnet, even browsing web servers I would set up on the opposite virtual system. Kal said he'd look into it and call me back.

That takes me to today with the call back from Daniel. Daniel was pessimistic from the start. He'd never heard of ssh either, and he wanted to try something "simpler" — windows networking. At this point I realized I wasn't going to get anywhere. He then proceeded to disclaim for a while that it wasn't really supported anyway.

So, Virtual PC doesn't support networking. Who knew? I should ask for my money back.

* last name removed to protect the maybe innocent.

Update 2004/03/23: Virtual PC Help says: "Under Mac OS X, a PC may communicate with the host Macintosh, with other PCs using the Virtual Switch, and with other computers on the network."

Update 2004/03/24: I talked to Daniel again today. He said he'd brought it up in a meeting and so I think he meant to say he was taking it seriously. I told him about reports I'd read on their own newsgroups that wireless networking was responsible for the problem. Later, I found a solution .

After years, years of avoiding serious Windows use I'm finally having to wrestle with two Microsoft products. Windows 2000 and Virtual PC. Although the "Virtual Switch" mode of VPC is specifically intended to allow you to log into the windows box as a separate entity from the host Mac OS X box, this only kinda sorta works. I can log into VPC from a different computer—the iMac in the other room for example. No problem. But I can't log in from the same machine (the host). So for now my workaround is to create a circular connection where I mount the windows drive on my iMac and then mount that on my powerbook.

I'm also running cygwin in Windows and logging into that. Layers.

The case of the monopolized undersea cable . Fibre optic undersea cables are the backbones of the internet (and the whole telecommunications structure of the world). So what happens when they build a new one but one single company controls a monopoly over the landing station where sea meets land? Read this to find out. This same situation is occuring in Africa as well, but it's not as well documented.

The Civil Society group at the World Summit on Information Society issued a powerful media statement today. Read it here . They basically say that the governments aren't going anywhere and that CS is going to go off and do it's own thing as a response to that. They don't need the governments ;-) For those of you just joining us, there are three main groups at WSIS: business, government, and civil society.

This should be required reading about IXPs (internet eXchange points): L2_Route_Reflector_IXP_v0.4.pdf

Connectivity is not the right word

I was thinking recently about fate sharing in a number of contexts. One of them is this server. It goes down occasionally. What's nice is that a number of people who all have the technical expertise to make repairs share the use of the server. So, when something happens, any one of us can step in to make repairs. Each one of us is motivated because we all share the same fate. If the server is down, it's down for all of us.

Next is the context of a technology incubator. In Waterloo, there has for a long time been a desire to build a technology incubator, which is basically a building or a small campus with lots of small technology companies at one shared location. There's all kinds of good reasons for doing this. One is because all of the people and companies start to share their fate. Small technology companies fail all the time for reasons that are just "because". Not because the people weren't good enough, but just because the market is random and lots of good ideas don't work out. But, with a shared fate situation, people can graduate from one company to another easily. Reputations are known through the social networks that build up in a close environment. In addition, things like internet connections, server rooms, IT infrastructure in general can be shared and you get the same reliability gains that I get with my server.

MIT's Media Lab has a weblog by interactive cinema group , where they use Nokia 3650 camera phones to make little videos. The videos are stored in a format that ends with .3gp and thus presumably has something to do with 3GPP. But they use the H.263 codec. The video is tiny, and the sound is poor, but it's a start.

The MMC card is a new alterative to CompactFlact and Secure Disk (SD) cards. It's a tiny little card that is designed for the cell phone market, and currently you can get up to 128MB cards. Incidentally, the Nokia 3650 accepts MMC cards. Someone uses it for something I consider a little odd Loud Thinking uses a 128MB MMC card to load simpsons and seinfeld onto the card, plugs it into the phone and watches them on the phone, on the train.

Wi-Fi networking is also creeping into the cell phone space. With 3G still in vaporware stage, people are trying to make do with 2.5G standards like EV-DO and 1xRTT. The speeds on these cell phone data standards aren't so great, and upload is quite low, maybe 40Kbps. (Thanks to Alan Reiter for some of this info and stimulating discussion). With hot spots spreading, and companies installing blanket Wi-Fi networks, people are starting to add Wi-Fi support to cell phones. Mostly these days it's for VoIP purposes, but data is data. In fact, at least one article already mentions video applications.

3GP is in my opinion too poor quality to be interesting. But, MPEG-4 ISMA layer-1 is a better looking video codec/format. I used it myself for the videos here. It runs at 50KBytes/s which is too much for a 2.5G network to handle, but fine for a Wi-Fi hot spot backed on a business DSL line. Also, the data rate is small enough that the previously mentioned 128MB MMC card could hold 45 minutes of video.

Put it all together and what you have is a "video phone" a cell phone with video capability. People might use them to capture moments on the street, with friends, at the club, etc. I don't personally have any interest in that. But lots of people already do this with their camera phones, so it seems reasonable to think they'd add video.

The Economist :

Moreover, as software is often built on the achievements of others, writing code could become a legal hurdle race. By analogy, if Haydn had patented the symphony form, Mozart would have been in trouble.

The VoIP paradox . Voice over IP is paradoxically both internet and telephony at the same time. Presents the paradox and background information.

Not only does this virus generate annoying quantities of spam from a single source, but it also causes stupid virus scanners to generate annoying replies to the wrong people. Something along the line of "your email was rejected because it contained a virus". Don't they realize that the sender address was forged? Grr.

But then I wasn't hit so bad. I "only" got about 100 messages when the virus hit. I've seen others who got thousands. Also I'm immune since it's a microsoft email virus only.

I've been trying to grok the VSAT alphabet soup lately. This post on isp-satellites seems like a pretty decent summary of the different two-way VSAT flavours. Basically it sounds like SCPC and DAMA are connection-oriented protocols with call set up and dedicated bandwidth during the lifetime of the connection. Of course I'm translating into internet terminology here ;-) On the other hand, MF-TDMA, which other people call FTMDA and which is used by DVB-RCS, is more like a packet-oriented connectionless protocol. The mapping onto the cell phone networks makes sense.

Two video streamed lectures by Jun Takei also helped me understand the basics. Takei-san clearly is an expert and has lots of interesting things to say. lecture 1 is an introduction to satellite data comm. lecture 2 gets into more internet over satellite detail. His english is not fantastic but good enough. And it's a high-quality, 250Kbps stream, and you can follow along with the slides on the web. Takei has his name on a couple of RFCs as well.

So I kinda sorta have a computer that's finally capable of running WinCrap32 on my powerbook, and what do you know I need to install service packs. Galore. It's so precise that it tells me exactly how many and how big they will be:

Total: 19 = 10.600000000000001 MB

What the hell is that???

Basic transit and IXP peering . Just the facts, ma'am.

What is the different between internet peering and internet transit? Peering is when you connect with another ISP for the SOLE purpose of exchanging traffic that is going DIRECTLY to that other ISP. On the other hand, Transit is a connection that will carry traffic anywhere on the internet. So, how do you choose which one, or what mix and match of the two to use? Try this 127 page thesis .

I might as well have called this entry voice chat != IP telephony. I've been think about Voice over IP for a while now and reflecting that the IP telephony people are kind of wandering around in the giggly weeds because they keep taking about crazy things like sending DTMF tones over the internet, and needing special hardware and all kinds of crazy stuff that totally goes against the e2e (end-to-end) principles of the internet. I mean, why bother with all that when you can just set up an e2e connection between two computers and start talking? Finally I got the answer, which is that internet telephony people are not talking about voice chat, they are talking about telephones.

Whoa, slow down. Telephones are not a best effort network, they are a guaranteed service network. The internet, if you use it, will try its best to do what you want but if it can't, hey, too bad buddy. That's a fundamental operating assumption, you can't change that without changing the nature of the internet. If you want to build a guaranteed-service network over top of the internet you're going to have a lot of trouble, because the internet is build up and down on best-effort systems — like ethernet for example.

So I think that when people talk about "Voice over IP" they need to be really clear about whether they mean a best-effort system or a telephone-like system. Some people seem to think that VoIP should keep working if the power fails. And so on, there's a lot of assumptions built in when you talk about telephony. The other side of the coin would be something more like a voice chat, where you are able to talk to someone anywhere at any time on the internet, but it's just like any other internet services, so you can expect there to be glitches. That's a fundamental part of best-effort networking, and it's also part of why it's so efficient and inexpensive.

So can VoIP be done over the internet without all kinds of crazy hacks to make it act more like the telephone system? I think so. The codecs are finally here to do reasonable voice quality over a modem connection, using Speex . IPv6 will hopefully help us get around the NAT barrier.

I just read Soekris Router Project . Soekris in case you haven't probably heard of it is a little company that makes these fantastic little PC-compatible chipsets that are totally solid-state, no moving parts, DC power, just the basics, a couple of ethernet ports, a PC card slot or two, a CompactFlash slot for the media, and a nifty-looking box.

And I am very impressed. I can get a Soekris , net4511 , for about $170, and a vpn1201 for about $70 and a CF card for about $50, all told, $300 for the hardware and it comes with a nifty looking box ( inside ) from Soekris. This is going to be with an extra twist from me because I want to install 6to4 support. I'll tell you why in a minute ;-)

OK, so first of all this slackwerks HOWTO is going to get me up and running with a totally secure IPSec based WiFi network. That's just cool. Instead of all this WEP/WPA/802.1x stuff I will have real end-to-end encryption running between me and my internet gateway (did I mention this magic box is going to be my gateway?). Then I set up IPv4 NAT on the soekris, and an IPv6 firewall as well, so it's now the ultimate gateway box. And, I set up 6to4 on the gateway, and configure my powerbook running OS X with ipv6. I've got a free ethernet port on the soekris to connect up local wired computers, and the wireless ethernet interface for my powerbook. What next?

Now I pull up ohPhoneX , an implementation of ohphone from the OpenH323 group which just happens to support IPv6. Since my powerbook is running over 6to4 it's not behind a NAT in IPv6, so I can send my overseas relatives and friends my powerbook's IPv6 address and they can directly connect to me. No more NAT nastiness, messing around with the DMZ, or whatever, it's a direct connection straight into my powerbook's globally addressable 6to4 address. Now I'm doing internet telephony, for free, over a wireless interface, and it's all totally autoconfigure.

It would be very sweet if lots of people got up and running with a gateway like this :-) Forget about Free World Dialup , forget about Vonage , forget about any kind of silly voice gateway. This is the end-to-end internet, not the InterNAT (or NAPT). I pay for my internet service provider to push the bits, and everything else is free. Even though most of the internet isn't running IPv6 yet, we can all use this setup (or a similar one) to build out the next-generation internet :-)

Reboot is a tiny little conference held in Denmark somewhere, but they got all kinds of cool speakers this year and made videos of them all. Based on the cartoon summary I I wanted to watch the video of Tim O'Reilly s talk. It was good .. I recommend it. He talked about open source, and the move from software- oriented world to a data-oriented world. (via multiplicity )