The Cost of Windows Vista

For the holidays I decided to leave my personal computer, Hopper, in residence, and just use the machine that is at my parents' house. One result of this is my not reading RSS feeds (basically my sole source of news) over the holidays. I know I will hear lectures of how I should use web-based RSS syndicators, but I like Liferea too much to just say goodbye to it.

As a result of not having read any of my favourite electronic haunts over the past week, I am a couple days behind on reading a particularly interesting news article. If you haven't already, I suggest reading A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. It's quite long, but I made it through the whole thing, and it's quite an interesting read, with many good points sprinkled throughout. Even the footnotes are good reading. Even though most people who read this blog have probably already found the article through Slashdot, I figured if more people blogged it, then more people will know about it. More specifically, I haven't found a response from a Microsoftie yet. There are the standard responses on Slashdot (Linux fanboyism), but hopefully other places like Channel 9 or other Microsoft community sites, and hopefully Microsoft bloggers will start to comment on it. I'll be keeping my eyes on the Google search for "vista_cost".

No Rockbox On 80GB iPod Video

Well, I was doing more investigating to see how easily Rockbox would go onto my new iPod, and if iPod + Rockbox would be better than iAudio. As it turns out, from the iPod FAQ wiki page, and from the forum, last updated December 19, it looks like Rockbox is not currently running on the 80GB iPod Video (also known as the 5.5 Generation iPods). Apparently, the project has just recently gotten it working with the 30GB 5.5G, but not the 80. At this point, I figure it's time to just return the iPod. Oh well.

Open Street Mapping

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, my father received a Magellan GPS. Being the open source kind of guy, I have always had very strong feelings about the should-be openness of maps. I believe that the great land of Canada, especially the public land, belongs to the people and the maps of those lands should be completely open and public domain. After all, public land is called "Crown Land" in Canada, to denote that it is owned by the government and the people. I own a small portion of Vedder Road, so why should I have to pay and agree to copyright restrictions just to find out where it is? Thus, we have OpenStreetMap. Using GPS traces, and applying various properties to different location nodes, volunteers can map out street/ground level information. Personally, I think that topographical information should also be stored, but the openness of OpenStreetMap will allow export in the future, so I'm not too concerned (plus the extra dimension of information would be a huge burden on the already slow server).

I have already created an account, and have uploaded my first gpx trace. My mom had to drop my brother off at his work (Prospera Center), so I turned on the GPS unit, threw it in the back seat, and waited for her to return. You can see the resultant trace of my mom doing some errands around town. I have also downloaded the Java Open Street Map software, and am trying that out. Here's a screenshot of the same trace, after some cleaning up around my house area (the gps unit's accuracy went down from +-6m to +-30m once it came indoors and lost some satellites, so I had to clean that up).


Hopefully I'll get this stuff all figured out and do a couple traces of the Vedder Crossing area before I go back to residence (I don't get to take the GPS unit with me, so no mapping fun over the semester).

iPod or iAudio?

The major gift that I received this Christmas was an iPod Video 80GiB. 30 hours after removing the gift wrapping, the iPod remains in its shrink wrap packaging. Why haven't I opened it?

MP3 is a terrible audio format. In most listening tests it fails miserably, it only supports stereo, and most importantly, it's not open. Obviously the best audio codec (for lossy) is Vorbis, but most portable audio players don't support Vorbis right out of the box. The iPod is no exception. There are firmware alternatives such as RockBox, but I'm not a fan of potentially bricking a $400 piece of hardware. I have heard of the iRiver, and its support for Vorbis, so I thought maybe that would be a good alternative. I decided to take a look at Xiph's list of portable players. Unfortunately, the latest iRiver product, the H10, is not capable of playing Vorbis, so it looks like iRiver is dropping official support for the superior codec. Another potential candidate would have been the Neuros, whose firmware decoder was actually coded by the good people at Xiph (Tremor was written under contract and paid for by Neuros). Unfortunately, the Neuros II has been discontinued, and the Neuros III is still in the planning stages. Yet another potential candidate, was the Rio Karma (Rio is a relatively old company, having some history in the graphics card industry), but the Rio company went under and sold out to SigmaTel. So far this is looking very hopeless.

The one device that catches my eye from the list of compatible players is the Cowon iAudio X5. It can play Vorbis and FLAC, as well as other features that I would be less likely to use, such as MPEG4 video, FM radio tuning, built-in microphone recording, line-in recording, etc. The other nice thing is that it uses a simple mass storage device style communication with the computer, which means it will work with Linux (the official website even says it will work with Linux kernels 2.2 or later). I did some Googling and reading, and judging by the reviews for the 20GiB on Amazon, the jury is split, with some loving it, and others having problems with the battery after about a year, or having problems with the positioning/construction of the headphone jack. I don't know if these problems were solved with the 60GiB X5, as the reviews didn't discuss it. Another problem would be the X5's limit of 10,000 files, compared to the iPod 80GiB's limit of 20,000. I would estimate I have around 7,000 audio files right now (Rhythmbox can give me an exact number, but I'm not in front of Hopper right now), so I could hit the file limit before I hit the space limit. The final problem that I can find is the possibility that the 60GiB X5 is discontinued. The official North American Cowon distributor, Jetmall, has the 60GiB listed, but NCIX does not (though it does have the 20GiB and 30GiB available for ordering). If you are interested in learning more about Cowon products, I would suggest checking out iAudiophile.net, the fansite for Cowon products.

So after all that research, I am going to go back to looking at RockBox, and seeing what kind of features it provides, and if it is safer to use than when I had last heard about it. Oh, and in case you are wondering, converting my vorbis and flac files to mp3 is most certainly not an option.

Geotagging It Up

For Christmas my father received a global positioning system unit, the Magellan eXplorist 600. We are still trying to figure the thing out. For some strange reason Magellan decided not to include a comprehensive paper manual, leaving most of that duty up to a pdf file on the Internet. Even basic things like how to hook up the unit to the computer is left ambiguous. In the paper manual it says that to hook up to the computer or to charge the battery, you must hook up the data/power cable to the unit. The catch is that the connector on the back of the GPS unit is symmetrical in two axes (there are six conductor plates arranged in an almost-hexagon, with a nut in the center, while the cable has six pins with a bolt in the center), which means there are two ways to connect the cable, and the paper instruction manual does not have any description or graphics on how to hook it up. For about the first ten hours I was trying to charge the battery and get the data transfer working all while the unit was hooked up backwards. Quite a silly connector design, and quite a silly choice in not including a proper manual with the unit.

The included software (MapSend Lite) is, in my opinion, useless. Sure I've only been using it for a couple minutes, but it already looks featureless and boring. It only has an outline for major bodies of water (I'm talking about oceans and The Great Lakes. The software can't even import the overlay maps that come on the same CD (these overlay maps are intended to be loaded onto the GPS unit so that you get extra map information about your local area). I also tried getting Google Earth to work with the GPS, but that requires a $20 annual subscription to get Google Earth Plus. Right now I'm working on getting WorldWind running, and hope that will be able to import POI, waypoint, track, and other information. One nice thing about this unit is that all POI/waypoint/etc information is stored in ASCII, and realtime information is transferred over USB in NMEA format, which appears to be industry standard. Hopefully this means the unit will at least be marginally compatible with Linux.

My last topic in this post has to do with Geotagging. Geotagging Flickr photos seems to be easy, and there are many guides to doing it, but geotagging blog posts doesn't seem to be as popular. I tried looking around for guides on how to geotag posts in Blogger (blogger.com/blogspot/google), but to no avail. Ultimately, it would be nice to have tags in the proper place in the html posts that you read in a webbrowser, and also the proper tags in the proper place in the RSS/XML feed. This would require Blogger to have a special field where you can type or copy-paste your lat/long and then it will put that info into the headers properly. Even better would be a "Geotag" button that gets the NMEA info from the USB device, and does it all magically (having a webpage read data from USB is something you probably can't/shouldn't do, but it would be fun). As it is, I seem to be forced to just put the tags into the post itself, and hope that RSS programs can interpret the information correctly. Geotag follows in meta tags, so should not be visible.



If you're in Firefox, just right click the page, go to "View Page Info", and the geotag should be visible in the Meta info textbox. To generate these tags, I cheated and used http://www.addressfix.com/ to generate the tag. Geotagging usually uses deg.deg format, whereas the GPS unit is currently set to use deg.min.min format, and if I want to do real geotagging, I would have to change the settings for the gps unit.

On the First Day of Christmas...

So it's been a while since I last blogged, all the way back in June. I've had some things that I was going to blog about since then, but I just never got around to doing it. It is now Christmas day, and our dinner guests will be arriving in about ten minutes so this one will be quick, but assuredly, I have some things that I will be blogging about over the next couple days.

For now I leave you with the following screenshot of Expedia.ca:

Do take note on how the advertisement is preventing legitimate use of the website itself! It is not possible to use the calendar in this state. The softwares involved are: Windows XP, Firefox 2.0.0.1, and Flash 9. This is definitely one lesson on how not to design a webpage. Don't worry, I have already sent an email to Expedia describing the problem and linking to the screenshot.

Why I Stopped Reading Digg

Today I decided to de-list Digg from my RSS syndicator program. I'm not sure precisely when they changed things, but I noticed recently that I have been unable to directly open articles from my RSS syndicator. You can read this article on Digg (if it'll let you) for more information. Normally I read headlines and entries in my RSS reader. If I'm interested, I will click the headline link, which Liferea sends to Firefox. Links within the article (if there are any) will also open Firefox with the linked webpage. Now, with "Digg v3", when I click the headline link in Liferea, Firefox opens and Digg tells me that I have to subscribe to read the article (this does not happen on some articles, to which I have not discovered a pattern). I have found that doing a search on the Digg website for the article's keywords still allow me to read the article, but introducing the extra step has just caused me to de-list Digg from my RSS reader.

The Hypocrisy of Digg

This brings me to another issue that both annoys me and makes me laugh about the Digg community. It seems as though all the users of Digg are big into what they call "Web 2.0", or "The Semantic Web". This is supposed to be a smarter Internet where data is traded between sites for smart collaboration and data relation (using XML, SOAP, API's, etc). First of all, we are nowhere near having a Web 2.0. Sticking a little orange RSS icon that links to a backend feed does not qualify as making something Web 2.0, but my vision and what should be required to make something Web 2.0 is another post altogether, so I digress. However, I would like to point out that this new account-required Digg completely breaks all the properties of the Web 2.0 that the Digg users subscribe to. The whole point of Web 2.0 is to have open data sharing in a computer readable way to support inter-site data transfer for easier amalgamation and relation of data. In other words, "screen scraping" should no longer be required under Web 2.0. Now the Digg community is not only closed to data sharing, but it is also a members-only site! How does this fall into line with their idea of Web 2.0? Do they think that just because the RSS/Atom feed is still available that this rectifies the problem?

Ah, but this should have been expected, as this attitude has been promoted for a very long time in the Digg community, along with much of the rest of the web. I'm speaking of the use of [Macromedia] Flash to store videos, audio, text, and other media that Flash should not be used for. Various formats have been coming out that support more and more semantic data that is used to describe our media. Take for example EXIF, which stores information about a picture, such as date, aperture, f/, focal length, comments, etc. Using EXIF information I can search for all photos I have taken that have a focal length of less than 30cm, which would mean it is a macro-photography shot. I could in fact search for all photos with a focal length less than 30cm on Google Images (if Google Images supported EXIF). Another example would be the Matroska Media Format, which is primarily used for movies, but it is capable of storing multiple video streams (think angles on a DVD), multiple audio streams (think language dubs), multiple subtitle streams, embedded photos (cover albums or something else), chapters, and comments. In this case, I could search for subtitle text, in any language covered by Unicode, or look for all videos that have an audio language of FR included. Flash, on the other hand, breaks all of these things. When YouTube, Google Video, and others encode videos into Flash, they are disabling and killing off any hope of supporting Web 2.0. The semantic data is gone. The player of my choice is not capable of playing the file. There's also the fact that there is no such thing as a 64-bit Macromedia Flash player (not even Windows 64), and open source versions suck because the format is closed. I just don't understand how people who claim that they support Web 2.0 can allow the obvious breakage of data trading and openness, both on their own site, and on sites they support.

Needless to say, I have decided to remove Digg from my feed syndicator.

Adam Got a Job

Yes, I now have a summer job (and have, in fact, had it for two weeks now). I'm working at a place called the Creative Centre Society - Cheamview Clubhouse for 35 hours a week, 9-4, Mon-Fri. Basically the place is a daytime clubhouse for people with mental illnesses to go and get support. I can't say much, as I agreed to keep the clients information confidential, but it's not a "nuthouse" like some might think. They aren't violent there, and most of the patients actually seem quite normal (their biggest complaints are about arthritis and how their grandchildren live too far away). The age range is also quite varied, but again, it's not like "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" or anything. It's only a day centre for them to get together, socialize, and rehabilitate, so no one lives there and no one is "committed". If any of them turn for the worse, then they get transferred to a different place. It's a good job, where I do a variety of things (better than flipping burgers). This might put a hamper on my weekday hiking availability, but hopefully Eric and I can convince Mike to come out some weekend ;)

The Birth of Hopper

On December 9, 1906, Grace Brewster Murray was born. She went on to graduate from Vassar College with a Bachelor's Degree in mathematics and physics, and continued her education at Yale, earning a master's degree in math and physics, and getting her PhD in mathematics. During this time, she had married Vincent Hopper, changing her name to Grace Murray Hopper. She joined the US Navy, working on the Mark I Calculator, and was the first person to write a program for it. After the war, she was discharged, but continued to work on the Mark II and Mark III calculators. It is during her time with the Mark II that she documented the now infamous "first computer bug". In 1949, she joined the UNIVAC I team, which was bought up in the early 1950s by the Remington Rand Corporation. It was during these early years with Rand that Grace Hopper wrote the world's first compiler, the A compiler. Her ideas and philosophies were used heavily in the creation of COBOL and FORTRAN, as she believed that computer languages could use syntax closer to that of English, rather than assembly. In her later years, Grace Hopper became a spokesperson and ambassador for the United States Navy. By the time of her retirement, she was a Rear Admiral, and the oldest officer in the Navy. From there she went on to be a spokesperson for the Digital Equipment Corporation until she passed away on January 1, 1992. For her extraordinary work in the area of computer science, proving that women can work beside men in this technical field, and being the person to write the world's first compiler, I have decided to name my fourth computer "Hopper" in her honour. The main objective of this computer is to further my experience in the world of computers, compilers, and all things of the sort.

As a recap, here is the list of my previous computers:

Babbage: Pentium 3 500Mhz, first computer to use the naming system. Named after Charles Babbage, the man who devised first mechanical calculator.

Mauchly: Pentium 4 1.4GHz, second computer to use the naming system. Named after John William Mauchly, the man who worked on the first electronic computer, ENIAC.

Cerf: Pentium 90Mhz, primary function was to act as a web server (http/ftp/svn/smb/...). Retired. Named after Vint Cerf, the man who co-invented TCP/IP.

This now brings us to Hopper. Hopper is an AMD64 Sempron 2600+ (1.6GHz) on an ASUS K8V-X SE Socket 754 motherboard. With 512MB of ram and a GeForceFX 5200, I'm expecting this computer to be a serious workhorse (as opposed to playhorse). There should also be no shortage in coding space, as Hopper is adorned with a 200GB SATA Maxtor Drive. One of the important things that I wanted to get was 64-bit because I know that 64-bit programming will become more important in a very short amount of time, and it would be a while before I make my next upgrade. In order to facilitate 64-bits and get the most out of this power, I have chosen Ubuntu Breezy Badger AMD64 for my operating system, and so far it has worked out quite well. I actually purchased the parts through a combination of NCIX and ATIC about two weeks ago, picked up the parts over last week, and assembled it all Friday night (Feb 10). Since then, I have been setting it up, and retrieving my files from Babbage (the computer I had been using at school up until now). Most applications work under 64-bit (as they have been compiled for 64 bit by the good people at Canonical). The only thing I need 32-bit environments for is video codecs from Windows and Macromedia Flash. Leave it to the closed source programs to prevent me from going 100% 64-bit.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of it on the web. I'll get those up when I move back into residence (I'm on spring break right now). I know I'm a little behind on breaking the news, and really behind on posting anything in my blog. I say it every time, but "hopefully I will update more frequently in the future". See you later!