Seeing Old Friends

Yes, it's always nice to get together with old friends to see how each other is doing. Sometimes when you meet people you haven't seen in a long time you have a different attitude towards them. When you previously had to spend many hours a day with these people you wanted nothing more than to eviscerate their intestines with a fork, but now that you meet them many months afterwards, you can both look back and laugh at times and events long ago. It's always nice to see old friends.

This past Saturday (Sept 24) I went out with a bunch of guys that I used to live with here on Nootka 4th. Many couldn't make it, due to being out of the country, out of the province, or otherwise out of reach. The eight of us that could get together met up at the UBC bus loop and went out for dinner at Shabusen. Shabusen is a nice little place in downtown Vancouver (Google it, there are only two locations in the world, the other in South Vancouver), where they serve Japanese sushi and Korean BBQ, with the availability of all-you-can-eat. All I can say is, "Oishii!" I've had sushi before, but only stuff like California rolls, and not really the "proper" sushi. This time raw salmon and tuna was had by all, along with a plethora of other vegetables, dumplings, wasabi, and other things for which I don't know the names. My personal favourite was the Korean BBQ, which was raw pork, beef, or chicken, marinated in special sauces, which you then cook yourself over a BBQ that is built into the table. My descriptions can do no justice, as I don't know what half the stuff was that I was eating, but it was very good. If you want to stuff yourself on Asian food sometime, try Shabusen. It is a bit pricey, at $23, and you will have to make reservations before going, but for a special occasion such as this, it was great.

To see some pictures of the outing, and check out the array of food, go to the pictures page. It might take a bit to load, as there are 29 jpeg photos. Clicking a photo will get you the Ultra-Extreme-Platinum-Super-Huge Edition (a full 5.1 megapixels).

Jogging Again, Windows Vista News

Well, I'm trying to get back into some form of exercise, and jogging would be it for now. I must admit that inspiration comes from Mikee, although I'm not following the Sun Run routine thing. I also haven't determined things like route and time just yet. I have found that I'm really out of shape, and just can't run like I used to. On the positive side, I can feel myself improving from one day to the next, because I'm so out of shape. Due to this, I don't have a set route to run, because after a couple weeks the current one will likely be too short. I'm also trying out the early morning run thing, getting up around 5 (more like 5:30) to do the jogging before my day starts. I don't have any good graphing software, so there won't be any statistics gathering (like I did for my meal plan points and my biking times). Should be interesting, to say the least.

There is a lot of stuff happening around Windows Vista this week. It seems that MS has decided to use the Professional Developers Conference (right now in Los Angeles) to announce things and show things off and lift NDAs on people like Robert Scoble. Two places to watch: Slashdot and Channel 9.

Settled In University

Well, I know it's been a long stretch since I last blogged, but anybody who has this on a feedreader will probably get it within a day. Those who were visiting the site manually will have dropped off by now and won't know anything about it.

I'd say I'm now pretty much settled into university. I'm back at UBC, taking second year computer science, and I'm living in Nootka 464. I'm right back on the same floor that I was on last year! The kids here are fine, they seem to be more the partying type than last year, but they also manage to find their parties elsewhere, which is fine by me.

One of my plans in coming here was to have my main box (Babbage, PIII 500MHz) as my work machine and then set up another box (Cerf, PI 90Mhz) as a server machine, hosting things like http, ftp, svn, and maybe even some bugzilla. Unfortunately, the bios seems to be going on it (can't boot from cdrom like it used to), so I think I will just junk it. If anyone needs a 2GB hard drive, a 1GB hard drive, or some old old RAM, they can talk to me. I don't think I'll get too many inquiries. Perhaps in a while I will get Apache set up proper like, with some ftp and subversion, just like I planned. That won't be for a while though.

UBC is also really messing with me. Someone put the wrong co-requisites on the registration website for one of my courses. Long story made short, I'm not allowed to take a course this semester that I wanted to, and I'm being forced to take it next semester (it's a requirement for my degree). This means that I will be taking 4 courses this semester and 6 courses next semester. My plan is actually to attend the classes for the course this semester so that when I have to take it next semester, I will already know most of the material (except the labs).

On the previous two notes, when I do get my Apache up and running, then I will add my timetable to my server. I have already copied it from the UBC webpage (dynamically generated just for me) and stripped the html down to bare minimum. You'll just have to wait.

On a non-personal, non-educational note, I've had this problem with XMMS (Linux's answer to Winamp) not reading the file length of some MP3's properly. It either reads them to be too long, or can't get the length at all and treats it as a stream. In the latter case, any seeking results in a "failed to seek" error. I tracked the problem down today to being a bug in the MAD decoder plugin incorrectly reading tags when XING tag reading is enabled. Perhaps over Christmas break I will make it my job to hunt this one down and fix it (or sooner if I can). One quick fix is to disable MAD and use MPG123 or to disable the XING tags in the MAD options.

Encoding DVDs Not A Fun Experience

Took my Windows XP machine (the faster of the two) up to Oliver BC to edit some wedding video for some family friends. Edited a total 92 minutes of video, including some image touch-up (the lighting was terrible in the dance hall), and some sound touch up (their camcorder has a very bad microphone that was at the back of the hall). Everything was going fine until I wanted to export the video and burn it to DVD.

Adobe has a built-in DVD burner that does everything for you, as long as you're not looking for menus and titles and stuff, which I'm not. I still didn't want to use the built-in burner because I wanted to burn multiple copies from one masterfile on my hard drive, and as far as I can tell, Adobe's built-in burner script doesn't keep temporary files around for long. I figured that Nero would be able to handle it all for me, so I exported the video using the MPEG2-DVD option in the Premiere exporter. According to my readings, NTSC DVDs can only handle PCM and Dolby AC3 for the audio, while PAL DVDs can do PCM, AC3, and MP2. Premiere comes with a trial copy of some AC3 encoder, and only having 3 trial encodes left, I opted for the PCM. Adobe ended up exporting an .m2v file and a .wav file (I was expecting it to put both video and audio into one container, but this wasn't a huge problem). I opened up Nero, only to find that it will only handle .vob, .ifo, and .bup's. In order to burn anything else to a DVD Video requires NeroVision DVD. Not feeling like hitting up eMule or any of that nonsense (considering I'm not on my own internet), I tried hunting around for freeware to do conversions and/or burning for me. One project I found was DVDAuthorGUI, which seemed like it would work, by taking the exported files and putting them in .vob files for Nero. When I got that program fired up, it turned out that it couldn't handle PCM wave audio, and needed either .mp2 or .ac3. At that point I had to go hunting for another program to convert my wave file to ac3. BatchffmpegGUI XP helped me along there, so that I had an ac3 audio that could go into a vob along with the mp2, which Nero could then burn. To top all this off, I was constantly short on hard drive space, shuffling files around from partition to partition trying to make this stuff work.

For the people who think that video games cause violence, I can assure them that video games cause far less frustration and pent up anger than having to deal with formats that are patented by large corporations. Why can't the process of exporting a DVD be easier? Why is it that a consumer has to spend hundreds of dollars buying software and licenses, or download software that can't be distributed in compiled form in the United States. The media conglomerates are so interested in their own investments that they make it purposefully difficult and expensive for a consumer to work with his own personal video recording. What a pain in the butt.

Crankworx Video

In relation to my Whistler trip post, I have another post, this time related to the biking aspect. My brother has finished editing a video, that I compressed into XviD/Vorbis/Matroska. You can either dink around with filters for the ultimately crappy Windows Media Player, or you can get VideoLan Client, which will play the video out of the box. You can grab the video off my ftp server here. I would have posted it on something like OurMedia.org, but my brother used a copyrighted song for the background. All the video was taken using my Nikon Coolpix 5900 digital still camera.

The Full/Empty Recycle Bin

I'm trying to clear up some space for the purpose of video editing on my Windows XP Pro machine. The E: drive is my chosen partition for this job, as it has nothing on it except for the raw capture. One problem I was running into was a slight problem of missing 2.4 GB. On a partition that is 24.5 GB, 2.4 GB is a lot of missing real estate. So I made sure that everything was cleared off (except for the raw video), and I mean everything. All the other files were moved to different partitions, the recycle bin was emptied and the system restore points were cleared. Still I'm missing some space. So I ran scandisk and defrag, hoping that would clear up 2.4 GB (a miraculous feat) on this FAT32 partition (I chose FAT32 when installing XP for Linux compatibility reasons). This did not clear up the space, so I converted it to NTFS. I then went directory diving in cmd.exe, deleted a small file from the recycle bin that wasn't showing up in explorer, but that still doesn't get me back my 2.4 GB. Check out the following photo:

Windows Stupidity. Please excuse any Flickr problems, you will need to view the larger size to read the text.

In this photo, on the top left, you can see that the recycle bin is empty, according to the cmd.exe shell command dir. In the bottom left is explorer.exe showing that the recycle bin is empty. On the bottom right we see my explorer settings to show that I am viewing all hidden and system files (I leave my settings like this all the time). Finally, in the top right, we see that the recycle bin is taking up 2.4 GB out of spite for its master. A comparison of the raw video folder with the total partition usage will confirm the 2.4 GB deficit. I know many people wonder why I use Linux, and maybe it's things like this that caused me to switch; Linux just doesn't screw with my head in such evil ways.

Does anybody know any other ways I can get back my hard drive space? I don't want to have to format (raw video is on there, and not enough space on other partitions), but perhaps there are other sneaky things that Windows is doing I don't know about?

Advertising On Adam's Blog?

Yes, it seems that everyone is getting on the Google AdSense bandwagon, and now I am no exception. I'm not actually a fan of advertising, as I usually find it to be intrusive and distracting, with Flash popups and popunders, huge animations, or full page ads that take precious seconds to redirect you to the actual content. But what's wrong with wanting a little money? So I now have an advertisement at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Statistically, according to Google, this is the worst place to put an advertisement, but that's okay, because I'm not paying for blogspot.com anyways, and I highly doubt this will be a big source of revenue for me. So let me test this out: I've picked the smallest ad size that would fit, and stuck with text-only ads. This should keep the advertisers nice and quiet while you read Adam's blog.

Update: I would also like to point out that most of my readers get this through syndication and aggregators (you should, it saves me a lot of time), which does not have the advertisements, thus the majority of my readers are unaffected. That, and I fixed a spelling mistake.

Canadian Indie Music, Wi-Fi Speed Spray

Not too long ago, a Korean MSN correspondent of mine asked me what Canadian music was like. My favourite band is by far The Beatles, with classical music, soundtrack music, and other forms of 60's and 70's rock holding up the rest of my playlist. I sent the Korean some Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive, but that isn't very representative of current Canadian artists. This is when I realized that I'm not very Canadian in my music listening choices. I don't listen to the radio much (kind of hard considering the esoteric stuff that I listen to), and it seems like most of the big bands I have heard of are from the States or from the UK. The only "current" stuff that I could think to send was Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews Band, and Nickelback, and even those weren't yet sitting on my hard drive at the time. Keeping a Canadian identity is very important for our society, especially with the proximity of the heavy-weight American media, and I decided that I needed to change that. I did some research on Canadian Music over at Wikipedia to get some ideas, and am trying out some of the suggestions from there. Today I found out about the CBC Radio 3 Podcast, and am currently listening to show #2. As a point of interest, Grant Lawrence, the DJ for the podcast, claims that the CBC Radio 3 podcast is the first ever public radio podcast with "pod safe" music, which means that the artists approved their music to be played over the podcast (first show, 30 seconds into it). I'm not going to fact check if it is the first legal music podcast in the world, but it wouldn't surprise me. So go check out the podcast, add it to your syndicator programs and be prepared to get blown away by the Canadian underground!

On another note, I've gone ahead and ordered three boxes of Wi-Fi Speed Spray (in case I should buy a Wi-Fi system in the future), and I would urge all of you to do the same. I mean, how can you go wrong with those equations?!

Back From Whistler

My brother and two of his friends volunteered for the Crankworx Mountain Bike Festival up at Whistler over the past weekend, and I volunteered to drive them up and stay with them (as no other parent was available). We drove up Thursday morning at 5, arriving shortly after 8, and were there until 4 in the evening on Sunday. A good time was had by all, the kids meeting all their heros and me walking around on the hiking trails. I set up a flickr account to post a small set of pictures here. The Lost Lake picture is out of order, making it seem as if the lake is at the top of the mountain, when it is actually at the base. I also didn't post any of the biking pictures, as I'm not into that stuff.

Windows Vista Losing Monad

It looks like yet another feature is being pulled from Windows Vista. This time, the Microsoft Shell (MSH, codename Monad) is the feature being pulled from MS's next operating system. Monad was going to be one of those cool features for geeks, as Microsoft was looking to the unix shells as a model on how to do great things with the command line prompt. Personally, I hated the command line, until I started to use Linux, and then I realized how a real command line is supposed to work. Monad has many great features, and looks like it will be a killer system, in conjunction with the Windows File System (also chopped from Vista). I know that Byron was looking forward to Monad, but it looks like his favourite OS company has let him down yet again ;)

MS is planning on releasing Monad with the server version of Longhorn, due to be released sometime in 2007.

Don't Buy Mitsumi DVD-R Media

In relation to this blog, I would like to suggest that one should never buy Mitsumi DVD-R 4.7GB 4x media. I went back to Futureshop and bought a five pack of Memorex DVD-R 8x, and so far 2 burns out of 2 burns have come out fine. I know that my sample size isn't very large, but 10/10 fails with Mitsumi media and 2/2 passes with Memorex media may be the start of a statistical trend. For both media I burned at half the speed they were rated for.

As for the FFII incident, an update that I got through a Debian blog (who in turn got it from ffii.de, but the link doesn't work for me) was that a DNS hosting company chickened out and removed the ffii.org site after receiving a letter from a Nutzwerk lawyer.

Shaw Assigning Different Subnets

Here's an annoying problem for you: two computers in a house, connected through a hub to Shaw Cable Internet. Now try ftping. I've come across this problem earlier this month, and it's back to haunt me today. As it turns out, Shaw's DHCP servers aren't smart enough to assign the same IP subnet to all computers registering through the same cable modem (I am entitled to two public IP addresses). When I try to transfer files over ftp all communications have to go through Shaw's router because they are on different subnets. This means that all transfers are limited to 50KBps, and the transfers will count against me in my monthly upload/downloads. One way I have found around this is to set IP aliases on both machines, creating my own private network (10.x.x.x). Of course, Windows needs to be rebooted every time you fart, so I have to wait for Kevin to save his game of Rollercoaster Tycoon so that I can restart the machine and get my own private network running in parallel. Oh, and this method seems to break the simple domain names that Shaw uses (like "shawmail" for my pop3/smtp server). Do I fiddle around with my DNS and gateway settings (breaking any hope of proper DHCP), or do I reboot Windows twice every time I want to transfer files? I've emailed Shaw technical, and the guy basically said that IP address allocation is handled by the DHCP server so they have no manual control over it.

FFII.org Shut Down By Nutzwerk

Has the FFII website been shutdown by Nutzwerk GmbH? FFII, the foundation that fights to get rid of software patents, among other legal battles, has apparently been driven into the ground by libel lawsuits filed by Nutzwerk GmbH over the past couple months. Apparently, FFII had posted some documents on their website about a legal win over Nutzwerk, and some of the text was seen as libelous to Nutzwerk (the FFII was badmouthing Nutzwerk). Since April, Nutzwerk has filed 5 court lawsuits, and word has it that ffii.org has been taken down due to financial strain. ffii.org.uk is still up, but has no related information. ffii.de is still up, and has links to two news articles, but these articles are both hosted on wiki.ffii.org, and are thus not available. Google has a cache of the earlier article, but has nothing for the more recent article. You can view a German press release on the Nutzwerk website here. Has Nutzwerk managed to take the ffii.org website off the net? Is the FFII merely trying to get the attention of the community? Has anybody heard anything more?

Babbage Coming Back Up, DVD Burner Problems

My school machine, the 500MHz is coming back into a state of usefulness. I try to do an average of one new program per day, letting it compile over night. Two days ago I got gaim installed, and yesterday was liferea. Today I will be looking around at different word processing programs (OO.org or Abiword or something else?) and I also have to get something for calendaring and todo-listing. Doing 1280x1024 on a 15" screen is also quite different and sometimes hard to see the smaller fonts.

Approximately a month ago I bought a DVD burner. There are so many files on my hard drive that are over 700MB that I would like to burn off, and I also want to convert the two dozen 8mm tapes in our house to DVD video. The burner I ended up buying was the Samsung DVD+-RW 16x DL burner (TSSTcorp TS-H552U) through NCIX for $60+tax. For my first media I bought ten Mitsumi DVD-R 4.7GB 4x discs at Futureshop. As of this morning I have burned all ten discs, and every single one of them has data errors. They aren't complete coasters, but in my mind, they are. I have used Nero 6.6.0.13, Adobe Premiere's built-in burner, DeepBurner, and Cheetah DVD Burner. I think it's safe to say that it isn't the fault of the burning program. I will have to go out to the stores and buy some more media (different brand this time) and try those. If they don't work, I will plunk this drive into the 500MHz Gentoo machine, and see what it can do.

I do hope that I can somehow get this thing to work.

Installing Gentoo

I'm currently installing Gentoo Linux 2005.0 onto the 500MHz that recently crashed. So far I have been through Red Hat 7.3, 8.0, Mandrake 10.0-10.2, and Ubuntu 5.04. I figured it was time to give Gentoo a try. Unlike most other distros, which prepare downloads in pre-compiled binary packages, Gentoo does everything from source. For a stage 1 install of the operating system, you first run a live cd, then use the compiler on the live cd to compile the gcc compiler. Quite literally everything on the computer has been compiled by the end user (for a stage 1 install). It is not terribly difficult, as scripts do most of the work for you, and there is a step-by-step handbook available online. I read the first couple pages in the book yesterday, and started the install process this morning. It took me from 8:30 to 11:00 to step through the initial set up phase (that includes about an hour of downloading stages and portage info). I basically read the manual off my Pentium 4 while doing the install on my Pentium 3. At around 11:30 I started my stage 1 compilation, and when they say it takes a long time, they mean it. On my Pentium 3 500MHz with 256MB of RAM, it wasn't until 2:00 that I got a compilation error. Turned out that there was a "bootstrap comparison failure" with the file gcse.o from the gcc package. Googling didn't turn up much, and most of the solutions out there were to do a make clean and then try again. So I changed my compilation options from the very aggressive -O3 optimization scheme to the relatively aggressive -O2, and set it back to work. It is now 5 hours later, and I'm still waiting for it to finish. I've always wondered what it would be like to have an entire operating system compiled specifically for my architecture. No longer will I be using i386 binaries, but instead will have -march=pentium3 -msse -mmmx -mfpmath=sse specifically for my Katmai CPU. It will be exciting. I think I will also try out Fluxbox as my window manager, though I'm whimping out and keeping the GTK and QT libraries around. I hope I can get past stage 2 before I have to go to bed, as stage 3 will probably take a day or two to compile through. Windows XP doesn't seem like such a long install process in comparison!

Babbage Failing

The machine that I had in residence is getting closer and closer to retirement. Today I rebooted it (after 22 days uptime) to switch over to a new kernel I installed a couple days ago. Upon attempting to start, the kernel panicked with the following:
"kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"
According to Google, this is commonly caused by hard disk drivers not being loaded into the kernel (eg. raid, serial ata, and reiser). Seeing as how I am using ext3 on parallel ATA on a pretty standard motherboard, I think it is highly unlikely that Ubuntu doesn't have my drivers compiled into the kernel. I have been known to have hard drive problems in the past. Put in Ubuntu Live, backed up some stuff, then started playing around to see if I could fix it. I decided to try running Memtest just to see what it would have to say. I've never seen Memtest return an error on my hardware before, but this time I'm looking at around 60 bad memory blocks around the 86MB area of my ram. Judging by NCIX, the going rate for PC133 ram is about 4x that of everything else. It would cost me around $100 to replace the ram in Babbage, while a new computer can be had for around $350. With the unreliability of the whole machine, I'm thinking I should just get something new for September. I will use Babbage until August, and buy a computer then, hoping that new computers come down by a couple price points. My next machine will also be fully researched for Linux compatibility in the hardware.

Sorry for any spelling mistakes, I'm typing on qwerty again.

Systm - MythTV

Well, another episode of Systm is out, and this time they check out MythTV. If you've always wanted a TIVO (which runs Linux, btw), but enjoyed tinkering yourself, and didn't want to pay the annual subscription fee, check out this video. I know Carl would like to see it, if only he weren't on dialup.

I've given thought to building my own MythTV box or Freevo box. It would be a fun project, but I just don't see it happening any time soon. Of course I would just have to go with DVI, Audigy, and IR remote, but all those fun toys add money. I've never used a TIVO, but I have used Windows Media Center (took me 2 minutes in the local FutureShop to crash Media Center), and I think that Linux-based systems can kick the pants off of the Win MCE. The MAME plugin for MythTV alone kicks butt (playing thousands of old arcade games on your television).

Why, oh why, doesn't systm have an RSS so that I can be notified of the next episode?

Open Formats - Why Aren't They Popular?

Steven Garrity has a nice little three part series on why open formats aren't popular, and why they are having problems getting adopted.
The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption,
Part 1: Music
Part 2: Instant Messaging
Part 3: Office Documents

My thoughts on Part 1: Music
He does make a very good point about how people associate mp3 with free, when it actually is not. Lame (Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder) is the most popular mp3 encoder, used by about 99% of the music ripping underground. It is, however, technically illegal. There are patents held by Motion Pictures Experts Groups (MPEG) members, and these members require licensing fees to use mpeg 1 layer 3 (mp3) technologies. Should the FBI and the courts in the States (and any other country that has patentable software) start cracking down and actually start enforcing the law, then people who rip music would have to start using Nero, Adobe, or some other encoder that must be paid for. For the record, the open source Lame is also orders of magnitude better than the reference encoders, so don't think that paying for the encoders will get you better quality; forcing Lame out of the equation will actually reduce quality of rips. The same thing goes for XviD. Despite being open source, it is still covered by patents, and is illegal to distribute in compiled form (I don't know where Koepi and Nic live, but should they be in the States, they are breaking the law for providing us with an excellent video encoder in binary format). Steven pretty much hits the nail on the head as to why Vorbis hasn't been adopted, although I believe that Winamp comes with Vorbis support out of the box.

Part 2: Instant Messaging
My brother, who is in middle school, recieved his year book today. The theme: Mount Slesse Messenger (a play between the school's name, Mount Slesse Middle School (MSMS), and Microsoft Network Messenger (MSN Messenger)) The front of the year book says "welcome msm" at the top. In the center is a little green blob man, just like that little green MS guy, wearing a muscle shirt with the school logo. Beside the guy is a button that says "Sign In .net", with the exact same colour scheme, font, and format as the MSN Sign In button. The entire year book is done up to look like MSN Messenger, with just enough changes to prevent copyright or trademark legal action from MS Canada. I also went to the school's year end assembly (to film my brother playing in rock club), and saw the unveiling of the year book. To initiate the unveiling, the student said, "what do we use almost every day?" Within a split second a girl from the back screamed "MSN!" This is very interesting to me as a person familiar with the Internet. MSN quite literally stands for 'Microsoft Network". It started off as an ISP that MS was using to gain market share from AOL. It has since extended to a set of services offered online by MS, from the ISP to the web portal "msn.com" to the MSN Messenger program. To a 15 year old girl, however, MSN has no connotations to a service provider. It doesn't represent a news site or a web search (Google for that one probably). For 15 year old kids in Western Canada, MSN has it's own urban dictionary definition of "gossiping with friends when you should be doing homework." Those three letters mean simply that, and the kids don't care about openness, or what company provides it, or how Yahoo! is more popular in another part of the country, and AOL IM is popular in another place, while SMS is the thing in Europe and Asia. Changing protocols would be very difficult because practically everyone here uses MSN. As Steven says in his article, you can use a multi-protocol client, such as Gaim. I use Gaim to log in as both "javaman1138@hotmail.com" and "tiosc@jabber.com". You can also view in Jeff Waugh's Project Topaz presentation from Guadec how he really got a girl interested when he said that Gaim can support MSN and Yahoo! and AOL all in one window, and all on Windows. Despite the capabilities of Gaim and Trillian to use multiple protocols, it is unlikely that there will be a massive migration. I have yet to meet another person using Jabber.

Part 3: Office Documents
Here is one closed format that I can't figure out how it became so popular. Winamp and MSN Messenger may be free, but when someone sends you a MS Word .doc file in an email, you need to run out and spend $400 at a computer retailer. Even with Dell and other OEMs selling reduced price boxes with a new system, how is it that everybody ended up having this expensive piece of software? Is pirating more prevalent than I thought? I'm not saying that OpenOffice should have been more popular, but why did people spend so much money on Office when there is a perfectly crappy piece of MS software called "Wordpad" that comes with every Windows box? What and when exactly was Corel WordPerfect killed off? I mean, MS Office is $399, while Corel's Office is "only" $299. Since when did people enjoy paying $100 more for an office suite? Why don't the kids use the bundled Wordpad like they do the bundled Media Player and bundled Internet Explorer? Could OpenOffice take over with its low low price of only $0?

My mom has to make changes to the school's parent advisory council constitution. This file was created in MS Word in 1997, and has not been edited since. When I save the file, I plan on saving the revised file in OpenOffice 2.0's OASIS .odt format, OpenOffice's MS Word .doc export filters, PDF, and HTML, with a text file explaining why there are all the formats. I wouldn't expect another edit to be made for another seven years, and I want to make sure that the file is still readable the next time that should happen. I rip my audio CDs in Vorbis and try to do everything in an open-source patent-free way, but I know not many do, and it is I who will have to adapt when someone sends me an email with an attachment.

MusicBrainz

In an effort to organize my music collection a bit better, I decided to try out MusicBrainz. Normally, I would have done all the music research myself, but that was taking far too long. So I went back to the site that Ian had mentioned a long time ago, and gave it a shot. The system basically makes a "fingerprint" of the audio using a short clip of the waveform and the clip length. This means that it can be a different format (MP3, Vorbis) and still get the same fingerprint. The theory is that many people have submitted known-good fingerprints which can be looked up. The program will then change your id3 tags and rename the files based on the information in the database. For my music collection it successfully tagged around 6/7 of my music. Around 1/2 of the remainder had a "fingerprint collision" which means that more than one song in the database have the same fingerprint, and you need to pick which one is the correct one. For the rest of the songs, it plain old didn't know what they were.

For the most part, the program worked out well. The program actually picked out some pieces that I had attributed to the wrong artist. There was perhaps two false positives (out of around 1000 songs) that I had to go back and change. Most of the user required selections were easy, such as picking the first option in the list. The program seemed to have the most difficulty with classical music. This is understandable, as there are different versions of the same song (Boston Philharmonic vs. Philadelphia Philharmonic playing Beethoven's 6th), and many songs can sound the same if you pick too small a sample (long stretches of violins holding a single note). Selecting the proper information for a classical song is no easy task, either. When scrolling through the list of albums for someone like Tchaikovsky, it is difficult to find an album that will have a song that matches the song on the hard drive, as different CDs have cut classical compositions at different points (eg. I have a Swan Lake excerpt that has Act II - Scene I, II, and III all in the same mp3 file, but most CDs have the scenes split up into different tracks).

It's times like this (organizing my mp3s and tagging them properly) that I wish more programs had support for Unicode and internationalized text. MusicBrainz isn't standardized themselves, as they have Kanno Yoko's name as the original Japanese Kanji (菅野よう子, for those who can read it), while a song from the Spirited Away soundtrack is listed as "A Summer's Day", when I've always known it as "Ano Natsu He". Firefox can handle Asian script, while Rhythmbox (default player for Gnome) cannot. I guess there has been a lot of work done on i10n and i18n standards, but it is up to the programmers to implement the capabilities. When you're developing applications, just keep in mind that less than 50% of the Internet uses English as the mother tongue.

Burgers For Sale?

Today I spent most of the day by volunteering over at the local middle school. They were having a BBQ fundraiser for the Parent Advisory Council, so I helped in the setup, handing out burger patties, and cleaning up. Unfortunately for the fundraiser it was raining today and the kids weren't in a very "BBQ" mood. There are now lots of burger patties and buns left over (some hotdog too), which the parents may have to "buy back" from the PAC. If you want to buy some burgers, I may be able to talk to my mom, and you could buy some burgers at a (slightly) cheap price. Tonight's dinner is going to be: hamburgers and hotdogs.