Month: October 2003

e-xpensive

I’ve begun reading more fiction again, after a long hiatus. I used to devour books like crazy as a teenager, but they gradually got replaced by textbooks and technical manuals and games and web surfing and so on, and I just didn’t have time for plain old written stories anymore.

Now that I’ve got my V37 though, it’s made it a lot more convenient to find books, tote them around, and read them in spare moments thanks to the wonders of the e-book formats.

There is the occasional problem though, and it’s best illustrated here.

Why in the world is the e-book version over 40% more expensive than if you were to buy it brand new in paperback??? The physical book’s price includes a lot of overhead costs like distribution, storage, printing, etc. that would be next to nothing for the e-book version, yet they want even more for it. The only reason I can think of is that demand for it is expected to be so low that the production cost of putting it in e-book format has to be a large chunk of each sale (i.e., if it cost $10,000 to convert and you only expect to sell 1000 copies, each copy becomes $10 more expensive), but then the high price deters people from the e-book version anyway.

Another questionable tactic is that of selling off individual short stories. Not that there’s anything theoretically wrong with it, but here it seems like an attempt to squeeze more money out of them. Traditionally you would get a bunch of short stories in a collection, but if you were to add up enough of the stories you’d expect to get in one, the total cost is a lot higher when you have to buy them separately. I don’t want to have to look through the whole list, story-by-story, trying to figure out if it’s worth the 87 cents or not.

Fortunately most e-books *are* cheaper than the paper versions by a buck or two. It’s debatable whether an e-book is really a good replacement for a ‘real’, printed book, but the cheaper they are, the more you can get. I’ll probably just get printed versions of my favourites, which I might still want to reread twenty years down the road, but I don’t need printed versions of *every* so-so story I run across.

Uh, Mr. President?

I’m not particularly political, but I couldn’t let this one get away…

“The Ambassador and the General were briefing me on the — the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice.” — George W. Bush

(Yeah, he didn’t really mean it that way, he’s referring to different people mentioned earlier, but the way he says things like this makes him sound dumber than a sack of hammers…)

Too Damn Early

Evil creeps up on you gradually, one warning sign at a time. As I sit here in the office, one such warning sign almost escaped my attention. A mere flicker of light in the corner of my eye, it would have gone otherwise unnoticed had I not been letting my attention wander.

There, out the window, across the street and midway up the apartment building there, I spotted them. Lights. *Christmas* lights. Before Hallowe’en is even over.

Bah, humbug.

My Cloth Pants Are Rusty

Diablo II has always been plagued by one major problem: cheaters.

In the Open games that was pretty much expected, since it’s impossible to prevent client hacking when the data is saved on your own system and there’s no central server to enforce the rules. The Realm games were supposed to be different though; with them there is a central server and the data is stored at the server end, not on the client. The Realm games were supposed to be unhackable, giving people a place where their accomplishments actually had meaning, items up for trade were actually worth something, and you had to play by the proper rules.

And unhackable they were. For about five minutes.
Continue reading “My Cloth Pants Are Rusty”

The Kernel’s New Recipe

The 2.6 branch of the Linux kernels is fast approaching ‘release’ status — the current version 2.6.0-test8 is essentially a release candidate, even if they don’t call it that specifically. I was curious just what was new in it and the latest version of Slackware I installed is supposed to be 2.6-ready, so I gave it a whirl.

What difference do kernel changes really make though? Well, here is a summary of the major changes between 2.4 and 2.6, and there’s a lot of them. Most are fairly subtle and arcane, so I’m just going to focus on the ones that really matter to me:
Continue reading “The Kernel’s New Recipe”

VeriSign Destroys The Internet

Okay, maybe that’s overstating things a bit. A small bit.

VeriSign, the company responsible for maintaining the top-level domain registry, started causing hostname lookups for non-existent domains to resolve to a site of their own, which would then show you a directory of sites that might help lead you to what you were looking for. ICANN made them stop doing it for a while, but VeriSign has vowed that they will put the service back into operation sometime soon.

What’s the problem?

Well, it’s formally incorrect behaviour and false information, for one. If I try to look up a name that doesn’t exist, I should get an error indicating that it doesn’t exist, not the IP address of some other site which isn’t what I’m looking for.

It’s annoying. An incorrect name error immediately tells me something is wrong, but if I get redirected I don’t know that until the site loads and I see it’s not the one I expected. With a ton of people being redirected to this single site it’ll get busy, so it could take a while just to find that out. And since the browser considers it a valid site, the misspelled name is now in the browser history, mucking up future lookups.

It impacts other programs and protocols; the Internet is more than just the web, after all. If I try to FTP/IRC/ssh/etc. to a site that doesn’t exist, instead of being told that it doesn’t exist my connection will now either be refused, or it will timeout. That doesn’t tell me that the name was wrong, so I remain unaware that the name I tried was incorrect and wind up thinking it’s just down or busy at the moment. Spam filters that try to check whether the originating domain is valid or not can no longer use that check — every domain name will appear to be valid. Misaddressed e-mail will have to pass through VeriSign’s e-mail servers before bouncing, if they even bother handling it, instead of letting the sender know immediately.

It’s unnecessary. Most browsers already give you the option of automatically doing a search engine lookup if the site you tried to reach doesn’t exist. This change by VeriSign overrides that, unnecessarily.

It’s a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist in the first place, that just causes even more problems. It smacks of being driven by advertising revenue behind their directory, which seems a tad unethical. It’s like having the phone company automatically forwarding you to Bob’s Auto Repair whenever you misdial Joe’s Auto Repair by one digit…

Mobile Music II

Oh, duh. After a bit of research, it turns out that my PocketPC situation isn’t as dire as I thought. I can remap one of the buttons that’s recessed a bit along the side of the unit to deactivate and reactivate the touch screen, and it’s out-of-the-way enough that it won’t get pressed accidentally.

There are still a few problems though: it’s clunky, the screen is going to get scratched up if I don’t get a case which leaves the earphone jack available, and one thing I forgot to mention before: the WMA format.

More music is better than less music, of course, so I want to cram as much as I can into the 256 meg card I have (the biggest I can get for this unit, I believe). The important factor here then is bitrate, since it directly determines how much time’s worth of music I can put in that space. I usually rip tracks at 192kbps, which sounds good enough to my ears (I’m not much of an audiophile). Unfortunately that would only give me around three hours total.

High quality isn’t really necessary for travelling music though, since there’ll be a lot of environmental noise interfering anyway, so I did a bit of testing with various MP3 bitrates. I found that in my own opinion, the cutoff point was at 96kbps; below that too many higher frequencies got cut off and it sounded way too muddy. But, I also did a few tests with different formats, and I found that I could go down to 64kbps with WMAs and still keep roughly the same quality. Yes, unfortunately, Microsoft wins on this one. 64kbps WMAs sound better than 64kbps MP3s, at least as encoded by LAME. It makes a big difference in capacity too — nine hours at 64kbps versus only six hours at 96kbps.

This presents a few problems. I already have a large number of MP3s but it’s not easy to convert them to WMAs; Media Player will only let me rip CDs to WMA, not convert existing MP3s, and I don’t want to have to rerip damn near everything (not to mention the files I wouldn’t be able to rip again….). One possibility is to convert to the Ogg Vorbis format since it does fairly well at 64kbps too, but then I can’t use the built-in player and would have to shell out money for some third-party player.

Still, it’s better than having to buy a whole new gadget. I’ve got too many of them lying around already…

The Bug Stops Here

As they tell you, in theory, there is a very simple procedure for tracking down and fixing bugs:
– Get a description of the conditions that cause the bug.
– Reproduce the problem on your own test systems.
– Use debugging tools to find the cause in the code.
– Fix the bug and prepare a new package with the fix.
– Give the fixed package to the customer. Everyone smiles!

They LIE.
Continue reading “The Bug Stops Here”

Mobile Music Musings

After my walk tonight, I’ve learned two things:

1. PocketPCs make awful portable MP3 players.

There’s nothing wrong with the quality of the sound from my V37, it’s the little quirks of it being a PDA first, music player second. The built-in media player has a stupid little ‘feature’ where any touch of the screen while a song is playing will cause it to pause, and while I’m walking along with the V37 jostling around in my pocket, the screen is getting touched a lot. Even if I minimize the media player, something else is going to get triggered by all those screen touches. I had to put the ebook reader up just because it has relatively few ‘hot spots’ on the screen to trigger.

Every touch of the screen causes beeps and clicks to pop up in the middle of the song, too, and although they can be disabled it’s a pain to have to do so temporarily just for these walks. There’s a similar problem with the buttons on the front of the unit — until I disabled them, it would constantly be switching between the built-in apps, scribbling garbage into each of them. A better case might help, but all of the cases I can find for this unit block the earphone jack, so I have to leave it exposed.

The shuffle feature of the player also seems pretty weak. The resulting playlist still has a lot of songs by the same group clustered together. There are better player programs out there, but they cost money of course, and won’t fix all of these problems. And 256 megs of memory doesn’t really cut it anymore. It’s more than enough for a walk, but I don’t want the hassle of syncing it up and loading a new playlist every day.

2. Earbuds just don’t cut it for walking about.

The wind and the traffic are heavy enough in this area that I had to crank the volume up a fair bit just to be able to hear the songs, but the earbuds are deep in enough that it was on the verge of causing an earache. Also, the slightest tugs on the wires would loosen them enough that I was constantly readjusting them through the whole trip.

If I really want to have music on my walks, I’m clearly going to need a better player and a proper set of headphones, so it’s time to do some research. The iPod is the traditional choice, but there are some interesting new models coming out like the iHP-120 and the Rio Karma. Now when was I scheduled to win that lottery…

Drugs and Music

Say hello to all the apples on the ground
They were once in your eyes but you sneezed them out while sleeping

— “The Nurse Who Loved Me”, A Perfect Circle

Whatever they’ve been snorting, it must be pretty good…

(And the album rocketh. DownloadBuy it.)

A Microsoft Miracle

[Tue Sep 30 16:45:59 2003] [error] [client 68.37.128.146] File does not exist:
/var/www/htdocs/scripts/..%2f../winnt/system32/cmd.exe
[Thu Oct 2 09:47:49 2003] [error] [client 68.65.168.115] File does not exist:
/var/www/htdocs/scripts/root.exe

What is the significance of these log entries?

They mean that I actually went for over 24 hours without a single goddamn Windows virus attack. A miracle indeed.

We Don’t Need No Steenking License

It’s kind of strange to admit this, but I, a 30 year old person who’s lived in urban areas most of his life now, have never driven a car. I don’t even have a proper license, just a Class 7 (i.e., learner’s permit) that’s been expired for five years now.

I suppose I’ve been lucky enough to have never really needed one. Buses got me to all the important spots, I didn’t really travel a lot or have to go far to hang out with friends, etc. Heck, where I live right now, I’m within walking distance of my office, a supermarket, the whole downtown core, an LRT station, lots of smaller stores… There have only been a few occasions where having a car would have been really helpful, such as carrying larger packages, travelling to less-popular parts of the city, and such, and even then there were alternatives available.

There are other factors at work to a certain degree as well. A bit of fear, since it can be a risky business after all. A bit of doubt, as without access to a vehicle I’m not even sure how to even develop driving skills before fully committing myself. And certainly a bit of laziness.

Still, it would be nice to have a bit more flexibility. If I ever get a house, I don’t want to be severely restricted in where I can be located. It’s unfair to drop all the transportation arrangements on friends all the time. Relying on my passport for id is a pain, I’ll have to get the license renewed eventually in order to renew the passport, so I may as well go all the way anyway.

Now where do I start? :-P