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

Move Over FTP

FTP has long been a mainstay of transferring files, but it’s been plagued by problems due to its centralized nature, especially for popular files: if the site is down you can’t get it, central or popular sites are often slow, mirrors get out of sync, etc… File sharing a la KaZaA/Gnutella is an alternative, but then you have to search for what you want and hope it turns up, connections aren’t reliable, what you get might have a virus…

Fortunately, these concepts have been merged into newer programs like BitTorrent and eDonkey, where you download chunks of the file from other people who are also downloading it. The bandwidth requirements are thus scattered across a large number of systems, you don’t depend on a single site, and the result is checked against the original package description to ensure integrity.

As an example, the Slackware 9.1 ISO images were released last week, but it was almost impossible to get on the main site or any mirrors and download it at a decent rate. Using the BitTorrent links instead though, I was able to immediately download both ISOs at over 250kB/s. At the same time, my client exported about half of the ISO data, which in turn helped other people who were downloading the files.

They’re certainly not a complete replacement for FTP yet, but hopefully we’ll see the usage of these kinds of programs on the increase. A lot of large data files like movie trailers, game demos, etc. can certainly benefit from this kind of distribution. Otherwise you’re stuck with services like FilePlanet where you wait forever in ‘line’ to download a file at a way too slow rate…

Pain, Thy Name Is Spam

I’m still getting flooded with those stupid Swen virus e-mails, as is half the planet apparently, but now I have a new spam menace to contend with as well.

In an effort to bypass filters and pose as legitimate e-mail, spammers are sending out e-mails with legitimate From: addresses. If you were to connect to the MX record’s mail server for that person and verify the address you would find that it does in fact exist. Unfortunately, it’s not the person who actually sent the spam… The spammers have huge lists of e-mail addresses they can send to, and they can pose as people on that list as well.

My e-mail address appears to have gotten on one of these lists, so now some people are receiving spam messages that appear as though they are being sent by me. Not only that but it’s the address of my private mailbox, which I had set up separate from a public one specifically to avoid spam. It got leaked somewhere along the way, though it’s hard to tell where.

Not only do I get the blame for these spam messages, but the errors regarding full mailboxes (fairly common with this Swen virus filling peoples’ mailboxes), nonexistent users and domains, etc. all get bounced back to me. Now I’m constantly cleaning viruses out of my public mailbox and error messages out of my private one. I really need to set up those filters…

This ought to be illegal, if it isn’t already. At the very least it’s identity theft for them to send e-mail using my address.

Patch This

My e-mail had actually been relatively spam-free up to this point, but now over the last couple days I’ve been flooded with fake messages in one of two forms:

1) The Microsoft Security Patch

An obvious hoax if you look at the right spots (somehow I don’t think MS’s e-mail address is bqgkxiqisa@support.net), but unfortunately some people will believe it and get suckered into running it and infecting their systems.

2) The undeliverable message notice

These messages try to give you the impression that you sent a piece of e-mail with an attachment to someone and it bounced, hoping you’ll be confused enough that you’ll open it up to remind yourself what it was when, of course, it’s really just a virus in the attachment. The same one as the trojan above, in fact. There’s also a variation on this one where you get a legitimate bounce message from a mailer because it had anti-virus protection, except that you weren’t the person who sent it in the first place because the virus spoofed your address from someone else’s address book, and the anti-virus software has now oh-so-helpfully sent you a copy of the virus as well. :-P

Although they’re easy enough to spot and delete, they’re still getting annoying. I’m receiving about 30-40 a day now and at 110k or more each, they’re wasting a lot of space and risk filling my mailbox and preventing other e-mail from getting through. My private mailbox is fortunately untouched so far, but I do still need to check for the occasional potentially important stuff in the public mailbox, too.

I’m not sure what brought this flood on so suddenly, but now I really need to set up those filters…

(Update: Apparently this is the newly-released W32.Swen.A virus.)

Musical Madness

One of the stranger parts of civil law is the notion that a corporation is considered a ‘virtual person’ with all the rights and freedoms thereof. The analogy goes even further though; apparently companies and organizations and such can become sick and even mentally ill. Otherwise how can you explain the recent actions of the RIAA, such as:

I do sympathize with the artists and they don’t deserve to get ripped off (though with the way things are currently set up they don’t make an awful lot off of album sales anyway), but this is getting a little heavy-handed…

Geekier Than Thou

Speaking of geekiness…

I figured it was about time for my semi-annual haircut. I usually dread these since I really have no idea how to describe what I want done, if I’m even thinking of any particular style to begin with. I’d just mumble something about short/long and hope the end result isn’t too bad.

This time however, I came armed. I went through all the old photos of myself, found one with short hair, and….loaded it onto my PocketPC and popped it up in a picture viewer. A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, after all.

I don’t know if the end result was really any better for it, but it was worth the peace of mind at least.

Invaders From The Planet Krispy

As I was leaving the Bow Valley Square building after finishing lunch, I saw something a bit on the strange side. A lot of people were walking around holding flat boxes. The exact same kind of box. *Everywhere* I looked — at least half of the people around must have been carrying them. Otherwise they looked just like the regular lunchtime crowd going around their business.

On the boxes was a logo I’d only seen or heard about from news sites and friends in the States before: the logo of Krispy Kreme. Strange, I thought, I don’t think we even have one of their shops here.

It must have been a promotion nearby of some kind, but I couldn’t tell exactly where they were all coming from. All too aware that their allegedly tasty temptations were a threat to my current diet, I fled the area and returned to the safety of my own doughnut-less office.

And then as I was typing this, my team manager leaned in my office door with a familiar-looking box and said “Hey, want one of these?”…

Password Hell

You wouldn’t think that changing your password would be a big deal. Enter your old password, enter the new password twice, that’s it. Except if you’re on a Windows domain…

The domain policy is set up to force us to change passwords every 90 days, as a standard security precaution. It never fails though — within hours of changing the password, the Weird Things start happening. Some shares remain accessible, some start giving me vague authentication errors, some claim they don’t exist anymore…

After a quick trip to the admin’s office, it’s discovered that my account is locked out because of too many failed password attempts. Of course there was no explicit warning of this at my own workstation as I had continued to be able to lock and unlock the console without trouble… I had however left myself logged in on my other development system under the previous password, and it was what was causing the failed password attempts.

Fine, I log out and back in on that system, unlock my account, and everything’s back to normal. Until a few hours later when the Weird Things start up again…

After roaming from office to office checking all of our test systems, I finally find one of our rarely-used systems that I had logged into two months ago to test something and forgotten to log out of. After logging out of that one and unlocking the account yet again, things are *finally* normal for good. Or at least until the next password change.

You’d think there would be a better way of handling this…