My World Line (Relatively Speaking)

What the deuce?!

I downloaded the Music Recommendation System for iTunes (MRS) a few days ago, and finally decided to give it a try (after making sure all of my 1700 tracks were rated). Let's just say this thing doesn't seem to work too well. The recommendations it made for me were a little out in left field. Half of the artists I have never heard of (not that that's a bad thing), and the others I know wouldn't like. (Fat Boy Slim! Ugh. I'm going to spew chunks.)

I can see where the Pixies came from, as I have quite a lot of Pumpkins music. And the Bob Dylan, and Billy Joel recommendations make a little sense, as I have a few Beatles tracks (a very small percentage overall though), but the rest of the recommendations just left me nonplussed.

My guess is that the MRS, does not take into account the number of tracks in a genre, and instead relies solely on the single track ratings. Or maybe the database needs to get a whole lot bigger. Alice in Chains, Queensryche, and Tool are my favorite bands, and my collection consists of probably 70-80% Hard Rock/Metal, but yet I see nothing in the MRS recommendations for that genre.

So this whole experiment was pretty much a bust for me. Ah well, maybe the engineers will improve their algorithms, the database will grow, and things will get better.

Safety First

I received my new Mediabank HS-R FW800 RAID Enclosure today. Along with two Seagate 200GB/8MB hard drives, I now have a RAID 1 (mirrored) system for all of my data. I'm still going to do my weekly backup to DVD-R, but I feel a lot better about the safety of my data now. I've gone through permanent data loss twice before because of HDD failures, and it is not something I wish to experience again–especially considering the amount of data I have now.

The enclosure, drives, an extra FW cable, taxes, and shipping added up to about $740. That's not too bad for a 200GB^* RAID system, and it's a more useful product than the tape drive that I was thinking about buying (for $100 more).

* Of course, 200GB is not really 200GiB, it's more like 186.3GiB. And then you have to format that, so another 65MiB or so is lost. Why can't HDD manufactures list the GiB size right next to the GB size?

Quicksilver

I finally finished reading Neal Stephenson's latest opus: Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle, Vol 1. At nine hundred plus pages in length, this is a tome that requires a significant investment of time to finish–almost three months in my case. The story was slow to start, and with Stephenson's proclivity for a surfeit of synonyms in his descriptions, I almost gave up before finishing the first one hundred pages.

Right around the hundred page mark though, the tale started to come together: characters were fleshed out and their intertwining lives started to form subtle patterns. At this point, I was hooked, and had to finish the book. I'm glad I did. Despite some filler material (mostly the aforementioned never-ending descriptions) the story is engaging, and the characters are ones you can care about.

Quicksilver serves as the introduction to a much larger work comprised of six books, released as three volumes. The second volume, Confusion: The Baroque Cycle, Vol 2 was released a few weeks ago. I haven't picked it up yet, but plan on doing so. The third volume is do for release this fall. In total, the volumes comprise almost three thousand pages which follow the lives of several protagonists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as they travel the world bringing down financial markets, inciting wars, and playing in the world of international espionage.

Now to try and make a dent in the fifteen other books in my reading queue. Fortunately, these aren't nearly as long as Quicksilver.

A Not-So-Perfect Concert

The APC concert last night was awesome. Too bad we had to stand through an unbearable hour of Mars Volta beforehand.

Mars Volta is a strange mix of Santana and Black Sabbath. They have a hard time deciding which one they want to emulate more. The lead singer also has his own identity complex: whether to be James Brown or Jim Morrison. They seem to be good musicians, but their penchant for thirty minute songs (that seem to be the same two or three riffs — or mutations thereof — repeated over and over) along with the lead singer's antics and caterwaul screaming lead to me checking my watch every single time the lights came up. There seemed to be a few fans in the audience, but I would guess that 90% of the crowd felt the same as I. I heard numerous boos and cries of "You suck!" or "Get off the stage!". Someone also threw a cup up on stage which ended up hitting the bassist in the leg.

Once APC hit the stage, things changed and the crowd went nuts. There were a few a**holes that made the concert less enjoyable by starting mosh pits. It's hard to watch the band when you have to watch the crowd so you can brace yourself for the next surge of bodies that want to knock you over. Security was trying to keep up with these guys, but it was pretty futile. The real kicker though, is that Mars Volta played for an hour, and APC only ended up playing for an hour and twenty minutes! I guess that's why the tickets were only $28.

Overall, though, I'm really glad I got to see APC. Even with all of the crap we had to put up with, it was still worth it to see one of best bands around today.

123... F*** Britney Spears!!!

Good Music

We went downtown last night and saw the Dave Matthew's Band tribute band Trippin' Billies in an open-air concert. These guys are excellent. Their sound is very close to DMB, and the lead singer bears an uncanny resemblance to Dave Matthews himself (both in looks and voice). We got there a little late, so we only caught the last hour-and-a-half, but even that was well worth the $7 cover. It was a really good time.

To top the whole weekend off, later tonight is the Perfect Circle concert at the auditorium. What a great weekend for excellent live music.

Unixy goodness

Thanks to the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X my desktop just cracked the 100 day uptime mark.

It's not aliens landing your backyard, but I pound on this machine hard and it's cool to know it just keeps on going, and going, and ...

Wide eyes watch

I just hooked up my new iSight camera. It's a pretty slick little device. The only thing I don't like is the included mounting brackets. Unless you hook it up to a PowerBook, you have to stick the mount to your display. I really don't feel like sticking anything to my beautiful Cinema HD. Apple should have thought the desktop mounts through a little bit more before releasing the iSight. How much more would it have cost them to make a bigger PowerBook style mount for their ADC displays? Me thinks not too much.

Right now, I have the iSight sitting off to the left of my display on a cardboard box (yes, it's tacky), but I'm thinking about dropping $30 to pick up a Sight Flex mount.

Anyway, I am now open for A/V chat. If you've received an e-mail from me in the past few months my AIM id is in my signature.

The real costs of software

As a rule, I generally don't like to talk about work here, but something is really bugging me.

The latest and greatest version of the NetWare Client for OS X was officially announced today, and already people are bitching – not so much about technical problems, but about what they view as an assault on their wallet. I'm sorry, but software costs money to develop; even free software. If I wasn't being paid to work on the NetWare Client, I likely wouldn't have the resources or the will to work on free software such as Ext2 and ChangeDesktop. In a sense, my job is subsidizing these projects.

In addition to paying developers to write software, there are numerous other expenses that a company incurs: marketing, tech. support, web hosting, electricity, etc.. Many times, there is also the additional expense of licensing fees to those that hold the rights to intellectual property used in a product.

People love to bitch about price (and I admit being one of them at times), but you have to stop and think about the costs involved. Prosoft charges $149 for a client that gives advantages over using the native AppleShare access. OS X has built in support for Windows SMB access too, but DAVE provides an added benefit for that service and charges the same $149. I wonder if Thursby gets so many complaints about price?

Pricing is a valid concern, but that cannot be the only factor when making a purchasing decision – otherwise Apple itself would have been gone long ago. If a product works as advertised, and fulfills a need, then it's technical merits should be included in its evaluation.

P.S. For the VT user that would need 150 licenses, the actual price per seat would be less than $75 when volume licensing is applied.

Go north young man

I think our neighbors to the north actually have a few public officials that aren't in the pockets of big corporations: CBC - Anne heirs fail in copyright bid.

With this and other recent events, I think Canada may be more worthy of our "Land of the Free" slogan. With the DMCA, Patriot Act, and imprisoning of U.S citizens without due process, I think the U.S. should now advertise itself as "Land of the Corrupt, Power Hungry, and Greedy".

Thanks to Larry Lessig for the pointer.

Constitution? We don't need no stinking Constitution.

In another case of the police over-stepping their power — and right in my own state — officers seem to have forgotten that pesky fourth amendment: Supreme Court to Rule on Drug Dogs in Traffic Stops. The Il. Supreme Court made the right decision, let's just hope the U.S. Supreme Court upholds it.

Ext2 for OSX 1.2b2

1.2b2 is now up. The only changes in this release (besides compiling w/o -DDEBUG) are for the pref pane. This will probably be the last beta, so if you find a problem, report it!