I got a new laptop! It's the brand new 15" MacBook Pro with the multitouch trackpad. It's a little bit wider and a little bit thinner than my old 15" aluminum PowerBook. Feels more solid, and maybe a hair lighter. I'm still in the process of getting everything configured the way I like it, but overall it's a world of difference. It has more pixels, a brighter screen (LED backlit!), and it's way, way faster than the PowerBook.

Some cons: a couple of programs I used to use occasionally seem to have broken; I need to figure out if that's due to the switch in architecture (PPC to x86) or the switch in OS (10.4 to 10.5). I may also have to look into SheepShaver in case I ever decide I really need to run those last couple of OS 9 programs I have lying around. I'm going to have to buy at least one more power adapter as well; I had gotten used to having power adapters already plugged in everywhere I went, but now I have to lug the one around.

All in all, I'm happy with it - I'm hoping to start doing some software dev, and my old G4 was getting a little long in the tooth. Plus, I can safely say that I'm doing my part to pull the economy out of recession - this thing cost a pretty penny...

Posted by Dennis at 11:14 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My 2.5 year old PowerBook G4 had started acting up over the last few months - occasionally when I would restart the computer, the screen wouldn't turn on. Clearly, a laptop with no working screen is useless, but usually after a few resets it would start working again. Today, it refused to obey the power-cycling method of problem solving.

After a quick Google search (not on my laptop, obviously) turned up this thread, I popped out the memory sticks one by one. Indeed, one of the sticks appeared to have gone bad, suggesting that during the boot sequence, it needs to read/write to one stick of RAM to get the display up and running. On a lark, I decided to reinstall the bad stick of RAM in the slot that it was not originally in. Everything seems to be up and running fine, and I still have my full amount of memory. If I start getting weird application troubles, though, I know where to start looking...

Posted by Dennis at 16:31 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball posted a short bit a while back about the Japanese concept of poka-yoke.

A fine example of this concept is illustrated in the differences between version 2 and the beta of version 3 of Apple's web browser, Safari. To make sense of the following screenshots, you also need to know that the keyboard shortcut to enter URLs is Command-L, and use a QWERTY-style keyboard.

The old version of Safari's shortcut to block pop-up windows was right next to the key sequence to move focus to the address bar. This would occasionally lead to inadvertent toggles of the pop-up blocker, leading to the occasional pop-up storm. Now the Safari shortcut adds in an extra shift key, reducing the likelihood that anyone would accidentally toggle the pop-up blocker status. It's not a major change, but it's one that pays off huge dividends in the user experience. Bravo, Apple.

Posted by Dennis at 13:01 (Central) | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Today Steve Jobs posted another open letter on the Apple website, entitled "A Greener Apple." It addresses recent criticisms leveled at Apple regarding their level of environmental friendliness. Note the following paragraph:

To eliminate mercury in our displays, we need to transition from fluorescent lamps to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the displays. Fortunately, all iPod displays already use LEDs for illumination, and therefore contain no mercury. We plan to introduce our first Macs with LED backlight technology in 2007. Our ability to completely eliminate fluorescent lamps in all of our displays depends on how fast the LCD industry can transition to LED backlighting for larger displays.

The emphasis added is mine. In particular, this is the first confirmation that LED-backlit laptops will be making an appearance this year. I say laptops because that's the obvious choice; the power savings gained by moving to LEDs from fluorescent backlights will help extend battery life. I guess that means I should start saving up for a new laptop...

Posted by Dennis at 12:49 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Steve Jobs published a very interesting essay yesterday on the Apple website entitled "Thoughts on Music". However, it wasn't so much about music as it was about digital rights management (DRM).

The pundits have already begun weighing in, and one item that continually keeps popping up in the discussion is "why not allow the artists who want to opt out of DRM to do so?" The obvious reason is usability. Apple's focus, ultimately, has been on the user experience, as evidenced by the Mac philosophy of "it should just work", the new user interface for the forthcoming iPhone, the interface for the iPod, etc. If Apple were to allow consumers to download some songs with DRM and some without, the user experience goes to shit. People will become frustrated that they can email say, a song on Nettwerk Records to their friend and it works, but the latest pop hit on Universal won't work. You could try to make it explicit on the iTunes site about which songs have which playability rights, but no one wants to remember which songs have which rights attached to them. Apple has always tried to make the experience as transparent as possible for the end user. Ultimately, I don't think that the iTunes store will go DRM-free until the majority (probably 90%) of the songs can be sold without DRM.

Update: On further consideration, I'm not sure that this argument holds up either. You already have a mix of DRM and DRM-free songs - the ones that users rip for themselves - and people seem to be dealing with it just fine. So scratch that. The store would become more confusing, labeling DRM and non-DRM free songs, but I'm not sure how much more confusing it would be. There are some good comments about this over at The Macalope's site.

Posted by Dennis at 13:27 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

iTunes 7 incorporated a technology called CoverFlow which allows you to browse through your albums by flipping through images of the album covers. It has the ability to download the album images from the internet, but frankly, it's not very good at it, because your track metadata has to pretty closely match the iTunes Music Store's version, and I have developed my own system for labeling things (especially remixes). Sometimes it'll download the artwork for compilations instead of the album, or for an album of the same name by a different artist, etc. You can add the artwork manually, but then it inserts it into the audio file. The problem here for me is that I don't want the artwork added to each audio file. It also maintains an additional copy of the image in a directory structure designed for fast access in a proprietary file format, .itc, which appears to be a wrapper around a standard image stream.

Instead, I've been using an older program called Clutter. It automatically downloads images from Amazon.com and if it gets the wrong one, you can trigger a Google image search instead. Ideally, I'd like to mod this program to insert the file downloaded from Amazon into the proprietary iTunes/CoverFlow format and directory structure. To that end, I started trying to decipher the .itc file format. I've seen a few efforts; you may want to examine these three links. Here are my results so far:

Continue reading "deciphering the iTunes .itc file format" »

Posted by Dennis at 22:38 (Central) | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Unless you've been living in a cave, you probably know that Apple Computer, Inc. announced the iPhone last week at MacWorld Expo. (Disclaimer: I'm something of an Apple fanboy, owning several Macs, a 4G iPod, and a busted 1G iPod.) It's a cell phone, iPod, and internet device all rolled up into one. Pretty sexy, although I don't know if I'd buy one at $500 - $600. However, if anyone is going to make the user interface for such a convergence device work, it's Apple.

Anyway, there have been a bunch of articles in the wake of the announcement, some positive and some negative. I won't bother talking about the positive points; if you're a Mac user, you already know what the Apple experience is about - taking the hassle out of computing and making it intuitive. If Apple delivers on the promises made during the iPhone announcement, it will do the same for personal information management. Even some of the negative points are valid - the talk is that no 3rd party apps will be allowed. This both sucks and makes sense - the user interface will be streamlined with no 3rd party apps, allowing for a more coherent experience (theoretically), however, you would be limited to the functionality that Apple provided you.

The one negative thing that people keep repeating ad nauseam that isn't completely true is about "Apple lock-in." Here are some relevant pull quotes:

Boing Boing:

It's ironic that a company whose name is synonymous with "Switch" has built its entire product strategy around lock-in. The iTunes/iPhone/iPod combo is a roach-motel: customers check in, but they can't check out.

the New York Times:

Even if you are ready to pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod as your only brand of portable music player or to the iPhone as your only cellphone once it is released, you may find that FairPlay copy protection will, sooner or later, cause you grief. You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff. Forever and ever. Because your iTunes will not play on anyone else’s hardware.

If you buy an iPod, you're not locked in buying Apple stuff "forever and ever." No one is forcing anyone to buy DRM-locked tunes from the iTunes Music Store. In fact, in my six years of owning an iPod, I've only bought one song from the iTMS, and that was because I needed it for a DJ gig that day. I promptly burned it to CD, and re-ripped it as an mp3, free of DRM. You can always just buy physical CDs (probably a smart thing anyway) and rip them yourself. You don't even have to use iTunes to use an iPod; there are several 3rd party music library apps that will allow iPod management.

The iPhone is a different story, though - you're pretty much stuck with Cingular (now AT&T) for the forseeable future. You'll probably be required to sign a 2-year contract, though, and let's be honest - the people who buy high-end cell phones are the same people who buy new phones every two years anyway. Regarding music lock-in, it'll be the same as the iPod, i.e. not a real issue (see above).

As far as 3rd party apps go, here's how I see it playing out: Apple will officially ban the use of 3rd party apps on the iPhone, as they will claim that for stability's sake, 3rd party apps are verboten. However, they'll leave a hole that clever developers will take advantage of in order to get 3rd party apps to load and function on the iPhone. Apple will probably make a couple of half-hearted attempts to change the API to close the hole, and then it will probably declare that if you brick your shiny new iPhone by installing a 3rd party app, it won't fix it. Caveat emptor. In all likelihood, installing a 3rd party app will at worst cause your phone to crash occasionally, but who wants to reboot their phone?

Posted by Dennis at 15:47 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Progress is awesome. This week has largely been a reading week for me; I'm trying to get up to speed on a new idea that we're working on. As a result I've been downloading and printing out lots of scientific papers (I think I killed a few trees). I know, reading scientific papers doesn't seem too exciting, but the awesome part is that a whole lot of these papers were printed before I was born. The oldest one I'm reading was published in 1954.

Posted by Dennis at 16:57 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day, my friends over at criticalbeatdowns.com emailed me because they were entering their first stages of dealing with comment spam, and I had previously been forced to deal with this problem. I solved it by installing MT-Blacklist by Jay Allen (which kicked much ass) but since upgrading to MovableType 3.2, have just been relying on the stock install which has had much of the functionality of MT-Blacklist rolled in.

Coincidentally, at about this time I got my first comment from a "Lamar Cole." I junked it; it made it past the spam filter but seemed to be a complete non-sequitur to the topic of the post so I assumed it was spam. However, it didn't have any real characteristics of comment spam besides the non-sequitur text - i.e., no links to porn or poker sites. Just recently I got another one, with the same text. Again, no other characteristics of spam. This raised my curiosity a bit - a quick Google search turns up thousands of comments by Lamar Cole. Almost all of these bear short messages about love - the two that were sent to this site said "Love is a path to the heart that knows its own way."

So the big question is who is Lamar Cole, and why is he posting these messages on random entries on random blogs across the web? There appears to be no overt spamminess - no links to raise Google PageRank, no trying to get linkbacks to a central site. The only commercial connection appears to be that some of the comments have this text - "Love is two people sipping Coca-Cola from the same straw on a warm sunny day." There even appears to be a potential working email address (I haven't tried it yet, but it's lcolej@yahoo.com). Is it just someone who is trying to spread some goodwill and cheesy sentiment across the big, bad web, or is there some weird level of calculation behind all of this that I don't grok? I'm not so curious as to try to track down this person, but if anyone else has any information, I'd be interested in hearing it...

Posted by Dennis at 15:49 (Central) | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

For those of you who care about this sort of thing, I upgraded the backend of the site to Movable Type 3 and installed MT-Blacklist to help me deal with the comment spam problem that I had been having. I can recommend MT-Blacklist to anyone with a MT installation without reservation - it's just that good at dealing with comment spam. I'll hopefully be migrating over to an SQL database in the back end as well, but that'll take a little longer for me to get up to speed with. Anyway, it looks like comments are back for good.

Posted by Dennis at 12:55 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lazy web request: If you are an expert at setting up and running BitTorrent trackers and seeding and all that crap, please contact me at the address listed in the post before this one. I can't seem to get BitTorrent to work correctly - I've made the torrent files, I've started a client to seed, and I have a tracker running, but something is still not working correctly. I've even run nmap against my network to make sure that the required ports are open, but I think the real problem may involve the NAT addressing on the internal network that my server is sitting on.

Update: It looks like I had the tracker miscoded in the torrent files. Download the new torrent file and give it a go now...

Posted by Dennis at 12:32 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In an attempt to address the crappy upstream bandwidth I have, I am thinking about switching over to using BitTorrent. Upload bandwidth will be crappy for the first couple of people who download, but will get better for each successive person *assuming you all leave your torrent files open* for as long as possible (days, maybe weeks). Check out their web page or their Wikipedia entry for more information about how it works. As a test, I'm making the last November archive available by BitTorrent now: the Vinyl Frontier, 30 November 2004 [playlist] If you download the file, please email me at torrent AT f a l s e c o g n a t e . o r g and let me know: # whether it works at all # what kind of connection your computer is sitting on # how many peers you are able to connect to # how long you can leave open your torrent files

Posted by Dennis at 17:19 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

iPod generation 1 versus iPod generation 4 shootout

	gen 1	gen 4
width x length	2.4 in x 4.1 in	2.4 in x 4.1 in
depth	0.78 in	0.69 in
weight	6.5 oz	6.2 oz
interface	mechanical scroll wheel with four separate buttons arranged in a circle for menu, fwd, rev, and play/pause, central select button	touch-sensitive scroll wheel with four integrated buttons arranged in a circle for menu, fwd, rev, and play/pause (aka the "Click Wheel"), central select button
capacity (advertised)	5 GB	40 GB
capacity (reality)	I never filled it all the way up because I never listened to more than about 200 songs on a regular basis	You would die of thirst before listening consecutively to all the songs you could fit on here
connectors	headphone + remote, standard 6-pin Firewire	headphone, remote, annoying Apple-proprietary iPod Dock connector
functionality	play(ed) music, clock, contacts, calendar, crappy version of breakout.	plays music, clock, contacts, calendar, notes, crappy versions of breakout, solitaire, parachute can rate songs on the iPod
intangibles	Possesses sharp edges. Useful in a fight.	Smooth and shiny, it is, my preciousss...

I guess the edge goes narrowly to the new iPod, 3-2. Now only if I had enough money for a new Powerbook, a Mac Mini, and an XServe...

Posted by Dennis at 20:09 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I didn't realize it until someone emailed me, but the archive downloads were busted. Something weird was going on with mod_bandwidth that I couldn't pin down. At first I thought my mod_rewrite-fu was no good, but actually the MaxConnection function of mod_bandwidth decided to quit working the way I expected it to. Anyway, the archives _should_ be working now. _I_ can download, but I haven't extensively tested it. Downloads are still going to be hella slow, but at they should work, at least. Drop me a note if they don't...

Posted by Dennis at 13:07 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I received my headphone amplifier earlier in the week. I purchased the Total Bithead, designed and sold by the HeadRoom corporation. I haven't had enough time to really test it out thoroughly yet, but my initial impressions are very good. It plugs right into the USB port of my TiBook and is recognized right away. The Etymotics have a considerably better bass response through the amplifier than previously. I'll try to do a full shootout sometime in the near future - amp vs. no amp, Etys vs. Sennheisers, mp3 vs. CD (computer D/A) vs. CD (Bithead D/A).

Posted by Dennis at 12:21 (Central) | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The Etymotic ER-4S are amazing. They are, without a doubt, the finest pair of sound reproduction devices I own, at least in terms of sonic quality. Obviously I own far louder devices, but that's not the point. My Infinity towers can't hold a candle to them, not even when paired with my Harmon Kardon amp. Right now I'm listening to the Etys powered by a first-generation iPod - no amplifier - and the sound quality is outstanding. First things first, though. I admit, it's taking me a little bit of time to get used to the idea of sticking things into my ear canal. These are not your typical earbuds that sit right in the outer part of your ear. No, these puppies go right into the ear canal. You can see from the picture how big these are - the right angle mini-plug is shown as a comparison. It's a little bit uncomfortable putting them in, but once they're in, you can _almost_ forget that they're there. They tend to remind you whenever you move your head, so I can only really recommend these for use in a stable listening environment - at your desk, in your favorite chair, or in bed. Very little environmental sound gets through these - with the white flange tips, you could probably stand right next to a loudspeaker at a club and not be uncomfortable. Supposedly the foam tips have even better noise reduction, but I haven't tried those yet.

Continue reading "Etymotic ER-4S review, part 1: impressions" »

Posted by Dennis at 00:45 (Central) | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So I just got myself a pair of Etymotic ER-4S earphones. The headphone amp I ordered, the HeadRoom Total Bithead, is delayed in shipping (it's a new product) but I can already hear things in my music that I didn't used to hear, and that's largely because of the ridiculous amount of sonic isolation. My iPod is straining a bit to power these phones, but things sound reasonably good. Certainly better than I'm used to, anyway. I can only imagine what things will sound like once I get my amplifier. I'll try to post a more detailed review of the earphones later, but the initial impression is good. They're reasonably comfortable and sound good. What more can you ask for?

Posted by Dennis at 12:39 (Central) | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I can't believe it's really taken this long for the mainstream media to catch on to the fact the current state of electronic voting is unacceptable. In today's New York Times, Paul Krugman writes an editorial that quickly details the issues involved with electronic voting machines. For more information on the problems inherent to current electronic voting machines, check out this website: BlackBoxVoting.org Then write to your representatives demanding that they do something about this fiasco. Here's an excerpt of the Krugman op-ed:

Continue reading "the perils of e-voting" »

Posted by Dennis at 19:42 (Central) | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's a little bit disturbing how much I rely upon technology in my everyday life. And how expensive it can get when items break. First off, my car window decided that it was too hard for it to go up. Unfortunately, it still was ok with going down. Clearly, it was a bad connection in the switch. You wouldn't think that it would be very expensive to replace a switch, but apparently the four window switches in the driver's side armrest come as an entire, inseparable unit. Throw in labor, and all the other crap I did (regular servicing, alignment, muffler replacement, and more) and *poof!* there goes a lot of money. Next, the screen on my two-year old Apple PowerBook decided to die. At least, the bottom two-thirds, which had already been acting up. It's goddamn expensive to get a laptop repaired; repairs through Apple would have been nearly one-third the cost of a new laptop. So I finally tracked down a replacement screen taken from an old machine and bought it. While waiting for it to be delivered (it got here today), the screen decided to come back to life. Fucking screen. Anyway, something else bad (or costly) is bound to happen, since these things always happen in threes (or so they say). Maybe all of my stereo amplifiers will blow up or something. Goddamn technology.

Posted by Dennis at 23:10 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Interesting. In honor of the Macintosh computer's 20th anniversary, Apple has put up the classic ad that kicked off the Macintosh platform on their website. Except that if you pay attention, they made a very interesting digital addition to the ad. The woman is now wearing an _iPod_ on her hip. Seems somewhat strange, doesn't it? That an ad released in 1984 with allusions to George Orwell's classic book should be remanipulated in this way? I love Apple, but really, they should just make the unadulterated version available. It's less of a blatant shill.

Posted by Dennis at 15:22 (Central) | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today in the New York Times, astronaut Buzz Aldrin writes an op-ed about the future of the space program. Bless him for thinking grandly. He's absolutely right - we should be thinking big, and building a space station out at L1 (the most obvious of the Lagrange points). It makes a lot of sense - the energetic cost of launching from L1 is much, much less than an earthside launch, and since it is close to the moon, we may be able to mine the moon for materials and fuel which would make things even less costly from an energy standpoint. Even Mobile Suit Gundam knows about the Lagrange points. Maybe someday we'll get our act together and do it. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic culture of today's world will probably doom mankind to extinction on this rock we call Earth...

Posted by Dennis at 11:04 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's kind of funny that one of my friends just posted about the need for new headphones and an mp3 player, as I am currently looking to replace my portable headphones. Of course, I would have to recommend getting an iPod, although I'm not sure if he's on a Mac. While I do recognize that they function under Windows, I'm not sure how well they work.

So far, my primary source of information (and probably the headphones) has been HeadRoom, which is a company that specializes in headphones and makes their own audiophile headphone amps. Right now I'm leaning toward replacing my Koss KSC-35 clip-on headphones (I use them exclusively with my iPod, as the first-generation iPod earbuds sucked ass) with the Etymotic ER4P, and possibly upgrading those to the ER4S along with a Total BitHead. It's a big step up from the Koss cans, but I think it'll be worth it. I should probably be able to use the Etymotics as DJ headphones as well, since they are actually earplugs and actually have better sonic isolation than most traditionally styled cans. My friend mentioned in an earlier post of his the ubiquitous Sony MDR-Vn00 series that lots of DJs own. They blow. They're not very durable - I had a pair completely ruined because a 10 cent piece of plastic broke - and frankly, they sound like ass. They're too muddy. You don't realize it, however, until you switch to a better pair. For cheap DJ cans, I recommend the Sennheiser HD-25SP or the big brother HD-25. The 25SP is what I have, and the sound is tighter, crisper, and generally more faithful to the music. They take a bit more power to drive, but that's ok. The clarity makes up for the lack of volume. Disadvantages of the 25SP which are corrected in the 25 include: non-coiled cable and split cable (as opposed to single cable).

Posted by Dennis at 19:28 (Central) | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By the way, I'm switching over to using a lot of PHP includes in my pages, so don't be surprised if links get broken over the next few days. I hope to figure out a way to use mod_rewrite to ameliorate the problem of broken links (pages that currently end in .html are likely to end in .php soon) but it might take me a while to fix. So please bear with me; in the end it will make site maintenance much easier, as changing the header and sidebar across the site will be a matter of changing one file each instead of changing every file. I'm also trying to get mod_gzip up and running to help with the bandwidth issues.

Posted by Dennis at 14:41 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the stupidest name for a product ever:

iHam on iRye for iTunes

But it's a great product. It's actually a trio of three apps that lets you control iTunes on one computer from another computer. Why, you might ask, would you want to do such a thing? Well, right now I'm listening to mp3 files playing through iTunes on my tower computer, but I can sit on the couch and control it from my laptop with wireless connectivity enabled. Fantastic. And it's free. (Donations are accepted, and I'm very strongly thinking about it, especially if it will help them work out the few bugs I've found.)

However, I'm also looking at some other possible solutions, namely this article over at O'Reilly's MacDevCenter. It's about controlling iTunes over the web using a Perl module. Unfortunately, it looks like I might have to run Apache as an actual user instead of nobody. Why, you might ask, would I want a web interface, when I have this spanky free product that does the same thing? Because I'm interested in running a small social experiment. I'm thinking about setting up a small web page to allow the world at large to control my music selection while I'm at work. I think it would be terribly amusing, and I'd also like to see if I ever made it through an entire song. The world wouldn't get to hear any of the selections, just inflict them on me and my co-workers.

Posted by Dennis at 19:56 (Central) | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that Apple has released iTunes for Windows, it seems that a lot of people are picking up on the fact that Apple designs some good shit. However, there's been some bitching that you can't resell your tracks. That's a bunch of bullshit, as this guy has shown that you actually can, although it might not be practical. It suggests that you'd probably need to sell a batch of them at a time, to make it monetarily worthwhile.

Whatever. I use iTunes because the goddamn thing is really well designed. I haven't even used the store yet. The smart playlists are where it's at. Current smart playlists of mine include:

• DJ sets - time is greater than 35 minutes (I rip my mix cds as one continuous track to eliminate the gap problem)
• tag-editing - Artist, Song Title, Album Title, Comments (I put the label info here), or Year is empty
• never played - Play Count is zero (currently trying to whittle away at 12 days worth of music never played as an mp3)
• recently played - Last Played within two weeks
• most played - Play Count is greater than n, where n is an arbitrarily chosen integer that keeps the number of songs on this list less than or equal to 250; sorted by descending order of Play Count
• highest rated - I don't often rate songs, so this one may go the way of the dodo
• recently added - mp3 added within the last four weeks

I have a few others, but you get the idea. And all of these update in real-time. Beautiful.

Posted by Dennis at 20:47 (Central) | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Oh yeah, I also built myself a new dj table (take a look at the picture!) because I just got Final Scratch. I needed room to put my laptop next to my mixer, so I went off and built a new table. Currently it has no legs (it's sitting on top of two record crate towers) but I may possibly add some, or possibly hang the sucker from the ceiling. If anyone in Texas is in the market for some custom-made DJ furniture, contact me and we can work something out. I'm currently working on a new design, as well as some improvements in this one. I'll be modifying this one to eliminate the cable runs you see hanging off of the back end, and the next iteration will hopefully have even less visible structural support.

Posted by Dennis at 03:27 (Central) | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

mod_rewrite is the most arcane, twisted beast ever. I've made some adjustments to the access of this server in an attempt to exert some control over my bandwidth usage before the cable company does it for me. A cursory analysis of my server logs from the last week has shown me that I've served about 0.75 GB (yes, gigabytes) of mp3 files. A little over 15% of that appears to be traffic driven from one of two specific pages based somewhere in Russia. I'm not cutting out a lot of traffic yet, but we'll see. The next project is to probably reduce the quality and therefore size of the mp3 files. This will have the added advantage of allowing some of the files to be served faster than real-time.

In any case, if you have troubles downloading mp3s from the server, please drop me a line either via email or in the comments - I may not have mod_rewrite configured quite correctly yet. It appears to work correctly for me, but I haven't banged on it too hard...

Posted by Dennis at 16:35 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a spanky new AirPort Extreme base station. The server may go up and down over the next few days as I try to get it to work the way that I'd like it to. Currently I am having problems getting it to act as the router while allowing port mapping of network services (read: webserver) to the Ethernet-worked computer. It's not behaving the way Apple's documentation says it should.

I also got a new 120GB hard drive for the server, because I was going to run up against the limit for my mp3 archives soon. This should ensure that I have enough space for the archives of my radio show well into the future. In any case, they were the excuse to go to the new Apple store over in the Galleria. Very well lit, very spacious, and tons of cool toys... I almost decided to buy a graphics tablet (I don't really draw), a digital camera (I almost never take pictures) and even a silly little aluminum knob. Not that I really have the money for any of this...

Posted by Dennis at 22:54 (Central) | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I make no attempts to cover up the fact that I'm a geek. I know that I have an unhealthy craving to play with technological things. This has led to a painful weekend. In an attempt to squeeze some more performance out of my server, I managed to botch things up so badly that it took the better part of two days to fix.

For those who care, this site is run on an old G3 PowerMac running Mac OS X. OS X is a Unix, and when you get comfortable with Unix you can make it do tricks that most operating systems can't do, or at least can't do easily. Unfortunately, Unices (is that the correct plural?) also have a nasty tendency to let you hang yourself. Which is, of course, exactly what I proceeded to do.

In any case, things are back up and running, and I've even updated to the latest version of Movable Type. Hopefully I won't ever have to do this again...

Posted by Dennis at 22:36 (Central) | Comments (1)