Month: October 2003

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Which Media Player Sucks Least?

Currently involved in a mondo thread regarding the question of whether QuickTime sucks or not, which by necessity also asks whether Real Media and/or Windows Media suck, and if so, how much? As with operating systems, I think all of them have strengths and weakness, but there are no secrets about my leanings: I think QuickTime is more flexible, has better (or at least equal) quality per bitrate, has a cleaner UI, is less big-brother-ish, and is less invasive (is less brash about stealing associations). QuickTime is also, unfortunately, the only one that nags the user till they cough up $30 — something I’m more than willing to do, though I know many/most people are not.

Not everyone shares my opinion. Thought I’d take a straw poll here on birdhouse, where the air is slightly less rarified than on the mailing list. What do you think? If all audio/video media on the web had to be in a single format, which should it be?

Which media player/platform gives the best overall user experience?

View Results

Gorgeous example of QuickTime in action.

Music: Janis Joplin :: To Love Somebody
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rsync backup

Working on new backup systems based on the tremendously flexible rsync, which ships with OS X and Server. Clever details here on utilizing hard links for incremental backups. The trick is shifting gears between contexts all the time; nose buried in man pages one moment, then helping a student discover the magic of File | Open (no kidding) the next, then lugging projectors and plugging in cables ten minutes later. Such a schizo job. Seldom build enough momentum to really sync into a task.

Music: Marvin Pontiac :: Wanna wanna
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Ravi Coltrane

Amy and I had our first real date in over a year — babysitter and everything. Went to see Ravi Coltrane at Yoshi’s. Ravi is the son of the great John Coltrane, though his father died when he was only two, so he didn’t grow up under the influence (though certainly under the shadow). Modern bop, pulsing rhythm section, very moving but not quite mind blowing. It must be incredibly difficult to be on stage with everyone looking for your father in you. Especially when you’ve chosen to take up the same instrument.

Yoshi’s is so genteel — “jazz under glass.” No smoking allowed. Nobody talks, glasses don’t clink, everyone totally attentive. There’s a lot to be said for that, and the sound system there is unparalleled — truly marvelous cahoustics. But it also feels a bit sterile; you find yourself wishing someone would fall drunk over your table, or knock an ashtray onto the floor or something.

Started with sushi dinner. Used to see music so often, felt great to be out at a club; even greater to date my wife again!

Music: Adam And The Ants :: Antmusic
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Sprinkler

Any Ace Hardware has a dozen or so lawn sprinklers to choose from, from dirt simple plastic rings on up to precision oscillating drums with variable scope, built-in clog pick, and snap-on hose attachment. But none are as elegant as the simple anodized aluminum head. Red for rectangular lawns, blue for squares, green for circular (I think). Just like when I was five. How long has this sprinkler been manufactured without alteration? Seems to have looked like this forever. Simple, works, beautiful, why change? Finished final stage of lawn this weekend, installing bender board. Ready to plant the beds.

Music: The Clash :: Washington Bullets
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iTunes Collection Plate

The problem isn’t downloading, it’s making sure the artists get paid. The EFF has produced a swell silent short to illustrate the point (and to solicitate your support).

Speaking of making sure the artist gets paid… iTunes for Windows is out (Apple’s homepage read “Hell Froze Over” and introduced “The best Windows app ever”).

At work I use an OS X (primary) and Win2K machines side by side. Installed the Win version of iTunes and was impressed at how the two mirrored each other pretty much feature-for-feature. The Rendezvous sharing is awesome – enable music sharing on the Mac and the Win machine sees and plays the entire library and all playlists.

Of course the only reason Apple does this is the runaway financial success of the iTunes Music Store, which is now available to a vastly larger audience. For a while, the sexy integration of iPod and iTunes was the draw so compelling people would supposedly quit Windows for the Mac. Then it was the draw of the amazing music store. Suddenly the strategy changes – people aren’t going to come to church, so why not bring the collection plate to their doorsteps?

Music: Cocteau Twins :: Little Spacey
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Flourescent Green Mutant Pets

Start with a zebra fish. Extract the magical glowing gene from a jellyfish. Insert glowing gene into fish DNA. “Wallah,” beautiful glowing zebra fish. Now these Night Pearls have become a hit as pets in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia. Meanwhile, Europe and the U.S. fear contamination of the gene pool and have disallowed them, despite promises that all exported samples would be fully sterilized.

Music: Led Zeppelin :: Hots On For Nowhere
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Double Your Yuan

Just went to register domains for the China and the Internet class, who wanted both .org and .cn domains. To my amazement, the totals showed dotster charging 2.5x more for .cn domains than for “standard” TLDs. Well blow me down. Bopped over to the well-loathed Verisign, and found they won’t even sell you a .cn. Checked several other registrars and found the same — either they won’t do it or they charge a wad. Wonder what the hang is. It’s a line in a database, how can one take more effort than another?

Music: David Thomas & the Pedestrians :: Sound of the Sand
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Chinese Language Pack

chinablog.jpgWe’re finally getting The Great Firewall of China off the ground – set to launch later this month. It was up to me to install the Chinese Language Pack for Movable Type on our server. Installation itself was fairly easy. Somewhat more tricky for a non-Chinese speaker is using the back-end in Chinese mode. Only via intimacy with the UI was I able to negotiate my way around. Let’s see… the Rebuild button is second from the bottom, and the Rebuild Category Indexes option is the third item in the picklist. If you switch languages without either knowing the language or having the muscle memory, you won’t be able to get back to the language selector to return to English mode – you’d have to wander around the labyrinth pecking half-random ’til you got it right.

chinablog2.jpg

The key is not just to get menu items to display in Chinese, but to have proper encodings on both the back-end and on your public site. Learned something interesting: If you’re in charset=iso-8859-1 and paste Chinese characters into a form, then save the record and look back at what you just entered, the characters will all be HTML entities (i.e. they’ll render okay for readers, but will be virtually uneditable). The browser does this, not MT. On the other hand, if you’re in charset=UTF-8, the characters are retained properly.

If you set the default encoding to UTF-8 in the MT config file, you’ll affect all blogs under the installation, which is probably not what you want to do. If you just want to affect one blog, leave the config file alone and hard-wire the encoding into the templates for that blog. That covers the public pages. The back-end language is selected per-user, and form encodings are switched automagically.

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Hyperdrive

I have presta valves on my bicycle tires. This morning went to put some air in the rear. When I removed the adapter, it took the core of the valve stem out with it. The little brass stem went rocketing across the garage and hit the back wall, scary projectile. Heard it, couldn’t see it. Tire deflated in two seconds flat, no pun intended. Walked to work. Over lunch discovered that the one bike shop within walking distance of UC Berkeley has closed down.

I never thought there were corners in time
‘Till I was told to stand in one.
— Grace Slick