Rick's World

Link: http://www.candylabs.com/skylight/

For a while now, I've been using a fantastic app called Quicksilver on my Mac. Its a great app if you are a fast typist because it gives you an easy way to launch any application from the keyboard without having to hunt through any menus. Just hit a key to bring up the program, type the first few letters of the app name and it runs.

Well, I just found a Windows equivalent to Quicksilver! It's called Skylight. It gives you they same keyboard based application launching that Quicksilver has. Try it out!

Link: http://www.ridethebandwagon.com

Recently, my web hosting provider offered me a free one year membership to a new site called Bandwagon.

Bandwagon, is an online service that offers to provide online backups of your iTunes library. They offer the service for $24 a year. At first my impression was "Hmm, $2/month to keep a backup of my 60GB iTunes library. Not bad." Of course after further reading, I found that they only store your iTunes metadata which really isn't that much space at all. You need to provide your own online storage through FTP. Ok, so not as good a deal, but I have tons of HD space on my web host and plenty of bandwidth to upload it, so I sign up for my free year and install the software.

The program installs no problem, reads my iTunes library and starts FTPing files up to my FTP site on my web host. "Great, now I'll just let it run for a few hours and my collection is backed up." The software needs some work though. The GUI uses that black, partially transparent style of window that is so popular on OS X these days. While pretty, that damn GUI insists on being the topmost application at all times! Which means I can't get rid of the thing shy of closing the window entirely! (which doesn't actually stop the program, it just hides the window). Ok, that annoying feature is gone.

After letting it run for a while, I decided to check and see how far it had gotten. Ok, after an hour I've only uploaded TWO files? What the heck? That's when I remember that while the download speed of my DSL is 6Mb/sec (about 800 kilobytes per second), the upload speed is much lower - around 800kb/sec. That means my upload speed is 10 times slower than my download speed! Now usually with a DSL connection that's fine since most of what you do is downloading. In this case though, it's a problem. For this, it's all uploading. Bandwagon then tells me that it will take 12 days for my entire 60GB iTunes library to upload! I am not going to leave my computer on for 12 days straight, just to upload this stuff! It would be easier to just burn it to a few DVDs.

It seems to me that online backup sites really aren't practical for someone running on DSL who has to backup a large amount of data. Until we start getting DSL with 6Mb/sec upload as well as download, this service is of little use.

I got an interesting spam email today. It purports to be from the 'United Stated National Medical Association'. As soon as I saw this name, I was highly skeptical. I had never heard of this 'government agency' before, so I did a quick Whois search on the domain. I discovered that not only was this so called government agency domain only registered on June 29, 2007 (a couple days ago), but it was done through a domain info masking service. In other words, it's a brand new domain and the owner is trying to hide his identity.

Had this been a genuine government agency, it would likely have been registered long before June 29th of this year, and they wouldn't be hiding their whois identity. Also, it likely would have been using a *.gov domain rather than a *.com domain. This appears to be an attempt by an online seller of prescription drugs to knock out the competition by making unsuspecting email recipients think they are a valid government agency. Then they just list all their competitors as unauthorized sellers of drugs and they get all the business selling drugs as the only 'legit' company.

I have to say, it's always interesting to see how the spammers are constantly changing their tactics to try to keep people buying their crap. You can read the entire email below. Note that I intentionally broke up the URL links so that they won't work from my blog and this site won't get any traffic from me...

The original spam email

The United States National Medical Association

Do you buy pharmaceuticals online? The US NMA was specifically established to
protect the consumer. Our experts check every online shop for bogus medicines. The
blacklist of unreliable or simply fraud shops is updated every week. We strongly
recommend to visit our site before buying any medical products online. visit us

Our site http: // www .us-nma .com

The common ways of online cheating are:
- delivery of low quality or fraud products.
- an enormous delay (up to 2-3 months) in delivery of products.
- shops obtain all the credit cards numbers and other credit information and then
simply send nothing.
- shops sell unlicensed products they know nothing or very little about.
- shops themselves don't have a license to sell the pharmaceuticals.

Please check our blacklist of unreliable and fraud shops before buying any medical
products online!!! Protect your family and yourself.

http: // www .us-nma .com/

With all due respect and care.
The US NMA.

Update: It looks like they are back. See my comments here...

Link: http://www.css3.info

Boy, did I screw this one up!

My previous post was a brief rant on how I thought that Safari was full of custom CSS tags that allowed Safari to achieve it's OS X type look on Windows. I was of the mistaken belief that these were non-standard tags and that Apple was using these to give Safari an advantage in how it renders web sites - specifically Apple.com. It didn't take long for a knowledgeable Safari user to put me in my place.

A commenter on the original blog informed me that while these tags are indeed custom to Webkit (the underlying browser engine in Safari), they are perfectly legal CSS and in fact are there for testing of new features in the upcoming CSS3 standard. He also informed me that Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer all do this too. It is in fact a necessary step in testing future standards compliance.

In my defense, the original article I read never quite clarified that these tags are for testing purposes only and should not be used on production web sites. However, I should have done more research into this before I ranted on.

Therefore, I would like to apologize to all the Safari lovers out there and any Safari devs that might be reading. Safari appears to be very much standards compliant and my faith in Apple has been restored.

I am a fairly recent convert to Apple from 15 years of programming in Windows and I guess I'm still suffering from some 'scars' from my time programming on Windows.

Sorry guys!

Link: http://dev.lipidity.com/apple/iphone-webkit-css-3

Bad, bad, Apple.

The above linked blog gives some examples about how Apple's Safari browser achieves it's 'OS X-ish' look in Windows. It does this by way of some Safari specific CSS attributes. These custom attributes allow Safari to do some custom 'rounded OS X-ish' button styles on standard web pages - at least ones that are running in Safari.

I really hate when browser developers like Apple or Microsoft do custom stuff like this! Web site developers have a hard enough time making web sites that work in all browsers. When there are tons of custom features that are specific to certain browsers, it just makes things all that more difficult.

Get with the program, Apple. Why can't you simply use standard CSS for this stuff rather than yet another non-standard addition! Sheesh.

My friend Dave, wrote a post about an interesting development with Microsoft's Silverlight web browser plugin. He talks about how Silverlight provides the ability to essentially script a web page using C#, instead of Javascript.

Silverlight is certainly a very interesting technology from Microsoft. It is a browser plugin that allows you to do a lot of 'Flash-like' things on your web pages. It's Microsoft's 'Flash killer'. The technology is impressive and I have to applaud Microsoft for making it available on Firefox and on Safari. This means it works on all the major browsers on both Windows and OS X. It's great to see Microsoft finally acknowledging that Internet Explorer is not the only browser out there and that Windows is not the only operating system out there. That said, I don't see C# scripting of web sites as going anywhere, unless Microsoft makes some very different moves.

The problem with using C# to script a web site is that you need Silverlight installed in order to do it. If Microsoft could convince Mozilla to bundle Silverlight in Firefox (unlikely) and Apple to bundle Silverlight in Safari (again unlikely), I just don't see Silverlight going anywhere. The only way I can see Mozilla or Apple to ever agree to including Silverlight in their browsers by default would be one of two ways.

The first way would be for Microsoft to open source C# and provide a complete open sourced implementation of C# scripting for all the browsers to include. This would need to be either GPL or LGPL licensed. Not another one of Microsoft's pseudo-open source licenses. I could actually see this happening. Microsoft has already submitted and got C# approved as an ECMA standard, so all they would need to do is provide the open sourced implementation of the scripting layer.

The second, and I think much less likely way for Microsoft to get C# web scripting standard would be to open source the entire Silverlight itself. I doubt this will happen though.

Don't get me wrong. I think Silverlight is a very interesting technology and I think C# is an excellent programming language. I just don't see this C# web scripting thing as being practical anytime soon.

Link: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/aolradio.html

It's not very often that I write about AOL, and its even rarer when I write to complement them, but this is just too cool. AOL just released a Mac version of the AOL Radio software! I used to love listening to the Windows version of AOL Radio (called Netscape Radio back then). Ever since my switch to Mac, that's been unavailable. Now I can listen to it again! (They have an excellent 'Hair Metal' channel.)

Way to go AOL! Let's see some more Mac ports of software (like Yahoo Music Unlimited...)

The below Youtube video does an excellent job of explaining the problem with compression in music these days. This is why so many albums I buy these days just sound horrible! I wish music producers would stop doing this...

Link: http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=636

The linked article describes in detail some of the toxic substances in Diet Coke (and other diet sodas). This is why I don't drink diet sodas anymore. It's a very educating read...

There is more to life than MP3.

I've experimented with many different audio codecs over the years. For those who don't know, an audio codec is a way of recording audio to a file. These files can then be played back from various devices. These days, that device is usually an iPod. Music players like the iPod are often incorrectly referred to as 'MP3 players'. People call them this because MP3 is the de-facto standard for audio files. Pretty much every music player in existence will play MP3 files. Most people hear the term MP3 and they automatically understand what it means. But just because MP3 will work everywhere, doesn't mean it's the one you should use. Lately I've been coming to the conclusion that MP3 is one of the worst formats you can use to record audio.

Why do I think MP3 is so bad? Because it is one of a class of what are called 'lossy' codecs. This means that when you encode something in MP3, there is a loss of some of the quality of the music. Essentially, some of the music is lost in the process of encoding it. This means that what you hear on the MP3 file will never sound as good as the CD it was ripped from. This lossy nature of the codec is done for a very good reason - file size. In order to shrink the file size down to a reasonable size you need to discard some information. The trick is to find a balance between file size and audio quality. An MP3 file on average runs about 1MB per 1 minute of audio. If you were to store that same audio in a lossless format, it would run about 10MB per 1 minute of audio. This means that by using MP3 you can essentially fit 10 times the amount of music in the same amount of space. This is one reason MP3 is so popular. Even with a small 1GB flash based music player, you can fit up to 1000 minutes of music on it! That works out to over 300 or so songs. That's more then enough for even the longest workout! Now expand that to a 60GB iPod and that means you can essentially store 60,000 minutes of music on an iPod. That's 20,000 songs! (assuming 3 minutes per song).

If you have an iPod, or for that matter, any other music player, don't be so focused on only using MP3 files. There are other, better formats that, based on my observations, do a much better job of balancing the quality/size issue. I'm going to discuss a few other audio codecs that I've played with and my impressions on how they match up to MP3.

Apple Lossless

This format only works on the various Apple iPods (and the AppleTV). It is the 'gold standard' in audio codecs. Why? Because it is a lossless codec. This means that literally what you hear is what was on the CD you encoded it from. The sound quality from this format is fantastic. If you are an audio purist, this is the format you use. The problem is that, since it is lossless, it generates big files. These files can run on average 10MB per 1 minute of audio. That's about 10 times the size of an MP3 file. Of course if you have the space, this is the way to go. At one point, I had my entire CD collection of over 100 CDs ripped to Apple Lossless. I had loaded this music onto my iPod and it sounded fantastic. While I enjoyed that the music sounded fantastic, I didn't like that I couldn't fit much on my iPod. My large CD collection ripped as Apple Lossless was well over 80GB. This was more than twice the size of the iPod I had at the time (a 40GB iPod), so that meant that at best I could only keep half of my collection on the iPod at any given time. Granted, I don't actually listen to my entire collection, but I wanted to have it all there if I wanted to listen to it. I also didn't like the idea of filling up the iPod completely. I always like to leave some free space on the iPod. After a few months of this, I decided that I couldn't deal with it, so I wiped the iPod and went back to the old standard - MP3. I had my entire collection on the iPod with space to spare, but the sound quality wasn't all that great. I'm no expert on audio quality, but after listening to Apple Lossless, I could definitely tell that MP3 wasn't there for me.

AAC at 256kb/sec

This is, not so coincidentally, the audio format used by the new iTunes Plus that Apple just released a couple days ago on the iTunes store. Back in April, when Apple and EMI first announced the DRM-free iTunes Plus deal, I knew little about AAC. I had always thought that AAC stood for 'Apple Audio Codec'. Being the stickler for standards that I am, I never bothered to look into this format. "It's an Apple only format! I don't want it!". They announced that the iTunes Plus songs would be encoded in AAC at 256Kb/sec. They said this was 'near CD quality.' This piqued my interest. Yeah, it could all be just a bunch of 'marketing speak' to attract interest in this new service, but I decided to test this proclamation myself. I decided to see if AAC was as good as they said it was. The next day I started re-encoding my entire CD collection again at AAC 256Kb. It took about a week of feeding CDs to the computer to do it, but I finally got it all converted. I loaded it all up on the iPod and started listening. I have to say that I am impressed! I am starting to hear subtle little things in the songs that I never heard in the same song encoded in MP3. This format seems to be almost as good as Apple Lossless at considerably less space. AAC files seem to run about 2MB per 1 minute of music - twice the size of an MP3, but well worth the extra space. This is a bit of a concession to sound quality, but considering how much better they sound, I don't mind. Also, I discovered that AAC doesn't stand for 'Apple Audio Codec', it stands for 'Advanced Audio Codec' and it is an industry standard. It's used on the Playstation 3! That's definitely not an Apple product! I have been trying to get through on iTunes Plus to purchase a couple of their songs which are also in this format, but I haven't had any luck at this. The iTunes store has been acting very flakey for the last few days. No doubt they are getting swamped with people trying out iTunes Plus. I'm going to keep trying until I can get in and buy a few. This sound quality is just too good, and it is worlds better than their old DRM format's quality. I never much cared for the sound quality of those recordings.

I have to admit that I have a few 'less than legal' MP3s. Despite the 'free' nature of these MP3 files, I'm rapidly reaching the conclusion that they are useless. The sound quality is absolutely horrible and they aren't worth listening to. Yes, you have to pay for iTunes Plus or for the CD that you rip to AAC, but the more I think about it, the more I think that you get what you pay for. The great improvement in sound quality from high quality AAC recordings over low quality MP3s make them very much worth the money you pay for them. While I still prefer to buy a CD and rip it to AAC myself, at least now the iTunes store has sound files of good enough quality that I can see myself buying them.

Be adventurous. Try AAC. You'll like it much better than MP3. Now I understand why iTunes defaults to ripping to AAC. It's BETTER!