Alston Grove

I just got the iRiver iHP digital audio player. I got tired of listening to electronic interference from my PC and having access to just a few measly songs. (”I can hear the opcode pipelining through my processor!”) I also looked at Apple iPod and Rio Karma. The iPod is small, well-designed, and aesthetic. But it doesn’t play Ogg Vorbis, the format I used to encode my CD collection.

Both the Karma and iRiver play multiple codecs, including mp3, wav, Ogg and WMA (in case I should ever turn to the darkside), and they have features beyond iPod. While the iPod battery lasts for 8 hours, these players last 16 hours. Karma has not only USB 2, but also ethernet for fast transfers. It also has a feature that no other player has: gapless play — it lets you play albums without adding pause between tracks.

In the end, I picked the iRiver because of its technical features and its nice form factor and appearance (it’s almost the same size and weight as iPod). Features over the other players include built-in FM tuner, recording, optical line in/out, and remote with LCD screen. Over USB 2, the player looks like a storage device, and building the ID3 database can be done under Linux. No player is perfect, and there is room for improvement. You can’t create playlists on the fly, but instead you create them from winamp/xmms. The interface could confuse new users, with buttons invoking different operations by context. The firmware is upgradeable, so hopefully iRiver will release gapless play and some other improvements in a future revision. For now, I am a very happy user.

Chris DiBona has an entertaining and informative article over at LinuxJournal called ASK Me No Questions, I’ll Tell You No Lies. With an inbox receiving 500 spam emails/day, he’s obviously in need of an industrial-strength solution. So he’s resorting to ASK (Active Spam Killer), a kind of challenge-response filter that requires unknown senders to reply to a confirmation message. It’s a nice Python proggie that you add to your procmail run-command file.

It reminds me of the SBC Privacy Guard service on your phone that screens unknown calls. Except this is a bit harsher. Some people will send you an e-mail, and then be asked to confirm their e-mail address before the first e-mail they sent will be allowed to reach you. This only happens the first time someone new e-mails you, but it might put off some people. Still, I’m becoming pretty desperate myself, and I’m considering installing it.

Steve Balmer’s infamous monkeyboy dance video was spoofed as an iPod advertisment. If you haven’t seen the original conference clip before, check it out here. The one where a sweaty Ballmer chants “developers, developers, developers” is quite funny too.

I’ve been thinking about what language, platform, and tools I would choose if I were writing a commercial desktop application. Here are my 7 requirements:

1. The application should be cross-platform.
2. UI should be rapidly developed with a tool.
3. Layout should be done with managers and containers.
4. The UI toolkit should adopt its look and behavior from the platform.
5. Application logic should be written in a high-level, object-oriented language.
6. Process-intensive tasks should be optimized later.
7. Software licensing should be GPL-compatible.

Click through to read my explanation of the requirements and my conclusion on which language and tools I chose.

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I saw this traffic ranking chart that shows how quickly Friendster caught on, and I was impressed with it.

Until I saw this one:

That meteoric spike of traffic is Google’s foray into the social network space with a little website called Orkut. Apparently, Google wanted to acquire Friendster at first, but was turned down, so they started their own. They launched the site by sending out 12,000 invitations, then waited for those people to invite others. Orkut is an interesting social experiment because you can only join by invitation.

If you love gadgets like I do, you might check out the weblog called Gizmodo. Apparently, the editor of Gizmodo, Peter Rojas, decided to leave and start his own gadget weblog as a moneymaking venture called Engadget. And since you can never read enough weblogs on gadgets, try this one as well. For gadgets that are more obtainable by budget-aware geeks, head over to the gadget section of ThinkGeek. Well, there goes about 2 hours of your time sucked away before you know what happened to it. Sorry about that.

If you’ve got a cellphone and you want to masquerade your location, you might want to check out SoundCover. This little program runs on your phone and will play background sounds during your call to make it sound like you are in a different environment.

Did you wake up late for work and you want your boss to think you’re caught in traffic? Select the Traffic Jam background and give him a call from your bedroom. Is one of your mates a chronic talker that just doesn’t know when to stop? Use the Phone Ring 15s background and your friend will hear a phone ring 6 times, 15 seconds into the call. Tell him that your other phone is ringing and that you have to go.

Considering the bad sound quality over a cell phone, someone might just be fooled by this thing. The Circus Parade is hilarious — complete with whips cracking during a trained animal performance. How often would you need to fake being at a circus?

So what’s next? A program that alters your voice as you speak? Maybe it changes the pitch or adds sounds effects like echo and reverb. I want the sound effect that makes me sound like a speech synthesizer. “Do you feel like we do?” I couldn’t resist.

I read an article by Tim O’Reilly who has some interesting thoughts about the information age and publishing books on free/libre, open-source software.

He says that Larry Wall (father of Perl) has something in common with Bill Gates (father of Microsoft). They both want their software to be valuable. But one releases the software for free and the other restricts access to it to create value.

I think it’s worth making the point that open-source software is also valuable because it’s good software, not just because it’s usually cheap. If Perl were buggy, unstable, and lacked useful features, nobody would use.

Another point is that open-source software does not necessarily come without a price! It just means that when you obtain the software, you are entitled to the source code as well — and most importantly — you are given the right to modify and distribute changes. But to obtain the software, you could have very likely paid for it (like ActiveState Perl).

Information wants to be free because the Internet makes it so cheap to distribute, copy, and modify. Information wants to be expensive because the right information at the right time is valuable to the recipient. Like so many things in nature, information is a dichotomy. The tension between the two divisions has lead to copyright and intellectual property laws that are endlessly debated.

The tipping point is when information costs so little that you won’t bother obtaining it through other (dishonest) means. Some information will always be quite valuable, such as software that runs businesses. The cost of other information will eventually be driven down by this cheap distribution system we call the Internet. Now, if someone would just get a micro-payments scheme working and adopted …