Playing With Sharp Objects

At the moment I’m reading Bob Woodward’s account of President Bush and the aftermath of September 11 in Bush at War. I plan on going through a few of these books in the coming weeks. Timely reading with the 9-11 hearings wrapping up in the news. Read on for more…

The book definitely puts all the players in an amazing light. Far from the bumbling goofs that the media makes the administration out to be, they improvise and pull together under the sudden unprecedented crisis. This is in stark contrast to past responses to the previous Trade Center Bombing and the attack on the USS Cole. Personally, I marvel at the restraint that the administration showed at a time when I wanted to see footage of nuclear mushroom clouds over Kabul. Things started out slow and rough, but suddenly gelled in the last weeks of the war. Published in 2002, this book has a lot of bits that the media is only now getting around to.

It’s amazing what the US was able to accomplish with so very few troops on the ground, air power, suitcases of cash, and the strength of the local people. It is a strategy that we were only able to partly make use of in Iraq by way of the Kurds. It is a testament to the will of the Afghan people that they so wanted to throw off the reins of tyranny when the prospect of help by the US first appeared. It is something that we were not able to leverage in the Iraqi people.

For some more important reading to complement this, see documents of the 9-11 Commission. It is important to see the lengths that the al Qaeda network went to harm our country and how much more catastrophic that date could have been had all their plans come to fruition. Surely these and other plans are still foremost in their sick minds. This puts actions like the Iraq war into perspective when we consider an enemy willing to die at all costs for the benefit of their cause, even if it is at odds with the religion they imagine to serve. By that very token, nothing but death will stop the most dangerous and pathological of these fighters. Being in the middle of the conflict, we don’t have the total awareness of the actual scale of what history will prove it to be. Certainly unfortunate events like Abu Graib will give the US a black eye, but the fact that we are punishing our wrong doers rather than rewarding them as Saddam Hussein did under his dictatorship, or tolerating them as the Saudi kingdom did until recently, goes to show that we have a moral high ground overall.

We still have a ways to go in the war on terror before we can feel anywhere near the freedom we felt on Sept 10, 2001. We may possibly go through another armed conflict against countries that continue to aid and harbor terrorists, countries like Iran for their threat of nuclear terrorism, or Libya for their false renouncement of terror. We may have to feel further sacrifice for time to come, and may at times have to be the lone participant. In the end, the goal is the same as any other conflict that has brought us here today: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, without having to check the current Homeland Security Threat Advisory. Anything short of that is to accept defeat. I shudder to think of what might have occurred had another administration been in the White House. Perhaps we would even have ceded North Carolina to Afghanistan as a peace measure had a certain Democrat been in office.

How many of us have large CD collections and want to better manage the way we listen and carry them? What are our entertainment options?
Those of us with a CD large CD collection need a better way to manage the way we listen and carry our music. Sure you can just listen to the radio, but I feel that these days the stations are just pumping out too much stuff I don’t care for in heavy rotations, even given the large variety of stations in the Northeast US. Frankly, if you’re buying a lot of pop stuff that you really aren’t interested in within a few weeks, you deserve what you get. Besides there’s always EBay and if you bought it in the first place, there must be someone else who will get sucked into buying it from you.

I tend to be very conservative about what CDs I buy in that an album definitely has to have more than one song that I’ve liked. Still I’ve gathered maybe a few hundred CDs of stuff that I really like and would like to listen to in a nice rotation. Once you are talking about having a choice of more than maybe 10 CDs n your person, things have gotten out of control. Working with a contraining medium like the CD, however, gives you no opportunity for advanced features like playing all albums of an artist or shuffling songs from many CDs. What can you do?

Enter the MP3 player. I’ve had an MP3 player since the Rio PMP300 days when I won one from a website contest. The Rio PMP300 is similar to the current Rio One player, but required the use of a parallel port rather than today’s friendlier USB port. In those days 32MB was the norm for onboard memory and an expansion slot for a SmartMedia card allowed you to add another 32MB. With the price of SmartMedia back then I was not interested in investing money into bumping up the space. This only allowed me room for a few songs recorded at low quality (64kps). This quickly got boring. Routinely uploading songs into the unit was a horribly slow process that detered me from using it as much as I could have.

Years later, when SmartMedia was cheaper I got a 32MB card for kicks and increased the available space in my Rio PMP300. The problem was that the barries between the two storage spaces meant that some song or another would not fit on the player.

A couple of years ago, I acquired an Audiotron 100. This unit hooked to an ethernet port and the RCA or optical connections of your stereo. The unit reads files over the 10MB/s ethernet link from a Windows share, dramatically increasing the space available for songs. I now have a 100GB partition shared from Linux via Samba that I rip all my CDs onto for home listening. In the case that I am in another room of the house, I can probably get away with playing the music over a nearby computer with Microsoft Media Player 9, but this isn’t always an option. To cover all rooms I would have to invest in a whole-house audio system, and that can be very pricy. One gets used to having these features when listening to music, though, so how can I do the same when I am not at home?

To show how common this need for music management has become, this past Christmas my brother and I got my daughter an RCA Lyra RD1071A with 128MB built in memory and an available SD card expansion slot. (I have since replaced this with an RCA Lyra RD1072 which has 256Mb memory [$60] and to which I added a 512MB SD card [$40] to get her the same storage capacity as the IPod Shuffle, but with an LDC screen and at a cheaper price.) I sprung for a 256MB card on sale for $79 at Circuit City to boost the storage space. Given the 384MB space, she was able to fit all her albums onto one player. Needless to say, I am jealous. How can I do the same?

The latest advancement in MP3 players is the addition of a hard drive. The first company that I heard of that added a hard drive was Archos which used a 1.9” laptop drive in its bulky Jukebox MP3 line. Apple has its feature rich iPod, which has inspired a slew of similar devices from many manufacturers. Ideally, I want to listen to my collection in the car while driving, so an FM transmitter module may also be necessary - I have a Belkin TuneCastII (model F8V3080). I was to get one of these at about 40GB, but the asking price is still very steep. Apple has also come out with a “mini” version of the player, giving you 4GB of space, but the price is far from 1/10 of the larger player. For $50 more you can get more than 3x the space with the 15GB iPod. Rumor is that Microsoft is coming out with a competing hard drive music system, but with their history of expensive PDAs and tablet PCs, I am not holding my breath for this to be any cheaper. The Dell Digital Jukebox is more sanely priced, but suffers from the same “unremovable battery” issue that plagues the iPod. For a little less money, you can get the Archos 20GB Gmini or RCA’s 40GB Lyra Jukebox. For just a little more money, the 40GB Creative Zen has a removable rechargable battery and the same features. It’s possible that may be the player I’ve been looking for! Now to find a way to rip my Pac-Man Fever vinyl. (http://www.bucknergarcia.com/)

Is MP3 the only answer? MP3 lacks the quality of 5.1 digital sound played on DVDs. Other solutions such as Ogg Vorbis are supported by the open-source community, but will nevere be supported for these players because of the lack of DRM. As a person who has never illegally downloaded music, I feel hampered in my purchasing options because of the misbehavior of other music enthusiasts. The day is coming when it will be difficult to have your music in all the places you want it, and the quality of albums has been much lower of late. It will be interesting to see where the technology goes in the near future as these players get more and more powerful.

And, of course, I went right out and got a Creative Zen 40GB. I’m starting to load the music now. A couple of months ago the 160GB Western Digital drive in my server died. That drive hosted this site and also served to hold my MP3 collection. Luckily I had just gotten the drive the previous month and still had the three old 8GB drives it was replacing on hand. Now that I’ve reconstructed everything, and having gone through a move, I was unable to find the drives holding my music, so I’m going through the ripping process all over again. It’s been a busy couple of days so far, but I’m about 1/4 the way through it. The software I’m using is RipCd.pl from Obsequium which is actually just a script frontend for cdparanoia and lame. I’ve synced part of it with the Creative Zen, and I’m not really fond of the Mediasource management software bundled with the player. I would have instead preferred accessing the player as a drive letter.

Out of all the mail readers out there, I’ve now settled on Mozilla Mail. It provides me with the best filtering technology and the most secure environment against executing virus payloads. The Mozilla browser also has a large number of modules that increase its usability. What are the pros and cons of this system?

Mozilla can be found at http://www.mozilla.org. It is available on all popular platforms, and if you can’t find binaries the tech-savvy among us can compile your own from the available source code. The mail client available in Mozilla versions 1.6 and up provides an accurate junk mail filter tool. After spending a little time training the filter, you can allow it to dump the junk mail into a Junk folder so that you no longer have it filling up your Inbox. There are downsides to this however: it is not 100% accurate, so you must spend a little time glancing over the Junk folder, deleting anything that really is spam, and untraining anything that might have been falsely identified. From a service provider standpoint, the inflow of spam has not been checked since it still occupies mailbox space for a time, no matter how short a period.

Ideally, the spam must be checked before the mail server, before the clients ever get a chance to filter. This saves bandwidth on internal networks, and saves storage space on mailservers. The downside of this is that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so there is no way to accurately filter everything and maintain a way for a large number of users to manage false positives. This means blocking before the server can really only catch the most general spam and the remainder is left up to the clients. Most spam appliances that perform this service are tunable, however, and allow you to change this ratio depending on your organization.

Just as annoying as the influx of spam is the number of ads popping up from your browser windows. While Mozilla does not come with an ad filter, the module Adblock can be obtained from http://www.mozdev.org. Simply put, if you see an ad, it is most likely from a domain like doubleclick.net and you can block the top level of that domain. Internet Explorer users can use a tool like Ad-Shield, but it is a pay product with fewer features than Adblock. Mozilla has a pop-up blocker built in, but Adblock stops those large ads from displaying in web pages, which often take up large portions of the page “above the fold.”

A number of other features common for Internet Explorer is the number of toolbars. I have found that Yahoo’s Bookmark management through the toolbar gives me a centralized view of my bookmarks that I can see in Mozilla or IE regardless of what system I am on. The Companion toolbar is also available through the Mozdev site. Likewise, the Googlebar module gives you the advanced search capabilities of the IE Google toolbar. Can’t leave your homepage without them.

The commercial support for the Microsoft IE system however, beats Mozilla in further system integration. The latest Yahoo toolbar comes with the PestPatrol adware scanner. If you’re not living in the Windows world, this isn’t a problem, but without it you are at risk of installing software that might otherwise be classified as a virus or worm. Certainly there are better free scanners in Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware or Spybot, but the convenience of having it in the toolbar for most users puts it where they can remember not to download/install random garbage off the Internet, or at least scan for it afterwards. This integration is not something that Mozilla now has, but it would be nice to see it in the future as a convenience. There are a number of freeware packages out there than could potentially couple with Mozilla to offer good free anti-virus (http://www.clamwin.net/) and malware solutions. Other functions like Flash support are all there for Mozilla because of its Netscape roots.

Finally, one of the best features about Mozilla is the tabbed web browsing interface. How many times have you found your taskbar filled to the gills with IE windows? The tabbed interface allows you to reduce that clutter and organize the way you browse the web. My favorite method is to have my Feed On Feeds page open in one tab, use the “open new tab” middle-click feature to open any stories I want to read, and then read the opened tabs.

Oh, yeah, Mozilla is very very stable!

The “Feed on Feeds” RSS Reader has just released a new version so I thought it would be a good time to highlight it. The reader can be found at http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds. While it is a bit rough around the edges, it is a great reader to monitor feeds from multiple locations without having to install software anywhere. It marks articles you’ve already read so that you don’t see it again at a new location. I use it to keep track of software releases at Sourceforge sites since it can be a pain to regularly keep track of multiple open-source software packages. A number of sites such as NewsIsFree offer common feeds like CNN and Foxnews. RSS is definitely the way of the future for distributing information via feeds rather than mailing lists, which are susceptible to spam. Its use in replacing general email and mailing lists at this time is questionable, however, as all readers do not yet organize articles in threads. While it is still new evolving technology based on xml, it is built on old ideas (remember PointCast?) and will take some time to find its niche among casual web surfers. For now, the benefit is that the data comes to you rather than having to repeatedly look at various websites for announcements. One glance at the RSS reader tells you whether or not you have any updated feeds. Most sites only allow updates once an hour, which is granular enough for most vendors and developer groups.