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109 posts with category “Tech”

Google favicons

Almost everyone must have noticed by now that Google has a new favicon for its search/news/maps/etc. pages. I personally hate it, I think aside from being drab, it actually doesn’t immediately evoke “Google.” That lower-case ‘g’ is not as recognizable as they seem to be hoping. It’s unfortunate for them that they’ve ended up with few and meager iconic brand signifiers. Their full ‘logo’ (if you can call it that) doesn’t scale well; maybe the most they have going for them is their color scheme, although it is strikingly similar to Windows’/Microsoft’s long-standing color scheme. It’s really got them handcuffed until they can gracefully re-brand with something more versatile. Good to know, then, that it’s only temporary.

I’ve also noticed this Google Reader favicon showing up momentarily as the site loads, though only in Opera. It resembles the large logo on the official Google Reader blog, and I can’t figure out what’s causing it — what is it that Opera is loading before the stylesheet tells it to look elsewhere?

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WordPress 2.7: Automatic Upgrade in Core!

According to WordPress developer Ryan Boren, the most requested WordPress feature is tentatively slated for the as-yet unscheduled 2.7 release.

This already exists in the form of a third-party plugin, which I’ve actually used successfully before on another blog. I’ve always found upgrading manually to be easy and problem-free, though incredibly tedious. Because I don’t use many plugins or alter any core WordPress files, I think automating the process will be a safe option for me, one that I’ll trust more in the hands of the core development team. Still, I’m sure I’ll wait till it’s been thoroughly tested in a couple versions before using it on this site.

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Last.fm Seasonal Impact Indices

Everyone’s experienced that thing where you’re listening to something, and you think to yourself, “Holy shit does this remind me of fall 2004.” How strongly certain music is correlated with certain periods of your life depends on many things, including but probably not limited to when you first heard it, when you first liked it, and when your listening to it was most highly concentrated. So, for instance, in my case, most Destroyer albums will recall times and places that are vague at best, and that depend mostly upon first exposure rather than concentration — this as a result of the fact that I listen to every Destroyer album all the time, approximately.

Blueboy’s Unisex, on the other hand, will probably always remind me of the winter of 2006-7, as I listened to it for the first time that season, nine additional times within that season (racking up about 150 tracks listened, according to Last.fm), and virtually never again once spring hit.

Ever since I began submitting listening data to Last.fm in November of 2004, I’ve wondered whether I’d ever enjoy direct access to all those numbers. Then came Last.fm Extra Stats, mercifully collecting all my listening data for me in a tab-separated file that can be pulled into Excel and manipulated to my heart’s content. Here, as a small example of the data, are my top ten artists (by tracks listened) from winter 2006-7, along with total listens for each artist (since November 2004) (now that I’m finally getting around to publishing this post, all the following data is very old):

Winter 2006-7
Artist Winter (S) ↓ Total (T)
Trans Am 163 163
Blueboy 148 163
The Lucksmiths 69 105
Ratatat 50 126
The Moldy Peaches 49 51
White Flight 36 41
Television Personalities 35 35
Beach House 35 64
Revolving Paint Dream 32 58
RJD2 31 52

Now for some methodology. Continue reading

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Alphabetization Is Not Fit for Music Libraries

Wikipedia’s article on alphabetization explains:

Advantages of sorted lists include:

  • one can easily find the first n elements (e.g. the 5 smallest countries) and the last n elements (e.g. the 3 largest countries)
  • one can easily find the elements in a given range (e.g. countries with an area between .. and .. square km)
  • one can easily search for an element, and conclude whether it is in the list

The first two advantages are things you almost never need to do with music libraries. And the third has been supplanted by now-ubiquitous search boxes: if you know what you’re looking for, you search; and if you don’t, an alphabetized list is not the way to find it.

Web visionary Ted Nelson (<mst3k>Dr. Ted Nelson?</mst3k>) has been paraphrased as pointing out that “electronic documents have been designed to mimic their paper antecedents,” and that “this is where everything went wrong: electronic documents could and should behave entirely differently from paper ones.” If the folder metaphor is inadequate for digital documents, no wonder it’s so pitiful at handling music. The proximity between pieces of music in a library should least of all be based on the first letter in a band’s name – it’s as arbitrary as sorting them by the vocalist’s month of birth – yet this is how it’s universally done.

Music library organization needs to be re-thought from the ground up. We need to consider how it is that people used to listen to music before it was all on their iTunes. How are your CDs organized (or disorganized) on your shelf? How are they organized in your head? What is it that prompts you to listen to what you listen to when you listen to it? And how can we use computers to adopt and enhance these ways of thinking, rather than forcing us to think like computers? Continue reading

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foobar2000 Is Dead or Dying: Part 1

Originally written June 30, 2007.

There’s always been a significant faction of foobar2000 users whose primary attraction to the player is its appearance, or rather the level of control given to its users over its appearance. In its infancy, with the standard (and still default) UI, very little was possible — the main window consisted solely of a tabbed playlist and several functional toolbars — but people nevertheless took a lot of pride in making it their own, and some impressive things were done with relatively minimal flexibility. It was in the standard UI that users began experimenting with album-level presentation, choosing not to repeat redundantly the artist and album name on each line of the playlist, but to use the second, third, and sometimes fourth lines to display other info, such as year, label, genre, replaygain info, etc. Each of these customizations was unquestionably unique, but most of the broad details of the interface were consistent and inescapable.

The Columns UI component began as an experiment in allowing for multiple columns within the playlist display, emulating the Windows Explorer “Detail” view (and many other Windows programs), with sortability via clickable column headings. Eventually Columns UI added a sidebar and, later, panels, allowing the whole foobar window to be split up indefinitely into panel-based component displays, the playlist viewer becoming just another one of these. This granted much greater flexibility, allowing users to tailor the interface even more precisely to their needs. You could now display album art as prominently as you wanted, or not at all; your entire library tree could be embedded within the main window, rather than tucked away in a pop-up; and with the trackinfo panel’s exceptionally lax (by that era’s standards) stylizations, the personalization of your foobar became even more addictive, and, more importantly, rewarding.

Many seemed hell-bent on concocting the most garish presentations imaginable: giant gothic blue-on-black custom fonts, deep-red 200-px-tall spectrum analyzers, all, of course, coupled with custom OS “vis.”

While some still preferred the purity and elegance of the standard UI, the personalizations made possible by Columns UI were inarguably functional ones, for the most part. Fonts, colors, distribution of panels, and a rudimentary method of text alignment were really as far as you could go. At the core of all the boasted screenshots was a recognizable structure, all slight variations on the theme of playlist+trackinfo+albumlist+albumart. Outside of displaying album art, there was nothing profoundly new that Columns UI allowed you to do — rather, Columns UI gave you more control over how you did what you needed to do.

Continue reading

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Windows XP SP3

Microsoft publicly released Windows XP Service Pack 3 yesterday, which means that it should appear in your list of available updates. To grab your own standalone copy of the update, download the EXE or the ISO directly from Microsoft. Lifehacker also has a tutorial on getting SP3 onto a Windows install disc to save yourself loads of trouble later. Read what Ars Technica, Lifehacker, and Wired have to say about the upgrade.

This service pack was rumored in November (by Wired and CNET, among others) to offer a 10% boost in speed, but who knows under what conditions it’ll actually be noticeable. And all this amidst protests against Microsoft’s plan to stop selling XP this summer. Even John Dvorak, whose columns I’ve been reading since adolescence, hates Vista:

You’re not supposed to deliver a new operating system that’s been in development for more than four years yet performs worse than the previous OS. Performance should be at the top, not the bottom, of the to-do list. You get the sense that Microsoft just piles code on top of code and somewhere in the middle of it all is MS-DOS 1.0.

I’ll say.

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Songbird 0.5

Songbird 0.5 was released last week, and, while not technically inconsistent with claims that its RSS parsing had been “improved,” I was disappointed to see that two of my three podcast subscriptions still aren’t coming through. The problem has been migrated to a new bug ticket.

There’s also a new “Media Views” feature, which looks promising. As of now the only add-on to take advantage of this is a simple tag-cloud library view, but I imagine things could get really elaborate there. Their line, “Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets?”, has me anticipating all kinds of innovative browsing environments; picture a navigable mood-cluster terrain, or a pannable, zoomable, clickable history wavegraph. I’m seriously considering teaching myself enough XUL to be able to write a hotness add-on.

Amazingly, 0.1 was first released over two years ago. And their releases have code-names like Bowie and Eno? Who knew.

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Crappy Leaks: WTF?

Portishead - ThirdPortishead’s new album Third leaked recently, and, like so many leaks before it, is pretty bad. I’ve only listened to a portion of it but the first track ends abruptly, and the whole thing is rumoured to be a transcode. Nevertheless it keeps getting posted to trackers.

I don’t get where these poor leaks come from in the first place. If someone has this CD at home you’d think they’d take care to rip it properly. Instead I imagine some guy in a back room at the label’s HQ, seated at a yellowed Pentium II with a CRT monitor, running Windows 98 and still used for mailing lists and spreadsheets, fluorescent-lit and surrounded by boxes and manila folders, ripping at 128kbps so that it can encode before he’s caught, then throwing the whole thing on a thumbdrive through the machine’s single USB 1.1 port. Still, why not rip straight to WAV and encode at home? Is it seriously the limitations of USB 1.1?, or is my imagination getting too specific? These are not rhetorical questions, and I’m not complaining, I’m just confused. That said, I want and expect to like this album, so I’m just gonna wait for the proper physical release date of April 29.

We’ve been using MP3s for like fifteen years now; shouldn’t this be foolproof?

Oh and in case you want it, it’s here.

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