Sleep Interrupted

A couple of weeks ago I came to the realisation that Louise and I don’t use our CDs any more. We have a big old glass cabinet hanging on the wall, half full of CDs and half full of DVDs. The former are almost never taken out. The only music we tend to listen to is on the radio or on our MP3 players, typically in the car. So why are we wasting space on storing these CDs when there were piles of DVDs stacked up around the TV?

Thus started my Ripathon, wherein I ripped every CD in the house, including all the weird and wonderful discs previously banished to the loft. After several weeks of fitful work I am finished; I am the proud owner of 1400 tracks and Louise has a more impressive 2400. Or in time terms, it would take me four and a half days of continuous play to listen to my collection, or six continuous days for Louise.

I now have the largest playlist of my life to listen to. I’m about 220 tracks in, rating the tracks as they go by. For a long time I resisted the urge to get into the whole “star rating” idea. Being a bit obsessive, I worry about issues such as the difference between two stars and three. And you mean I have to decide this 1400 times?! Why can’t the machine learn what I want to listen to? Oh well, better a half-good playlist today than a magically learning system next year.

Jayne asked me if this all meant that I’d start downloading tracks instead of buying CDs. I’m not entirely sold, mainly because you don’t get entirely the same quality of sound (theoretically) from an MP3 as you do a CD. In addition, I prefer to use Vorbis in place of MP3, which gives you better sound quality compared to an MP3 of the same file size. That said, with the death of DRM, I’m a lot more prepared to court the idea.

All this, of course, doesn’t help me get at the boxes of vinyl stuck up in the loft. Given that I’ve touched these, I think, on one occassion in the last ten years, I’m also wondering if it’s time to sell my 1210s. I’ve held off doing this (if it’s not stating the obvious at this stage) for a long time. For much of this time I’ve considered teaching some of my old skills to Ben or Jessica in a few years from now but the more time passes the more I wonder if the world has moved on…

Update: My postings seem to be exhibiting a certain synchronicity with the news at the moment: Napster is launching a music download service without DRM.

Perhaps I spoke too soon?

I was just ploughing through my Google Reader backlog when Ben walked up and asked, “How do you make it go up and down?” He was referring to the page on screen.

“I use the mouse wheel, you know, on the mouse. The little wheel you use to make things go up and down.”

“Can you use the arrow keys?”

Without waiting he reached out and sent the page flying across the screen. Laughing he said, “Why does it go up when you press down?”

I had to stop for a moment and suddenly I was thrown back to the mid-eighties and the first time I used an AMX mouse with AMX Pagemaker on our BBC Master. The problem is, to go down the page you press the down button but in doing so the page appears to move up the screen.

Clearly our brains are wired the same way.

While writing this post I had music on random play and it produced a surprisingly good track transition: From Hemp by Living Colour into Into Temptation by Crowded House with a three second crossfade. Not perfect but not bad for a random selection!

One of the reasons for my recent posting hiatus — thanks for filling in Louise! — has been the near demise of our desktop. Recently, when I rebuilt it with the latest version of Ubuntu, I took the opportunity to put in a new, larger hard drive. Well, I say “new” but it was… liberated, shall we say, from its former home. Anyway, it turns out that it was a bit dodgy and one day when Louise booted the desktop it went into a tailspin, ending in a rather unglamorous text-only black-and-white screen á la WarGames.

I was able to maintain my tech-guru reputation by a few incantations of fsck, bringing the desktop back to life. However, I don’t think the drive will last much longer, so I’ve plugged the old drive in as well and I’m using rsync to make daily(ish) backups.

We nearly lost a large batch of our photos because of this… Do your backups, kids! This was a sobering experience and backups is something I’ll be taking more seriously in future. If you’re an Ubuntu user and you’re not sure where to start, you could do worse than read BackupYourSystem.

I have long been opposed to DRM on music downloads, which is why I’ve never bought music online (and yes, I am aware of options such as eMusic). So I was thrilled to read today that EMI has agreed to release every song in its online catalogue without DRM. This means that tracks I download can be copied as many times to as many places as I like — just the same freedoms I enjoy with a good old CD and without being prejudged as a criminal by the record label.

If you use Ubuntu, please take a couple of minutes to fill out this short survey. If you don’t use Ubuntu, there’s a different survey that you can fill in. If you don’t even know what Ubuntu is, there’s yet another survey there for you. Look, I’m sure you’re not really that busy. Go on!

This week I decided that Louise shouldn’t have a monopoly (mono/poly, that’s interesting) on this studying lark, so Wednesday will become my Study Night. However, my concentration is wandering after about 45 minutes with the big C# book, so I bring you this post…

I’m a bit of a sucker for keeping up with the latest developments in free software land and my current crush is Ubuntu, not least because it’s the Linux distrubution running on our home PC. Now I’ve really got to take my hat off to them — they’re replacing init. For those of you still playing along at home, this is a part of Unix-like operating systems that’s been more or less unchanged for 30 years.

Mark and I speculated about this a couple of years ago and came up with a few ideas about how we’d tackle a replacement for init. I have to say, though, what Scott James Remnant has come up with is something far superior.

Now this kind of thing I find really interesting, exciting even. It’s quite likely you won’t. Apologies. Move along, please.

Watching tonight’s edition of Real Story about fraudsters picking up bank account details from peoples’ dumped hard drives was certainly food for thought. The one time I dumped an old PC I made sure to wipe the hard drive but this will certainly make me more methodical in future.

Of course the show didn’t give any advice on how to wipe a drive, just a warning that not doing it was bad. The linked article above at least has some help in this direction. Bare in mind that just deleting files or reformatting a drive is insufficient; it doesn’t take much to undelete the data. My recommendation would be to use the free DBAN utility. If I know you, I’ll come round and do it for free. For anyone else it’ll be a tenner. Companies are more than welcome to get in contact and I’ll do them a quote.

I finally installed Ubuntu’s latest version “Dapper” just before we went on holiday last week. I wiped the drive to get rid of any of the development software left over from my FFL days; no point wasting time upgrading that any more. It also meant loosing the Windows partition. This was no big loss, given that it had never been used since I created at Louise’s request. (I think if we do ever end up wanting to run Windows-based software again I’ll go down the virtualisation route with VMware or QEMU, or maybe try Wine.)

The installation was, as widely reported, a breeze (no pun intended). After booting from the CD, which took about 5 minutes, and answering half a dozen questions, the remainder of the installation was completed in just over 20 minutes. Bare in mind that this included most of the office “productivity” software and extras you’d have to install manually after a bare Windows installation. Very impressive; that’s at least twice as fast as the previous installation of Ubuntu I did from CD.

And then there’s the performance. They said it was faster and there weren’t lying. When I first upgraded to the previous version of Ubuntu my old 800MHz P3 box booted, logged in and started Firefox in 2 minutes 17 seconds. Yes, I really did measure it and keep a record; this is me, get over it. With my fresh Dapper install it does the same thing in 1 minute 35 seconds. Not bad! In fact, that’s the fastest it’s ever been under Linux. It’s worth noting that Windows XP managed the same thing in 38 seconds flat but that’s apples/oranges, at least to a certain extent.

Firefox users who want to keep up-to-date with the latest World Cup results may be interested in the Joga Companion extension. Given, it probably would be better as its own app — something that makes me yearn for tear-off tabs in Firefox — but it is well executed, convenient and provides a nice theme for your browser.

For a genuinely useful Firefox extension, users of multiple computers should check out Google Browser Sync. Just bear in mind that some or all of your personal browsing information will end up stored on Google’s servers, encrypted but still out of your physical control. I’m not saying this is intrinsically bad, just alerting you to the need to make your own judgement.