There’s lots of Mercedes cars parked outside the flat today - dunno why, but now I’ve got that stoopid BigBrovaz song stuck in my head and decided to compose my own little ditty, sing along at will…
Buy me ipods and laptops with nice apple logos,
Maybe an isight, an imic, and protools,
An aluminum G5 with dual processing,
Those are a few of my favourite things…
It works, as long as you can excuse the dire American pronounciation of aluminium…
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A friend recently deposited his iPod with me (mwahaha!) to look after until the nice man from AppleCare comes to take it away to be repaired (he lives in halls of residence and these things have a habit of.. disappearing..). He also wants to back up all the music on it in case Apple send him a replacement unit.
Now, I’ve heard some horrible stories about how hard it is to get music off the iPod due to attempts at media control, DRM, etc etc. So I dutifully set about using the wonderful multi filesystem support of the mount command in GNU/Linux to mount the iPod as a firewire hard drive feeling pretty confident that it would pay no heed to the DRM hoojum woojum that was likely to be present. Indeed, the iPod mounted with no problem and slightly shaky firewire support aside (you know who you are, sbp2), there was not much of a problem until I tried to copy a certain file from the device (just a random mp3, in case you were wondering) when the whole thing would grind to a halt and crash, necessitating a hard reboot (ouch..).
Not to be put off I decided to plug the iPod into my PowerBook and see what magic I could weave with the Terminal. To my surprise, exactly the same files were visible as on the GNU/Linux box, but not from the Finder. A quick download of TinkerTool, and hidden files were showing up in the GUI, no problem. It was then trivial to copy the files across.
The mp3 files on an iPod are kept in sequential folders in /iPod_Control/Music/F00-19 (on this iPod, YMMV) and are renamed XXXX.MP3 (where XXXX is a four digit number). A problem? No! Thanks to id3 tagging, when you copy the mp3s into iTunes, if you have it set to reorganise your music for you it will rename all the files and arrange them in a nice, logical order.
Looks like Apple’s famous ‘ease of use’ triumphs again - although a little bird tells me the same can be accomplished by viewing the iPod with ‘Show Hidden Files’ on with Windows. Either way, I am a little disappointed it didn’t put up more of a fight…
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Why, oh why… Here we are in this world of mass consumption and production, and the simplest of items to make - the t-shirt - is seemingly impossible to construct. As any girl will know buying a t-shirt in Topshop, or New Look, or any other cheap high-street retailer, for £5 or so you are guaranteed it won’t last and will most likely shrink to an unusable size after four or five washes. That’s fine, you pay for what you get and it’s not this that I wish to take issue with today.
Anyone who knows me well knows that the t-shirt is the backbone of pretty much everything I wear. I wear them lots and own many, and varied items in this vein. However of late there has been a revolt occurring in my hallowed t-shirt drawer; most of my t-shirts are unwearable. Did I buy too many cheap t-shirts? No, I went out and spent a lot of money buying more the more expensive variety on a shopping expedition around Covent Garden…
So, what went wrong… Well after about two washes many of these t-shirt’s have shrunk, the kind of shrinking that’s not all-over smaller and just about get-awayable with, but the kind of shrinking that makes things short and wide. Now, although I am not overtly against the sight of my stomach, it is firstly a little cold to be flashing my navel, and secondly the lack of sit-ups or any sort of exercise has made that area of my body a little unsightly. Please tell me - what is with the shrinking?
I know absolutely nothing of the textile industry, but when any very simply made cotton t-shirt malfunctions on such a great level, you have to think something is awry… A plot is afoot, my friends, the t-shirt manufacturers are evil capitalists. They plot, they do, day by day, “make rubbish t-shirts, people will have to buy t-shirts more frequently, we make more money (ha ha ha, make your time…).”
What is to be done… I have a plan, t-shirt wearers unite. I am going to send back all my shrunken t-shirts (along with well-written polite letters) to the manufacturers and see what I get back… My next blog will consist of a cut out and send off letter for you readers to bombard the lousy clothing manufacturer of your choice. Even if I don’t get my money back I could always use a few new items of clothing…
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Although I can see EMI’s point. If you control one of the most powerful and recognised brands in the world, you are going to do your best to prevent any dilution of that brand.
Unfortunately this means that although if Danger Mouse wanted to record a cover version of a Beatles song and distribute it, he would have (relatively) no problem doing so, if he had asked for permission to sample first, he would been told in no uncertain terms to forget about it and this album would never have happened in it’s current incarnation. Which having listened to it, might not be a bad thing. I dunno, although a highly impressive feat of remixing it seems all the good tracks are good because they sample the best tracks/riffs/etc on the White Album rather obviously…
Still, check out the site and make your own mind up.
There was a copy on eBay the other day that went for something like ¬£f170 (although it seems to have calmed down a bit now). Incredible. It’s not even on vinyl..
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I’m meant to be writing an essay. When I say meant it means that I should be doing that now, but I’m not, I’m posting my first blog. I’ve decided that achingbrain.net is looking far too Alex-o-centric… Enough with his techno-twaddle…
In attempting to conceive this first blog I pondered the various aspects of life, the universe or everything that I could potentially discuss thhrough this medium of the internetweb. So what would I like to point out/rant about to the great and good readers of this site (all four of you - you know who you are…). What did I decide, I hear you ask…
Well I thought I would do a little introduction into my excessively warped mind. I foolishly study music, recently people have started to ask that time-honoured question - what are you going to do when you finished (this mostly comes from sensible older relatives). Well I decided to try and find out what you do with a music degree…
First stop - Prospects - this is the UK governement approved site for careers advice when you graduate. And what does it tell me…
First on the list become a musician (painfully obvious suggestion - but painfully impossible to acheive) - apparently the armed forces are the largest UK employer of musicians. You have got to be kidding, me, in the army, pah!
Second on the list - composer, please… Apparently though the average composer’s income through composition itself is only 20% the rest being made up from ‘other employment’ (read job in the service industry).
They then go on to suggest various things such as librarian/editing/publishing/journalist all of which are dovetailed with ‘further training required’ or ‘highly competative’
Strangely the last thing they list is teaching… This seems to sharply contrast with the informative University of York Careers Pages which would suggest that out of there 162 graduates from their music department 30 of them ended up teaching or training to be a teacher. A further 65 ended up doing further study. The reamining 67 ended up scattered around. How 11 went into scientific jobs (including 1 medical - what?) I have no idea, given that music training has got precisely nowt to do with science. It is quite scary to think that these wholly unqualified people are out there doing whatever scientists do (blow up labs, experiment on rats…). 13 ended up in ‘other employment’ (read service industry).
The future is certainly not looking bright. However I still have lots of work to do before I actually graduate (with this essay looking more and more patchy by the minute, my chances of actually making it to the finishing post are looking slimmer by the second)…
If anyone has any suggestions what I should do with my life, it would help me to give a definative answer to those pesky relatives… Currently I work in what you could call the service industry (I prefer to refer to my current place of work as ‘the house of hell and eternal damnation’) and I have no intention of staying there… Internetweb readers and blog enthusiasts - save my soul…
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Nearly a week after it was supposed to stop spreading, MyDoom.A is still finding it’s way into my inbox, albeit at a trickle compared to the avalanche of the previous few weeks.
I can only assume that those brain dead enough to get infected with the virus are also too stupid to figure out how to set the clock on their machines correctly. I mean, it’s not as if it’s a fucking VCR…
But what do I care, I got my PowerBook back yesterday 
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I’ve been playing a little game recently and I thought I’d share it with you, dear reader. The game is to see how long it takes you to spot someone, anyone, listening to an iPod in the time it takes you to leave your house and get to wherever it is you are going. As I live just round the corner from where I seem to be spending most of my time at the moment, this doesn’t leave much time to spot one of the diminutive white jukeboxes. Thankfully though, they have rather distinctive earphones whose earbuds stand out a mile away and whose cable has a way of hanging just so.
The game has become somewhat easier of late, with all those iPods sold over Christmas finding their way into the hands of London’s hipsters (What? You didn’t get one? Me neither. Guess we just ain’t cool enough 
). My current best for time is at the bus stop (which for the record is about fifteen seconds walk from my front door) - which was almost broken the other day as I looked out of my window, about the house and spotted what turned out to be a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen NX (snappy name, eh?). Although not really related to a journey from home to work/whatever, my frequency record currently stands at four iPods in a space of about 50 metres (The ground floor of the library - spotted during a walk from the communal discussion area to the exit).
This (admittedly rather dull and slightly techno-fetishistic) game may become a lot more amusing when the iPod minis become available, in particular the ghetto-fabulous blingPod…
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Not too happy at the moment. My PowerBook is at the menders as like a troublesome adolescent, it’s come down with a nasty case of white spots. I’ve been trying to read through the 650ish post long thread at Apple’s discussion board, but it’s all a little depressing… 
All is not bad though as they should replace the whole display unit, which should take care of those two dead pixels
In other news, the new iLife suite arrived today to compliment the better half’s new iBook (Penfold - to replace Brain, which was sadly stolen in the break in). I’m surprised she managed to get to work as she was quite taken with the cheese-o-licious loops in GarageBand this morning.
There are now officially more PPC based computers than X86 ones in the house. This is a little troubling and yet strangely comforting at the same time.
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Enough is enough. Every now and again I’ll read Bill Thompson’s column on the BBC’s website. Every now and again he’ll make a point that, although usually slightly inaccurate, generally has some base in common sense. But then it’ll take a random slant that would not take too much to get the right wing loonies stampeding through the streets waving their copies of the Daily Mail shouting ‘Something must be done about this’ which will inevitably lead to some poorly though out bit of legislation.
A recent example of this is the bill that is currently attempting to be pushed through the US Congress by Senator Lamar Smith of Texas. Basically it says that if you give false information when registering a domain name, you will be liable to up to seven years imprisonment and a maximum $150,000 fine. The reasoning behind this as I understand it is to deter spammers from using fake WHOIS data associated with the domains they send email from and as such make them easier to track down and bring to (hopefully swift, bloody and painful) justice. Now, while any attempt to stem the flow of spam is good in my book, this is hardly going to help the problem while spammers use open SMTP relays (i.e. ill configured email servers which allow anyone to use them to send email) and compromised machines to inform and educate the world about alternative treatments for male impotence - because it has nothing to do with the details registered with registrars about domain name contact information. Add into the mix the fact that most spam originates outside the US and as such out of US jurisdiction, it all starts to seem a little pointless.
But back to Bill Thompson. In his column today entitled ‘How to control what is online‘ he comments on the recent tragedy of Brighton teacher Jane Longhurst who was murdered by Graham Coutts. I shall not go over the gory details here, but suffice to say, the victim’s mother claims ‘Jane would still be here if it wasn’t for the internet.’
Thompson jumps on this choice soundbite to put forth his manifesto on how the Internet should be regulated (although I’m sure he really means the World Wide Web).
He starts off well, pointing out that effective regulation of internet traffic at the packet transport level is rather difficult, with the task of filtering data packets being ‘decidedly non-trivial’ (a term used by serious programmers, apparently. One wonders what term a Sunday programmer would use. A pain in the arse, perhaps) without serious dedicated infrastructure type backup, as with the Great Firewall of China.
He comes to two conclusions. One is to give up the ghost and admit that the Internet (once again, the World Wide Web) is effectively unregulateable, while leaving the task of content filtering at to the user level with ‘parents and school teachers and youth clubs [installing] filters and blocking programs on their computers’.
But then he starts to lose the plot somewhat in suggesting that ‘part of the problem is that the net’s standards are controlled by bodies like ICANN and the Web Consortium (by which I can only assume he means the W3C) whose primary interest is technical stability and corporate interest’.
Now for a quick reality check. ICANN (the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) is a non-profit, private-sector corporation which coordinates the assignment of various bits and pieces the Internet requires to function. These include domain names, IP addresses, protocol parameters and port numbers. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is another not-for-profit organization that develops the language and framework standards that are the icing to ICANN’s cake. These include HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, DOM and a host of other important acronyms. The work of both ICANN and the W3C is influenced, but not dictated, by various industry players (Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, etc).
He then goes on to suggest that he ‘would rather see the network in the hands of governments who can be lobbied, replaced and argued with, than leave it in the hands of the large corporations who develop the programs or standards bodies who are blind to people’s real interests.’
And this is a perfect example of why Bill Thompson is a fucking idiot. Yes, the standards that drive the Internet (not just the WWW) are controlled by these organizations (and what is wrong with technical stability exactly?). However they have nothing at all to do with what content is available online. That kind of control is exercised by individual Internet Service Providers who have ‘fair use’ policies which control the content served from and often, via, their facilities.
Instead, he would rather see the content of the WWW regulated by governments of each individual country, even if said governments have a habit of censorship, media manipulation and human and/or civil rights abuse - but this is okay apparently because ‘not everywhere is the United States or China’. There are reasons why organisations and/or resources that would be very open to abuse by the powers that be have certain levels of, or complete autonomy - non-tech examples of the Bank of England and the judiciary spring immediately to mind.
The (sort of) self regulation the WWW has at the moment may not be ideal, but it’s a lot better than the short sighted alternative he suggests.
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All new website! Hussah!
I’m going to try to post more often on this one. Might even put some pictures up. Maybe.
Anyway I’d like you to point your mouse/screen reader/arrow keys/whatever at the word ‘katherine’ and see what’s on the mind of the better half. If she’s stopped playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 long enough to post something.. :-/
Enjoy..
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