I just finished a book published in April by Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September, 2007. Pancreatic cancer is very hard to treat — Randy was told that he had a 4 percent chance of survival even with radiation and chemotherapy (the treatments haven’t worked and the cancer is now metastatic). Randy was scheduled to speak in CMU’s “Last Lecture” series, which he agreed to do before he was aware that he had pancreatic cancer. This lecture series serves as a hypothetical “final talk,” i.e., “what wisdom would you try to impart to the world if you knew it was your last chance?” After the diagnosis, Randy decided to go on with the lecture and that it really would be his “last lecture.”
I highly recommend watching the lecture on YouTube (or on DVD from CMU, as well as iTunesU) and reading the book. Proceeds from the book will support Randy’s wife and three children.
I purchased The Soft Bulletin 5.1 by the Flaming Lips and noticed that the CD was the original 1999 release instead of the 2006 remaster. I was only aware of the difference when I put the CD into my computer to copy into iTunes, and noticed that the tracklisting didn’t match that on the packaging. I went online to see what was up and found this on Wikipedia’s The Soft Bulletin page:
Packaging error
The first pressings of The Soft Bulletin 5.1 were erroneously shipped with an original US CD instead of the new remastered CD with the revised track list. The band are offering to replace the incorrect CD with the new version for anyone who received the wrong CD in their package.[6] In addition, many people who have sent their incorrect CDs in for replacements have also received a hand-written letter of apology from the band’s bassist, Michael Ivins. Warner Bros. has since fixed this problem and is now shipping 5.1 packages to retailers with the correct CD included.
I e-mailed Rick Gershon at Warner Bros., since his name came up on Google when I was trying to find someone to contact at the label for a replacement. He put me in touch with Tom Osborn, who promptly sent me a new copy of the album with the 2006 remastered CD.
Radiohead released their new studio album, In Rainbows, this morning as an MP3 download. The album has been thoroughly discussed in the media over the last week because the band decided to release the work independently without the help of a record label. The album is available for purchase in two formats from inrainbows.com: a digital download or a 2xCD, 2xLP discbox. The special edition discbox is priced at £40 (~U.S. $81 at the time of release). The digital download is available with no set price — you pay what you think the album is worth.
I think the “donationware” concept of the Radiohead album is an interesting idea. Personally, I am more inclinded to buy a group’s album if I know they are receiving money from the purchase. Radiohead is not the only band who is going to attempt to go it alone in the near future. A couple of days ago, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor anounced on nin.com that he has not renewed his major label record contract and will attempt to go it alone like Radiohead. Rumors have been circulating around the Internet this week that Oasis and Jamiroquai will follow suit.
Digital distribution straight from the band is a great idea but I can already see a number of flaws in the model that need to be addressed. First, the album needs to be made available in a lossless format (i.e. FLAC) with no digital rights management attached. In Rainbows is available only as a low quality 160 kbps MP3 download. I am willing to pay for a lossless download but not an MP3. Until that’s available, I will stick with CD. The other problem is distribution. Radiohead opted to serve the MP3s straight from their site from 10 server mirrors. BitTorrent is a much better protocol for serving up a digital download to a large number of customers. Blizzard already uses BitTorrent to deliver World of Warcraft patches to its subscribers.
This week I made the switch from Courier to Consolas, the new monospace font from Microsoft that utilizes ClearType rendering to provide improved on-screen readability. I am now using the font in my e-mail client (Thunderbird/Apple Mail), lab notebook (Journler), and text editor (TextPad/BBEdit). One major benefit to switching is that it renders well on both the Mac and the PC, whereas Courier only looks good on the Mac platform. Courier New looks great on the PC but is too thin on the Mac. Consolas also has better support for international characters, which is helpful when using Greek characters in my lab notebook.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still in the majority (53%), following by Firefox (34%), and Safari (7%). I think it’s safe to say that in a couple of years, alternative browsers will outnumber IE. This is a blessing for the web design community since Microsoft’s browser has a buggy rendering engine.
Facebook recently launched their application API interface, and many of my friends have added apps to their profiles. It’s a great idea in theory but the majority of applications currently available on the site are useless and unsightly. I haven’t found a single useful application except for the official ones provided by the Facebook development team. So, I decided that I’m going to block third party applications and all the other goofy stuff on the site. I managed to accomplish this with a custom userContent.css file:
I stopped by the U of M Student Union yesterday to pick up a copy of Vista Ultimate. I asked one of the employees if they were planning on stocking the new Mac Pros over the summer, and he said they weren’t, but the new Apple Store that’s going in at the Briarwood Mall will!
Open up a text editor and save this line of code to a file named userContent.css:
iframe { display: none !important; }
Follow the instructions on Floppy Mouse for activating the userContent.css file in your browser. This trick works with Mozilla browsers and Apple Safari. I disable the remaining unaffected ad servers on a domain name basis with Saft.
When people ask me why I purchase albums on vinyl instead of from iTunes or on CD, I always think of this Bob Dylan quote:
You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like –- static.
Beginning in the early ’90s, audio engineers started using “hot” mastering to make albums sound as loud as possible, but at a loss of dynamic range, and thus fidelity. This resulted in a “loudness arms race” between record labels that still exists today. Luckily, vinyl records of new albums still retain a respectable amount of dynamic range:
At present the loudness war tends to only affect audio CDs and consequently any MP3 or other digital music files produced from them.
Recent recordings released on vinyl do not undergo the same kind of loudness-based mastering. This is partly due to technical limitations of the format and partly due to vinyl now being a niche market product favoured by a small number of hi-fi enthusiasts — similar to the CD’s role in the mid-1980s.
Some SACD and DVD-Audio releases are affected as well. However nearly all DVD-Audio discs also contain a Dolby Digital (AC3) or DTS soundtrack to allow the disc to be played in a DVD-Video player that does not have DVD-Audio playback capability. Dolby Digital has a defined and calibrated reference playback level and the DTS track will also follow this. It therefore is beneficial that the high resolution DVD-Audio soundtrack will be produced at the same reference level - and this indeed is normally the case.
As these new high resolution formats are marketed largely at audiophiles, attempts to apply loudness mastering to them would almost certainly be counterproductive as the target audience is likely to be highly critical of sound quality and dynamics.
Recently, I have purchased some 5.1 remasters in DVD-Audio format, but for new releases I stick with the trusty old LP. Great warm, dynamic sound with better packaging and no digital rights management.
On June 29th, I created a thread on the Apple discussion forums regarding a cryptic error in iTunes 7.3 that kept popping up after I upgraded from version 7.2. Whenever I launched the program, a progress bar would appear indicating that a library upgrade was in progress. Once this finished, a dialogue box with the message “The iTunes Library file cannot be saved. An unknown error occurred (-50)” would appear. This same error popped up every time I attempted to play a track. This lead me to believe that my copy of iTunes 7.3 has a problem saving the library database files on my hard drive. I removed iTunes, QuickTime, and Safari from my system and re-installed. The error message popped up again.
That day, hours before the iPhone launch, many other users logged onto the discussion forums in search of an answer to the exact same issue. Apparently, this cryptic error I was receiving affected a lot of other people. None of the Apple employees hired to manage the discussion forums made an effort to help solve the problem. Users who called Apple technical support over the phone were told the problem was a non-issue. Hours later, the long-awaited iPhone launched. Apple sold 500,000 units over the weekend.
On Saturday, reports of the -50 issue flooded the discussion forums. The problem made the front page of Digg, and quickly became the top story. The Apple forums were brought to a crashing halt due to the traffic from Digg and new iPhone users. Apple scrambled to restore the forums, and a temporary version was launched with the search engine disabled. During the upgrade, the iPhone forums were moved to the top of the page, above the Macintosh Computing Hardware section. Clearly, Apple’s priority was the iPhone, and the iPhone alone.
Over a week has passed and still no fix has surfaced. The -50 error thread has over 38,000 views but no officially acknowledgment from Apple. This is not the way to keep a customer happy.
Safari will by default search Google when you type a query in the search box located in the top right of the browser window.
David Watanbe released a great add-on for Safari named Inquisitor, which lets you perform a spotlight-like search in the built-in search box. The program also lets you specify links to additional search engines at the bottom of the results list and assign a keyboard shortcut to each engine of choice.
Since I have to pull up journal articles up at work quite often, I thought it would be useful to add PubMed to the list of additional engines. PubMed isn’t built in to Inquisitor’s list, so I made one from scratch. Here is the code if you are interested:
Site Name: PubMed
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed&term=%@
Shortcut: ^ return
You can also customize the PubMed search a little bit further by adding university support to the query. As a grad student here at the U of M, I like to be able to pull up SFX (U of M library) results directly in PubMed. This can be accomplished by adding “otool=umichlib” to the search query.
The U of M modified PubMed search string looks like this:
I have found that I use this searching method almost exclusively now and only travel to the PubMed front page when I need to refine the search to reviews or a specific date period.
Apple has started selling videos on the iTunes store and the program has evolved from a music jukebox to a complete solution for music and video management. However, it is lacking some critical features. Here’s what I suggest Cupertino incorporates into the next release:
The ability to purchase high definition 1080p media from the iTunes Store.
Import of unencrypted Blue-ray, DVD, HD-DVD media (AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories) or conversion support to H.264.
iPod
The iPod has gone through a number of revisions and is a solid product that doesn’t need many revisions. Here are a couple of my suggestions for making the best portable media player on the market even better:
Shuffle by Album support on the iPhone and iPod touch.
The ability to browse by Album artist in the navigational menu. This feature is kind of supported — Cover Flow mode sorts by Album Artist.
Enable transcoding of Apple Lossless to 128 kbps AAC on the iPod. Currently enabled for the iPod shuffle.
802.1x support for Wi-Fi connectivity. This is essential for many corporate environments and airport hot spots.
Metadata
iTunes is great for managing a large music library and I’m constantly using the search feature to find a song or album of interest. However, I think that the program needs to allow room for some new metadata fields:
Ability to tag songs as clean or explicit. Currently songs downloaded from the iTunes Store come with these labels but you cannot add them to existing media in your library. This would be nice for parents to be able to restrict the music younger children could access in the library. This can be done in Mp3tag with the ITUNESADVISORY tag set to “1″ (explicit) or “2″ (clean).
Automatic lyric import. iTunes already supports the addition of lyrics but this must be done manually on a per-song basis.
Original artist field support (i.e. for cover songs).
Fields for catalog number, music label, and release type (i.e. bootleg, deluxe/special edition, EP, promo, remaster, single).
Fields for original release date and/or re-release date.
Subtitle support (i.e. for remixes and alternate versions).
Ability to modify play/skip count values, including batch addition and subtraction.
Ability to replace existing album artwork with art downloaded from the iTunes store. Currently requires manual removal of existing artwork before downloaded artwork appears.
BPM and key detection.
Interface
iTunes 7 introduced a number of changes to the interface, many of them controversial. I welcomed some of the new changes but still see some room for improvement:
Ability to search lyrics and restrict your search to only the lyrics field.
Make the grouping tag work like it does on iTunes Store. If you browse the Complete U2 collection that Apple advertised, you will see that the collection breaks down per disc with titles of each original U2 release in the set. You can hide or reveal the tracks on each disc by clicking the arrow on the left of the header. I would like to see something like this implemented in iTunes, especially for classical albums, which often contain multiple symphonies on a single disc.
Support for lyrics display in iTunes not just on iPod.
Yesterday I took the plunge and purchased NetNewsWire to manage my newsfeeds. I like the program the best out of all the ones available on the Mac because it synchronizes with Newsgator online so I can read my feeds on my home PC without the program.
After I purchased the program, I decided that an investment in a blog editor would be a good decision. The two most popular choices on the Mac are Ecto and MarsEdit. I have since tried both and prefer the layout of Ecto, which was recommended to me by Om Malik. I ran into one snag, which was that WordPress does not currently conform to the Movable Type XML-RPC spec correctly, so I’m using the MetaWeblog API instead. However, for my needs it works fine.
In the end, I’m going to use ecto until something new arrives. Ecto 3 is currently in the works and it sounds like it’s going to be very impressive.
