Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

iTMS Affiliation is a pain in the butt

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First, the good: I’ve gone through, bug-checked, and slightly tweaked the code for automatically linking to the iTMS in ecto to ensure that it works and performs searches as it should (something I’d been meaning to do for a bit now, as that page seems to be referenced fairly often by people working on that particular issue).

Then, the bad: while I love the idea of iTMS affiliation — and if I got more traffic, it might even bring me more than a few pennies here and there — I’ve got to agree with Scot Hacker that the whole shebang is really a pain to deal with. While I haven’t had to fight with the POST/GET issues that Scot is, some of his issues sounded very familiar to me…

It turns out that a lot of the links provided through the LinkShare back-end (Apple partners with LinkShare for the affiliates program; you have to use their back-end to generate your custom links) simply don’t work. See the six (currently static) album covers in the left column of the site? Only two of them actually take you to that album in iTMS. The other four take you to the iTMS homepage. All six links were pasted directly out of the LinkShare link maker, and should work as-is. This problem is totally unrelated to the POST problem — they’re just dishing up broken links to affiliates, period.

[…] I was expecting to find some kind of ad rotation mechanism for affiliates. See those static Stevie Wonder banners at the top of all the lyrics pages? I should be able to drop in a block of code and have those rotated out automatically from iTMS. Instead, the only option is for me to return to LinkShare every few days and grab some new static code. …why should this be so difficult?

[…] I’m trying to sell music for Apple here. You’d think they’d welcome all the help they can get. This whole process has been incredibly frustrating. Maybe I’ve drunk too much of the Apple Kool-Aid, but I really expect better from them.

iTunes “Insane in the Brain (Hot Tracks)” by Cypress Hill from the album Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1997, 5:18).

Poseidon

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Apparently, there’s a big-budget remake of the 70’s disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure being made, and the first trailer just hit the ‘net.

As I was watching the trailer, a shot of the huge wave bearing down on the ocean liner made me wonder about just how likely such an event really was. To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, waves such as that are generally associated with tsunamis, where waves that might be unnoticeable on the ocean grow to incredible height as they progress into shallower water near shore. Large waves away from shore are generally associated with storms or hurricanes. So, to see a wave large enough to capsize a modern ocean liner in the open sea on an otherwise clear night seemed to be straining, if not outright breaking credibility.

In my head, then, I decided that part of the remake should be the question of where such a wave would come from and what could generate it. In my version of the movie, the survivors of the capsized cruise ship would make it to the surface, find a life raft or some other craft, and make it in to shore…only to discover that the wave had been generated by a huge meteor or asteroid crashing into the ocean not far from their ship, and by the time they’d escaped the ship and made it to land, huge tsunamis had wiped out entire coastlines across the world, practically destroying the world as they’d known it. Kind of a modern-day Planet of the Apes ending, only without the sci-fi time travel element.

What really surprised me when starting to write this post, then, was noting these two passages on the IMDB’s trivia page for The Poseidon Adventure:

Paul Gallico was inspired to write his novel by a voyage he made on the Queen Mary. When he was having breakfast in the dining room, the liner was hit by a large wave, sending people and furniture crashing to the other side of the vessel. He was further inspired by a true incident which occurred aboard the Queen Mary during World War II. Packed with American troops bound for Europe, the ship was struck by a gargantuan freak wave in the North Atlantic. It was calculated that if the ship had rolled another five inches, she would have capsized like the Poseidon.

Such mid-ocean “rogue waves” were previously thought to occur only once every ten thousand years. A 2004 study of satellite radar images showed they can happen as often as hundreds of times every decade.

Whoa. Such waves are real? Apparently so!

Rogue waves are freakishly large waves, much bigger than the surrounding swell. They seem to rear up out of nowhere, sometimes out of a fairly calm sea, and disappear just as quickly. Mariners have recounted tales of such waves for centuries, but until recently oceanographers discounted them, along with sightings of sea monsters and mermaids. Naval architects, however, have analyzed the wrecks of ships sunk in recent decades, and have found that a large proportion of them have damage consistent with an encounter with a rogue wave, which can reach heights of a hundred feet. Even supertankers have been sunk by these monster waves. Now the evidence is too great to ignore, and physicists are trying to understand how rogue waves are generated. The issue is important not only for our understanding of the ocean, but also because rogue waves seem to be responsible for the loss of many lives at sea.

Hot damn that’s cool. Freaky and scary, but really cool. Guess I should be giving the scriptwriters a tad more credit than I had been!

My favorite random facts about…

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…Vin Diesel:

  • If you rearrange the letters in Vin Diesel it reveals his credo: “I End Lives.”
  • There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Vin Diesel allows to live.
  • In an average living room there are 1,242 objects Vin Diesel could use to kill you, including the room itself.
  • Crop circles are Vin’s way of telling the world that sometimes corn needs to lie the fuck down.
  • Vin Diesel is the only man to ever defeat a brick wall in a game of tennis.
  • Vin Diesel can set ants on fire with a magnifying glass. At night.
  • Vin Diesel can divide by zero.
  • Magnetic compasses do not point toward true North – they point in the direction of Vin Diesel. He just likes to sit on a lawn chair and shout, “Jackets are for pussies!” at the Acrtic researchers.
  • Vin Diesel invented black. In fact, he invented the entire spectrum of visible light. Except pink. Tom Cruise invented pink.
  • When Vin Diesel runs with scissors, other people get hurt.

…Chuck Norris:

  • Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.
  • Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.
  • If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can’t see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.
  • Bullets dodge Chuck Norris.
  • A Handicap parking sign does not signify that this spot is for handicapped people. It is actually in fact a warning, that the spot belongs to Chuck Norris and that you will be handicapped if you park there.
  • The quickest way to a man’s heart is with Chuck Norris’s fist.
  • Chuck Norris is 1/8th Cherokee. This has nothing to do with ancestry, the man ate a fucking Indian.
  • Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.
  • Chuck Norris frequently donates blood to the Red Cross. Just never his own.
  • Superman owns a pair of Chuck Norris pajamas.

…Mr. T:

  • The last man who made eye contact with Mr. T was Ray Charles.
  • Every time a church bell rings, Mr. T pities a fool.
  • Mr T. and Chuck Norris decided to spar, they travelled to the only safe place in the Universe, the beginning of time. They bowed to each other and Chuck launched in with a roundhouse kick. Mr. T blocked it, and the resulting pressure wave is commonly called the Big Bang.
  • When Mr. T folds his arms, the U.S. Terror Alert Level is raised to gold.
  • Ever have a sharp pain in your chest that you can’t explain? That was Mr. T, and it was a warning.
  • Contrary to popular belief, the ancient world knew of 5 elements, not 4. They were earth, air, fire, water and pity. Mr. T invented them all.
  • Twenty-three. That’s the number of people Mr. T has pitied in the time it has taken you to read this sentence.
  • On the A-team, Face, Haniabal, and Murdoch were all masters of disguise. Mr T didn’t have to wear a disguise. The bad guys didn’t recognize him out of fear.
  • Mr. T is not black. It’s just that the sun is to afraid to shine on him.
  • Mr. T’s edition of the VH1 show ‘Where Are They Now’ was the shortest in the show’s history. It was 10 seconds long, and consisted of a black screen with the words “Right Behind You” written on it.
  • If you were born before 1980, there is a good chance that Mr. T is your father. If you were born after, it’s guaranteed.

Marie Antoinette

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How very odd this is — odd, though, in a way that gives me a grin. The first trailer for Marie Antoinette, a new film by Sofia Coppola (from whom Lost in Translation came to the screen). It’s a period piece starting Kirsten Dunst (yum!) as the ill-fated queen…and the trailer is all set to New Order‘s “Age of Consent“.

Odd…but I think I like it.

(via Pop Astronaut)

Update: I keep seeing places linking to this (interruptorjones, kottke, and others) describing the soundtrack as ‘indie rock’. Since when is New Order — especially New Order circa 1983, when ‘Power, Corruption and Lies‘ was released — ‘indie rock’ instead of ‘new wave’ or ‘new romantic’? Bad enough that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the various genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres that have been concocted for today’s music world, but retrofitting today’s labels to music that’s 23 years old just makes it even more confusing.

Let it snow!

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Heh — cool web toy of the moment (if you have a webcam — without a cam you can read about it and see the sample images, but the effect just won’t quite be the same): Webcam Snowstorm.

This experiment simulates a snowfall with 400 snowflakes on screen, each with random size, rotation, speed and blur (using BlurFilter). Each of them is independently affected by wind (as partially controlled by your cursor’s x position). That Flash can run it all fluidly is impressive in itself, but of course there’s more. It’s also monitoring the webcam input, detecting edges, and making the snowflakes settle gently on any horizontal surface they encounter – pretty cool.

If you don’t have a webcam, you can still see the snowfall, and I’ve appended a picture of it in action below. If you do, try playing around with it – one of the neatest things I think is to let some snow pile up on your head or shoulders and then brush it off with your hand… virtual dandruff!

If you’re on a Mac, you may need to tweak the Flash player settings a touch to get it to work. Right-click on the flash movie, choose “Settings…”, switch to the webcam tab (fourth along the bottom), and set it to a different video input (for my iSight, it ended up being “IIDC FireWire Video”).

(via TDavid)

Going Going Gone (And I Did Nothing Wrong)

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My feet aren’t terribly thrilled with me this morning…but the rest of me is quite glad I finally got a chance to go out to the_vogue last night.

Normally I tend to be out dancing at least every other weekend, heading out every weekend when I can swing it. Between working retail during the holiday rush, being sick, and just plain exhaustion, though, it had been over a month since I’d been able to get out and go bouncing. Far too long…

Good night, though. Right about the perfect sized crowd for me…not dead, but not slammed either. Enough people for a good night without having to fight your way onto the dance floor. Said hi to gracesine before she wandered over to the_mercury to meet up with some other friends; chatted for a while at various times with Shawna, sirriamnis, Brooke, Suzanne, Chris, Mikey, Ron, and other occasional random people; and did the usual bouncing around on the dance floor.

Amusing moment of the evening: now that the club is non-smoking, it made the one guy who forgot about the smoking ban really, really obvious as he sat in the corner having a cigarette. Nobody went up to say anything to him until Evan came on the microphone between songs and said, “Welcome to a smoke-free Saturday night at the Vogue….” Suddenly, the guy got a hilarious “Oh, shit!” look on his face and started frantically stubbing out his cigarette. Quite funny.

And…I finally got to bounce around to a song I’ve wanted to hear in a club for a few years now — Information Society’s “Going, Going, Gone (Razed in Black remix)”. I love the original, but this remix makes it just that much better. It took bugging Evan a couple times before he finally got around to playing it right after last call, but he did, it didn’t empty the floor, he liked it, and ogremarco commented that it was a really sweet remix, too.

Hell, I knew it would go over well. ;)

Eventually, back home to sleep, and now up and getting ready for another day in the trenches at the mall. Whee!

iTunes Signature Maker

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Cool toy if you use iTunes to listen to your music: the iTunes Signature Maker.

People often ask me what music I listen to, and I find it difficult to describe my enormous music collection in just a few sentences. So I created iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) to answer in sound a question I cannot answer in words. iTSM analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent it.

iTSM selects a small number of your “favorite” tracks based on some simple selection criteria, such as the number of times you have played them or the rating you have assigned them. Then it analyzes the audio content of these files, combining a small bit of each of them to create the signature.

Here’s my first one (464 Kb .mp3, 23 seconds).

And with slightly different settings, one more (1.2 Mb .mp3, 64 seconds).

Here’s the analysis that iTSM provides — if you know the songs and listen fast enough, you can hear them all in this order.

(via Kottke)

Read more

That school thing

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Well, it’s official — there will be no financial aid for me in the immediate future. Since aid for the current ’05-’06 year is determined by how much was made in 2004, and as I was applying for winter quarter (late enough in the season that the majority of the school’s aid money has already been passed out), I just don’t qualify. Meh.

On the bright side, as long as I apply first thing in January when the next round opens up, I should have no problems with getting aid for the ’06-’07 school year…starting in September. Until then, though, I’m on my own.

So, Prairie and I are going to see what we can do to scrape together enough funds to get me into one or two classes for the next two quarters (if we can get two 5-credit classes paid for, that’ll cover the 10 credits for a minimum full load) just to get me started and in the system. It’ll likely be a little tight — especially once I drop down to part-time at work come January — but it’ll be a start.

Narnia followup

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A selection of quotes from reviews of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe…

The book’s well-discussed Christian allegorical content, by contrast, is rendered precisely as Lewis wrote it; no more and no less overt than on the page.

— The Seattle Times

Los Angeles Times reviewer Carina Chocano described the film as “real by the logic of childhood” and noted that the book’s much-discussed Christian themes do not overwhelm the simple tale of four children’s adventures in Narnia.

“As a Christian primer, it’s terrible. As a story, it’s timeless,” Chocano wrote in a review on Wednesday.

— Reuters

The Christianity may be too New Age to make good 700 Club fodder. On the other hand, The Lion et al. could serve as a powerful teaching story: the gospel according to Tumnus. Certainly, the Boschian “crucifixion” that Aslan suffers has to be friendlier than Mel Gibson’s Jew-baiting sadomasochist extravaganza. Anyway, for all the Lion‘s blatant allegory, the tale’s engagingly child-centered family dynamics will most likely be understood as a cosmic divorce settlement pitting Aslan’s cuddly dad against the White Witch’s castrating mommy.

— The Village Voice

Some evangelical groups have been promoting the movie as ” ‘The Passion’ for kids,” which makes it sound potentially like a greater source of lifelong trauma than “Bambi.” But the Christian allegory embedded at its chewy center serves less as evangelical cudgel than a primer on morality and the myths we create to explain it. The magical land of Narnia is a place where Western myths and religions (classical, Christian, Celtic, Norse, you name it) are jumbled together so that we may consider their similarities and uses. If it weren’t for Lewis’ stated intention to write a fantastical story to make the dogma go down, it might even come across as a liberal humanist parable about myth and its function in society, especially during times of trouble.

[…] If a scene featuring the torment and grisly execution of Aslan is meant to recall the crucifixion (the lion is eventually resurrected, thanks to the rules of the “deep magic” that governs Narnia), the other stuff cancels it out. That is, unless Christianity has lately been amended to allow for the Christ figure in pitched battle against a witch, a Minotaur and evil dwarfs (the centaur, the faun and flying wildcats are on his side), which, these days, you never know.

[…] No wonder that some might take it as religious instruction: It’s a medieval vision of Christianity for another dark age, with the Christ figure as soldier and war as the way to make the world safe for Santa Claus. As a Christian primer, it’s terrible. As a story, it’s timeless.

— Los Angeles Times

If you’re not a fan, perhaps you’re among those who know of the book mainly thanks to the bleating of certain evangelicals who claim that Lewis’ tales–unlike those featuring that satanic Harry Potter–bring viewers to Christ. (“Go spend money on Narnia stuff to show that you love the Lord!”)

It’s true that there are elements of biblical allegory in here; it’s also true that this is a fantasy. And frankly, it’s the story that matters; even if you must categorize Narnia as a Christian movie, it’s many times better than any overtly Christian movie in recent memory. Faith-based films like Left Behind tend to pile on the sentimentality; Narnia does not.

— The Dallas Observer

While pundits and the press witter on about whether C.S. Lewis’ ageless tales of Narnia are too Christian, or not Christian enough, or the wrong kind of Christian, children the world over will yawn politely and read on. I must have devoured The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at least 10 times while growing up in an aggressively Anglican culture, and it never once occurred to me that Aslan the super-lion died the death of Christ and was similarly resurrected. Nor would it have bothered my little Jewish soul had someone set me straight.

…if Narnia according to Adamson is more a democratic war on crypto-fascist totalitarianism than a holy war against the non-Christian barbarian, I for one won’t be filing a complaint.

— LA Weekly

…generations of readers have found The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe to be a gripping adventure that reaches well beyond its religious underpinnings, and this robust version respects both aspects and finds the same winning balance of excitement and meaning.

— The Onion AV Club

The lion’s eventual resurrection is crucial to the Christian overlay in Lewis’ work, and while this element may help “Lion” lure Gibson’s passionate audience to untold upward B.O. effect, the film does not stress its religious parallels.

— Variety

Time to put my money where my mouth is?

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Ten months ago, when I was trying to figure out BitTorrent so I could keep up with Battlestar Galactica, I wrote this in a comment:

As it is, I’d gladly pay a few dollars per episode to download high-quality versions of this show (and, theoretically, other shows that I might be interested in in the future), much like I currently do with music from the iTMS (with the caveat that I’d expect any DRM to be no more restrictive than what the iTMS uses).

And wouldn’t you know it — Battlestar Galactica is now available through the iTunes Music Store at $1.99 per episode! Very nice.

Of course, over the past ten months I’ve become accustomed to the quality afforded through captures of HD broadcasts: the episodes I download through BitTorrent are ~350Mb each and widescreen at 624×352 pixels; the episodes Apple offers are ~200Mb and shown at the ‘standard’ (pan-and-scan? cropped?) 4:3 ratio at a much smaller 320×240 pixels. Of course, there is the risk of getting a bad quality rip from BitTorrent that wouldn’t hold up to the norm, while it’s probably safe to assume that the officially sanctioned videos from Apple will be consistently good quality.

As an experiment, I purchased the most recent episode of BSG (‘Pegasus’) and compared Apple’s version to the version I downloaded via BitTorrent.

Battlestar Galactica’s ‘Pegasus’
iTMS BitTorrent1
Filetype: .m4v .avi
Length: 45:27.04 44:19.03
Filesize: 207.26 MB 345.80 MB
Time to download: I didn’t immediately think to time this, roughly 20-30 minutes on my connection. Varies depending upon the number of active BT clients: at best speed should match the iTMS time; at worst speed could take anywhere from hours to days.
Dimensions: 320 x 240 624 x 352
FPS: 24.00 23.98
Video encoding2: -NA- Generic MPEG-4
Audio encoding3: AVC0 Media MPEG Layer 3
Data rate: 636.72 kbits/sec 1106.58 kbits/sec
DRM: Apple FairPlay v2 None
Comparitive: At native sizes, the iTMS video is sharper but noticeably darker. The BitTorrent copy isn’t as crisp, but being a few notches brighter makes it easier to see (a situation exacerbated by my using an old 17″ monitor that already has its brightness and contrast at maximum and really needs to be replaced when I can afford to do so). Even so, the iTMS video is gorgeous: darker and smaller (2/3 the height and 1/2 the width), but better quality — at native size.

At full screen, the smaller size, greater compression and lesser data rate of the iTMS track is very obvious. Compression artifacts not noticeable at 320 x 240 are very visible when blown up to my monitor’s standard setting of 1152 x 870. The BitTorrent video, while softer, doesn’t show nearly as much artifacting (but then, given the larger native size and widescreen ratio of the video, it’s also only being enlarged 247% as opposed to the iTMS version’s 360%).

All in all, while the iTMS video is better quality at native size, the BitTorrent copy is far more watchable when blown up to full-screen.
Notes: 1: Due to the distributed and decentralized nature of BitTorrent, the reported statistics, while representative of the quality of most BT downloads I’ve received, are only definite for this particular copy of this episode.
2: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Sound Track’.
3: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Video Track’.

So, now what? I did say in the original quote that I’d happily pay for “high quality” copies. At the moment, with Apple’s focus on optimizing the video for the iPod, I’m not sure that the video offerings are quite enough to tempt me away from BitTorrent on a regular basis. It’s close…but not quite there.

Unless someone gives me an iPod video for Christmas, of course. Then I may need to re-evaluate. ;)