It’s about time some of the music companies started realizing that, cliched as the phrase may be, “if you can’t beat ’em — join ’em!” According to a story in the LA Times, Universal and Sony will be offering low-cost, unencrypted music downloads over the ‘net. Individual tracks for 99 cents, albums for $9.99 — and they can be freely (and legally) burned to CD once they’re downloaded. Hopefully it will work well enough that the other studios will follow suit….
Tech
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
Faster than a speeding bullet
Major benefit to having my own DSL connection: because it’s up 24/7, I can run this website out of my own house, off of an iMac I have here.
Major downside to my DSL connection: at the level I can afford to pay for, while my incoming speed is great (1.5Mbps, equivalent to a T1 line), my outgoing speed bites (128kb/s, about twice the maximum theoretical speed of a 56k dialup modem).
This has been bugging me for a while — while my outgoing speed is great for the majority of my site (text and graphics are small enough to transfer quickly), the .mp3 mixes I have available for download on my dj propaganda page take forever to download whenever someone decides to grab one. I was whining to Casey about this yesterday, and he pointed me over to a friend of his.
So, at this point, I’d like to give major thanks to Karim, who graciously let me use some space on dragonshed.org to host my .mp3 files. As dragonshed sits on top of an OC3 connection (155.52 Mbps — insanely huge pipe), anyone who wants my .mp3s will now be able to download them at the maximum possible speed of what ever line they are using to connect to the ‘net with.
So, I’m in the process of uploading all my mixes to dragonshed now. I should have them all transfered over to the new server by the end of the weekend. Thanks again, Karim!
(Update @ 12:48 am Saturday — they’re all transfered over now — woohoo!)
Back in the day
I’m about to head to bed, but I just found this article, and as far as I’m concerned, it should be required reading for anyone who’s been online for more than just the past few years: When 300 baud was the bomb, from Salon.
(Lots follows in the rest of this post — what started as some simple thoughts turned into about an hour and a half worth of reminiscing. Aaaah, nostalgia….)
Why blog?
Some days I sit back and wonder just why I do this. My site doesn’t get a whole lot of traffic — primarily just my folks and a few friends who stop by from time to time when they remember. And, admittedly, much of what I write probably wouldn’t be of any real interest to the world in general. Bits and pieces of my life, what I’m doing, what’s going on. Heck, I don’t even get personal enough most of the time to make for any real good drama!
I found the following quote over on Peach’s site after she left a comment to one of my posts, and it seemed to sum up fairly accurately why I keep banging away at this — because, whether or not it’s seen all that often…it’s fun.
I am very pleased with my (o.k. and yours too) blogger. I feel like I have fallen down the rabbit hole; just falling and falling in a blissful state, sans the drugs. I love IT! It is peering through my own looking glass at my own ego and my written word. Whether you are an amatuer or a professional; whether you are an exquisite artiste or you stink, it makes no difference. Most people who create at some time or another, have a strong sense of who they are in the images they create. Mediocrity is the scare word for us. Your word or my word, we all checked off ‘public’ for a reason. We would like to be read and responded to.
Sometimes, though, I feel that I shouldn’t be ‘published’ unless I am very, very good. And then again, who cares? It’s my Journal and if you want to read it, be my guest.
Ack
Oops — I just upgraded my blog software to the newest version, and in the process nuked the hack I had that inserted smileys into posts. Hence, my Spider-Man post isn’t displaying the stars at the moment. Grr. I’ll fix it tomorrow….
A few new site bits
I’ve added a few features to the site — one a couple weeks ago, and two just a few minutes ago — and I figured I’d babble for a moment about them.
In brief — the first is a list of books I’ve read recently, found in the right sidebar just underneath the search box. As I start reading a book I’ll put it in, and it will appear at the top of the list. Once I’m done with a book I’ll babble about it, and a ‘Comments…’ link will appear after the book title — click on that to read what I have to say. Simple, sweet, works.
The second — well, the second is a blatant plea for money and support. :D Up until now I’d avoided doing anything like this, but as my finances aren’t what they used to be, I figured it was worth a shot. Via a program that Amazon offers, there’s now a voluntary paybox towards the bottom of the righthand sidebar (at least I didn’t put it right at the top…if I’m going to beg, I’ll make it as subtle as possible). Should you feel like it, click on that, and you’ll be able to donate money to me to help me keep things afloat. I’m not expecting much (if anything) from it, but I figured it was worth a shot. The worst anyone can do is ignore it, right?
The third is also a potential way for me to make the occasional buck or two off the site. Another Amazon program allows me to set links for books, movies and the like to point to their site — then, should somone click through the link to buy something, I get a small percentage of the purchase price. As with the others, it probably won’t add up to much, but every little bet helps.
Technical details follow below.
ISSN 1539-4387
Back in March I found out that I could apply for an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) for my blog, legitimatizing it as a serial publication in the eyes of the U.S. Government. I figured what the hey, I might as well, applied — and just got the noticed that I’m registered!
This doesn’t really have any truly major benefits or consequences for me, other than the fact that librarians everywhere can now look me up in the ISSN database, but what they hey — I’m official. Why not?
Site statistics are back
It took a while, and I had to reset my server logs to do it, but the site statistics page is live again.
Getting it running was a bit of an adventure, that’s for sure. It’s something of a geek milestone for me, however — in the process of getting Analog up and running, I ended up doing my first compile of a *nix command-line program from source code!
A bit of background…
I generally like to have Analog set to run daily at midnight on an automatic schedule, so that my statistics page is automatically generated every day, and I’ve always got the most recent statistics available to me (or anyone else, if they’re that bored). However, until now the only version of Analog I’d had was the Mac port, where it had been given a (minimal) user interface. Nothing really wrong with that, and it is more familiar to long-time Mac users, but it meant that for me to run it, I had to leave my webserver logged in under my username, as the Mac port wouldn’t launch while the machine was sitting at the login prompt. It was only a minor security risk, sure, as the webserver itself resides in my apartment, but hey…I wanted to “do it right,” so to speak.
I knew that the original version of Analog ran from the command line, and that I’d be able to have it run in the background no matter what state my server was in…but I wasn’t sure how to go about getting it running. There was a pre-compiled command line version for OS X, but when I first started looking at this there was a typo on the page and I wasn’t sure if it would work for me. I e-mailed the guy behind the pre-compiled OS X version to ask (and he’s since fixed the typo that had me confused), but in our correspondence he recommended that I go ahead and give compiling Analog myself a try. Well, heck, why not? Ya gotta learn sometime, right?
So, yesterday evening, I spent a few hours installing the developer tools onto my server (necessary to compile software under OS X), downloading the Analog source code, mucking about with configuration and make files…and ended up with a working version of Analog that I built myself! Sure, by many geek’s views this is simple, entry-level stuff…but I hadn’t made that entry yet, so I’m pretty happy that I managed to get it all working.
I did end up nuking the Apache log files in the process of this (quite intentionally), so at the moment, the statistics page looks pretty empty, but it’ll become more useful over time.
So…that’s my latest excursion into geekdom, and my initation into compiling source code. Fascinating, I’m sure….
Update: The site statistics discussed here were for my old webserver. While it’s still up and running, they no longer have any real sigificance to this weblog. So it goes….
Smileys!
I found a fun little hack for MT over on So Very Posh today, and thought I’d give it a shot. So — my site now has smileys! :D I can use them in my posts, and they’ll also show up in comments — read on for instructions.
So here’s the deal. Using the hack has allowed me to set up certain text strings that my server will automatically translate into graphical smileys whenever they’re used — in my posts, in people’s comments, wherever. To use each smiley, just type the code for the smiley, and the rest is taken care of automagically!
Addendum: As of August 30, 2002, the available smileys and the codes to use them changed. If you’ve stumbled upon this post, please jump on over to the updated list. Thanks!
Update: Now that I’m on TypePad, I’m not using this hack anymore. ’twas fun while it lasted, though.
New toy
This is too cool. Yesterday evening I was talking with Melvin (my landlord), and he gave me a new toy to play with! We were talking about Palm devices, and I mentioned that mine died a while ago. Turns out that when he got his post here at the Park Seneca apartments, the company gave him a nifty little cell phone/Palm combination device. The thing was, he already had one — so he gave me his old one! Really surprised me, but he had no use for it anymore, so he figured he’d rather have it be used by someone than just sit unused in a drawer.
This thing is a nifty little toy, too — it’s a Kyocera SmartPhone. I’m not using the phone part of it yet — I’ll have to call Qwest when I’ve got some more stable income and investigate that — but for now, I’ve at least got a very functional PDA again.