Archive for August, 2003

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AOL Blogs


2003
08.27

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Hat tip to Satoshi’s Wireless Weblog. AOL launches a blogging service. I’ve got to say that with Jon Miller taking over, they really are doing more software. Cranked out AOL 8.0 after a long hiatus. Then pumped out AOL 9.0 Optimized (don’t understand that branding myself) about six months later.

Now they are doing AOL Journals. ANd they have an Outlook Express clone called AOL Communicator. The only issue is that when I launch AOL now, I get a mess of applets. I kind of liked the unified view really. Should have been more like Outlook with a button bar.

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Cognitive Style of PowerPoint


2003
08.27

Posted in PCs | 2 Comments »

Hat tip to Zagula on Tufte’s new book on bad PowerPoint presentations.

IMHO, blaming PowerPoint for bad presentations is a little like blaming Word for your essay not being Shakespearean. Or Outlook for long turgid email. Or MovableType for a boring blog.

The darn thing is a tool and you can really misuse it. No doubt about it. Kind of amazing how widely used the tool is though. Mentioned in Powell’s book on his career in the military, in the Nasa analysis and of course essentially every school in America now uses for everything.

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MIT Classes online


2003
08.27

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“MIT Open Courseware”:http://ocw.mit.edu. Hat tip to Ludwig. Hat tip again. What a cool idea. You can take any MIT class online. Sounds like Software Engineering 6.170 is a wonderful course.

Also shows how global the knowledge worker business has become. The “Wired”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit.html piece talks about a Vietnamese student in Ho Chi Minh City taking courses at MIT. How wonderful. Not to mention a great opportunity for precocious and bored high school students around the word.

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Kazaa Hash Issues


2003
08.27

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Updates on the P2P business:

* “P2P Links”:http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.leonard1/webdir/index.htm. Tim Leonard did P2P guardian (a nice IP blocking program) and has some good links to track the P2P business.
* “Zeropaid”:http://www.zeropaid.com/. A whole portal just for file sharing.
* “Boycott RIAA”:http://www.boycott-riaa.com. Pretty humorous site that tracks the RIAA.
* Zeropaid.com – Music industry uses vulnerability in Kazaa Hash Calculations. I am listing this topic here, because more and more people are beginning to download fake or corrupted files from the FastTrack network, despite using a verified hash. Some people have asked me how this is possible, the main reason being that Kazaa does not use each and every byte of a file to determine its hash.

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Tyler Hamilton’s Inside Story


2003
08.26

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Tyler tunes: Teamwork smooths out bumps in a tough Tour. The Tour de France is long over, but I thought this inside story on how it went for Tyler’s team (CSC) was pretty amazing. Shows how much suffering there is. Some samples:

* When we decided I would try to ride the next day, I really didn’t think I’d make it more than 10 or 20 kilometers. But I felt like I had to prove to myself I couldn’t ride. I didn’t want to look back on the race and wonder “what if?” Honestly, I was the last guy who thought I would make it through the day.
* Michael Blaudzen was hampered by nasty tendonitis in his wrist. This develops out of the blue sometimes, and the only thing you can do to help it is rest. But at the Tour, there’s no time for that. So he had to immobilize his wrist off the bike, and ride through the pain on the bike.
* Carlos Sastre managed to find success before suffering, however. He attacked and won on the finish to Plateau du Bonascre. But on the cold and foggy descent of Luz Ardiden after the finish, he managed to pick up a pretty serious case of influenza.
* Nicki [Sorenson] was the motorbike that decimated the breakaway group I bridged up to after being towed back into contention in stage 16. He ripped the legs off the guys in the group and set me up for the attack that ultimately led to my stage victory.

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Ogg Vorbis and other formats


2003
08.25

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I’m experimenting with funky new encoders that are coming out all the time. For instance. XIPH:http://xiph.org seems to have an amazing collection of encoders:

* A speech encoder called SPEEX
* Vorbis for music. There is a nice 5MB encoder called OggDrop that includes the encoder.
* FLAC is now a XIPH project as well for lossless compression.

Both are supposed to be great. So, I just decode FLAC to WAV (e.g., the original uncompressed stuff) and try the new encoder. Apparently the way it works is that OGG is the container format and in it you can put speech (hence the term OGG SPEEX) or music (hence the term OGG VORBIS) or lossless music (hence the term OGG FLAC).

Feels like I’m speaking Martian.

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Monkey’s Audio


2003
08.25

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“Modatic.net”:http://www.modatic.net/audio/ape.php. Another site says that Monkey’s Audio is the best performing, so I’ll try it. It is Windows only though.

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Trek 5900 Headset Problems


2003
08.25

Posted in Cycling | 2 Comments »

Replacement headset for Trek 5900. Great set of posts about the headsets in the 5900 vs the 5500s. A good discussion about the custom headset used in the 5900 frame that saves a few ounces and allows an a strong aluminum steerer rather than a carbon fiber one that will get destroyed if you over torque the stem bolt. Yikes, those things are delicate.

I’ve notice my own headset if pretty tight compared to say my buddies Cannondale CAAD7 with Campagnolo headset. Maybe the reason is this adjustment problem with their headsets which are apparently custom.

Mike Jacoubowski over at Chain Reaction Bicycles (the very first place I ever bought a bike 20 years ago!) says that you have to reinstall the lower bearings to get it smoother. Yikes, who knows how to do that. Maybe I need to call him. He says:

All you need to do is remove the fork, remove the lower bearing from the fork, reinstall the bearing and then reinstall the fork (with bearing attached). In 90% of the cases, that takes care of it. It doesn’t seem to be a misaligned cup, but rather an issue with how the lower bearing seats in it.

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Disneyland Ho!


2003
08.24

Posted in Disneyland | 6 Comments »

Went to Disneyland for five solid days. Yikes, I can’t believe it. Good thing I’m a kid at heart. Also learned a ton about how to make it a great trip. Here are the top ten hints:

* Read “Undiscovered Guide to Disneyland”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0764566059/qid=1061792942/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-7370691-7420060?v=glance&s=books&n=507846. A great book that overviews getting around Disneyland. This is the 2003 edition, but he updates it regularly.
* Sign up for “RideMax”:http://ridemax.com. The absolutely amazing program that makes it about 10 times easier to get around. Both Ludwig and I have tried it. It really works and they have really the latest information about how Fastpass works. It is not as obvious as it sounds and you have to understand in depth how the whole system really works.
* Get there at the crack of dawn. I’m not kidding. If it says Disneyland opens at 8AM, if you are driving, you have to get there at 7AM because of the 20 minute ride from the parking lot and also to buy your ticket (see below to get a ticket ahead of time). That’s why staying at a Disneyland property is so good, gets you more shut-eye!
* Get a Multi-day Fastpass. This is a special thing that you can get only from a Disney travel package or some AAA packages. It allows you to get multiple Fastpass’es for multiple rides. Wow, it is kind of a wonderlful deal. We hardly waited in line at all with a combination of RideMax and Fastpass.
* Do the early morning, take an afternoon break and go for a swim. Then hit it in the evening during the weekdays. It is very crowded there, so being early makes a huge difference.
* Think about where you want to eat. Disneyland is not the place with a hot dog stand on every corner. For us anyway, there were only a couple of OK places to eat and making sure you were right there when hunger struck was key.
* ESPNZone. A totally cool place in Disney Downtown. If you get the right package from Disney Resorts, they’ll give you $10 each in vouchers for the arcade. Wonderful way to end the day and it is cool.

Now for a review from the eyes of a 4, 7 and 9 year old:

* The best attractions were Indiana Jones, Small World and Grizzly (over at California Adventure). Just like our kids to love such a variety of rides. Splash Mountain was awesome but the drop is really scary.
* Dumbo and the Astro Orbiter as well as the Tea cups and Toontown Car Spin are wonderful. Also the last two are great places to get dad sick which is more than half the fun.
* If you have younger kids, they have this switchoff feature. Go the start of the line, say you want to switch off and then one grown up can go while the other waits with the kids. Pretty nice of them!

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Archiving Music


2003
08.24

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One of the things I’ve been doing is to work on having an archive of CDs. The kids just destroy CDs at an amazing rate (only cassettes are less durable :-) . So, here’s my strategy for archiving things. I archive into two formats:

* A lossless format so that I can recover the exact audio content. Right now I’m using “FLAC”:http://flac.sourceforge.net (free lossless audio codec) for this. It is about a 50% compression compared with raw CD format (called PCM for pulse code modulation).
* I also encode them into MP3 as this is a pretty much universal lossy encoding that let’s the kids listen to say the entire Harry Potter Sorceror’s Stone 7 CD collection jammed onto one CD. So, there is less to recover when they use it as a hockey puck.

Here are the exact steps…

(more…)

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