Month: December 2007

I do apologize beforehand if this blog post is a bit less exciting and less intellectual than my previous ones, but everynow and then a guy needs to publically rant.

As you may or may not know, BlueSata is a machine I built myself. I love this computer, I love how its configured and how everything works how I like. Theres almost nothing I would change even if I were to build a new PC now. Its quiet, fast, has tons of storage (and fast storage) etc. Theres one GIANT problem though.

My memory keeps dieing. Not just once or twice mind you. FOUR TIMES.

No, its not being zapped or friend as to indicate its getting bad power. Its one or two bits everytime. And as those of you familiar with how computers work will know, if 1 bit is off in a Stack pointer things go bad quickly.

I’ve gone through the usual culprits, Motherboard has been replaced once (that was an outright failure, props to asus for a quick/clean RMA). CPUs don’t really go bad; Power supply seems fine (nothing else is glitchy, and I doubt a bad PSU would cause a single capacitor in 1 of billions in DRAM to go haywire). The only conclusion, by occam’s razor, is that I’ve just got horrible luck. Two pairs of CORSAIR XMS2 Dominator blah. DDR2-1066 both problems, both RMA’d smoothly (props corsair). Now I’ve got a pair of no good supertalents, which will be RMAd as well. A friend of mine swears by A-Data so I’ve got a pair of those on the way now. *Sigh. If bluesata is down in the next couple days: you know why.

So, i’m flooded with work this week, finals being next week and all but I came across this press release by nokia and was floored.

I don’t know what air duct cupid used to get into Nokia’s CEO’s office but thank you Mr. air conditioning repairman for forgetting to seal the vent.

There are very few companys who really make decisions and big moves to help the end user. Steve jobs did it a while ago in pushing record labels to remove DRM from some itunes music. Google does it everyday just by being google. Nobody though, nobody, can compare to nokia in the recent couple months. Now, before you cry ‘fanboy’ (of nokia?) here me out. I really like my phone, but for everytime I say I love it I probably also complain about it. The mobile computing/entertainment experience is often difficult (in that I have to use lots of effort / tricks to get things to work) or near impossible. Anything these big companies do to bring ‘ultra convergence’ and ease into the average person’s handset is a good thing. Google is thinking it with android (a more user friendly OS) and Nokia is now thinking it as far as the music experience.

Mr. Bob, lets call him, has his new cool smartphone. Mr. Bob works in an office, non-tech related and doesn’t give a damn about computer ‘mumbo jumbo’. Mr. Bob wants to listen to music on the way to work. (Mr. Bob is starting to sound a lot like my dad). Mr. Bob is unfortunatly totally left in the dark. Does he click the real one player on his phone and hope theres music there? Does he buy it on the phone? Does he even have to buy it? Oh he has to get it from the computer… how? Put in a CD and click and drag? Oh he has to get it from some store like iTunes. But then how can I get it on smartphone X? Bob switches from Palm to WM6. Can he put music on in the same way?

You see my point; this kinda stuff is murder for those who only have a casual interest and want it to ‘just work’. Free music for a year (hopefully integrated into their on-the-phone music service, ovi for a simple experience) certainly help’s make Mr. Bob’s life easier. He can solve his questions himself in the second sentence of the above paragraph. “Do I click on this real player link? No, that didn’t work, but this OVI Music Store link looks promising. Oh, I don’t have to pay either and all I have to do is click and it works? Fantastic”. How it should be.

Added the tinyest bit of polish to the downloader. Also, you now download a .zip instead of a .3gp. This is OK because the N95 handles zips very elegantly (and consistently!). And, the .3gp’s seem to work 100% when they come form the zip. And it also saves the tinyest bit of data.

Also, a link to the source for those of you interested.

As of today I am officially the new writer of the Wine Weekly Newsletter (WWN). Wine is a layer that sits inbetween linux and windows applications allowing you to run windows apps (windows API calls) on native linux. I presume most of my readers will be familiar with this software. Head over here to read my first issue! Also, if you happen to notice a small easter egg or two, blame XKCD 🙂

So, as many of you will know most phone’s browsers are incapable of properly displaying and playing youtube. There are several work arounds; one of my favorites being bywifi.com‘s solution. Their solution is to have a website where cell users can search and browse youtube in a mobile-capable fashion (so they parse youtube) then let you select a video to download. Their site fetches the video, converts it and provides it for you to download.

I’ve been using this service for some time. Yesterday however, their site was down. Me being impatient decided that wasn’t good enough for me; I want a service thats always around when I want it.

So I wrote it myself. Here is the result of about 2 hours of work. It needs a bit more polish, but it always works… in making the video. For some reason my phone is really picky about which 3gp files it will play. They’re all encoded the same, yet when I try and download in the browser it _always_ open with a text viewer, and when I do manage to actually save the file its only about 50% of the time that it is a “recognized format” (despite always having the same extention and same encodings).

I’ll be making small updates to that site, and posting the source here in the near future. But for those of you curious it uses the following tools:

Perl Module LWP::Simple to download youtube.com
Perl Regular expressions to parse youtube.com HTML (Google made it REALLY easy to parse <3 )
youtube-dl.py – A really cool python script which download’s FLVs from youtube.
Mplayer — to dump PCM audio from the FLV
Mencoder (from player) to dump a MPEG4 video stream from the FLV
FFMPEG to rencode the PCM and MPEG4 into a 3gp container