IS it really good enough?
The recently released Opus codec is
currently not very good at encoding complex music sequences, which is especially
evident with orchestral music. Choppy tones, very hollow-sounding overall; Flac
and the Coreaudio Aac encoder sound way better. EVen the Nero encoder doesn't
quite come up to par. The good news is that Ffmpeg seems to support Coreaudio
pretty natively i.e., I was able to encode the same music in the straight
Coreaudio format, and have it sound exactly like the original test I was sent
that is encoded with Coreaudio/muxed in the M4a container with ITunes.
igueths@lappie:/root/Dropbox$ file solitary-ground.m4a
solitary-ground.m4a: ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, iTunes AAC-LC

ANd this concludes my brief semi-frequent foray into the world of audio codecs.

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Is a computer science degree worth the paper it's printed on?
This Infoworld
article argues this very point, and rightly so. While I was fortunate in the
fact that I went into college with an extensive amount of preexisting knowledge,
had I not had said knowledge I would likely be quite fucked. Case and point: B.S
in network engineering (not CS per-se, but same point applies); fast-forward to
the present, and I am not exactly reconfiguring switches/setting up new routing
protocols day in and day out! Rather, I am doing something completely different
from what my actual degrees are in, and it is the very diversity on which I have
been steadily building my skill set over the years that has enabled me to
successfully branch out.

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I was finally able to order my Raspberry Pi! Hopefully I
get it within the next 12 weks or so.

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To googlephone, or not to googlephone?
As soon as I heard that the new Googlephone
had been released, I decided to dig up its technical specifications. Me
currently being an IPhone user, I could readily make some comparisons. This
phone does have a few pros over the IPhone, in that it includes a micro type-B
USB port, MicroSD slot (SDHC support), trackball instead of only a touchscreen,
removable battery, Bluetooth (most likely all profiles supported, including
A2DP), and Ogg/Vorbis support. By now I'll bet you all are asking; why doesn't
he up and buy one of these damn phones already? Unfortunately, this phone does
seem to have one major drawback; it only supports 3G on the 2100 MHz band, which
is apparently what Tmobile uses, while AT&T uses a different frequency band.
Consequently, since I am currently stuck with ATT, I'd be confined to Edge. Now
if someone released a firmware update or something to allow the 3G radio to tune
into the ATT 3G frequency, I'd be intrigued; however, until then, no Googlephone
for me!

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He was born in the U.S.
Or was he?
It remains an interesting mystery, and one that should be solved sooner rather
than later.

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true or not?
If this video has some
truth to it, which I think it most likely does, then thungs are about to get a
whole lot worse, instead of better. Yay for headed down the shitter express!

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U.S dollar headed down the shitter?
It looks like this is further proof. This
pretty much echos the editorial I linked to in a previous post; the faith-valued
dollar is fast headed down the path of no return, and back we go to the gold
standard. Can we say "history repeats itself?"

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The Dell failtop
Because that is exactly what this thing is. First the cooling issues, and now I
find out that this machine may or may not have a bad PCI controller. First some
seemingly driver-related problems with communicating with my Cardbus wireless
card, and some kernel "PCI0xxx (where xxx is an I/O address) int A disabled"
messages later, it points to either the card itself getting flaky, or a bad
controller. Unfortunately for me, I won't know which it is until I get my new
laptop, since I neither have an Expresscard to Cardbus adapter to test the card
in Tracy's machine, nor a second Cardbus card with which to do some more
testing. So yup, up shit creek until further notice as far as that goes. Itunnel
works thankfully, well enough for me to establish an Edge/3G connection if I
need it whilst traveling.

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Yeah, I caved in after all.
I restarted the BBS at lava-net.com port 23. Everyone come check it out! It has
some old popular favorites on it, including Kanons and Katapults, Barren Realms
Elite, and some others. If I find that the board is getting some traffic, I may
just add some more doors.

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BBSs?
So I seem to have re-discovered BBSs apparently, along with most of the games I
used to play back in the early 90's. And, the Gameland BBS hadn't gone away, the
telnet port was just switched to 24. I wonder how long it will be before someone
throws me a bunch of chemical weapons in Barren Realms? Only time will tell. Not
sure if I should restart my BBS; I may just end up doing that.

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Not entirely sure what to think of this. It
should be interesting watching regardless though.

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I have finally done it!
So I have finally purchased my new laptop!
I did add the full HD 1920X1080 display, 5050 GB hard disk, and 8 GB of RAM. The
rest is as according to the base configuration. I can't wait to see how this
thing plows through building LFS and Gnome; hopefully Gnome doesn't take 15
hours to build, which is about how long it took on this old Dell I am currently
using.

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linkage
And this is why the Flu
shot can be bad news. It really can't be good to injest something that
contains 25 times the amount of mercury that is even rated safe for human
consumption? I didn't think so. As a result, no H1N1 or Influenza vaccines for
me!

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I
lol'ed over this one. So when is ISO coming out with the new standard that
is going to regulate the number of transistors that can be manufactured onto
next generation CPUs? Because holy shit, the world will end if there is a
0.000000000000001% chance of one of those transistors sparking and starting a
little fire. In which case, one should observe propper grounding procedures.

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More govt crap
I am becoming increasingly against public, government perpetuated education. Here's
why. If that isn't socialist indoctrination, I don't know what is. Imo
education should be left to the private sector, so that as much choice as
humanly possible becomes available as a result. Do you want your kids to become
well versed in the ways of science in technology? No problem, just send them to
the local all-technical school. Or if militarism is your thing, just call the
local military emphasis institution. Etc etc. No wonder an increasing number of
individuals are becoming accepting of the current federal government and its
ways, it's all in how you present your propaganda. And, nothing better than to
have your children pass all the propaganda they get in public school to future
generations right?

</sarcasm>

. Until we get rid of this monstrosity
that steals our income, suppresses our ability to conduct freedom of expression
(puritanistic indecent exposure legislation anyone?), we will never truly be
free.
Edit: And as if the above news story isn't enough, Youtube video.

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testing123?
Yup, I am still alive. There hasn't been a whole much to report as of late;
consequently, I guess a lack of updatage. Random facts: I hope I can get my laptop
fairly soon. Beyond the base specifications, I will probably have a Core2 Quad
Q9000 put in, 8 GB of DDR3 SDRAM, and a 500 7200 RPM SATA hard disk. That should
make for a kickass Qemu virtualization machine, as well as anything else
CPU-intensive I plan on throwing at it. I am getting more and more fed up with
this Dell Inspiron 600M failtop by the day, mostly because of cooling issues.
Speaking of cooling issues, I am quite surprised that this thing still runs
properly, and yet here it is. I have started listening to Free Talk Live, and I rather like it so far. I
guess at heart I have always been a Libertarian, and I didn't really figure it
out until now. Robert Murphy's Politically
Incorrect Guide To Capitalism, helped push me in that direction (initially).
And in other random news, I hope this case
gets ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, given that the bank really did fail to
secure the online account access properly. Like Bruce Schneier says in his blog
post on the case, the key to eliminating this sort of fraud is to
authenticate the transaction, not the user. The major credit card companies
already do this, and the end result is a fairly low percentage of fraudulent
transactions. Why can't the banks do this? Oh I know why; it's because they are
too busy getting ass raped by big government bailouts, to where the customer is
quite secondary (in other words, they don't really give a shit anymore).
Seriously though, someone has to fix this problem, and the free market is the
best way to do it. I think I am done rambling for now though, I now return you
to your regularly scheduled programming.

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I have gone the way of the Apple.
At least for now, that is. I have obtained an IPhone 3GS, so that I can see how
I like it, and consequently if I decide to keep it or not. So far, it has
provided a very unique experience, with regards to gesturing in order to
efficiently navigate the screen. And then I think to myself; if I wave at the
phone, can it make my coffee? I think not, but one can always dream anyway.
Sending SMS messages is still not something I have mastered yet, mostly due to
the fact that I haven't quite memorized the keyboard orientation yet. I still
have the N73 in case I decide to ditch the IPhone, but for now I'm playing with
it, and seeing what comes of it.

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Metered usage is stupid
Was talking to a few friends/acquaintances of mine yesterday about the
possibility that all ISPs will eventually have implemented usage-based billing,
and their thinking is that this will be the case in about 5-10 years, including
on dedicated links. On the other hand, I do not possess this belief. While I can
see this somewhat making sense in the case of shared media i.e., cable
connections, this really does not technically make sense when applied to a
dedicated link. In the case of such a connection, the ISP provisions you at a
given maximum rate that you pay a flat fee for, you only send and receive data
at a maximum of said rate, and that's it. The only additional costs incurred in
this case would be maintenance, and overall constant costs associated with
running the overall network infrastructure. You wouldn't have the problem that
is all too often experienced on shared cable networks, where one of the users
can use all available bandwidth on the link constantly, and the ISP would need
to allocate more bandwidth to the rest of the customers on that node, in order
to increase throughput for the customers that are using somewhat less bandwidth,
but still want their page loads to remain relatively fast. This sort of network
management does incur additional costs, which is why I can somewhat understand
the rationale of the cable companies; on the other hand, if their reasons are
purely based on pushing non-TV customers to their cable TV offerings by metering
their internet connections, that in my opinion is a death sentence for them. If
it doesn't affect them at present, it will definitely start affecting them in
the future. They will eventually have to face the fact that they are in the
business of bit delivery, not content. A couple of links that can demonstrate
the above points are this, and this.

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Happy mother's day?
I was sitting online, and amaena pointed me towards this. I haven't
stopped laughing yet!

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Lol
How stupid can it
get? Apparently, it's not over yet; rather amusing nonetheless though.

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