Tuesday, 01 July, 2008
I've noticed that a number of bands' websites are massively Flash-enabled, to the point where the entire site consists of an HTML wrapper with a large-scale, dynamically-loading Flash application. While the argument of whether or not this is an acceptable way to code a website is arguable, I'll save that argument for some other time. Something's made me wonder about such sites for quite awhile: almost all of these band sites allow a user to listen to a full-length track at no charge, using an MP3 player coded in Flash.
That's great and all, but obviously I don't want to have to go back to the site and navigate through a good lot of Flash menus just to listen to the track again. Obviously, Flash needs to cache its MP3s somewhere, and it turns out these caches can easily be found in your browser's cache folder. There's the original MP3 file, with no container modifications and no rights management.
Here's the problematic part. This MP3 file is already on my hard drive. Flash downloaded it for me, straight from the band's website. If I choose not to clear my cache when I exit, I can go load this MP3 into Windows Media Player, copy this MP3 into my music collection, and treat it as part of my music collection. So, the question is, am I or am I not legally allowed to take advantage of how this band is downloading free music straight to my computer?
Sunday, 29 June, 2008
Admittedly, I'm surprised that there's something of an active market for CRTs in today's age of flat-panel displays. Most of you know that I recently replaced my 19" Emerson CRT TV with a 17" Sony Trinitron, which I'm now using as an HD-capable set along with a colorspace transcoder. Just a few days ago, I managed to sell the 19" TV for $25 on Craigslist to somebody that wanted it for a game room.
Today, my friend and I found a great Craigslist deal: 17" and 19" Dell FD Trinitron monitors, conveniently located just off Storrow Drive in Boston, for $20 and $30, respectively. My friend picked up one of the 19" Trinitrons to create an awesome triple monitor setup on his desk comprising two other 19" FD Trinitrons. I picked up one of the 17" monitors, which I swapped out with my fading 17" Samsung.
Just hours ago I found a 19" TV out on the roadside with a piece of paper taped to it: "Free, works, and comes with remote!" Needless to say, this was picked up and driven home, where it will promptly be placed on Craigslist along with the 17" Samsung that I no longer have use for.
So why, again, am I using CRT monitors? Let's consider that, in the case of HDTV, I'm passing either 640x480, 1280x720, or 1920x1080. Common sub-20" LCD TVs constantly run at 1366x768, meaning that I lose lines at higher resolutions and have to upscale 720p and below to the higher resolution. In the case of a PC monitor, I pass 1400x1050 from my laptop, 1280x960 and 1024x768 over my Linux desktops, and 720x400 over my FreeBSD server. Most 17" LCDs top out at 1280x1024, which isn't even a standard 4:3 resolution, so running 1400x1050 is out of the question while the lower-resolution Linux machine and the FreeBSD would both need to be scaled up. In both cases provided, a CRT can natively display all of the resolutions I've just mentioned without the need for upscaling or line elimination.
I also have yet to find anybody with a TV tuner, TV antenna, IR transmitter, VGA transcoder, and Ethernet hub balanced on top of an LCD.
Wednesday, 25 June, 2008
I can't help but talk a bit about my own uses for USB, the universalized successor to just about every other external port save for video that was available on the original IBM PCs. My laptop lacks a parallel port, floppy drive, and the two PS/2 ports, but features three USB ports in their stead. What's hooked up to them? A parallel adapter, a floppy drive, and an adapter with two PS/2 ports. Pure genius, folks!
Then there's the issue of incompatibility. I recall, back at a trade expo in the 1990s, seeing somebody with an OCR wand hooked up to a serial port, feeding data off the port into MS-DOS Editor using nothing but MS-DOS's built-in I/O and the ctty command. Palm handhelds that operated over standard serial ports never required special drivers to operate: simply place the handheld in a serial cradle and hit the HotSync button with the client software running on a PC. With USB, drivers are involved - drivers that Palm has decided not to port to 64-bit OSes, aren't supported under Vista, refuse to install if you don't have an accelerated video card, of all things... Need I go on?
My question is this - what exactly is USB doing that original legacy ports couldn't also do, or that other, driverless, more specific standards such as eSATA and Firewire can't do? Why not instead implement PCMCIA or ExpressCard in desktops, giving devices fast, direct access to the machine's ISA/PCI/PCI-E bus without the need to open up the case and install expansion cards?
Wednesday, 18 June, 2008
As I had mentioned earlier, I bought a hi-definition VGA transcoder box, so that I could effectively gain the ability to view true HD signals on my computer monitor without actually having to dump $500 on an HDTV. At the moment I only have 480p-capable hardware, but for $50 I'd say it was a good investment to be able to do 720p and 1080i in the future.
I took a gamble and bought a no-name "Hi-BOX" off eBay for a couple of reasons. The Hi-BOX was $15 cheaper than Neoya's X2VGA 2.0 and Vdigi's VD-Z3. The X2VGA simply doubles 480i's sync frequencies, meaning that only half a 480i signal appears on the screen at a time, while the VD-Z3 simply ditches 480i altogether. The Hi-BOX, meanwhile, has both a scan converter and a deinterlacer onboard, so it can help out even with older hardware that can't output 480p or higher. Plus, it comes with composite-to-3.5mm audio conversion jacks, which saved me a $5 trip to Radio Shack.
When I first unwrapped the box and plugged it in, the signal quality was pretty disappointing. I'd hooked it up to an old Samsung monitor I have, and even with brightness and contrast set as high as they'd go, the picture was still too dark to view. On top of that, even 480p signals were blurrier than 480i had been on my old TV. I later found that the Samsung monitor was to blame for the brightness problem: I hooked it up to my Sony Trinitron, and the box's defaults turned out to be pretty good. I've got the Samsung hooked up to the KVM instead, since I use the machines attached to that mainly for console work anyway.
After searching through the box's menus, I found that the signal was being scaled up to 1024x768, which accounted for the blurry picture. After scaling back to the proper 640x480, 480p looked amazing on just about everything I could throw at it. The scaling feature on the Hi-BOX is designed for LCD monitors, so that the signal can be scaled up to the LCD's proper resolution. Since CRTs don't have a fixed resolution, I don't have to scale the signal... While I'm on this topic, I still don't understand why we adopted fixed-pixel technologies for HDTV when multiple resolutions were standardized for it.
The Hi-BOX only has component (Y/Pb/Pr) inputs, so theoretically it shouldn't be able to handle composite or S-video signals properly. Remembering back to the NTSC specification, a channel is 6MHz wide, and the Y channel is roughly 5MHz of that. Due to this design it's possible for black-and-white NTSC TVs to display newer color signals in black-and-white, so I decided to hook up the composite line off my capture card to the Y channel on the box. Surely enough, I got a steady signal in black-and-white. Adding color would somehow involve breaking the signal up into Y and its respective two color streams, Pb and Pr, which I'm not going to bother with: the Hi-BOX has a VGA pass-through that I can hook my laptop up with, so I can just pass color signals to my laptop via Firewire and then back to the box over the VGA pass-through using VLC. Complicated, maybe, but it works.
In terms of picture quality, the Hi-BOX's HD support is pretty awesome. Even running in 480i, details pop out much more than they used to on my old TV, and in 480p visuals appear several times sharper and (where applicable) at twice the framerate. The difference between 480i and 480p is subtle on the PlayStation 2, and more noticeable on the Xbox. Surprisingly, for the smallest and generally considered the most underpowered of the three, the GameCube packs an amazing punch in its 480p support - there's a night-and-day difference between 480i and 480p, which almost made me believe that two different sets of textures were used. Consequently, it has roughly the same difficulty rendering at a constant 60fps as the Xbox, while the PS2 keeps up quite well with the higher framerate.
I'm working on a photo gallery of screenshots, which I'll post a link to sometime soon..
Sunday, 08 June, 2008
It's hot out. Yesterday I measured 102°F in my bedroom, which is always ten degrees or so hotter than the rest of the house. Meanwhile, it was 68°F in the basement, so I decided to take my laptop and radio and set up down there. If it stays cooler than the rest of the house, I'll probably end up spending the summer down here, minus when I sleep.
Unfortunately, there seem to be a few problems with this idea. First is that we use the basement as a storage space, so at the moment I'm sitting on a rusted bar stool with my laptop on top of part of our old kitchen set. A close second is that radio reception of any sort is terrible down here: everything from FM radio around 100MHz to cordless phones at 5.8GHz have reception problems, as well as everything in between such as 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and 1.9GHz GSM. Third is that my presence down here over the past 24 hours has increased the temperature to 76°F...
I suppose I'll enjoy this while I can...
Friday, 06 June, 2008
It looks like the local library system finally ditched their Dialcat installation. For as long as I can remember, the library had maintained a system in which their Dynix-based catalog could be remotely queried by any VT100-compatible terminal emulator. Today, though, I dialed in and found that the number is now out of service, and the library has removed all information concerning the number from their website. Of course, I'm not entirely sure how long the system has been out of commission, since I haven't used it since roughly this time last year.
I suppose I could've seen this coming. Back in 1998, the library adopted a new in-house system to replace their Dynix terminals, based instead on Windows 95 and Netscape 4 running on Gateway 2000 desktops. Before the turn of the millennium, the new HTML-based system was made available online, so that anyone with an Internet connection could access it. Admittedly, the only reason I've held out so long with Dialcat instead of the new iBiblio catalog is for its speed and simplicity. Dialcat's few lines of ASCII actually turns out to be much faster to navigate than the Web-based interface, not to mention I don't need to get out my library card just to use it.
I suppose I have to ask: is anyone aware of direct-dial data services still active in their area, or has the Internet ultimately superseded those?
Sunday, 01 June, 2008
After my previous experience with Firefox 3.0, you'd probably come to think that I wouldn't even bother taking Firefox 3.0 RC1 for a spin. Nonetheless, my curiosity got the best of me, so I went and downloaded the latest build from Vector64. Imagine my surprise when Minefield loaded up with Googlebar and Adblock Plus clearly functioning as they should! ChatZilla and DOM Inspector appear to be in working order once again as well.
Firefox's new theme is still terrible, except this time around I managed to force a recreation of the Firefox 2 theme onto Firefox 3 with a simple RDF tweak, as was possible in the good old days of Firefox. The theme also took care of the design issue I had with the new FTP client, returning Firefox's FTP interface to a slightly more stylized version of 2.0's flat list.
I'm glad to see that Firefox 3.0 RC1 and the simple addition of a theme were able to solve so many of the issues I had with Beta 5. I suppose that I'll be all set with Firefox until 4.0 comes out with Prism and Weave...
If anybody from Mozilla or a third-party builder is reading this, I'm still waiting for a 64-bit Lightning extension for Thunderbird.
Sunday, 25 May, 2008
I almost feel guilty about not updating, regardless of the fact that I'm talking to a massive network of computers, which are being stared at mostly by people I've never met in my life.
I wanted to hold off on this post until I received some parts I ordered last week. As you already know, I upgraded to digital TV earlier this month. I decided to take things one step further and finally order the component-VGA transcoder I've been talking about for the past year or two, along with appropriate cabling to hook up the gadgets I have that can run in progressive scan. The entire order, split across a few stores, shipped from China and Japan, so it's taking its sweet time to arrive in Boston. As of yet I've only received the component cable for the PS2, through which I've been enjoying the cleanest 480i picture I've ever seen. I'd been hoping that the rest would ship in time for the long weekend, though it looks like that isn't going to happen. I'll keep you posted as the rest of the order flows in.
I took the SAT Reasoning Test again and got the exact same score as last time: 640/640/750. I'd been shooting for over a 2100 aggregate, though apparently that isn't going to happen. It's a shame that more colleges don't consider the new writing portion as much as they do the English and Mathematics sections, as a 750 supposedly puts me in the 99th percentile across the country. Coupled with the fact that I got a perfect 12/12 on the essay (I got Prompt 1 from here, so you can imagine I had a field day with the essay)... Well, you catch my drift.
In other news, my laptop is now free of visible duct tape. I spent a few hours supergluing the antenna in place instead. Since superglue bonds stronger than tape, I don't have to grab the antenna against the display when I extend or retract it. There's still tape on the bottom, which I haven't yet found a way to replace.
Thursday, 15 May, 2008
Driven mainly by the under-the-hood rendering improvements and the availability of a substantially more recent x64 build, I decided to give Firefox 3.0 another try today. Oh boy.
Compatibility problems are still running rampant throughout my Firefox 3 install. I managed to fix the some of my issues through unofficial updates, hacking around with Firefox's RDF control files, and in the case of the classic and self-preferred Googlebar, turning to underpowered alternatives. DOM Inspector isn't an optional component anymore, and I can't seem to install it directly from the "Firefox Add-Ons" page, so I assume I'm going to have to go manually install it and hope for the best. DOM Inspector is the best HTML debugger I've used, and I wouldn't particularly enjoy having to figure out Visual Studio 2005's less-equipped equivalent.
Speaking of "Firefox Add-Ons", once known as "Mozilla Update", is the site really necessary in the first place? A repository of extensions is cool, but the totalitarian stance they're taking on extension dominion through various means is somewhat disheartening. I greatly preferred the old model of the now-mostly-stagnant Mozdev, where there was a higher degree of separation between the developer and distributor, and it wasn't necessary to create an account and log in just to download an extension. Humorously enough, even "Firefox Add-Ons" can't seem to keep up with the new error-checking schemes in Firefox 3: the vast majority of extensions give me some error pertaining to the new security features.
Firefox used to have pretty good FTP support, using a clean, flat list of files and directories that could be navigated like any Web page. Now they've apparently implemented some sort of XUL-based FTP client akin to that of Netscape 6.0 and early Mozilla milestones, with the exception that it's actually less functional than the NS6/M1x model. Unfortunately I can't seem to find any pref to turn off the new interface, either.
I find the new Firefox 3 theme visually unattractive. I'd go install a better-looking one from Firefox Add-Ons, but for reasons unknown, I can't seem to do that.
Apparently, few provisions were made for those that tried upgrading to Firefox 3 early on, went back to Firefox 2, and decided to try out Firefox 3 again after adding bookmarks, saved passwords, and the like in Firefox 2. I opened Firefox 3 to find things exactly the way I'd left them... Roughly a year ago. Thankfully deleting all my SQLite bookmarks and importing my old HTML boomarks to SQLite wasn't difficult at all. I keep passwords on paper, so manually entering a couple into the new signon log isn't so difficult in my case, though may be a greater burden for someone that relies exclusively on PSM to store their passwords.
So Firefox 3.0 isn't completely terrible. It loads and runs faster than Firefox 2 did, and manages memory considerably better: I'm currently looking at around half of the usage I experienced with Firefox 2. JSBench scores are pretty good: in a comparison of Firefox 3 x64 to Firefox 2 x64 and IE8 x64, my scores were roughly 450ms, 950ms, and 1250ms, respectively. GIF rendering speed has improved slightly, especially at higher resolutions (I ran an overkill test of a 35-frame 800x600 image set to render at 5fps).
For the past few years, I've been watching the development of KDE and Konqueror from a distance, and to be honest, I'd rather use the recently-released Konqueror 4 than Firefox 3. Over the summer, I'm going to try out openSuSE Linux again, and see if I can get used to using it full-time.
Tuesday, 13 May, 2008
Having uncomfortably finished three term papers earlier this month, I decided to buy a PS/2 to USB signal converter so that I could use my IBM Model M keyboard with my notebook.
(Yes, I colored in my Model M's cable such that it's PC97-compliant. =D)
This turned out to be somewhat difficult, for two reasons. First, the Model M is based around en entire Motorola 6805 CPU rather than the standard-issue Intel 8048 microcontroller. Rumor has it that the keyboard was designed as such to facilitate a hardware terminal emulator, though I've never been able to confirm this. As a result, the Model M draws significantly more power than a regular keyboard, and thus I found various reports of the keyboard not being able to power up using some cheaper cables. Second, I wanted the signal converter implemented in hardware, rather than in software, so that I could use it as if it were a plain old PS/2 keyboard in any OS.