Technophile Monkey

I used to make a physical copy of all the audio CDs I buy to CD-R. Then I’d only listen to the CD-R, in fear of breaking my original discs.

Maybe you think this is madness, but I do own CDs that I’ve been listening to every month since 1989. I don’t want them to break, since they are irreplaceable. Sure, newer versions of the same albums sometimes exist, but they are usually mastered in a very bad way to turn up the loudness to all hell, so all detail that was present in the music is gone. The original CDs from the 80s and early 90s don’t have this problem, they offer much more fidelity. If you’re interested in this crazy loudness competition between studios, it’s sometimes called the Loudness Wars.

But to make the long story short: Copying to CD-R is stupid and annoying, and lossless compressed formats such as FLAC have arrived. Also, terabytes of disk space are cheap. So now I can rip the CD to FLAC and stick it on my RAID NAS, which I backup from time to time. If I ever need a physical CD copy of the music, to play on my reasonable-quality CD player, for example, I can just burn from those FLAC files as they contain pristine versions of the audio. If you use a proper audio player, you can also listen to FLAC files directly on the go, and of course on your computer or network audio player. In case you need to save space or don’t need the quality, you can encode the FLAC to Ogg or MP3 and listen to that copy on the road. All much easier than with CD-R copies!

Here’s how easy it is to rip to FLAC in any decent Linux distribution, in this example using Sound Juicer:

One click, and it rips, encodes and copies to my NAS for safekeeping.

I still have to buy the original disc and have it shipped to me, but that’s okay, I like to have a physical thing from a band in my hands, something I can hide in my sad and sunless CD archive to preserve things until the fall of mankind.

Blizzard’s Azeroth is quite a beautiful world, thanks to wonderful art direction. Some people in Blizzard’s art department have a very strong vision of what they want the game to look like, and it shows. Also, they employ many low-poly wizards and great magicians of texturing, which helps create a surprisingly good-looking, smooth-running world without too many polygons.

But it’s a shame you have to play WoW to see Azeroth. That is, you might not have to play WoW at all. Look:

That’s a druid, morphed into their superfast bird-form. You’d have to play for a bunch of months to level a druid far enough to get this form, and while you would be able to do some sightseeing while leveling, you’d be mostly busy grinding. Now with my method, I get to see the nice landscapes of WoW without having to play WoW. Here’s how:

• Download WoW (there’s a link for the client download here)
• Sign up with the private WoW server WowBeez
• Log in and create a level 80 druid (you need to pick the instant-80 server for that)
• Go through the portal you see when you enter, you’ll be transported to The Mall where you can train all the shapeshifting skills and buy some Tier III equipment with the included gold
• Walk back to the Taxi NPC you came from. Talk to him to get food and water (optional)
• Talk to Taxi again and ask him to transport you to an area you’d like to see. He can transport you to leveling areas as well as instances
• As long as you’re in a Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King area, you can shapeshift into a bird form and check out the landscape from above! Press space to climb, X to sink (default key assignments)
• If you’re in a Classic area, just use some other fast form to explore quicker

Granted, this does not let you explore the inside of instances (only the noob ones, you can’t survive the others), but you do get to see most of the outside world. And you certainly see more of the landscape in shorter time than if you had to actually grind through the game.

Like Tipa, I am still waiting for a game that caters to the Explorer Bartle type. Azeroth is a beauty to explore, if half of Blizzard’s art team split off and created a niche Explorer game, I’d probably pay to play that. Until then, I just look look at their work using WowBeez sightseeing

Carrumba writes that he has received permission to publish the source code of the Bundestrojaner.

This trojan horse was built under contract from the Swiss government, and among other things, it was one of the first pieces of malware that could listen in on Skype calls.

It will be very interesting to see this. As Carrumba writes, it will finally confirm (or put an end to) the rumors that were going around back when the Bundestrojaner was first released. It will be a chance for anyone “who is also curious what the root of all the rumours was” to see just that.

On Wednesday, two friends and I couldn’t resist the urge to go and watch Brüno’s premiere. And afterwards go to a gay bar and order Cosmopolitans. Only the bar was out of some ingredient (perhaps cranberry juice?) so I had to drink a prosecco instead.

Anyhow. Brüno delivers exactly what you expect, but I’m shocked that people are shocked about some of the things he “reveals”. Let’s look at a list of things:

• Rednecks and hillbillies are homophobes
• People that like to go to UFC-style fighting events aren’t the most likely audience for a hot man-on-man lick-a-thon
• Butch hunters with beards and rifles don’t approve of gay people, they don’t fit into their world-view
• Radical Christian anti-gay activists don’t know what they’re talking about
• The Israel/Palestine conflict is a touchy subject and representatives from both sides probably don’t want to kiss and hug
• The celebrity charity industry is stupid and shallow
• The fashion industry is stupid and shallow

Does any of this sound like news to you? Thought not.

Still, it’s the execution that counts, and Brüno is more or less flawlessly executed, so I’m happy to recommend it and can’t wait to see what character Cohen thinks up next.

I don’t often complain about game companies (because by the heavens, I know how it feels to walk in their shoes), but this is a ridiculous piece of programming:

If the game were sane, it would let you set buttons for “strong punch”, “medium punch” or “heavy punch”, for example. But this thing lets you remap your “key 14″ to whatever the game thinks an imaginary “X” button is.

Do I need a picture of an Xbox controller to be able to configure my fighter game? Geez. Some console developers should stay console developers, or hire some competent company to do the PC porting.

Remember the 90s, when Microsoft had illegally established a dominant position in the browser market and the dominant browser was MSIE? You might think that was harmless, but it has caused several problems:

• No competition means websites were written for a specific browser instead of to a standard (that the W3C publishes)
• MSIE (purposefully?) broke this standard in order to make sites written for MSIE incompatible with other browsers and further strenghten Microsoft’s position
• MS started adding tags to MSIE that didn’t exist on any other browser. Not for the good of mankind, but to lock people onto the MS product
• Lack of competition meant that innovation stagnated
• There are plenty of security holes in MSIE, and there was little incentive for MS to fix them
• Ask a web developer to tell you just how broken MSIE’s HTML rendering engine is

Yesterday, the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 3.5 with many new features (mostly under the hood) and speed boosts. People have noticed this new competition and are no longer happy with an old and broken browser like MSIE 6.0, which used to be the default for many. When we look at our website stats at work, about 35% of our users use Firefox, another 35% use Safari and only 25% use Internet Explorer (either 6, 7 or 8). This is excellent news because it is living proof of competition.

If you think that competition doesn’t make a difference, you’d be wrong. Look at what happened thanks to competition:

• Stability on the web has much improved. Google released their Chrome browser, which runs a separate process for every tab you open, so that only the affected tab crashes if e.g. a plugin messes up, like Adobe Flash often does. Other browser makers are following suit.
• Google’s Chrome had an extremely fast JavaScript engine, making JavaScript-heavy sites such as Flickr run faster there. There was little competition in this area before Google started the race. Now Firefox 3.5 has caught up with Google Chrome 1.0 in speed, and further improvements in all camps (including MS) can be expected.
• Mozilla’s rendering engine (Gecko) and various JavaScript engines have been ported to all major platforms. Developers for those platforms have an excellent, open source rendering engine available to use in their projects.
• The KDE Foundation’s HTML engine (KHTML/WebKit) is used by Apple in Safari and on the iPhone, by Nokia on their mobile phones etc. It’s another Free Software HTML rendering engine. So even among Free Software engines, there is competition!
• Security is much improved, as pointing at security holes in the competition’s browser can now be used as a marketing tool. Browser developers have improved their QA processes and even Microsoft no longer allows itself six years to fix the browser.
• Web developers had been frustrated with MSIE’s broken HTML renderer for years. Since there is competition, there is pressure on Microsoft to start following the web standards. Firefox, Chrome, Opera etc. do a much better job at using web standards, but no one cared for a long time since they had to write broken HTML code in order to support MSIE users. Now web developers discovered their pride, started writing according to web standards (with the help of influential figures like Jeffrey Zeldman) and boom, suddenly good standards support is an important feature for a browser. Someone obviously woke up the developers at MS as well, because IE 8.0 does a much better job at standards support than the previous versions.

So if you ever think “bah, it doesn’t matter that there’s a monopoly, I wouldn’t be better off without it”, think of these points. Yes, it does matter. The lack of competition in key IT markets makes a massive difference. Imagine if we had the same situation in operating systems as we have with browsers, a 30/30/30/10% split of the market. Standards would be followed more closely, systems would interoperate better and there would be an actual incentive to innovate and improve. And most importantly, you as an individual or company would have more choice.

Some people think this is just a mantra repeated by free-market fanatics, but it is true, as you can see with your own eyes in today’s browser market, with just the few examples mentioned above. Oppose monopolies in computing. They are bad for you.

Edit: Just one day after I posted this, Microsoft was again caught abusing their power. They are deploying a program that changes people’s default search engine from whatever they have selected (perhaps Google?) to Microsoft’s own Bing. The user is never asked whether they want this change, unless they have third-party software installed that alerts them to such changes. You see that anti-competitive actions by monopolists are still seen in this industry. This needs to stop, for the good of the industry.

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