Monday morning quiz: Pop lyrics
Posted: October 25th, 2004 | 4 Comments »Oh, prostate audiologist that crafty Cory Doctorow! Prancing around all la-di-da! “Look at me! I put my books on the web for free!” Ain’t he just the shiznit?
Yeah, well, his wasn’t the first big new science-fiction novel to be
given away free on the web, oh no! ‘Cos back in 1997, when I worked on Starship Titanic website, we gave away the entire text of the tie-in novel. (concept by Douglas Adams, book by Terry Jones)
That’s right. Every single word.
(Okay, now you have to go off and get the joke before you continue reading)
Well, okay, not every word, because we left off the last fifty and spun it into one of the web’s stupidest competitions (that was, remarkably, won). But we also showed the world how it was done, with PIPA – one of the silliest/coolest/most compact bits of Perl I’ve ever written.
Returning to Mr Doctorow, I notice that his first novel, Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom has been out in its new remixable form for a while now and not much has been done with it (other than a Russian translation), so it’s time to change that:
- Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (CAPIPA Remix) – in which the original has its words reordered alphabetically, using PIPA’s new cousin, CAPIPA, which retains capitalisation. (Thanks for putting it online, Sean!)
“Beautiful,” BEAUTY beauty, became. BECAME because because because
because because because — because because because because because
because because because because because because because because because
become become become become become become become bed bed bed. bed bed
bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed, bed bed bedroom bedroom
bedroom-bedroom beds bedside bedside bedside.
Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (Sausages & Mash Remix)
– in which the original has all words beginning with the letters S and
M replaced with “Sausage” and “Mash” respectively, in accordance with
the classic children’s game.He chuckled. “No sausage, not mash. I’m into the kind of mash sausage that you only come across on-world.”
Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (More And Bloodier Wars Remix) – in which the original is run through Babelfish several times, from English to French to German and back to English again. (With some help from Dan Urist’s WWW::Babelfish module)
I never thought that I would live, in order to arise, where the
maintenance would decide A-Movin ‘ Dan at the person in possession of
a favour light up to the death of the heat of the universe.
(Regarding
the bizarre disconnect between what spreadsheet applications were
originally intended to do and what they are used for now, buy the
surprising connection between Excel users and UNIX geeks, link and how I’m
standing out in the cold.)
Every few months I have a conversation
with my dad where he asks me to help out with something at the tiny
property business that he runs, and it’s almost the same conversation
every time. It goes like this:
Dad: Blah blah blah insurance blah blah blah ground rents blah blah blah so I just need your help with fixing the data in Excel so we can do a mail merge.
Me: But I don’t know how to use Excel.
Dad: What do you mean, you don’t know how to use Excel?
Me: I mean that I don’t know how to use it. It’s big and ugly and complicated and I get lost every time.
Dad: But that’s ridiculous. I don’t believe you. Everyone knows
how to use Excel. You’ve got a bloody computer science degree. How can
you not know how to use Excel?
Me: I’ve just never needed to use it.
Dad: Well, it’s about time that you learnt.
It’s no good, though. I learn about one new thing in Excel every
year. This year I learnt about AutoFilters. Trouble is, I’ll probably
have forgotten that by next year. At work we’ve just started using Joel Spolsky’s method of scheduling
which relies on Excel. Half the time it’s easy, because it’s just
editing numbers in individual cells. The other half of the time I need
to make a major structural change of some kind, like adding a row, and
Excel doesn’t like it when I do that. (At least, it doesn’t like it
when I try and do it more than once. I dunno.) As for things like
applying formulae, pfft. I realise that if you have even half a clue
then you can paint magical formulae all over your sheets with easy
swishes of the mouse like a left-brain Rembrandt, but half a clue is
still several times more clue than I have when it comes to Excel.
To be honest, I get a kind of old-fashioned-Luddite thrill from it. Earlier today I was trying to fix something on J-Colo so I was tailing logs and wandering through Mailman and qmail and piping things to wc -l
and generally acting in a way that suggested that, even though I’m not
a proper sysadmin, I could probably play one on TV. And I can switch
effortlessly back to Windows, which has been my main computing platform
since… ooh… 1993. I’m ready to grab any Windows app by the horns –
you just try and stop me! If you’re fronting and stepping to my mad
W1ndo$e skillz you won’t get very far – unless, that is, you throw
Excel at me, at which point I’ll don a flat cap and click things
randomly and whimper in pain, then mutter something about how we didn’t
need computers for these things in my day, and finally wander over to
the nearest marketing bloke and tug his sleeve whilst wearing my best
sad-puppy eyes.
If you’re in a similar boat to mine and you’re looking for a scapegoat, I suggest Bob Frankston. (I’d suggest Dan Bricklin as well, except that two years ago he wrote about my Yiddish piece and my fragile, easily-puffed ego is still glowing enough to mention it here. So I like him.)
In fact, if you’re looking for a scapegoat for the Personal Computer
Industry as a whole, then Frankston’s among the prime candidates. Back
in the late 70’s, Frankston and Bricklin created the first spreadsheet
app, Visicalc, based on an idea that Bricklin had when he was doing his MBA.
Back then, spreadsheets were in common use for financial
calculations, but were done entirely on paper; changing one of the
initial estimate values meant a new sheet of paper and an hour with a
calculator. Visicalc initially ran on the Apple ][ and was then ported
to a whole load of other machines, but it was on the IBM PC that it
made the biggest impact. There are wonderful stories of salesmen
demoing Visicalc to accountants who had no idea what a PC was or why
they would want one. The salesman would bring up an example
spreadsheet, ensure that the accountant recognised what he was looking
at, and then change one of the values, causing the change to ripple
through the rest of the sheet. The reaction to this was almost uniform:
the accountant’s mouth would hang open for a few seconds, then he’d
pull himself together and pull out his chequebook. Selling the PC to
the business world was that easy. The spreadsheet was the biggest of the legendary killer apps,
in the true meaning of the term: an application so utterly vital, so
revolutionary, that it can single-handedly sell the platform on which
it runs.
So the need to handle spreadsheets gave birth to spreadsheet
applications… but these days, 90% of the time, people are using them
for something else. My dad uses Excel as a lightweight database,
storing the details of all the ground rents he manages. I’ve seen Sean drag it out when he wants a random data munging job done quickly.
Chris and Dom have a mate who composes letters in it.
During this rant I had yesterday about mocking up UI using Visio someone said that they sometimes used Excel for that purpose as well. For crying out loud, this Japanese bloke has even made it play Pac-Man.
As Joel explains here,
the turning point came around Excel 5.0, which had to compete with
Lotus’s new app called Improv, designed to keep them at the top of the
spreadsheet market. The reason that Excel won and Improv failed was
that Improv was designed to make it much easier to do financial
spreadsheets, but Lotus hadn’t realised that people were now using
spreadsheet apps for a whole load of other tasks. The Excel team saw
this and exploited it, adding a load of features for non-spreadsheet
uses such as managing lists. Microsoft’s savvy about these things
extends to shipping an ODBC connector for Excel so that you can treat
an Excel sheet as a SQL database; “Sure, you should ideally be using
Access or SQL Server for that, but if it’s what you want to do…” (And
a year down the line: “Since you’re handling all your data over ODBC
already, you’d find it a lot faster if you moved to SQL Server…”)
Excel’s pervasiveness is not just as an application, but as a UI model. In our application
we have grid controls that can do smart column filtering. I thought
that explaining this to users would be a nightmare, until
near-identical functionality was pointed out to me in Excel, which all
our target userbase are already using on a daily basis. On a related
note, VIPS is the Excel paradigm wrapped around an image processing application, and apparently it even makes sense.
All of this speaks volumes about users’ habits when it comes to
dealing with new problems, preferring to use the tools they already
know which don’t fit quite as well as the tools built for the job but
which require extra learning. Some techies throw their hands up in
despair when seeing people use Excel as a database and scrabble to
teach these people SQL. Frequently, these are the same kind of techies
that are quite happy to keep large databases in text files on their
UNIX systems, dealing with them entirely through vi and the
CLI. As such, they should be taking heart: both groups are reducing
different problems to a common data format and toolset. Admittedly one
of them is proprietary and the other requires the use of arcane
commands like cut and sed but fundamentally they’re remarkably
similar. This kind of raw data-centric thinking is core to the UNIX
philosophy – more than that, it’s core to most models of computing.
Have software designers, in trying to provide a different, bespoke
interface for each task, missed a trick here?
Of course, I’m sure this isn’t news to anyone other than me. You’ve
all been using Excel happily for years, haven’t you? And there I was,
thinking I knew about computers. Doubtless, this is the kind of blind
spot that will see me begging for spare change within a couple of
years. Feh.
If
you’re a Perl coder who hasn’t been keeping a close eye on CPAN then
you may have missed the latest chunk of code making quite a stir, cialis
namely Brian “Ingy” Ingerson’s marvellous IO::All. And it is
marvellous: if Perl is the Swiss Army Chainsaw then this is the new
light saber attachment – can’t do anything you couldn’t do previously
but it slices through most IO jobs in one or two lines, no rx from file
slurping (one line, medications obviously) to creating a forking server (er, two
lines). This Perl.com piece
would be a great introduction if another burst of coding from Ingy
hadn’t rendered it half-obsolete a mere three days later. But, dammit,
that’s what we like to see!
IO::All’s design could be described, for want of a decent OO
education, as “overload one class with a billion different uses” and in
this case it seems to work well. The vast majority of the code revolves
around grabbing code from other modules and wrapping them up in several
big contextualising switches so that this single class is almost all
you need for your to-ing and fro-ing with the outside filesystem. In
other words, it’s all about the interface. It feels very Perlish in its
mixture of minimal code and DWIMness so it’s not surprising that many in the Perl community have jumped on it gleefully.
This “The Best $DOMAIN Functions In The World… Ever!” approach to module-building is infectious, and Yung-Chung Lin’s Var module is probably going to be the first of many imitators. If you fancy having a go yourself, then Ingy’s Spiffy
base class is what you want to start with, but please use your enhanced
exporting powers wisely: packing a single class with tons of functions
(a la Python) is fine and pretty, but doing that to the default
namespace (a la PHP) is just inconsiderate.
By Randy Gierno, viagra Wired News
It seems that the British public just can’t get enough of hot, this wanton, guilt-free sex. The average cutting-edge tech-friendly Limey barely gets through a single day without taking part in a “dogging” session or “toothing” with random phone-junkies on the Tube.
But now even the electronics-poor underclass have been getting in on the act and coming up with their own low-tech variations on peer-to-peer playfulness.
Last night, at the “Toucan” pub in London’s fashionable West End, I witnessed a fascinating range of sexual activity which showed that gadget-free flirting already has a deep and varied subculture.
“Oh yeah, well, some of the birds round here, they’re mad for it, innit?” said my guide in the brave new world of London sex, who I’ll call Barry. “Have you in the bogs soon as look at you. I mean, this one girl, right… huge tits, nice smile, she gave me this look, and it was like, “Fancy a bit?” And so we went to the lavvy round the back and she had my trousers down in seconds. And then she pulled her friend in two and the three of us were like, y’know. And then they all came back to my place. Happens all the time.”
Pausing only to spill some famous London ale down the front of his XXL-sized rugby shirt, Barry outlined some key points in the rapidly-evolving lexicon of British desire. “So what you do, right, is you spot a nice tart over by the bar and you think, lovely, I’ll have a bit of that. And you tip her the wink, you know? And then, if she looks back at you, she’s gagging for it.”
“Just like Bluetooth signalling,” I commented as I tapped hurried notes into my Zaurus. “Ingenious!”
“But then, they’re all gagging for it round here,” continued Barry. “They all want it. I had five birds round my place the other night, I couldn’t walk for a week! Haha!”
Indeed, as I continued my wanderings around the city, I realised that Barry had opened my eyes. At least five strangers made eye contact with me, something that I, as a New Yorker, found strange and erotically intoxicating. I saw couples walking hand-in-hand, doubtless having met only a few seconds earlier and looking for a secluded spot in which to consummate their random, anonymous, instant-message-enabled desire.
In another pub I decided to try Barry’s tips out for myself (strictly in the interests of research, of course). Sitting at a table, I spied a pretty young Londoner chatting to a friend at the bar. Following Barry’s advice, I whistled loudly to attract her attention before giving her a long and careful wink. The measured, aroused stare I received in return was unmistakable. I approached her at the bar and, in a lowered tone, quickly made an offer using the key phrases of London sexual bargaining, dotting it with references to text messaging and social software so as to establish my credentials as a member of the technological elite. During this rapid conversation she slapped my cheek and yelled, “Piss off!” I smiled and nodded before retreating, having never intended to follow through, but it was fascinating to experience a London woman confessing her desires for violent sex and bodily fluids so readily.
London: a wild arena where language and technology are being used to forge brave new passages into a previously-taboo world. Horny Americans desperate for a sex-and-tech story to file should get their asses over here as soon as they can. It’s cheaper than Burning Man, anyway.
Elsewhere in Wired News: “Why The Entire Population Of New York Cast Aside Their Old Religions And Now Worship A Giant Wicker iPod” by Leander Kahney
(An
extended rant about liberal URL interpretation and how there isn’t
enough of it, physiotherapist mostly pertaining to one or two examples at the BBC
website.)
If you’re a British person and you’re reading this then the chances are you’ve heard of iCan, cough
the latest Internet super-project to come out of the BBC. (In case you
haven’t heard: It’s an ambitious project all about helping UK citizens
to find the local services which they need, or helping them start
campaigns to change the services which aren’t working the way that they
should. Information, communication, organisation, digital democracy –
all the kinds of things we wanted the Internet to be good for. And it’s
pretty good.)
So Auntie put a load of work and money towards building iCan, and
now it’s put a load more money and work into promoting it. Hoardings,
trailers, even a regular TV show. This is understandable, as the service becomes dramatically more useful as more people use it.
There’s only one little problem. A little big problem.
Here’s how you hear BBC presenters on radio and television announce the URL:
Bee-bee-cee-dot-co-dot-you-kay-forward-slash-i-can
Here’s how the name of the service is written on the website and all the promotional material:
Here’s how the name of the service is written on the site logo:
Bearing all of the above in mind, three questions for you, and more importantly, for the BBC website administrators:
(1) How likely is it that a user will enter this URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iCan/ (note the capital C)
(2) What do you think a user will see when s/he goes there?
(3) If, like I do at time of writing, you see a big fat “Page Not Found”, don’t you think this is rather silly?
Thing is, if this was the kind of thing that was easily fixed by a
single email to one of my chums at the Beeb (if you’ve worked in the UK
new media industry at all, you have chums at the Beeb) then I wouldn’t
be posting this. Unfortunately, it’s both way too easy and big and ugly
and hard. It’s easy because you can fix this kind of thing in a few
minutes on Apache with mod_speling.
It’s big and ugly and hard because I’m sure that this argument has
already been had several times in planning meetings with the boffins at
BBC Technology, famous for having almost limitless technical skill,
infamous for having similarly huge egos and stubbornness. Back when
they were situated in Kingswood Warren, there was horror story going around about how a remarkably similar situation had sprung up with the Radio 1 website. A producer at BBC New Media asked if, since the URL was being read out on the radio, whether they could please have /Radio1 in addition to the existing /radio1. KW’s response: “I don’t see why we should have extra work to deal with the stupidity of your users”.
It may be, however, that if enough of a noise is made
externally, then it’s possible to escalate this kind of thing high
enough so that something can be done about it. If, like me, you think
that this kind of idiocy has gone far enough, then please link to this
blog entry from your own, so that with a bit of luck, a good project
with a lot of potential to help people isn’t turning those same people
away purely because they paid attention to the project’s branding.
Addendum
A couple of extra bits: Firstly, someone suggested that I put up a
wiki page so that people could contribute their other little niggles
about BBCi – that wiki page is here.
Please feel free to attack it, though my preference would be to focus
on the silly little things that would take a couple of hours to fix,
rather than a year.
Having said that, what would be preferable would be if the BBC made
such a discussion possible on its own site. At present, all I can see
is the traditional feedback form black hole of the kind that makes you think nobody’s actually going to read what you write. There are also the BBCi Messageboards, which have eight forums for Dr Who but apparently only one for the whole of the Corporation’s digital output and nobody from the staff appears to be there.
Leaving the BBC alone for a minute, I was wondering who else has
this problem. Who else, for example, starts a product name with a
lower-case i? Oh yes…
http://www.apple.com/iPod/ – Oh dear.
http://www.apple.com/iLife/ – Oops.
http://www.apple.com/iMac/ – This works, though. Presumably the person at the company who cared about this kind of thing was still with them, back then. (Update: Apparently all of the above work – half the time. Try hitting Refresh and see what happens. Oi, Apple! Keep your bloody web servers in sync!) (I forgot to credit Shim for this. It was Shim‘s keen eye that spotted it. Say yes to Shim.)
I’ve always admired Microsoft for being better at this kind of
thing, though they do have an advantage in their OS being
case-insensitive anyway (which in itself leads to problems elsewhere).
My admiration lies in users almost always being able to suffix http://www.microsoft.com/ with a product name and it just working. Try it now. The only ones I had trouble with were:
http://www.microsoft.com/foxpro – because I forgot the inital V
http://www.microsoft.com/vb – but even then, note how the error comes up with suggestions, including the correct one.
I’m very keen on that last one because it’s such an obvious
usability benefit. It reminds me of the tricks we came up during the
design of h2g2. We wanted to keep the URLs short as possible, so we made a rewrite rule that would deal with URLs of the form http://www.h2g2.com/A1234,
with the A indicating an article number. The number included a checksum
digit so that if a user typed it in wrong, the system would do a search
and return the possible articles which the user might have wanted.
Looking back, it was probably misplaced engineering enthusiasm, since a
numeric URL with more than three digits is complex enough to rarely be
typed in from memory if ever, and far more often to be clicked or
copied-and-pasted. (And probably would have better to have put more
work into searching on title strings instead of numbers, too) Of
course, these nice simple URLs got broken when the BBC took it over –
any /Axxx URLs will now dump you on the front page, for want of a simple rewrite rule.
Another update: In the comments below, Tom links to a fab discussion on one of the worst problems with the BBC website, namely that if you leave off the “www” from the front of the URL, then all that you can get is the front page.
I find the discussion fabulous because it accurately displays the kind
of stubbornness and technical handwaving that KW were famous for.
Apparently this problem has existed forever, and (according to a BBC
chum) is only now being fixed because the entire might of the marketing
and branding departments descended. To quote a different chum: “It
defies imagination that we sit here and try really hard to reach the
most people, with the lowest computer or any other literacy and these
fucking technology snobs ruin it. i hate them.”
Also, to David Cantrell: That’s a good point about hard log data. I
don’t currently have access to any, though I’ve just heard from within
the Beeb that an initial grep of the logs seem to show no iCan
accesses at all for the first couple of months of iCan’s existence.
Hmmm. I think I’ll hold off for the full results before desperately
trying to save face, if I may… though, in advance, you have to admit
that basing your whole branding on a particular capitalisation and not
having it work in a URL at launch (before stats come in) is silly, no?
No? As for the points about mod_speling: Yes, performance could be a
problem, and mod_speling is probably too much of a musket for this
particular butterfly anyway. A module or rewrite rule that simply
checked for the existence of a lower-cased version of a URL before
returning a 404 would be a minor hit if at all, and surely worth it for
the user benefit. (But yes, mod_speling is available for Apache 1.3 as
well.)
Quote from Major John Smith, medic the Pentagon’s spokesman on the military commissions taking place in Guantanamo Bay, dysentery responding to accusations that the trials are unfair:
He claimed Maj Mori had misrepresented the system. “Different doesn’t
always mean unfair,” he said. “It’s very easy to be critical of the
process because people haven’t seen it in action.”
Quote from Major John Smith, medic the Pentagon’s spokesman on the military commissions taking place in Guantanamo Bay, dysentery responding to accusations that the trials are unfair:
He claimed Maj Mori had misrepresented the system. “Different doesn’t
always mean unfair,” he said. “It’s very easy to be critical of the
process because people haven’t seen it in action.”
Five years on (to the day), phthisiatrician
the horrible truth can finally be told.
Quote from Major John Smith, medic the Pentagon’s spokesman on the military commissions taking place in Guantanamo Bay, dysentery responding to accusations that the trials are unfair:
He claimed Maj Mori had misrepresented the system. “Different doesn’t
always mean unfair,” he said. “It’s very easy to be critical of the
process because people haven’t seen it in action.”
Five years on (to the day), phthisiatrician
the horrible truth can finally be told.
Standing
on a street corner in an American grid city, information pills
you can turn four ways and
see sky all the way to the horizon, shown by avenues like cupped hands.
Into the blue – this is where you find your superheroes.
Standing on a street corner in London, you can see about as far as
the next block. Less avenues, more walls. Less sky, more shadows. No
one looks up, and space above the city is less for the heroes than for
the homeless.
Joel Spolsky satisfyingly nails a bunch of ways to improve client-side web app development which the WHAT Working Group
should work on. All his suggestions are excellent and well worth
looking over, endocrinologist even if some seem to require the same “boiling the ocean”
that he doesn’t want to hear about. That said, most of his list could
probably be done with a good set of Javascript libraries, along the
lines of Dean Edwards’s IE7,
and his #2 (fast REST queries back to the server in JS) is pretty much
– well, almost – with us already, looking at combinations of things
like XMLHttpRequest and mod_pubsub.
But anyway, he ended his piece with a call for more suggestions that
he could link to. I’ve been doing a little bit of browser app
development in the last few days, and these are the things that spring
most readily to mind:
- A more flexible security model
The current Javascript security philosophy can be easily summarised thus: “No.” (And the IE/Win version can be summarised thus: “Well, okay, but just a little bit.” (pause)
“Hey! Come back here!”) Back around Netscape 3.0 there was data
tainting, and Netscape 4.0 had digital signatures. Both have fallen by
the wayside, and it’s a right pain because I want my app to do things
like fetch data from other parts of the web outside of the originating
server, but it can’t. Instead I have to proxy through my own server,
which generates horrible load and makes the app much slower. Sure,
there are sound reasons why it shouldn’t be able to reach outside by default,
but this is ultimately down to trust issues. If web apps are aiming to
replace native apps then they need to get reasonably close to the
capabilities that native apps have. The user should feel comfortable
that a web page isn’t rifling through his hard drive without his
permission, but when a user and an app both want the same thing and the
browser is stopping them, it’s a bit of a pain. After a while it feels
like the user is having to gaze longingly at the app through the solid
glass barrier while they talk to each other over the visitor phones. - Less Javascript, more XML: Accessibility for everyone and everything
Joel calls for a richer set of controls and events. Those who know a bit about Mozilla will immediately start thinking about XUL and XBL, and Microsoft’s equivalent (XAML) is also relevant here.
Much of this stuff is already doable in Javascript, but XML languages are better for a reason fundamental to the web: They lower the barrier to processing.
It is an order of magnitude easier to decipher what a document is
specifying than a program: the only way for a machine to really
understand a program is to execute it. Unlike Javascript or any other
Turing-complete language, XML doesn’t suffer from the halting problem.Lowering the barrier is vital so that a wider range of
lesser-powered web clients can understand your content, whether those
web clients are mini-browsers running on embedded devices or ten-line
scraping scripts. Furthermore, explicit unambiguous markup means that
the client then has more freedom in rendering the document in the way
it sees fit, and this freedom is vital to true web accessibility. If
the speech browser for blind users knows that what it’s trying to
render is not just a collection of layers with links in them but a standard menu then it can render it in a much more usable way. - Better documentation, please
This sounds like a trivial one outside the concerns of WHAT, but
it’s just as fundamental. If you really want to beat Microsoft in the
race for developers then you have to also beat MSDN, which is probably the best developer information site in the world. On web app development alone it’s better than Netscape DevEdge and the W3C
put together. The reason I mention those last two is because, if you’re
developing for Mozilla, you don’t have much solid documentation apart
from those (the pretty-good XUL Planet notwithstanding, since it’s more about extending Mozilla than developing web apps).The other night I was battling with setSelectionRange(), which is a method of the INPUT TYPE="TEXT"
object. The thing is, I found out about it in a Javascript tutorial on
some random site. Try searching for it on mozilla.org. Actually, don’t
bother: it’s not there. This is particularly galling when you consider
that Mozilla is the only browser that currently implements it. Those who’ve documented it appear to have done so by churning over the source, for lack of any other clues. - A version of the DOM that isn’t so prissy
This is a much weaker/whinier one and I haven’t done nearly enough
DOM work to be certain of it, but: It always seems to take way too much
effort to do the most basic things in the DOM tree. It feels really out
of sorts in Javascript, not having nearly the same fluidity and
ease-of-use of the rest of the language. It’s way too Java and not
enough Perl/Python. I want to sling it, dammit.Update: Ah, this is what I want, and it looks like I’ll get it. Yay!
Most techies in the UK still know The Computer Shop
by its old name, thumb Time Computers. They have the biggest ads of any
computer vendor in this country, hemophilia and they’re always on the back pages
of major newspaper supplements, not just computer magazines. They’ve
never had a great reputation, but sometimes the deals look just too
good to be true, especially given that there’s a fair amount of
name-brand hardware in there (such as decent ATI-based graphics cards).
However, it was only recently that I discovered (through a friend,
whose office had bought several of these machines) where a chunk of the
scam lies. Here’s a clue from the ad:
- Modem : Dedicated high speed Supanet optimised 56K modem
- Internet Access : Supanet Internet Access Preloaded
The machine comes pre-configured to access a particular ISP. This is
nothing particularly unusual. It gets a bit more awkward when you try
and delete the Supanet dial-up from the machine – apparently it can
only be done with some registry hacking, though you’re still at liberty
to add other dial-up connections. But they won’t work, because the modem is firmware-locked to Supanet access numbers and can’t dial anything else. (That’s what it means by “Supanet optimised”) The Computer Shop will help you get around this, as long as you call their £1 per minute support line (no, there’s no email address for support) and then pay £60 to have them send you a CD with unlocking software on it (oh, and the installable copy of Windows they fail to give you).
So it gives me great pleasure to tell any poor TCS customer who’s
wandered this way via Google that they can “unoptimise” their modem for
free, like this. In the meantime… Trading Standards Authority, anyone?
I’ve recently been reading a lot about latest wonder-codec being pushed for low-and-medium-sized audio use, condom HE-AAC.
It’s had some extravagant claims made for it, most notably that it can
achieve “near-CD quality stereo” at 48Kbps – which would make it more
than twice as good as MP3. Read on for some more explanations and a
horrifically-amateurish (but still revealing) test.
HE-AAC is a new version of the popular AAC codec, which is part of MPEG-4 and is most notably used by Apple for its iTunes Music Store. HE-AAC, also known under the commercial branding aacPlus, is already supported by the open-source AAC decoder FAAD2. Winamp includes this support as of yesterday’s 5.04 release, so I’m quite keen to see what this thing can actually do.
How it works
MP3 and AAC are perceptual audio compressors, which means
they do their best to spot and remove audio frequencies that the human
ear won’t notice but which still take up data space. Unfortunately,
when the going gets tough and they’re working in a tight space, they
often chop out high frequencies that the ear can hear. This is why audio aspects such as treble and speech sibilance get very messy when MP3 drops below 96Kbps.
Standard AAC, which Apple uses with added DRM, is already known to
deliver better quality at low bitrates than MP3, but the HE (High
Efficiency) version goes a step better by using a patented technique called Spectral Band Replication.
SBR specialises at dealing with those high-frequency ranges that
perceptual codecs mess up, but the cool thing is that you can bolt it
onto those codecs rather than replacing them: You let the existing
codec deal with the lower frequencies and then add SBR data which adds
the higher frequencies in a much more efficient way than the other
codec would.
For example: suppose you MP3-encode a tune with added SBR. You
generate a 48Kbps MP3 stream, which would normally sound terrible, but
you sprinkle a 16Kbps layer of SBR magic on the top. While doing that,
you ensure that the MP3 codec isn’t wasting its time with the higher
frequencies, so can put more energy (and data) into refining the lower
ones. What you end up with – if the hype is to be believed – is a
64Kbps MP3-SBR hybrid which sounds better than a 96Kbps vanilla MP3
would. Even better, this new hybrid file is still playable on vanilla
MP3 players, because they just throw away the SBR data. (Of course,
it’s not going to sound that great) So you create a new format out of
this hybrid and push it to the industry, showing how it maintains a
kind of two-way backward compatibility while achieving much better
performance for those who support it, and you call it mp3PRO.
Similarly, HE-AAC is normal AAC with added SBR.
But is it actually any good?
When I started reading about HE-AAC I was quite keen to have a listen, as I currently use my Treo 600
for mobile music with a relatively small 256MB SD card as storage, so
I’m obviously quite keen to get the best bang for my bandwidth. It
helps that I’m pretty cloth-eared when it comes to audio quality, but I
can still easily tell the difference at lower bitrates. Currently I use
80Kbps Ogg Vorbis (thanks to the excellent Pocket Tunes). If HE-AAC can give me better quality at lower bitrates, bring it on.
In Roberto Amorim’s thorough analysis,
HE-AAC comes out comfortably on top at 64k using the same Nero codec I
use below. Still, I wanted to try it for myself. (And I, um, hadn’t
found that test at the time. Given my resulting experiences, though,
I’m glad I did it anyway.) As I said, I’m cloth-eared when it comes to
evaluating audio quality, so I didn’t bother with proper scientific
methods, blind testing, and all that malarkey. To be honest, I just
wanted to take one tune from a CD, throw it through some different
codecs at a few different bitrates (48, 64 and 128, with a mixture of
Constant and Variable Bitrate encoding) and see what happened. If you
want the full empirical experience, head for Roberto’s tests. This is
just a quick muck-about, using the following software:
- Test Track: Deacon Blue‘s
“Closing Time” (because it’s got a varied range of strings, bass and
vocals, it’s an old favourite, and stop sniggering, dammit) - CD Ripper/Converter: The excellent and free dBPowerAMP Music Converter
- HE-AAC Codec: Ahead’s Nero Digital Audio Plug-In with dBPowerAMP adaptor
- MP3 Codec: LAME 3.93
- Ogg Vorbis Codec: 1.01
- Player: Winamp 5.04
Summary of test results: Vorbis quite comfortably kicked HE-AAC’s arse.
At both 48K and 64K Vorbis delivered much greater clarity for the
higher frequencies (despite all the SBR hype) and better bass too. In
fact, I found 64K VBR Vorbis so good that I’ll probably use that for
portable music from now on. But they both beat MP3 quite comfortably.
(I must once again stress the horrifically unscientific nature of this
muckabout, and given that I contradict Roberto’s much more qualified
findings, I’m not going to push it too hard. But I’m still somewhat
stumped, given that even with my untrained ears I find the difference
completely obvious.)
If you want to check out the resulting files, they’re here
– please go easy on the server and download rather than stream (unless
you just want to hear the first thirty seconds for comparison, which is
all you really need).
So what happened was there was lots of stuff I wanted to write about but I went off to Burning Man and while I was away one of J-Colo‘s power supplies had a SMEF, physician followed by one of its hard drives, ed which led to poor Dan having to field all the support calls while I was in the desert and Richard was being treated for acute pancreatitis, and so I got back and obviously I had a billion emails and loads of catching up to do but also the rather severe problem that involved not having any usable backups since our last SMEF six months previously so everything had to be manually rebuilt including this blog which I spent last night labouriously copying and pasting from Bloglines as well as setting up a RewriteMap so that all inbound links to post-January blog entries would still work (even though they’ve, um, been missing for two months now) and now my blog is working again and J-Colo has some big changes coming which should see major reliability improvements and everything’s going to be okay.
Okay? Okay.
The F-Secure blog is continuing to provide excellent value for my attention-dollar: Marketing wanted to brand some free giveaway security-related widgets, medicine but was smart enough to ask the anti-virus coders to test them first. After gaining superiority in a matter of seconds, information pills the gang went on to trash some laptops. Computer security’s about more than just software, y’know.
The F-Secure blog is continuing to provide excellent value for my attention-dollar: Marketing wanted to brand some free giveaway security-related widgets, medicine but was smart enough to ask the anti-virus coders to test them first. After gaining superiority in a matter of seconds, information pills the gang went on to trash some laptops. Computer security’s about more than just software, y’know.
Name the fairly popular, prescription fairly recent (all within two years apart from the last) hits which featured these words/names in the lyrics:
- Hector
- refectories
- shrapnel
- Munchausen
- bupkis
2 is Franz Ferdinand’s Manatee, one of the best songs ever about this rare seagoing mammal
4 is Eminem’s Cleaning Out My Closet
still stuck on the other 3 – Google, don’t fail me now…
and actually bupkis is the easiest to google for, though who knew that’s what they were actually singing?
just came to me: shrapnel is The Street’s “Fit But You Know It”
(were we supposed to post the answers here or am I spoiling it for everyone?)
Hector is that Morrissey one about “first of the gang to die” – which, indeed, appears to be its title
next challenge please!