enjoy listening to music, but yet again who doesn’t? There is always catch though — a pitfall if you like: records and files get ‘used up’ after a period of time. Obtaining new music is a time-consuming process whether it involves walking, browsing or loading CD‘s.

Since peer-to-peer (P2P)) downloads are illegal, I have been downloading a lot music from small bands’ Web pages en masse. What I do not like, I can immediately dispose of. Using the command line, I am able to download music in the background without any manual intervention, simply by spidering the Internet.

I have come to realise that I do not know the names of songs that I listen to. I rarely bother to look at the filenames or tags because it is the same time-consuming ‘luxury’ mentioned above. In most cases, I fail to remember the names of bands too. To use an extreme example, a song which I must have listened to 50+ times in past few days has been completely obscure to me up until now. To repeatedly play it, I would typically use the “jump” function followed by the string “be” (for the word “belief” contained in the song’s title). This plays the song merely at the power of will, taking no more than a second to find and play it. It all leaves song titles and artists’ names in the dark unfortunately.

While on this issue of ‘music productivity’, XMMS accelerators, for instance, are used to control the music player without changing application focus. In other words, key combinations involving SHIFT, CTRL and/or ALT work universally and affect the player’s state at any time. You can change tracks, adjust volume etc. while in the midst of writing a sentence. The mechanism which enables this is described (also visually) towards the end of an old item about Music Log Files.

I have reached what I consider to be a Utopian situation. This is analogous to have a radio station with infinite supply of music. I have the ability to skip tracks, repeat tracks and organise the music supply at great ease. Moreover, the music supply can be handled purely by robots (cron jobs), as described in an old item on music mass-downloading.

Having your name on top should take no more than 5 seconds to achieve

Copy and paste the URL below to your address bar and change YOUR_TEXT with any text of your choice.

The page functions as if it is the authentic Google homepage by using Google for all operations. One wonders how Google feel about use of their bandwidth from sources on another domain. However, this certainly benefits their overall status.

• Brought to my attention by Dr. Scott Tobkes.

lames have recently been thrown due to confessions about bad experiences with New Yanoff. New Yanoff is the successor of Yanoff, which is the well-known newsgroups reader for the Palm platform.

Let us begin with compatibility issues. New Yanoff is not compatible with some recent models of the Palm such as the LifeDrive.

Secondly, the user interface of the trial version ($24 for the registered version) is filled with many nags. It is understandable given the purpose of this trial package. Nevertheless, nags were claimed to be excessive.

On to more major flaws, the user interface is relatively unprofessional, as indicated in a Yanoff 3.0 review. Below is one screenshot that has been borrowed from this review.

Example of bad UI design

Finally, the default signature for sent messages bears citations from the bible. It works this way by default and gives no warning and indication that this is happening. To some this will be no cause for concern, but religion, much like politics, is a sensitive issue to many. This is in fact the point which initiated the flames in nntp://comp.sys.palmtops. The developer strongly defended his choice to “spread the gospel” (exact quote), which is a very controversial step among most developers (imposition of the developer’s views).

As the discussion developed, New Yanoff turned out to be a relatively disappointing piece of software that is not sufficiently reliable. GPL Yanoff, which is of course free, can still be downloaded from its Sourceforge Web site.

Cited by: PalmAddict

Slashdot on my home computer

ood old Slashdot is one of the heaviest hubs on the Web. What distinguishes Slashdot from most ‘Internet Authorities’ is that new items get added in a linear form (reverse-chronological, much like a blog) and contain links to external sites.

It is common knowledge that once an external link appears in the front page of Slashdot, it can ‘kill’ that external site within seconds. This is known as the notorious ‘Slashdot Effect’. This deadly side-effect can have an impact on many sites if they are hosted on a shared server. Slashdot will cripple such a server, if not bring it to the brink of total collapse. That is the expected outcome when a surge of (tens of) thousands of surfers hits the same server simultaneously. Large sites with multiple servers can endure the load, but otherwise, nobody benefits — neither the sites and hosts which are linked to, nor the ‘Slashdotters’.

As time went on and Slashdot grew, the need for mirrors was realised. If local (temporary) copies of the destination sites can be retained quickly enough, the bandwidth barrier is somehow circumvented. Certain site mirrors (The Network Mirror is one such Slashdot-bound/ripoff site) can gain PageRank as high as 6 without any original content, but only the reflection of Slashdot content with a crawling depth of 1 (i.e. front pages and all pages linked from the front page).

Earlier today, yet another site bit the dust. As soon as small and modest sites appear in Slashdot, they vanish from the face of this Earth. Even the mirrors to do not appear to work unless they cycle for updates frequently enough (before the servers collapse). I sometimes wonder: “News that matter, but where’s the news?”

By the way, schestowitz.com was once cited by Slashdot and endured the load thanks to its excellent Web host, Catalyst2.

here is a well-known issue with the Palm Tungsten E, which appears to have been resolved with the release of the Tungsten E2. A large number of users are have reported a continuous buzz, which makes the use of the handheld quite unpleasant, especially in low-noise environments. An on-going discussion in UseNet reveals more details.

Only yesterday, a group member stated:

The E2 doesn’t have a screen buzz, at least the two I’ve tried in different stores didn’t!

On the contrary, Colleen confessed that she was a victim of this fault:

My E2 has the buzzing noise, but only when I have my headphones in. I must admit, if I could hear it all the time, I would rip out my hair…

Yet another reader adds an opinion:

There have been a number of reports of the TE2 having screen noise also. Like with the TE, it is a rare occurrence. But when millions of units are sold ‘rare’ occurrence can mean a substantial number of units…

Lastly, let us add possible solutions to the mix:

I remember reading the buzzing sound had something to do with the processor speed so I tried out LightSpeed but it wasn’t stable enough to use on my TE. When I tried the two E2 units at two different stores I just figured that the increase in processor speed corrected the problem.

…when I changed the clock speed of the processor the buzzing went really low, almost to the point of being undetectable but the software I was using wasn’t stable…

There were more messages involved in this large on-going thread, which keeps developing at this very moment. The bottom line is that this buzz is endemic in the Tungsten E, but may affect the Tungsten E2 as well.

Cited by: PalmAddict

Yahoo have recently introduced nice features such as news delivery as RSS feeds. They now offer an extensive audio search which encompasses on-line music stores as well as smaller sites and self-promoting bands. It appears to work well because it managed to pick up some long-forgotten files — the stuff I recorded in 2002 or thereabouts. It’s all quite embarrassing, but I am flattered to find my name among the results pages. Raves and insults in the box below….

or quite some time I have been wanting to create a CSS Zen Garden style. This morning I spent about 2 hours designing a dark layout as I could no longer resist my desires. Shown above is a screenshot (Firefox 1.0.4 under Linux) which you can click to enter the actual page. As for the translucent PNG element at the top, I suspect that Internet Explorer would not render it properly. Support for transparency with a decent colour depth has always been poor in Internet Explorer (see related item).

I named the style Palm Bliss, which like any other hastily-chosen title, is a stupid name. All graphics were worked on under The GIMP version 1.2.3. The style is still considered “work in progress”, but I could not help exposing it already (despite its premature state). Knowing my past experiences, it will remain in its current form forever, never to be worked on again or even submitted. Nevertheless, I truly feel as if it was something that I had to do in order to challenge myself.

You may also wish to see an older item about Zen Garden galleries.