I found the following article quite fascinating.

Songs we hear as teenagers tend to remain lifelong favourites because they become hardwired into our memory during a critical time, a memory conference has heard.

[...]

“You recall more memories from the period of 10 to 25 [than previous or subsequent periods] and the bump has a peak between 16 and 20,” he says.

“The brain works at its optimum in that period. It’s a sponge and it soaks up everything.”

To name just a few songs that will remain with me forever: “Tonight” by Blackstreet and a couple of renditions of “I Can’t Go for It”. I tend to associate — mentally that is — album covers with certain songs that eternally stay in my head.

S part of the recent crackdown on piracy on the Web,American corporations are using politics to subvert international laws and ethics. Firstly, they ‘invade’ Sweden owing to government approval . Then, they also pose conditions to the Russians, due on Web sites that they harbour, or turn a blind eye to. Bear with me as I justify my view on this.

“How is this related to Linux or the general theme of this blog?”, you might ask. As many people have said, it’s a demonstration of the growing trend where governments assist businesses, or get manipulated by them. As one commenter in Digg said (typos corrected):

There are many who say that “they deserved it because they are violating copyrights”. We could debate for ages on copyrights… but the reason for the demonstration is not all about the copyrights. When a cooperation has the ability to manipulate a foreign governments law enforcement and government into raiding a legal business (it may not be legal in the US but US law does not apply outside the US), then theres reason to be worried. Cooperations are getting greedier and worse as time progresses. In the last decade they’ve been trying to make as much money as possbile with spending as little money as possible. In the next decade we will likely see more corporations attempting to persade governments into taking serious actions (legal or not) for their benefit, and we’re already seeing the very beginnings of this trend.

I hope this post is not perceived as redundant. Linux/Open Source is often boycotted by corporations, even with government’s assistance (through direct action or legistlation). The GPL does not serve the interests of money-making, long-standing software vendors.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

N my own eyes at least, this story is pretty remarkable as it marks a certain milsetone. Sony, being a large and proprietary-oriented brand, has opted for Open Source solutions. The news has so far it has been covered in techworld.com and computerpartner.nl. To quote:

Sony Online Entertainment is to replace some Oracle databases with software from EnterpriseDB in a vote of confidence for the open-source company. Sony is the company’s biggest customer win to date.

Oracle’s acquisition of Open Source companies was not enough to prevent the inevitable. They even tried to buy and thus eliminate MySQL, unsuccessfully so.

O you know the feeling of listening to playlists which contain assorted tracks from various different albums? More familiarly perhaps, have you ever pondered this issue of volume shifts?

The sound becomes louder and quieter as one track bounces onto the next one. Balancing the — shall we call it — ‘cross-song imbalance’ is an unnecessary nuisance. This lead to a lot of manual intervention with the volume control throughout playtime. Should music players not have the capability to adjust this on-the-fly, before playing a track? Equating in one form or another the volume baseline? Would this be done better off-line? The latter option often requires that the entire track is analysed first. One wonders which players incorporate such functionalities already.

HIS morning I got myself isolated for 3-4 hours. I spent a long time mechanically erasing unwanted music. At the end, I was 5GB leaner; around 1200 unwanted files were fully disposed of. The existence of so much ‘grabage’ is an artefact of recursive downloads and the procrastination that follows. The approach is based on the accumulation of piles of arbitrary music, then getting rid of the undesirable bits. I concentrated too much of the former part, yet the hard-drive’s capacity has reached its limits.

I finally had the opportunity to take some time off (owing to the holiday), so I got a few mandatory chores out of the way. Now that media files have been filtered, I will have fewer cases of bad music coming up when I change tracks in shuffle. mode The method of music erasure involved a few tricks to increase overall efficiency:

• Deletion from the physical disk directly via the music player (in this case XMMS)
• Deletion in batches of up to 12 files at a time
• Seeking for 5-10 seconds per file using the track poisition bar, thereby getting a sense for what tracks are unwanted and what tracks must stay
• Global shortcuts, particularly for skipping tracks
• Prompts for deletion confirmation – use the ENTER key which is adjacent to the keypad and thus nearer to the mouse. Meanwhile, the other hand (usually the left) hovers near the ALT, SHIFT and CTRL keys to take advantage of keyboard accelerators.
• Use of the playlist highlighter feature (of any) for selecting of multiple items, with the aid of the SHIFT key. This becomes natural after hours of repeated keystrokes and actions.

A big burden has been lifted off me. The result: more free space and improved ‘successful hit rate’ for music.

The next challenge which involves a mechanical-type job is organisation of my references. They tend to float around in different documents and some text files; all in a flat or inline text form, thus no semantics. One needs a better storage form, a better structure, more like a database. Putting some papers on-line has enabled me to use Web searches for quick discovery, but this is far from convenient. I want to embed everything in a BiBTeX-friendly tool. I have been planning organisation under a tool such as JabRef, which I have had installed for a while. Some time in the past I was using EndNote, but soon departed from that lock-in which involves expensive proprietary software and integration with Windows-centric programs.

Songbird teasers: pre-release screenshots

ONGBIRD is a new media-type Open Source project. It is intended to clone, at least in some sense, the popular iTunes from Apple. Songbird will offer users the ability to buy music from a variety of sources on-line. To me, this seems like amaroK with an option to spend money.

I already have amaroK (see image at the bottom) and rarely do I feel tempted to switch. I get music by running wget recursively, so I needn’t purchase anything, no matter the cost. amaroK does everything I could possibly wish for. It even comes pre-installed with KDE-oriented distributions like SuSE. GNOME users can use Rhythmbox instead, but it is poorer in terms of looks and functionality.

I have recently been told that amaroK 2.0 will be based on QT4, so with the arrival of KDE 4 (around the third quarter of 2005) expect a Windows version too. Open Source music managers could truly take off in a broad market, rather than just a niche. In fact, both amaroK and Songbird have the potential to have impact that is on par with that of Mozilla Firefox.

Related item: amaroK’s recent open review in the KDE News site

amaroK in action

MMS and Winamp, among other popular music players, begin (or have long ago begun) to lag behind more bloated applications such as iTunes and Windows Media Player. Bloated software from the giants is continuing to develop and evolve. The target audience is easily manipulated into using anything that comes along these large marketing ‘pipelines’, either pre-packaged or pre-installed.

AmaroK is a fully-featured player/playlist management suite for KDE (Linux). Believe it or not, it boasts an endless amount of features that got me overly excited. I have been toying with AmaroK for the past couple of days as if I was a 1-year-old that has just discovered baby wipes. Here are the top 10 features the way I personally perceive them:

• Lyrics of most songs can be brought up at the speed of a mouse click. This does not only apply to popular chart hits.
• Album covers are easily fetched and displayed, also at the speed of a mouse click, apparently using an Amazon service
• Smart list accumulation is handled by the application
• ‘Jump’ function (equivalent to ‘j’ in XMMS)- character patterns are searched for among all songs. Indexing makes subsequent matches immediate. For example, type in “dless” and every song in your playlist which contains that string (even part of a word) will be listed immediately for you to select.
• Universal keyboard shortcuts like the ones XMMS offers. The user can change track, for example, while desktop focus is placed upon another program.
• Show all songs from the same artist, often subcategorised by albums while any song gets played
• Media library management – breakdown of songs to form trees of artists, albums, or genres
• iPod synchronisation built-in and included in the core of the application. I rank this feature low as I use a Palm Tungsten for MP3′s, not an iPod. For iPod owners this might be considered a “must-have” feature.
• Popularity analysis – for each song, statistics are recorded, e.g. time last listened to, time first listened to and related songs/artists. That feature makes my log files merely obsolete
• Transparent on-screen display (OSD), just like in XMMS

The following bulletpoint cannot properly be labeled “features”, but they are also worth listing, perhaps as “selling points”:

• Rich graphical user interface, which is highly customisable. This includes some 32-bit transparencies.
• External small GUI, much like that which is offered by XMMS/Winamp. This enables the user to control playlist flow without taking up plenty of screen space.
• Various plug-ins I have not had the luxury time to play with, yet

On File Type Support

Support for MP3 files is not build-in when SuSE 9.3 initially gets installed, which is a PITA (setting aside that primitive, buggy variant of Real Player 10, which has spyware tendencies). The same applies to Fedora Core and has become a major notoriety. Other distributions like Ubuntu are no exception.

For SuSE, one needs to get update and recompile the multimedia components with MP3 support. This is something I discovered when I set SuSE up a few days ago. That possibly explains the declined pace of blog posts, by the way.

As for Ubuntu, XMMS with MP3 support can be trivially installed using the package manager called Synaptic. By default, older versions of Ubuntu (at the least) come with no application that handles the MP3 format. That is just a painful reality as far as I can gather.

AmaroK supports a variety of formats including WAV, OGG and the like. In fact, virtually any filetype is supported, provided that it is understood by the underlying multimedia layers.