BACKUPS ARE GOOD

By Josh Highland in hardware, software

I should have posted this last thursday, but in the Christmas rush, I havent found time until now…

Last week, I was at home working on my computer (creating a new version of notPopular.com actually) when my system froze. It was a bad kind of freeze. The kind of freeze where you know something major just went wrong.

I hit the power button to reboot. The bios posted with no problem. Then my raid controller came online…


CRITICAL ERROR: ONE OR MORE OF THE DISKS IN THE ARRAY HAS FAILED

Press esc to continue booting

HOLY CRAP! One of my drives died! THANK GOD for RAID


Side note on RAID:

RAID stands for: redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks

RAID is a data storage scheme using several hard drives to gain increased data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput or capacity compared to single drives.

There are many configurations of RAID to achieve different tasks. For me the best solution was "RAID 1" which is mirroring. Simply, one drive mirrors another. I had two identical drives in my computer but the computer would only see one, but any data stored, would be saved onto both drives. This allows my data to be redundant and fault tolerant in case oh say…. one of my drives fails; I have an exact copy of the data, and no down time.

ok ok ok, back to my story… OH CRAP! One of my drives died!

I was stunned, but I wasnt worried, that why I have backups and use RAID 1, for a situation just like this. In the last 13 years, I havent had drive just stop working. I always heard about it happening to people, but never me.

I booted into windows, and everything seemed the same, and it should, to windows I only had one drive, it didnt know about the hardware raid controller. Awesome, I didnt lose a single file. I immediately started to back up my files onto DVD and onto a larger external hard drive.

Long story short. If you build your own computer or are serious about securing your data get a raid controller and an extra hard drive. You can buy a really good RAID controller card for under $100. My high end motherboards now offer integrated RAID controllers.

I also have an external drive and use syncback, as recommended from lifehacker.com

BACKUPS ARE GOOD

IE7 with ClearType

By Josh Highland in internet, software

I installed IE7 with ClearType.
ClearType is a technique to smooth out text and make it look softer to the eye.

It sounded like a good idea, then I relaized that it didnt just effect IE, but windows explorer, my computer, control panel, and basically all the other internal windows areas.

It wouldnt be so bad if it didnt make all the text on the screen look like it had a slight blur to it, It was annoying and hurt my head after a while.

I tracked down the way to turn it off in windows XP:

  1. Open IE7
  2. Open Tool Menu
  3. Click Internet Options
  4. Click Advanced Tabs
  5. Under Multimedia, clear the Use ClearType checkbox
  6. Click OK X 2

Making better mp3 files with iTunes

By Josh Highland in music, software, tutorials

I am an mp3 snob, and I am not ashamed to say it.

I ripped my first mp3 file in 1994. I ripped them at 128 kbps, with no ID3 tag information. I did this with most of my cds

and any other cd I could get a hold of for years. Back then that was the way to go. Most people didnt have computers, forget

about portable mp3 players.

Flash forward to today. If someone hasnt heard the term "mp3" or "iPod" yet, they have been living under a rock, or in a time

warp. There isnt a person that I know who doesnt have some music on their computer in some format.

When it comes to music player, the iPod wins, hands down (at least until the zune comes out… hey, im hopeful for it).

iTunes is the defacto standard for loading up your ipod with music. Most people drop in a cd and import (rip) it without

thinking. All they know is that they now have the music on their computer and iPod, to most people its all just computer

voodoo magic.

Default settings on most things SUCK, including iTunes.
Lets look at the default settings of the itune cd import.
first off, iTunes doesnt defaulty rip cds into mp3 files. It uses an apple specific AAC format.

Why AAC files sucks:

  1. non Standard format, very few players and devices support it (mostly apple only)
  2. DRM : digital rights managements. In english, rules they say how you can and cant use that file
  3. Most of the time they are very lossy and sound horrible (high quality is 128kbps)

Why MP3 files rule:

  1. Standard format that almost any audio device can read, from computers to car stereos
  2. NO DRM : no one can tell you what to do with them once its in MP3 format, you are home free
  3. Capabable of producing very high quality sound

Terminology: BitRate
In a nutshell, the amount of data that is pushed out over an period of time. The more data being pushed, the more detail the

audio file can hold. The more detail, the better the sound.


Common Bitrates and their real life equivalents

32 kbps am radio
96 kbps fm radio
128 kbps very low cd quality
160 kbps low cd quality
192 kbps near cd quality
256 kbps high cd quality
320 kbps very high cd quality

looking at the list above, how would you want your cds transferred to your computer? Most software defaults to 128 kbps.

Personally I can tell you if a file is anything less then 192 kbps from listening to it. Im of the school of thought that if

I am go to take the tile to convert my cds into digital formats to listen to them, they should sound reasonably good. For me

reasonable is anything 192 kbps and higher.

With higher bit rates comes higher disk space usage though. In the space you can store 10 songs at 128 kbps, you might be

able to store 5 – 7 songs at 192 kpbs. personally I would rather 1000 songs that sounds awesome on my mp3 player then 1500

that just sound ok. A great combination of size and quality is VBR (variable bit rate) encoded MP3 files.

Basically when there is a part of a song, like a half second pause, you dont need that at super high quality, so if the blank

part of the song has a bit rate of 128 kbps, who cares, When there is a lot of detail to the music, the MP3 file is encoded

at a high rate, like 256 kbps. The net result is a song that changes rates hundreds if not thousands of times, ending up with

a song that sounds great and takes up a reasonable amount of space. Any person who is serious about their music should rip

High quality VBR MP3 files. end of story.

Below is how to make iTunes record High quality VBR MP3 files

  1. In iTunes, go to "edit->preferences" on the tool bar

  2. go to the advanced tab and select "importing", we want to change these settings, the default ones suck

  3. Select the MP3 encoder for importing, then pick the Custom setting

  4. You should get a pop up window what lets you adjust settings, select 192 knps as the bit rate, check use VBR, and set that to

    High

  5. I like to keep my mp3 files away from my other documents, so I changed where the library is. I also like to have iTunes

    organize the folders. iTunes will create a directories in the following manor. ArtistName/AlbumName/trackNumber trackname.mp3

Multiple Libraries in iTunes 7

By Josh Highland in music, software, tutorials

Yesterday I got a phone call from my friend Jeff. He had recently bought a video ipod for himself and some nanos for his daughters.

His question to me was how to keep his music seperate from their music, basically meaning seperate libraries. At first I told him that I didnt think it was possible, but I would look into it.

A few google searches later I had the answer. In iTunes 7 it is possible to have seperate libarys. To create and switch libraries, you have to hold down the shift key and then open itunes. Instead if it launching, it will present you with some options.





Now when My friend want his music, he just has to open his library, His daughters will do the same thing, but only have access to their library.

Its a cool feature, but a freaking stupid way to access it. Way to go apple I thought you cared about usability. There is nothing usable about having to hold down a special key when opening and application so you can access a new library.

IE DOM : WTF!

By Josh Highland in internet, javascript, software, web 2.0

I have been working on a help documentation system at work.
There are roughly 50,000 HTML files to deal with (yes 50 thousand).
The html files have a pretty decent structure, but they are by no means XHTML.

I dont have access to a web development language like php, cfm, for asp or this project to insert
the site navigation, page headers and footers, So I decided to go with some sweet web 2.0 un obtrusive javascript.

to make life easier for myself, I had the authors of the help system insert a single line into the head of each HTML file.
The line was a call to a javascript file. That javascript then used the DOM to insert all the appropriate CSS and other JS files I needed to make the pages look clean, and do what I needed them to do.

Things looked great in FireFox. Life was good until I loaded the site into Internet Explorer.
My beautiful project looked like a pile of crap, no styles, no javascript, just a stupid javascript error.

IE isnt known for its script debugging (another reason to no use IE). It took me literally hours to track down the problem.

I was doing this for all the css files (4 of them)

	var tmpElm = document.createElement("style");
	tmpElm.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
	tmpElm.appendChild(document.createTextNode("/some/directory/sweetness.css);"));
	document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(tmpElm);

Its clean, simple unobtrusive javascript.
create a style element, add the right attribute to it, add value to the style tag, then append it to the page head.
straight forward stuff.

Like I said, FireFix had no problem with it. After doing tons of test, i realized that IE didnt like me appending a style tag to the head!
Then I found this:

IE won't allow document.createElement('style')
If you try to add style declarations in the head of a document, IE borks at the name 'style' – "unexpected call to method or property access".

http://www.quirksmode.org/bugreports/archives/2006/01/IE_wont_allow_documentcreateElementstyle.html

IE gets confused between the head element <style> and the object property .style!

So I spend all that time debugging my code, which was perfectly fine, because IE is retarded and doesnt know the difference between <style> and .style!
WTF!

I removed all that sweet un obtrusive code and used this instead:

	document.write("<style type="text/css">@import url(/some/directory/sweetness.css");

I hate using document.write() these days, but it works in both IE and FF now.
My life sucks some times.