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Archive for September, 2007

Anatomy of the iTunes library

I’ve been thinking of backing up my computer to do a fresh installation of OS X. I do this frequenty to ensure that the speed of my 6 year old PowerBook stays up to par with my current demand.

I’ve been noticing lately that the price of external hard drives have been dropping and I’ve been considering picking up one for back-up purposes beyond my biannual wipe-out. While doing this I want to keep my iTunes music intact. This includes playlists, ratings, album artwork, iPod settings etc.

This article will go over the structure and possibilities of the iTunes playlist. It should be mentioned that you should always create a back-up of any file that means enough to you before you “tweak” it.

First let’s find the file. The iTunes library is an xml file that normally sits on the local user documents on the hard drive. In a Mac running OSX head to /userX/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml (the xml may be hidden) and on a PC with Windows its in \Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music Library.xml

Now let’s get into the nitty gritty. Before opening the file make sure to open it in a plain text editor. DO NOT USE MS WORD. I recommend TextWrangler (OS X) and Edit Pad (Windows). Both offer a free and very usable version of the software.

The first few lines of the XML give a head’s up of what’s going on behind the scenes of your program:

      Major Version1 Minor Version1 Application Version7.0.2 Features1 Show Content Ratings Music Folderfile://localhost/Volumes/max/itunes/ Library Persistent IDD5A292963EC7CAEB Tracks 
  • This shows what version of iTunes your running (in my case 7.0.2)
  • I am allowing the program to show my ratings.
  • I also have my library stored on a network hard drive called “max”. In “max” is a folder called “iTunes”. This is where all of my music is stored (more on that later).
  • The Library Perisistant ID is where my library resides (in computer terms).

Now onto the tracks:

10236  Track ID10236 NameKarma Police ArtistRadioHead AlbumOK Computer GenreRock KindMPEG audio file Size6278920 Total Time261616 Track Number6 Date Modified2006-05-10T07:55:14Z Date Added2006-05-25T23:24:24Z Bit Rate192 Sample Rate44100 Play Count4 Play Date3258238538 Play Date UTC2007-04-01T06:15:38Z Rating60 Persistent ID57318355222A2A50 Track TypeFile Locationfile://localhost/Volumes/max/itunes/RadioHead/OK%20Computer/06%20Karma%20Police.mp3 File Folder Count4 Library Folder Count1

Boy, that’s mouthful. It’s easy to take in though. Let’s break it down:

  • The track ID is the unique number of the track in the library.
  • In this case it was the 10,236th track put in.
  • The name of the track is “Karma Police” from Radiohead’s OK Computer CD.
  • The genre is Rock. Next comes the type of file it is. I have a majority of my files in MP3 format (or MPEG audio).
  • How big is the mp3?
  • That’s what’s next. The total time.
  • This is the 6th track on the CD.
  • I last modified the file on May 10, 2006 and added to the library on May 25, 2006.
  • The mp3 was encoded at 192k at a sample rate of 44.1k. With the price of hard drive space I don’t go below 192k anymore. The higher the bit rate, the better the sound and the bigger the file.
  • I’ve played the file 4 times.
  • The last time I played this was on April 1, 2007.
  • The 60 rating is out of 100. In this case 3 out of 5 stars.
  • The persistent ID stays intact on every entry of the XML. Hence the name.
  • The file location is next.

If I have not explained anything, it means I do not have enough working knowledge of the entry.

Playlists anyone?

Namemellow Playlist ID37308 Playlist Persistent ID1A8DDF9F540360F5 All Items Playlist Items   Track ID2166   Track ID2166   Track ID2286

Once you get the hang of tracks, the playlists are cake.

  • The name of this playlist is called “mellow”
  • The unque Playlist ID and Persistant ID come next
  • It will show all items, then the
  • Playlist items. (this simply calls back to the Track ID in the library. The items repeat until the playlist ends.

Now why I am writing this? Well once you know how something works the more likely you are less afraid of it and can make it work for you. Why should you have to re-rip or reimport all of you songs from that remote drive and loose you ratings, playlists, and other related material?

  1. All you have to do it install iTunes on your new hard drive and make a back-up of the new XML file.
  2. Then, with the program closed, paste in the old XML file with your data on it.
  3. Then open up the file in a plain text editor and do a find and replace to the location of your files (let’s say on that network drive).
  4. Relaunch iTunes and your files are right there with no crazy !s next to them.

I hope this has proved helpful to anyone wanting to know more about what goes on behind the scene of iTunes.

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Laptop Journal: Toshiba Satellite A135-S4656

I’ve had this laptop for about 3 weeks and here’s what I’ve run into so far…

When I was in the market for a Windows-based PC I figured I’d go with a laptop. Prices have been dropping and performance didn’t seem to be too much of an issue for what I was planning on doing with it. The Toshiba Satellite A135-S4656 went on sale a Best Buy for $349 and jumped on it.

With an 80GB hard drive, 520 Celron, and 512 MB of ram I thought this would be good enough for some programming I was planning on doing along with the low resource e-mail and www surfing.

Let me tell you about after I brought it home:

Microsoft Vista: Vista seemed to be a cool OS at first. They’ve built in some added “security” to the OS. After a while that security got annoying, but I was able to turn it off. The OS was fine, as long as you don’t want to run anything else on it.

I tried running the iTunes installation 4 times to no avail. A confirmation to run the install came and went with no further.

I do some podcasting for Addpile.com and use a Blue Snowball USB mic. I would plug the mic in, Vista would recognize it but there would be no indication that the OS recognized the mic.

With these key and other frustrations I decided to try Ubuntu Linux on the laptop.  I ran a dual boot setup and was unable to load the proper drivers in Ubuntu for sound.  So Ubuntu was not in the cards for me.  Enter Windows XP.

I formatted the drive to see if I could run XP.  I know that XP will install iTunes and recognize my microphone.  It’s too bad that Toshiba made this laptop just for Vista.  Toshiba do not offer any drivers for this laptop to run Windows XP.  Another I should have looked at before buying this laptop.

Next came the memory.  The 512 MB of RAM was not able to run Vista.  There were countless moments that system choked upon program start-ups and other functions (save, export, etc).  I wanted to upgrade to the maximum 2 GB to run Vista smoother.   Again I chose Best Buy because they had a good deal.  Again, I struck out.  Both sticks of RAM I bought did not work.  The package I bought had “Toshiba” as a brand of laptop it would work with and the RAM speed would work.  A call to Toshiba tech support about the RAM didn’t help.  They wanted me to use their e-commerce site to buy the parts.

Next was the big one (and the one I’m currently in).  After my failed XP install I wanted to restore everything back to the factory setting.  The factory default using the Toshiba Recovery Wizard is very slow. It took the better part of 4 hours to set everything back to normal on the hard drive.  That did not include the Vista install!

After 4 hours of formatting and (I thought) partitioning the hard drive the computer rebooted.  Then I got a “hard disk error: bad partition”.  I tried to run the TRW again and that did not help.  I again called Tech Support.  They advised me to go to my local UPS Store (aka Mailboxes Etc) to drop the laptop off to get shipped to Texas for repair.  They told me it would take 5-7 business days to repair the hard drive. They would pay for shipping.
I would gather that I had a hardware issue with the drive, not a partition problem.  I’ll keep everyone posted on what I find.

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Comcast speaks out on “heavy users”

Don’t worry, your crazy Aunt Tillie won’t get pulled off of the internet, unless she’s a fraction of a percent of Comcast users.

In the past few days there has been a flurry of discussion online about the policy of bandwidth caps by cable/internet provider Comcast. The reports have brought up a few things, but mostly it has to do with the 90GB cap per month some users were reaching that caused a stir.

The terms of the policy of use with Comcast is vague, which is no surprise.  The surprise came when they started enforcing it, which then scared some heavy users of the service.

A spokesman for Comcast wanted to put some rumors to rest.  Charlie Douglas, Comcast’s director of corporate communications for online and voice services, told ArsTechnica, “More than 99.99% of our customers use the residential high-speed Internet service as intended, which includes downloading and sharing video, photos and other rich-media,”  He went on to say, “[Our] policy is to proactively contact the customer via phone to work with them and address the issue.”

Comcast, being a company looking at the bottom line has done something wise: Rather than kill the contract right away with a user they ask that they bump up their service to reflect the amount of bandwidth they are using.  The “commercial grade” package includes more bandwidth among other nice little products you don’t have as a customer.  The package ranges from $95 to $160.

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Google pays $1 billion a year in “click fruad”

Things must be going pretty good at Google.  It seems that the web giant pays $1 billion a year in “click fraud” or false clicks on it’s ad services.

Google’s AdWords programs were a relief to the banner ads of a few years ago.  The service paired text based ads with the content of the page being visited.  When a visitor clicks on an ad the web host gets paid.  This works great for Google, webmasters, and surfers.  Not so fast.

Google says less than 10% of the ads showed on AdWords are invalid.  That adds up to about $100 million a year in revenue the company can not make.  If the link does not work, Google doesn’t charge the advertiser so Google “eats” those invalid click-throughs.

Google settled a lawsuit last July (2006) for $90 million and about $60 million in credits to its advertisers in credits for click-fraud. Although spokespeople at Google say they are taking click-fraud “very seriously” they aren’t hurting with all that lost revenue.
Google has the power, money, and technology to take care of these click-frauds, but doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot about it.

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Comcast clarifies it’s ‘excessive use’ policy

There have been stories floating around online for a few weeks about how Comcast has shut subscribers internet service down due to excessive use.  To date there is no policy written down to clarify what that means.

The contract, which can always change, that Comcast has with its users only spells out “excessive use” as a reason to shut off service.

Now a spokesman for Comcast has clarified that “excessive usage”means.  Charlie Douglas explained that the threshold of “excessive usage” would have to be a subscriber downloading the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures, or 13 million emails a month before service gets shut down.

Although not clarifing the amount of bandwidth this does make things seem promising to users of the service, who before had no idea if they were pushing themselves out of a contract.

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Are you paying digital prices for analog cable?

The trend over the past few years for cable companies has been “going digital”.  You’ve seen your bill “going digital” too, but how do you know your not watching an analog channel and paying for digital?

First a quick lesson:  You could use a third-party converter box or better yet the tuner in your TV and hook into the cable system to get channels 2-99.  Some systems like TiVo allow you to tune into the digital band (above 100) for your service.  Cable companies provide you with their own boxes that have their own mapping of channels.  This would mean that a non-cable company box (like a TiVO) may tune into channel 212 and find The History Channel but the same TV with a cable co. box tunes into 212 and gets PBS-HD.

If you’re seeing a trend, stick with it.  On your bill you pay for digital service without the box.  Those boxes of course come with a added fee.  The service is what matters here.  You are paying for digital service and still getting analog.

How can you tell the difference?  Sometimes just looking at the channel helps.  If you’re eyes can’t pick up that you’re seeing a good analog channel you can always tune to the diagnostic channel on your cable company’s system.  If you have a box like TiVO it may seem like your recordings are strange.  With TiVo there is a screen you can enter to see if you are getting a digital signal or not.

Please make sure your are getting what you pay for, otherwise the cable company will keep charging you that “digital” bill and you’ll be stuck watching that analog programming.

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Installing Apache on Vista

Like Digg but can never get on the the front page? 

Try AddPile, user powered news site with a weekly podcast. 

So I picked up a laptop the other week and like any other technogeek I wanted to see if Apache would run on the version of Vista on the new computer. This version was Home Basic, but seemed to do the job. Here’s the steps I took to get it running:

NOTE: These instructions on for educational purposes only. I do not hold any responsibility for any fowl things that happen on your computer. I also don’t take responsibility for the fall of music sales due to file sharing networks. Please make sure you have admin rights on Vista before you start.

  1. Grab a copy of the Apache installer apache_2.2.4-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi. I downloaded to a directory I could easily navigate to in the Command Prompt (see step 3). I saved it in c:\setup.
  2. Turn off the User Access Control (UAC) in Vista. If you’ve used Vista for 25 minutes you’ve come across it. That’s the program that keeps asking you if it’s OK to install a program, or delete a file, or take a leak (OK maybe not the last one). Here’s how to do that:
    1. Start > Control Panel
    2. User Accounts
    3. Click “Turn User Accounts Control on or off”
    4. Uncheck “Use User Account Control”
    5. Click OK
    6. Restart Windows (this one’s important).
  3. Once you’ve rebooted head over to “Command Prompt” and run it as Administrator. In my time with Vista I’ve found that going to Start->Search and typing in “Command Prompt” works. Now right click on the shortcut and select “Run As Administrator”.
  4. Now navigate to the directory you’ve saved the .msi file to.
  5. Type in “apache_2.2.4-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi” and let the installer do it’s thing. You will be prompted to put in some data, but that can be changed in the httpd.conf file later.
  6. Windows will try to block port 80 (the default port) for Apache. When prompted by Windows Firewall say “Unblock”.
  7. By default Apache will run pages out of the “C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs” folder. If you want to change this, like I did, create a new directory on your PC (I used C:\www\) copy all of the files in the “C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\” directory on move it to your desired directory.
  8. Now open up the file called “C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\httpd.conf” in a plain text editor.
  9. For the sake of speed I used a “Replace All” function to change all my settings. Replace “Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2″ with “your_directory“. Again I used “www”.
  10. Now head to your directory and open the file in “your_directory\index.html” in a plain text editor. Where it says “It Works!” change it to read something else.
  11. Although you can restart Apache in the Vista Program Menu I just decided to restart the computer. Heck, I had 15 updates running before I had to reboot anyway. This one’s your choice.
  12. Open up a web browser and type in “localhost” in the address bar. The text you changed “It Works!” to should now be showing.
  13. Sit back and relax. While your doing that, think of some more devious things you will be doing after you get this running.

Like Digg but can never get on the the front page? 

Try AddPile, user powered news site with a weekly podcast. 

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Cable companies must support analog TV until 2012

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has unanimously to ensure that cable companies provide an analog signal to subscribers well beyond the digital over-the-air deadline.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was quoted as saying, “If the cable companies had their way, you, your mother and father, or your next door neighbor could go to sleep one night after watching their favorite channel and wake up the next morning to a dark fuzzy screen.”

The affected people in Martin’s quote would be the many people who have yet to pick up a digital TV when the February 2009 deadline comes for the digital transition.

The FCC has taken measures to help the 40 million Americans who still receive over-the-air broadcasts by setting out a plan to help buy digital to analog converter boxes.  Now the FCC has voted to make sure the cable companies do the same for all local broadcasts.
In February 2009 cable companies can use two signals from broadcasters: A digital standard definition (SD) or a digital high definition (HD) signal.  As of now neither will work with an analog TV (ala Martin’s remarks).  Cable companies can choose either one of the signals to show their subscribers.  The SD choice would rewire the provider with sending 3 versions of the same signal down their lines (taking up much needed bandwith) or provide a converter box for the SD signal (which may be more costly).
When this new rule is up in 2012 the FCC will review how things are going and make a new decision.

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What if the Simpsons met Star Wars

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Mr. T on (80s) Fashion

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