Category Archives: Music

Albums, concerts, playlists, musicians, and the joy of listening.

Dave Matthews Stand Up

Music, Rant

“Crash into me…” If you buy the new Dave Matthews Band Stand Up CD, do not put it in your Windows computer. I did and it popped up an annoying software installation and I said no to it just like I did 9 years ago when I first saw that happen with Fiona Apple’s Tidal. It then ejected the CD. First strike! I just wanted to listen to it. So I did the logical thing and pushed the CD drive back in, and the CD spun up and then the computer crashed and rebooted. Needless to say, this is a very bad thing.

Bizarre Windows Behavior

Humor, Microsoft, Music

So I’m sitting in bed on the Powerbook doing some editing. My music stops and I look up just in time to hear the Windows-shutting-down noise and see my main desktop turning off. My first thought is something is wrong with the power, which is why the desktop would be acting funny but the PC laptop is just fine. I was going to turn the music off anyway so I keep working. Then beeps and noises start coming from my laptop. The laptop (which has never had problems, even with SP2) looks like it’s shutting down too. I get to my desk in time to see it close the unsaved documents I was working on and start rebooting. It totally ignored the dialogs that were popping up, I couldn’t click or stop anything. Totally helpless. Now I’m in panic mode. Did one of the computers get infected with some new virus and they’re going to keep rebooting? Is some joker on our wifi network messing around? I quickly go to my router status page from my Mac and see just the normal clients are connected. I check the logs on the router and there’s no unusual activity. By this time the desktop PC has rebooted and I decide to log in to see what happens. It boots up normally at first, but then everything starts blinking and explorer.exe seems to be stopping and starting every 3 seconds. The laptop just came back up, so I login to that. A little icon pops up in the taskbar telling me a security update has been installed that required rebooting my computer.

THANK YOU MICROSOFT! I didn’t need those hours of work anyway. I feel so much safer now because I don’t have to worry about evil crackers getting to my data because I can be certain that you will mess it up first. God. There goes my weekend.

I just ctrl+alt+deleted out of the desktop because it was getting painful to watch. The laptop seems fine but I’m so disgusted I don’t even want to touch it. Just earlier this evening I was reading Scoble and thinking MS had some pretty decent stuff in the pipeline I could see myself buying, like the OQO. Not anymore.

The desktop started the login screensaver, but now appears to be totally frozen. I’m just going to turn it and the laptop off. I can see in the morning if maybe this was a virus/worm pretending to be a security update. This weekend will be spent getting valuable data off NTFS partitions and reformatting hard drives. Thinking back I’ve been a user of Microsoft software for about 75% of my life, I grew up with it. Now I’ve grown out of it.

I’m actually kind of sad. Yes it’s 4 AM. Yes I’m going to have to recreate the lost work. Yes I save, and thankfully it looks like I only lost about fifteen hundred words.

Update: Scoble apologizes. He reminds people to save often, personally I hadn’t really left the computer, I was just about 6 feet away. It’s a laptop so I never worry about power outages, it’s highly locked down and hasn’t crashed in at least a year. I wasn’t using Word 2003, even though I own it, most of the work was in open XHTML/PHP documents and a bit in a browser window on my local wiki. I can live with the fact that a hard drive might crash, or lightning may strike, or any number of extraordinary circumstances might cause me to lose data. I can’t reconcile that it was due to a feature of an operating system, a feature I was told to turn on to stay safe, and a feature that bugs you when it isn’t activated. I trusted the computer because of the improvements to stability Microsoft had made in XP and SP2. Trust like that is slow to build and easy to break.

Trip Begins

Music

I’m hoping to blog this trip better than my last one, so here goes. I got through security without any troubles and began the trek to my gate which was quite literally the furthest in the airport. I got here find but my shoulder hurt a bit from my carry-on, so I was glad to finally be able to sit down. This part of the airport looks like a mall, just with more places to sit. The food smells great. Anyway as I sat down and opened the Powerbook to write this entry I noticed my pants were sitting a little low — I had left my belt at security. Half an hour later I’m now back where I started. At least I got a little exercise. 🙂 This is going to be my first long trip since I got the iPod and I’m looking forward to enjoying good music and not having to worry about battery life. I’ll see you guys again when I get to the Golden State.

Random Photo Returns

Gallery, Meta, Music

The random photos are back. I wrote a quick hack to loop over every photo in every album and read its relevant info into a MySQL table. Now instead of taking a few seconds to get a random photo using the Gallery data stores, it uses a single query and takes a millisecond. Long-time visitors to the site remember that the random image in the corner has always been one of my favorite things about this site, but as the photolog grew to a thousand, two thousand, and then nine thousand images it slowed down more and more. I had to start caching it so it would change once every 15 seconds, then every minute, then every 5 minutes, and then I just manually rotated it for a while. Finally I put the random image out of its misery.

Now it’s fully dynamic, every page you view is completely unique, just like you.

(There goes my bandwidth.)

RSS Bandwidth Usage

Design, Music

Robert Scoble looks at RSS bandwidth usage but unfortunately doesn’t give real numbers. There are a couple of important points in looking at HTML vs. RSS bandwidth usage, some brought up in his comments but I’ll review here:

  1. RSS is not a transport mechanism, and these problems should be handled on the HTTP level. This is faster, better tested, works with caches and proxies, et cetera.
  2. I don’t care if an aggregator checks my feed every 5 minutes, if they support HTTP properly (last-modified headers) the load is neglible for me and them. The bandwidth used each time is around 250 bytes.
  3. Speaking of HTTP, gzip encoding works just as well for RSS feeds.
  4. Bloated HTML in full content feeds will make for bloated feeds. We’ve upped our standards, up yours.
  5. Adjust your number of items to match your posting schedule. If you update two or three times a week, you don’t need 20 items in your news feed, try five. If you update a lot like myself or Robert you run the opposite risk: people who don’t check your feed for a while might actually miss content. I talked to aggregator developers a few months ago about a way to address this, perhaps we need to look at this again.
  6. A visit to a homepage like this generates a lot of requests. First you get the HTML, then your browser requests the CSS files, then it gets all the images, probably about a dozen of them. RSS is generally a single request, and then images embedded in posts may be requested later if that entry is viewed.

That out of the way, how about some real numbers? I can give the best stats for photomatt.net because my RSS feed is on a separate subdomain. Here’s bandwidth usage for August:

photomatt.net – HTML and images, et cetera
56.0 GB
xml.photomatt.net – RSS and other variants
1.7 GB

The ratio for July was similar, 77.6/2.0 GB, I guess I lost some readers in the summer slowdown.

My front page is an average of 17K HTML and about 30K of images, so lets say 50K. The images and CSS are all cached, but I don’t output the proper headers on the HTML because it would be a pain. I would have to check the time of the latest post, check the latest updated link, make sure there’s not a random photo, basically go through a lot of trouble that isn’t really worth it. (When I was caching everything with Staticize the page was stored in its entirety so I sent correct headers, but I don’t bother with that anymore because everything is so fast it doesn’t really make a difference.) All that said, I’m happy with the level of optimization, my HTML and CSS is as streamlined as I want it to be.

My feed, on the other hand, is completely self-contained. I can send headers with confidence because I know everything in that file and can say authoritively when it was last changed. (Actually WordPress handles it all automatically, I don’t worry about it.) Most of the aggregators that hit my site support this. I don’t think about it and they don’t think about it, HTTP just works. My feed has 25 items because of my posting frequency, more than twice the number of items most feeds have. The feed is usually around 10K, and as I already mentioned it’s only one request.

Here’s the kicker: my RSS feed is requested 3 times for every time my front page is loaded. So a HTML page with 1/3 the traffic is using over 30 times the bandwidth. What was that about scalability again?