John's Recount

How I use Google Apps

gaelicwizard — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 19:18:00 -0400

I use Google Apps as my e-mail service for gaelicWizard.net. Here’s why and what-for.

Gmail

Gmail is almost the best e-mail service ever. This is not actually saying much, though. Most e-mail systems merely replicate a directory tree. A directory tree is just not a good way of storing human-centric information. Gmail ditches this. The storage of e-mail is abstracted away. Gmail doesn’t talk about storing e-mail. Gmail talks about organising e-mail, using labels.

It also integrates certain little features that most e-mail clients ignore entirely, or support as an afterthought. One such example is threading. Gmail groups all messages into “conversations.” Always. Labels apply to conversations, not individual messages, so that you can’t forget to label them.

Unfortunately, Gmail lacks a few obvious features and at least one not-so-obvious,-but-would-be-wicked-useful-to-me feature. For example, Gmail’s filters can only match a very limited set of headers. Fortunately, list and delivered-to are included in that set. Unfortunately, most everything else isn’t.

Catch All

The killer feature for me would be, sadly, rather niche. I use Gmail’s catch-all feature in order to receive e-mail addressed to any address which end up at my domain. This means that I have absolute control over everyone who wants to send me e-mail.

Example: I sign up for Formspring. I tell them my e-mail address is John.Formspring@…. Then, if I ever receive a message addressed to that address which is not directly from Formspring, I would know that Formspring sold my e-mail address to spammers. Even better: I can block that entire e-mail address, and only the spammers and Formspring lose contact with me. (I should note that this has never happened with Formspring; its just an example.)

NeXTSTEP

Gmail does this. What I want Gmail to do is one step further. I want Gmail to filter based on the incoming address, automatically. I can set up filters, and I do, but I have to set up a filter manually for each incoming address. I want my e-mail system to automatically parse the delivered-to header, tokenise the domain-dependent portion, drop the “John”, and use the rest as a label.

I could achieve this with procmail(1), but I would need to route my e-mail through a system running procmail. That would mean no Gmail. I don’t want to lose all the other benefits of Gmail.

Blogging for RWU Law

gaelicwizard — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:55:00 -0400

Update

I’m gunna be blogging for my law school. The blog will be targeted at prospective students, so it might be interesting to some of you out there in blogger land.

I’ll put up a link to the blog once I know the URL. Here’s what should be the starting-content on the new blog.

Bio

I’m not an honour student. I’m not on Law Review. I’m a regular joe schmoe. Well, I’m a regular law student, at least. I didn’t graduate from high school. I spent five years at a community college. When I transferred to the University of California for undergrad, I majored in Philosophy, with a co-major in Law and Society. Now, I’m a 2L.

Three Weeks In

I’m sitting here contemplating my position on the first day of the fourth week of my 2nd year; the day after labour day.

Although one semester seems like a long time, and two is twice as long, law school goes by fast. I already need to be planning for summer internships and it’s barely even September! I didn’t internet last summer since I went on the London Study Abroad trip and needed at least some time for my wife (i.e., to travel to visit the in-laws). So, I’m feeling a bit pressured as to what to do with my 2nd (and last) summer of law school.

The coursework itself, however, is much more manageable this time around. Only one of my professors seems to want to “make sure” that a student never comes unprepared twice. (First year, all my professors seemed to go out of their way to impress upon us the importance of being prepared.) Combined with the fact that we’re mostly all still smarting from last year’s emphasis on preparedness and it means for a more fluid lecture. The professors seem to sense this, and so when a student isn’t prepared, they’re much more willing to give him/her the benefit of the doubt and move on to another ~~victim~~student.

Don’t be confused, though: I have hundreds of pages to read every single day. That’s not really as scary as it sounds, but it’s nothing to sneeze at. Speaking of reading, I’ve got some to go do.

Dropbox

gaelicwizard — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:10:00 -0400

I tried [Dropbox]. The promise of working cross device file sync sounded really intriguing, but the final straw was [Elements]. Elements is a great app. I purchased, downloaded, and launched it. I signed up for Dropbox right there, then downloaded Dropbox onto both my laptop and my desktop.

Installation was drag-and-drop. From what I’ve heard, the sync works wonderfully. However, when I first launched the app on my laptop, it asked for my administrative user name and associated password. That’s a bit odd for any app, especially one which does not modify the system in any way, so I investigated a little. Dropbox installs three pieces into one’s system when it first runs.

The first one is the app itself, but when launched it marks two files within the app bundle as set-user-id-root (suid). This is extremely strange and extremely dangerous, from both a stability and a security perspective.

The second is a Contextual Menu Item, which is a plugin which adds an item to the right-click menu. However, in addition to the extra feature added to the context menu, this plugin also injects an additional “plugin” when it loads. This is extremely strange and extremely dangerous, from both a stability and a security perspective. (This plugin was for finder.)

Third, it installs a file named “.dropbox” (w/o quotes) in one’s home folder. The placement of this file is strange (the appropriate places would be ~/Library/Application Support/Dropbox and ~/Library/Caches/Drbox), but not at all dangerous.

Some of these mistakes come from Dropbox’s recent addition of Mac support. That is, they just don’t know any better. On windows, significant stability damage through the use of novel and unexpected code injection is the norm. A carefully designed “plugin” would put no more strain on the system than what comes on the system from the original manufacturer. (I’m not saying that windows is more stable with “plugins,” but that nobody would notice the instability introduced by these “plugins.”) On Linux, suid binaries are entirely normal. In fact, significant parts of the user land live entirely in root space, e.g. the X window system itself. There, the security implications are dealt with through over engineering and careful disclosure, while the stability implications are expected to be dealt with by the system administrator (read: end user).

On Mac, however, stability and security are two of the platform’s primary draws. Those two reasons are exactly why I, myself, use a Mac. Furthermore, as a software developer, I can clearly see solutions to the problems that Dropbox appears to have been attempting to solve. For example, the contextual menu could be provided by a “service”, thereby bypassing the need for that plugin. The code-injected Finder “plugin” could be scrapped entirely and replaced with careful use of custom folder icons, supported by the very same folder-change-monitoring system used to watch for actual content changes. Actual content changes could be provided by the system that Apple built into the platform for that very purpose: FSEvents. This is part of the system that Spotlight and Time Machine use.

I uninstalled Dropbox shortly after my investigation. Perhaps I’ll try it again once they’ve had a change to fix up their Mac support.

Bash's init files

gaelicwizard — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:31:00 -0400

I finally understood the shell init files for Bash. I think my block might have been due to a left-over confusion from tcsh.

When bash is interactive it runs profile or bashrc, not both.
1. If its interactive and login, it runs profile.
2. If its interactive and not login, it runs bashrc.
If its not interactive, it runs neither (unless you tell it to).

Easy, right?

My problem was that I was always thinking that a login shell might not be interactive, and so profile might run when not interactive.

There is an environment variable to set to get some init done in non-interactive shells, but normally nothing is done for non-interactive shells. ($ENV or $BASH_ENV.)

The only remaining problem is the “unless you tell it to” from above. This problem, however, is much easier to work with conceptually. In the simple sense, only profile can be easily told to load for non-interactive shells by passing —login. So, bashrc is exclusively interactive and profile is presumptively interactive. Sadly, because of this minor difference, it’s not as simple as it sounds to separate.

I’m still not quite sure how to deal with this. The easy solution is just to source one from the other. That is, source bashrc from within profile. This is the solution that is adopted by almost every GNU/Linux distribution that I’ve ever seen. I believe this to be slightly suboptimal. It defeats the entire purpose of the separation.

Really, though, my problem is that I don’t know what should be in one file and what should be in the other. What, exactly, should I make sure is loaded in login shells that is not as important in non-login shells?

Back from London, Back to School

gaelicwizard — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:24:00 -0400

This summer I spent five weeks in London with RWU Law’s very own Professor Robert Webster. Around thirty other students and I explored the history of the common law, and where it has led to, right where it began. That, and we explored London and the surrounding area… and Dublin.

The focus of the program was Comparative Trial Advocacy. Now, I have never intended to be a litigator, but not only did I enjoy the adventure and learn a great deal about what it takes to tango in the High Court, but I also learned that litigation isn’t exactly what I had thought. I can see myself as a litigator (although it’s still not on the top of my list).

The last two weeks, an optional extension for an additional 3 units, really tickled my fancy. This second part was entitled Comparative Constitutional Perspectives. The focus was privacy. I’ve come away with a whole new appreciation for both perspectives on privacy, new vocabulary for describing those perspectives, and a whole new theory all my own. (You’ll have to wait for me to publish that one later.)

Finally, two weeks to relax with my wife and now school is back on. My favourite class this semester? You guessed it: constitutional law. Well, that or Professor Santoro’s Business Organisations.

purge(8)

gaelicwizard — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:11:00 -0400

Warning

IMPORTANT: DOING THIS TOO OFTEN WILL SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE PERFORMANCE. Furthermore, the equivalent happens automatically. THIS IS A TOY ONLY.

Fun With Debugging Tools

Do you like it when Activity Monitor reports large amounts of free memory, regardless of actual performance? Try this: open Terminal and just type “purge” (without quotes).

OMG WTF BBQ

Pretty neat, eh?

Details

The purge(8) utility is a debugging tool which interacts with the Unified Disk Cache. Basically, Mac OS X (and all modern OSes) keeps recently (or frequently) used files in RAM, since it is fairly likely that they’ll be used again very shortly. This does, in fact, happen more often than not.

Most files are tiny and read once and “never” again. (We’re talking about seconds here, so re-opening the same file tomorrow or after lunch is like talking about how your house will look in the year 2256. Its just as good to say “never.”) These files drop out of the disk cache quickly enough, since they’re closed (programatically) as soon as they’re opened. Other files are enormous (many megabytes) and are rarely merely loaded and closed. Instead, these files are frequently read partially, again and again, and often modified in-place. Often, these files aren’t ever read start-to-finish, and certainly aren’t closed once read. Examples include databases, any sort of for-editing media (audio, video, images, animation, &c.), and even not-for-editing consumer-targetted media files (like a 1.4GB movie downloaded from iTunes).

Most applications interact with files in ways that lets Mac OS X know which category they fall into: open and “discard”, or frequent access. Even when they don’t, Mac OS X is fairly good at guessing.

When an application behaves as though it is clearly within the frequent access category (i.e., working with enormous files that simply couldn’t fit into RAM at all), an app may nevertheless explicitly tell the system that it is really in the other category. Creating a new ZIP or TAR archive, or exporting from source material to ProRes, are some examples of this sort of exception.

The problem comes in when an application is working with those aforementioned enormous files, but neglects to tell the system that it really should be in the other category. The purge(8) utility exists so that a developer or system administrator can debug this situation.

Purge(8)

The purge(8) utility merely empties the aforementioned disk cache. That’s all.

Just like all caches, the purpose of the cache is to increase performance. And, just like all caches, emptying the cache is usually pointless and generally unnecessary. Just like all caches, it will clean itself over time. Unlike the cache in a web browser, though, “over time” is minutes not days or weeks. However, just like the cache in a web browser, it is extremely unlikely that you will get any performance improvement by manually emptying it.

In rare situations, however, a developer or system administrator may know specifically of a situation where the built-in heuristics will guess wrong, or at least not guess quickly enough.

Not HD _yet_

gaelicwizard — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:53:00 -0400

I haven’t jumped on the HD bandwagon yet. Here’s Why.

Subjective Quality

One of the reasons that I don’t use Blu-Ray or choose HD when purchasing from iTunes is that I don’t need it. 480p, that is full-resolution, progressive-scan, DVD-quality, is good enough for me. My television is only 33 inches diagonal. Its widescreen and LCD and all that HD goodness. It’s also full 720p, not that almost-720p 1280x800 nonsense. 480p looks damn good on it. 720p looks better. I can see the difference, but only when I’m looking for it. (Music Videos are an easy way for me to compare since I have both 480p and 720p versions of a few. The difference is apparent, but only when looking for the difference.)

At the end of the day, 480p looks good enough.

AppleTV

720p

I use an AppleTV. This is my AppleTV. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I don’t “hack” it, either. It runs stock, Apple-supplied software only. (I have upgraded the hard drive, but that’s not a “hack” in any real sense.)

The AppleTV happily plays 720p25. Movies, generally shot at 24 fps, play just fine in HD on the AppleTV (@ 720p24). PAL-formatted TV Shows (and other PAL-formatted content) also play just fine since PAL runs at 25 fps.

Unfortunately, American TV runs at 30fps. The AppleTV doesn’t play 720p30. For some unfathomable reason, content which is not, never was, nor ever will be produced for television broadcast, will invariably appear at 30 fps if produced in the USA. Thus, this content won’t play in HD. (Actually, it won’t play at all on the AppleTV, but I’m assuming that I’d be able to get it in 480p (or 540p, see below).)

While this sucks, and I would likely purchase a new AppleTV should Apple opt to release (significantly) upgraded hardware, that’s the way it is.

So, some 720p content plays. That’s a recipe for frustration. While movies should encode to 720p24 just fine, some won’t. The result will be that I’ll have to re-encode, wasting much of my time. Or, I’ll have to instruct my encoder to hit a ceiling at 25 fps. That just bugs the frak out of me. I do not want to mess with framerates. That’s a quick way to run quality into the ground. Either way, I’ll end up with some good-looking 480p content, some “great”-looking 720p content, and some not-great-looking 720p-ish content. That would then lead me to become even more desensitised to the quality of the video and might very well leave me indifferent to high-versus-low quality, meaning that I might not notice when something worse than 480p makes it into my library. That, or it’ll drive me nuts (more likely).

540p

The AppleTV will play 540p at 30 fps. I could just encode HD video to 540p, thus solving my problem with 720p. However, now I’m no longer in magical-HD-land, but I’m above SD-lan, so I’m somewhere in in-between land. Depending on how I deal with 720p30 content, I might end up with good 480p, better 720p, and in-between 540p. Again, leading to the mixed-and-matched frustration I just mentioned.

This might be a viable option, but seems like an awful lot of work for a minor increase in resolution with compromise baked-in from the get-go.

iPhone/iPod touch/iPod classic

The iPhone and iPod touch both play 480p content just fine. While Apple’s official specifications seem to indicate that they are limited to 640x480, this is not true. Anything 480p (widescreen or 4:3, including anamorphic) will play on any iPhone or iPod touch.

The iPod classic will even play 480p content, but will squeeze it to 4:3 somewhat unceremoniously (by basically ignoring the anamorphic settings). I haven’t tested this in a long while, so its possible that the iPod classic isn’t as flexible as I recall. Its definitely close though. (By close, I mean that it will play 480p, but perhaps there are other limitations that make it somewhat incompatible with the 480p on the iPhone.)

I very much like having the ability to put my media anywhere I like. I like to be able to bring my Podcasts and TV Shows, and even a movie once in a while, with me wherever I go. Admittedly, I don’t do this much, but I do do it sometimes and I value the ability to do so. I would, of course, still be able to bring all my 480p media with me, but the new 720p content would fail to sync. Having to check if something is 480p or 720p before deciding if I want to bring it along for the flight will most likely end in frustration for me and my wife, who is more than happy to ignore any technical explanation I offer as to why Dexter won’t sync.

Now that I think about it, my wife does regularly sync our media to her iPhone, so really this isn’t just a vehicle for frustration but is, in fact, a show stopper.

Ripping & Encoding

Until recently, it wasn’t entirely clear that reasonably full-featured ripping/encoding solutions were available for Blu-Ray. While I’m as able as the next guy to recompile my linux-kernel with the appropriate drivers and more than capable to step through the Blu-Ray debugger in order to grab decoding keys, it just seems like an awful lot of work for what I’ve already explained isn’t really all that compelling to begin with.

Nowadays, of course, there are much simpler ways of ripping and encoding from Blu-Ray, but they’re still not as streamlined as for DVD. For DVD, most tools can read directly from disc and encode directly to H.264. Tools like HandBrake don’t do this themselves, but are designed so that you can add one plugin to do that actual DeCSS work outside of HandBrake itself. Its about as simple and Mac-like as you can get.

Blu-Ray, to my knowledge, requires a three step process. First, rip. Then, extract. Finally, encode. The rip itself can be done with Mac BluerayRipper Pro. Once that’s done, a somewhat-shady but nevertheless reputable MakeMKV can be used to grab a given “title set” (a single movie or single featurette) into a single file. (I think that MakeMKV can read directly from the disc, if necessary.) MakeMKV, thankfully, doesn’t do any encoding at all. It merely copies the data into a new container package, for easy access. Finally, HandBrake will happily encode H.264 from the MKV container into a nice MP4 wrapper.

For DVDs, I use RipIt to get a DVDMedia bundle, and then HandBrakeCLI to encode. (As mentioned above, HandBrake can read directly from the DVD if VLC is installed.) I’ve written a set of small scripts which make this amazingly painless. I’d have to either expand or replace those scripts for Blu-Ray, again seemingly much work for seemingly small profit.

1080p

My TV doesn’t show 1080p. My AppleTV doesn’t play 1080p. My MacBook Air doesn’t show 1080p, and likely couldn’t play it anyway (or at least not very well). My iPhone doesn’t play 1080p. My Blu-Ray — wait, I don’t have a Blu-Ray player.

Conclusion

In short, its just not worth it for me right now.

In the future, however, I’m sure that I’ll jump on the HD bandwagon. Its just a matter of time. 720p and 1080p seem to have gained popularity at the same time and are often confused with each other (since both are referred to as “HD”). I’m thinking that once its clear what format content will be available in (1080p), and that such content is high-quality, I’ll flip the Blu-Ray switch: buy a new TV, buy a new (upgraded) AppleTV, buy a Blu-Ray drive, buy Mac BlurayRipper Pro, rewrite the scripts, and start encoding to 540p — oh, wait.

HD is an expensive project.

Prostitution, Politics, and Human Trafficking

gaelicwizard — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:52:00 -0500

There’s a young woman in my class who is both smart and highly motivated. (Actually, there are several people like that.) This last year she led a campaign to make prostitution illegal in Rhode Island, and succeeded. I was always curious about why she was so passionate about it, though. Whenever she talked about it, she rarely spoke about the business/institution/practice of prostitution. Instead, she spoke about Human Trafficking a.k.a. slavery.

While both topics have a connotation of less-than-moral, they’re still quite distinct and I wasn’t quite sure how they overlapped. Certainly, slavery can be used to “employ”** prostitutes, but slavery can also be used to “employ” farm workers. Arguably, the conditions surrounding undocumented immigrant farm workers are just as bad if not worse than those surrounding legal prostitution in Rhode Island. Why campaign just against prostitution? Why not campaign against undocumented/coerced farm workers too?

(Just to be clear, since I do expect to be misunderstood here, I am morally and politically opposed to slavery in all its forms. I believe it to be wrong, I think its already illegal, and I believe that it should be illegal.)

(I’d like to point out that I’ve never interacted personally with the person who prompted this blog entry. I know nothing about her except what I’ve heard from her during lecture discussions or observed visually.)

I think I’ve figured out why. She, like I, is opposed to human trafficking. She is also, separately, opposed to men having sex with women. That sounds absurd, but please read just a few more sentences before you think I’m making an ad hominem attack.

I took a course on feminism during my last semester in undergrad. The professor for that course, who was a fantastic professor, was married and had one child. Her husband and her split the child care responsibilities. She worked Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and he worked Tuesday, Thursday, and either Saturday or Sunday. Or something like that. On days when she was at home with their child, she would make dinner for her and her child. She deliberately would never make enough for her husband to eat when he got home later in the evening. She was already making dinner, and already cooked for two. However, she deliberately never cooked for three. On purpose.

Her husband would come sit with them at the dinner table with a bowl of cereal.

Since she teaches a feminism course, you can probably guess that she is a feminist. Her blind opposition to traditional roles was so strong that she not only avoided the role but avoided the appearance of the role. Since women have traditionally made dinner for their husbands, she now refuses to make dinner for her husband even though she is already in the kitchen making dinner. There’s something not quite right about that. (Her husband does cook for her.)

I think that my classmate’s opposition to prostitution is feminist in nature, and not merely a moral objection to slavery.

Why does the nature of her opposition matter? It matters because of her choice of what to campaign against. She campaigned against one thing, while using rhetoric directed against another thing. The arguments in favour of subjugating men as “pay back” for their historical subjugation of women are completely different from the arguments in favour of stronger slavery legislation. That, in turn, is significant because there isn’t as much support for the subjugation of men as there is for anti-slavery legislation. Not only would virtually all (but not absolutely all) men be opposed to male-subjugation, but the vast majority of women would be similarly opposed.

Check Your Phone Bill

gaelicwizard — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:41:00 -0500

Did you know that any company can just add a ten dollar charge to your phone bill?

I had a charge for $9.99 added to my bill without my permission. I called AT&T. They said that any company can add any charge to your bill at any time without my knowledge or permission. If I have never sent a single text message to anyone, let alone this random company, they can still charge my bill without my permission.

I only noticed because my credit card expired and I went online to put in the new expiration date and decided to look through my bill while I was at it. It’s been on there for months.

I checked the incoming and outgoing text messages for the line. Two months ago my sister-in-law (on my “family plan”) RECEIVED three text messages from this company. She never replied. She did not sign up or “activate” anything.

The woman I spoke to at AT&T was very friendly and helpful and informed me that this was standard operating procedure for AT&T. She said that many customers call in to complain and that AT&T had a policy of refunding all unauthorised charges when the customers complain and can block accounts from using the “feature”. However, AT&T has since changed this policy. Now, only 90 days worth of charges may be refunded.

The moral of the story? Fuck AT&T. and check your bill.

UPDATE: Ars Technica has a story about this practice and how “crammers” can make quite a bit of money off it. http://arst.ch/fwv

English Dubbing

gaelicwizard — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:02:00 -0500

So, I’ve been watching Bleach for a while now. I’m getting it on Netflix, so I’m roughly three years behind what’s on-air in Japan. I really enjoyed seasons 1, 2, and 3. Seasons 4 and 5 are filler, and therefore suck ass. I’m hoping season 6 will be as enjoyable as the first three.

My wife, @RussianDina, refuses to watch it with me. Why? Because she can’t get past the embarrassingly ridiculous voice-acting. We’re watching it in English, and I keep trying to explain that the original Japanese is much better, but she has a point. The English-language voice-acting just sucks ass. Not only is the acting bad, but the translations are positively horrible. Its like they’re translated by a marketing committee. (Watching with Japanese audio and English subtitles wouldn’t work for her either because English is her second language and it would be too distracting for her to watch and read simultaneously.)

We would enjoy the series much more if I were to steal it via BitTorrent or just watch on YouTube. Why? Because the fan-made subtitles are vastly superior to anything to be found on the official DVDs. That is sad. The translations are true to the spirit and letter of the original dialogue. What’s more, the fan-made subtitles will often add little explanations (at the top of the screen instead of the bottom, so as not to be confused with dialogue) helping to explain phrases or expressions which can’t be adequately translated.

Its sad, really, that to get the best experience I would have to steal my content. Why can’t I pay for what I want? If big-content want to survive this decade and next, they’ll have to figure out how deliver what the fans want.

This isn’t just Bleach. If it were just bleach, then I’d just complaint about Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, Viz Media, et al. This is a common problem for nearly all anime. Its almost as if the marketing committees just don’t realise that this is real art. This isn’t Blue’s Clues. These aren’t children’s programs. The amount of violence and sex should make that quite clear. Most of these shows have lesbian lovers. Sailor Moon, e.g., featured full frontal nudity in the opening credits of every single episode, and often in the episode content itself. (You’ll have to go steal a Japanese rip to see it. They censored the American releases.) Nearly the entire second half of Evangelion, e.g., is rated TV-MA. If you don’t have HBO or similar, then you’ve never seen a TV-MA program. They’re not broadcast on regular TV. TV-MA is adult. Its not like an R rating. Its like an NC-17 rating.

Apple "Tablet"

gaelicwizard — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:31:00 -0500

Here, documented, is my prediction for the we-have-no-information-at-all-but-“know”-it’s-coming Apple “tablet”.

Prediction

The new “tablet” computer from Apple will replace the MacBook.

Fine Print

Please keep in mind that this prediction is as accurate as, if not more accurate than, all other predictions regarding the Apple “tablet.” That is, entirely made up out of thin air.

Ripping Speed

gaelicwizard — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:00:00 -0500

Over the last few weeks I’ve been re-working my DVD-to-AppleTV procedure.

For getting the material off the DVD, I use RipIt. For encoding, I use HandBrake. Then, I tag using AtomicParsley through Lostify.

I do this two-step process, instead of using HandBrake to read directly from the DVD, for two reasons. First, RipIt gets the movie off the DVD and onto my HDD much more quickly. I can load several DVDs in sequence, instead of doing one at a time. Second, I’ve come to realise that HandBrake isn’t really that good of an encoder, but I trust other encoders I’ve come across even less than I trust HandBrake.

Ripping

RipIt is a great little app: super simple, mostly reliable. Mostly. Yeah. Well, its a very young product and totally worth the buy. Yes, its a for-pay app and yes I paid. I don’t regret it. It did produce some trouble when HandBrake refused to encode from it. The problem was a minor metadata error in the RipIt output. HandBrake, however, flat-out refused to encode due to that metadata error. I filed a bug with HandBrake; They said fuck off. RipIt has recently fixed the bug on their end, so everything works again.

Encoding

For the encode, I use HandBrake’s Universal preset, but then I turn on “detelecine” and then mess with the audio tracks.

I have no idea why detelecine isn’t always on. It is non-destructive, and always results in better video. Any good video player will detelecine as part of its rendering process (part of “up converting”), so there is no purpose to leaving it telecined. Telecine only exists to begin with because of the limits of early television technology. If I ever forget to modify the preset settings before clicking start, I have to go back and encode again.

HandBrake often over-crops the video with its “autocrop” feature, so I’ll often have to go back and re-encode with manual cropping. However, more than half the time (three quarters?) HandBrake autocrops correctly, so its better to leave it on and re-encode when it gets it wrong.

HandBrake’s Universal preset is also set to encode the main audio track twice. That’s intentional. The reason given is that the AppleTV can use the original AC3 encoding used on the original DVD, so in addition to re-encoding the audio as AAC for the iPod and Mac, they include an extra copy of the full, original audio encoding in the file for the AppleTV to use and pipe out over the digital optical audio out port to then be decoded by your high-end digital surround sound home theatre system. If I cared about my “home theatre experience,” I wouldn’t be encoding using HandBrake and even if I were, I wouldn’t be using the Universal preset. Besides, the AAC audio is actually fantastic, so I’d really have to spend some serious cash to even be able to tell the difference. In many cases, I wouldn’t be able to anyway.

Since DVDs can support up to 8 audio tracks, some for foreign language dubs and some for commentary (i.e. director’s commentary), I tell HandBrake to drop the AC3 pass-thru and instead encode the english main audio track and the english director’s commentary track. Sadly, this runs into problems where the original language of the film isn’t english, and fails completely if there is no english track. So, in the end, I just tell it to encode all the audio tracks. Unfortunately for me, this results in having to manually check boxes for every encode, since HandBrake can’t be told to do “all” audio tracks. It has to be told each audio track. If you try to trick it by finding a disc with 8 tracks and then saving those settings as a preset, then on a disc with, for example, 3 tracks, HandBrake will encode track 1, track 2, and track 3, but will encode track 3 six times. Ok…

I filed a bug report on that one. They said fuck off.

Good customer support, guys.

Tagging

I have a little shell script which checks the DVD name for a pattern, and tags it with any known info. This is useful exclusively for TV Shows such as LOST, Battlestar Galactica, Family Guy, &c. This script also adds album artwork, if known.

Finally, I fire up Lostify and add the last few details.

Bleach: The Bount; or Corporate Content Creation

gaelicwizard — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:44:00 -0400

The Bount

I love Bleach. I first discovered this Anime while attending Genius training in Cupertino. One of my roommates was watching it on Cartoon Network. I immediately added it to my NetFlix to catch up. Last week, I started watching the Bount arc (season 4).

If I had seen an episode from the Bount arc that day on Cartoon Network, I never would have considered Bleach. I wouldn’t have NetFlix’d the DVDs. I wouldn’t have looked up the AMVs. And, were someone to recommend it to me later, I would have ignored the recommendation. Season 4, the Bount arc, sucks enormous, hairy, sweaty donkey balls. It’s an embarrassment. It’s a fucking joke.

So far, I’ve made it through episode 73. Its slow going, because I can’t stand the pain of watching such a great show go through such contortions. Episode 72 stood out as just plain stupid, along with a few scenes from 73 (such as the giggling in the final scene). Not to mention, that it just doesn’t hold my attention.

Content Creation

This is what happens when content is authored by committee. The author of the Bleach manga had not completed anything further in the story line by the time the anime studio finished season 3 (the Rescue arc). Instead of wait for more original content, they just wrote filler. The result: shit.

Content is a creative endeavour, not a capitalist endeavour. Content must be created by a visionary, an author. Someone who is not driven merely by greed. Take for example the Walt Disney Company. Look at Sleeping Beauty 3, The Little Mermaid 2, &c. Inane drivel.

This is an outgrowth of our business-oriented culture. We pay our businessmen, the ones who create nothing, more than we pay our artisans. The businessman who strikes a deal with an artisan to distribute a new something becomes wildly rich beyond any of our craziest dreams, and the artisan usually comes out quite well off too, but never at the same level as the businessman. Disney is, again, a perfect example. Walt, the man, although severely mentally off-kilter, was a visionary. He led, and in some cases built himself, a creative empire. His successors, the businessmen, have done nothing of the sort. They merely run the business, and get stinking rich because of it. The last Disney, Roy if I remember, resigned from the board in protest against the ridiculousness that has become this once-great enterprise.

All of the greatest films to come out of Disney in a long time did not actually come out of Disney. They came out of Pixar, which Disney then purchased.

Copyright

This can all be fixed.

Our constitution creates a monopoly on the legal right to distribute elements of content. Today, this right is lumped in with property, and is often colloquialised as “Intellectual Property.” We forget, though, that there is no property, real or personal, in this monopoly. This is an invented concept, with the express purpose of promoting the useful arts and science.

Well, instead of allowing colloquial usage to dictate our social constructs. I’ll repeat it again: copyright is a social construct. So, since modern copyright is obviously a faulty concept (for more reasons than just Snow White 2), lets change it.

Lets keep copyright, but make it explicitly less like property. Lets make the right to distribute content originate with the author or inventor, just as it does now, but lets make it stay there. Lets reward the creator of the stories we love so much, instead of the first businessman to scam him out of his creation. We can keep the corporations of distribution. Let them make piles of cash too. But, the key here is that the control of the copyright rests with the visionary, not the businessman. If the author wants to go one direction, then let him. If the businessman wants to go another, then fuck him. The businessman is already rich.

The Google Books Settlement

gaelicwizard — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:48:00 -0400

Lots of people are complaining that the Google Books Settlement is really just an end-run around existing copyright law and Congress’ power to set copyright policy. It is. That’s a good thing.

Congress’ copyright policy from 1976 has flaws. Congress addressed those flaws by completely fucking up the whole thing with the DMCA. Now, the cracks in the original system are showing, and the fuck ups of the DMCA are pissing off the very people who create the things which we say copyright is here to protect.

Google’s book-scanning protect is not about making books available online. Its about making out-of-print books available online. The only books that Google is trying to scan are books that you can’t get at the book store because nobody is printing new ones. That’s a good thing! If the copyright owner cared about making money off of these books, then the copyright owner should print more and sell them!

Google is only scanning the books that the copyright owners have abandoned!

I, for one, fully support Google’s project.

"$ hdiutil compact Armitage_XXXXXXXXXXXX.sparsebundle Starting to compact… Reclaiming..."

gaelicwizard — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:17:00 -0400

“$ hdiutil compact Armitage_XXXXXXXXXXXX.sparsebundle Starting to compact… Reclaiming free space… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Finishing compaction… Reclaimed 195.9 GB out of 729.1 GB possible.”

- Compact that bundle!

Why I turned on FileVault

gaelicwizard — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:31:00 -0400

FileVault was introduced in Mac OS X v10.3, if I recall correctly. Basically, it replaces one’s home folder with a disk image, which is mounted during login and unmounted at log out. The idea is that the disk image is encrypted, and so therefore your home is encrypted. At first, this sounds like a fantastic idea: real data security. However, there are often misunderstandings about what this does and how it works.

A fundamental requirement of any encryption system is that it fails closed. What does “fails closed” mean? When something fails, what happens? If a door lock fails, then its either stuck open or stuck closed. If stuck open, then you can’t lock your door. If it fails closed, then you can’t unlock your door. The goal of all encryption systems is to fail closed. If anything is tampered with, then the contents are inaccessible. Only a working lock (disk image) with a working key (password) can be unlocked. If it ever failed open, then anyone could just come along, smash the lock with a hammer, and walk in.

So, you’ve probably already realised why this is a problem for users of a consumer operating system on a consumer computer. If you drop your laptop, then your hard drive is damaged, then your lock is damaged, then it doesn’t matter if you still have your key. Worse, what if you lose your key? Worse, what if your lock breaks by itself during one of the myriad occasions when a consumer operating system or a consumer computer fails by itself? (I’m not talking hardware failure, but simple application crashes, kernel panics, unexpected sudden power loss, &c.)

The result is that, unless you have some reason to be significantly concerned about data theft, your concern for data loss ought to outweigh all possible motivation for turning FileVault on.

Sadly, we are talking about consumers here. These people don’t backup. Their fear of windows viruses produces an unreasonable desire to turn on anything labelled “security”.

Therefore, FileVault is often a cause of complete, catastrophic data loss.

Well, if you do backups, for example using Time Machine (properly), and you don’t forget your password, and you understand that encryption systems are designed to fail closed, then there aren’t really any down sides, even though FileVault is admittedly often a cause of catastrophic data loss.

I turned on FileVault because I don’t want anyone to get my data if they steal my computer. I don’t want my login details (even though the passwords are encrypted) recovered from my keychain. I don’t want my financial details recovered. I don’t want my personal files recovered (not just pr0n, but also personal e-mails &c.). I recognise that I must now log out in order for my backups to happen. I recognise that I must be more careful about where I save enormous files (such as my iMovie Events folder or disk images of any software I purchase). I recognise that even if I’m extremely careful, my home might be corrupted anyway and I’ll have to restore from backup.

OK. It’s worth it. I don’t want anyone to be able to report what brand of pr0n I like. Not just because of the embarrassment it may cause, but because of the misguided social constructs which govern any sort of public behaviour and which have been enshrined in the ethics requirements of my profession. (I have a whole other essay on why “ethics” requirements are anything but.)

Postscript: Of course, Apple has taken steps to ensure that FileVault is less troublesome. Starting in Mac OS X v10.5, Apple introduced a type of disk image called a “sparse bundle” which breaks the disk image itself into hundreds of tiny files so that the chance of file corruption causing complete data loss is much lower. The sparse bundle format also serves to separate some of the metadata from the file data to improve fault tolerance.

iPhone OS 3.1: Fix for Deleted Messages in Spotlight

gaelicwizard — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:58:00 -0400

MobileMail CVE-ID: CVE-2009-2207 Available for: iPhone OS 1.0 through 3.0.1, iPhone OS for iPod touch 1.1 through 3.0 Impact: Deleted email messages may still be visible through a Spotlight search Description: Spotlight finds and allows access to deleted messages in Mail folders on the device. This would allow a person with access to the device to view the deleted messages. This update addresses the issue by not including the deleted email in the Spotlight search result. This issue only affects iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone OS 3.0.1, and iPhone OS for iPod touch 3.0. Credit to Clickwise Software and Tony Kavadias for reporting this issue.

So, a few weeks ago the interwebs erupted with news of a new security vulnerability in the iPhone OS. Today, Apple fixed this in iPhone OS 3.1. If you’re not as stupid as the webtards who thought this was a vulnerability to begin with, then you might notice that Apple didn’t fix anything. They just made the deleted message not appear in Spotlight. The deleted messages aren’t actually any gone-er than before.

Now, if you’ve been hiding under a rock for a while, then you’ll be curious why Deleted Messages are not, well, deleted. The answer is Trash. On your Mac you “delete” things by moving them to the Trash. Microsoft calls this the “Recycle [sic] Bin.” Although things are conceptually deleted or removed, the user is still able to recover those “deleted” things. So, from the computer’s point of view, they’re not really deleted at all, are they?

In my years at Apple’s Genius Bar, I ran across several customer who actually rely on this. They stored important files in their trash. Things that they explicitly did not want to delete.

Welcome to iPhone. iPhone’s Mail app uses a trash folder named “Deleted Messages.” The messages in this folder ARE NOT DELETED. If you were on your Mac (or Windoze- or Linux-box) and you deleted a message, IT WOULD ALSO NOT BE DELETED but instead moved to this special folder just like on your iPhone.

Perhaps it was a bug in Spotlight to show you items from your trash. Spotlight on my Mac does not show me items from my trash. I’ll assume it was a bug. Was it a security bug? No. Was it a security vulnerability? (Vulnerability means that someone could take advantage of it to break into your data.) No.

So, Apple fixed it. As you might have noticed in the quote above, Apple labelled the fix a security fix. Why? So that the webtards would at least say that Apple fixed it.

Fucking stupid.

Bristol Water FAIL

gaelicwizard — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:31:00 -0400

Begin forwarded message:

ROGER WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY
Message sent - 9/8/2009
Boil Water Alert

Campus Community:

Bristol County Water Authority has issued a Boil Water Alert for Bristol, Warren and Barrington, which includes Roger Williams University.

DO NOT USE TAP WATER FOR ANY REASON unless it has been boiled for at least one minute and then cooled. This includes drinking, brushing teeth, making ice, cooking or bathing of infants.

Dining Services is aware of the problem and is taking measures to ensure that all water used in RWU dining venues is safe for consumption. Further information will follow as soon as it becomes available.

More detail is available via the following news article available on the Bristol Phoenix website at http://www.eastbayri.com/detail/131158.html.

Modify alert notification settings: This e-mail has been sent to you by ROGER WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY as part of our alert notification system. To learn more about the system or if you do not wish to receive further notifications, please visit http://www.rwu.edu/. Thank you.

Copyright © 2008 Blackboard Connect Inc.
This e-mail has been sent from ROGER WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY through the Connect-ED service.
Connect-ED is a service of Blackboard Connect Inc.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Snow Leopard can't write to HFS volumes!

gaelicwizard — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:38:00 -0400

I remember when HFS+ was released in MacOS 8.1. They recommended that one does not use it as one’s boot system, since it was still new and, more importantly, since one wouldn’t have a bootable floppy(!) or CD which could read HFS+.

I dutifully reformatted by boot system to use HFS+, without a bootable floppy or CD. Some time later, I found that this was not such a great idea, but whatever.

Now, HFS+ is the only file system. UFS was removed, ZFS evaporated, and now HFS is gone too.

Trivia: the Hierarchal Filing System was so named because its predecessor (Macintosh Filing System) was not hierarchal. That is, you couldn’t have any folders. The entire system software lived inside the System suitcase. All your files just lived at the root of the drive.

—
Sent (in-part) from John’s iPhone2,1

Thoughts on Snow Leopard

gaelicwizard — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:13:00 -0400

In short: go buy it now.

Grand Central Dispatch has just guaranteed that Macs are the most powerful machines in the consumer, workstation, non-HPC, and maybe even HPC market segments. Period. All Snow Leopard apps for Mac will, quite simply, beat the shit out of all comparable Windows or *nix apps in terms of performance and flexibility. Hands down.

Update: I told you so.
OpenCL will nicely complement [GCD][Grand Central Dispatch].
Blocks will make apps less buggy and more flexible.
The 32-bit kernel was the reason that Apple hasn’t gone anywhere near 64GB RAM yet. Fixed.
Hardware drivers (in KEXTs) will be less buggy once updated for 64-bit. This is because they will have to do much less memory management themselves.
Whenever Digi gets around to updating ProTools for Snow Leopard (2015?), its kernel extensions will ACTUALLY WORK AND WON’T BREAK WITH EVERY NEW POINT RELEASE. Why? Because Apple no longer allows the unsupported entry points that Digi lazily relies upon.
Shutdown is faster because Mac OS X cheats. However, it is very careful to make sure that the result is non-destructive. It still cheats.
The new Services re-work will make Power Users, and Grandma, very very happy. This will make you faster on the computer, without regard for the actual performance (see #1 above).
Aliases have been replaced. The replacements are called Bookmarks. They work the same way. Also, the end user will probably never see this change. In fact, the word “alias” is still used in the UI.
OpenCL will easily make Mac OS X the platform for high performance media manipulation. IF Adobe were to port Photoshop et al to OpenCL, then Photoshop on Mac would, quite simply, blast the shit out of Photoshop for Windows. On the same hardware. Without using GCD. Multiply by GCD for a mindfuck.
Font management is getting better and better.
Apple gave up on getting web “developers” on Windows to create proper images. Pick your battles and all that …mumble mumble…