JollyBOX blog - technology

Is the CD doomed?

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:14:00 +0000

Questioning the future of something that is to be found all around us in everyday life needs some explaining. I think there's a good chance that we will, this decade, see a serious drop is CD sales and use. CDs are still common, and they're good at what they do, but they're no longer the best—they've been beaten in every way.

They call us the iPod generation, or, if they don't, they might as well. That's how we relate to music: everyone has some manner of MP3 player, everyone has an internet connection, everyone has a computer, and those tend to have large hard disks: When we listen to music, most of us listen to MP3s, not to CDs, and more and more people are discovering that it's possible to legally download them—on the one hand, there are those that have been pirating music for years, and on the other hand, there are those that used to buy CDs, and then started ripping them. With every iPod owner being an iTunes user and Amazon providing MP3 downloads alongside physical media, it'd be hard not to notice that the way music is being distributed is changing.

CD stands for “compact disc”. True, at 12 centimetres across, it really isn't a large medium, but, to put that into perspective, nowadays, you can store the MP3 equivalent of over a hundred of them on a chip smaller than a dime with normal consumer equipment. CDs aren't even that useful any more: the MP3 player and PC having become the tools of choice when it comes to listening to music, a new CD usually ends up being ripped, possibly passed around to friends, and then shelved with the other dust magnets.

True, CDs offer really high-quality sound that an MP3 can't. But, let's be honest: have you ever noticed the difference between a CD and a good rip or commercial download? I'll give you that your typical Napster file might not be that great, but most of us have no chance of telling compressed audio files from compact discs by listening. The true audiophile might prefer a CD over an MP3, but then, more often that not, we see audiophiles declaring that vinyl sounds better than CDs. I also think it's possible that, soon, some online music stores will be offering CD quality files for those that will satisfy those that once shunned MP3s in favour of shiny round 12cm plates.

Vinyl records have been having quite a renaissance in the last few years, and I think it's fair to say that this is part of essentially the same movement away from CDs—in a way, gramophone record beat CDs and don't so much as glance at the unworthy MP3. There is one thing that digitally distributed music does not have, cannot have: a physical form. We just like being able to touch things. Being able to physically and separately handle, display and admire a record appeals so much more to our collectors' instincts than simply fondling a tiny box that blasts photons at us from minute pixels. I find it adds a whole dimension of value to the music that it just doesn't have when I tell amaroK, winamp or rockbox to open a certain file. One could say a physical record honours the music and the artist a lot more.

In that area, however, it is not the CD that trumps, it is the gramophone record. Vinyl records are larger, there's more to look at, more to touch, not just that flimsy little booklet. You actually see it while the music is playing, and anyone can understand the basics of how it works: a lot more down-to-earth, appealing so much more to our senses, gramophone record are a lot more “real” than those tiny, silly CDs. I think that we are going to see, and seeing right now, a development away from them in two directions: the “mass market”, that gigantic group that runs around with iPod & Co., donning earbuds in the tube and connecting their trusty companion to their home and car stereos, will pay for more and more downloads, while that niche of audiophiles, music enthusiasts and collectors will develop their, or should I say our, preference for “the classic”, vinyl.

A great example of this development is the La Roux single Quicksand: in December of 2008, it was released as a digital download and as a 12 inch vinyl EP, not as a CD. (There has since been a re-release on CD—a year later)

What about you? How do you buy music?

Creating the perfect keyboard layout

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:22:00 +0000

After having read this post's title, you might have though “ah, he'll be presenting [insert favourite subculture keyboard layout eg neo]! nice!”. If so, you'd be wrong. If, on the other hand, you're thinking “perfect keyboard layout? There's no such thing!”, then I couldn't agree more. Anyway, …

I have been using the standard US keyboard layout for years, almost always without actually using an American keyboard. The main reason I chose it over the German layout is that characters like []{}|/`, used in many programming languages, are placed in a civilized manner, meaning I can type them quickly and without breaking my fingers.

The standard US layout has a certain problem, though: when it comes to typing in languages that don't happen to be English, it fails spectacularly. Since I have to write quite a lot of German and, nowadays, French, on my computer(s), this is quite a drawback.

Umn, I fixed it

It's not that hard to create your own keyboard layout, which I have done. I chose to use a standard US layout as base, leaving every single key binding intact, using level-3, i.e. AltGr, bindings to represent missing characters.

The German umlauts and ligature ÄäÖöÜüßẞ (the last character is the capital ß) I decided to map to the most obvious places imaginable: on the A, O, U and S keys, so AltGr+Shift+U produces Ü.

I created support for most romance languages by adding Çç to the C key (as above), Ññ to the N key, and a number of hidden dead keys: AltGr+' e renders é, AltGr+" e renders ë; the keys for `,~ and ^ act equivalently. The characters Ææ,Œœ,Øø and Åå are on the W,I,Q and Z keys, respectively, ensuring full support for French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and probably other languages. The Esperanto alphabet is completed by the dead circumflex ˆ and AltGr+y, rendering ŭ. Some other possibly useful characters, beside the quotes „ « » ‹ › “ ”, are ¿ ¡ € £ ‰ Δ π μ § ¦ - —. If you're really interested in the details of the layout, please, try it out!

Yes, you can have it

For X11 (Linux and other Unices): us_tj2.tgz.

For Microsoft Windows: us_tj2c.zip. (older version, missing a number of characters. German, French, and Spanish are supported equally.)

Why do I use Linux ?

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:49:57 +0000

Years ago, I used Linux because it was new and interesting to me, and I had the time and motivation to just play around with it. The fact that I switched distributions all the time was a mark of that.

At some point or points in between, it might have been the freedom.

Now, the reason is: “Why not?”; I've used GNU/Linux for ages, I can almost always make it do what I want to do when I want it – it works. Windows or Mac OS X would probably also work just as well if I was as used to them as I am used to Linux. But I'm not.

JollyBOX, the next generation

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:19:15 +0000

The original creation of this blog in April 2008 was the beginning of a JollyBOX.de renaissance. Maybe the key change was the usage of Serendipity, giving up on AFoC. Since then, I have created a new, simple and refreshing reference design with simple, regular logos for sub-sites. Nice.

Since not too long ago, the website has been hosted on an external server, meaning it's faster and more reliable than before. Finally, even JollyBOX code now uses the new design, and is based on PmWiki instead of simple HTML, which is a great help now that it's going to host information on software I write (previously at the now-dead zombieHQ). To celebrate this new splendor, the JollyBOX sites now all carry a bar at the top referencing each other.

Privacy @ JollyBOX

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:38:52 +0000

I would like you to know that

I do not save your IP address in access logs.
All *.jollybox.de web sites are available over an SSL-encrypted connection, including this blog. The server's SSL certificate is currently self-signed. If you tell your web browser to trust it, please tell it to permanently save it to make sure you're always connected to the same potential imposter.

Lisping: IRC bots are fun

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:19:00 +0000

A wee while ago, I decided to learn a lisp. Randomly, my lisp of choice was Common Lisp. (though I will probably have a look at Scheme sooner or later) As if a new programming language wasn't enough, I also started using GNU Emacs (rather than my previous absolute favourite Vim) for editing the code... Why ? SLIME. Implementation-wise, I have used GNU CLISP (love it), Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL, quite nice) and GCL (rather pointless).

Of course, you cannot really learn a programming language without programming with it. Back in the day, I used the BWInf competition to learn the adorable Python language (along with a book), and this time, I solved a part of this years' BWInf round 1 in Common Lisp for starters. But, more importantly, as it was more fun and I can publish the code, I have written a bare-bones IRC bot in lisp using the CL-IRC library (which is very lacking in documentation, but both the IRC protocol and the library source code are open, so that wasn't a great problem).

You can get the code via Mercurial.

There is really only one aspect of the implementation worth noting here: the command-creation macros. Not really spectacular, but rather lispy, I'd say.

Instead of

(defun blah-command (connection source channel text)
  ; make sure the user is logged in
  ; parse the text into useful chunks
  ; more ))) than cool
)
(setf *commands* (cons (list "blah" #'blah-command
                             "blah documentation) *commands* ))

You write

(auth-irc-command admin "blah" (connection source channel) (arg1 arg2 arg3)
  ; get stuff done
)

etc.

Macro definitions are here.

This site has an IP address !

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:53:35 +0000

Until recently, this site was hosted on my home server, which is connected to the internet over an asynchronous DSL connection, without a fixed IP address, that broke off at least every 24 hours. And hosting a web site on a crappy connection is never really good.

Anyway, I now have a VPS, and I can only hope that means everything jollybox will experience a lot less downtime in future. I have already migrated this blog (which was relatively easy, since this Serendipity setup uses SQLite3 instead of some dinosaur of a server) and set up a mail hub, which basically means that all the new spam is stuck in one central location when my home mail server isn't accessible.

Seriously, I can't wait for proper IPv6 deployment, I can't wait until having a few IP addresses of your own becomes natural once more. We already have the software, now the development of a v6 internet must continue at the leaves of the network: if ISPs don't provide IPv6 addresses and routing to customers, why would anyone want to properly hook up their servers to the IPv6 network—it costs at least a little time, after all. I know the Windows Firewall isn't suited for the internet, but we can't cope with less than 2³² addresses forever, especially if we want to give Africa civilized access to the 'net, and, while I don't know if I'll have any influence there at all, I want high-speed lines all the way from Cape Town to Helsinki.

Bringing synergy to the table

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:06:00 +0000

Once again, my desk is rather clean (a state that doesn't tend to last for long, let's see how long it holds this time), and I have decided to reintroduce a multi-head setup at my workstation. I've done this twice, and always enjoyed the space, and now I've also seen what it's like to have only a 20in wide flat screen sitting in front of you. In addition to that, I made sure there was a place for my laptop, as the recent acquisition of a PCMCIA network card made it desktop-compatible once again.

To spice things up a bit, and, I'll be honest, to spare myself the tedious labour of stretching toward my laptop whenever I want to use it, I've started using one quite magnificent piece of software called Synergy. What Synergy does is, quite simply, allow me to control my laptop with my desktop's keyboard and mouse (over the network). This feels just like having multiple X11 displays: I just move my mouse pointer off the left edge of my big screen and focus is on my laptop. This allows me, for instance, to have an IRC client running on the wee laptop screen without really being distracting

By the way, the video deliberately placed on the right-hand screen in the photograph is one of Julien Doré's extremely arty «Les Limites»-clips. Grep Youtube for it if you will.

The new face of JollyBOX

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Sat, 24 May 2008 00:15:47 +0000

Having finished the blog's style, it is now time to implement a common theme out of that for all of jollybox.de (except maybe the zombieHQ). The designs will follow a common scheme, but not be identical—the blog is slightly wider (due to the sidebar), and they shall have different Tango-based colour schemes. The root logo looks like this:

This uses the Tango Butter colourset, which was also used in the style sheet. Similarly, on this blog, the logo and style alike use the Tango Chameleon colours. I have created logos in all Tango colours, but probably won't need them all The images were created in Inkscape, the fonts used are Gentium and Century Schoolbook.

Just for reference, here is what I used as logo before:

Any comments are, as always, welcome.

64 Studio ?

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:26:58 +0000

Though I swore to myself a while ago that I would cease to hop from one distro to another faster than Steve Ballmer can say “patent”, I have just started downloading 64 Studio 2.0 which I intend to install alongside my Debian sid system. Though, in general, I don't mind the “instability” of Debian GNU/Linux unstable—in fact, I quite like how new software flows in and creates tiny problems every few weeks instead of ripping apart the system every release—, but lately, and especially today, I have become fed up of a certain consequence: video editing software is constantly broken. A while ago, the Debian kernel team included the new Firewire stack in the distribution, a change which has a habit of breaking nearly everything to do with Firewire (well, firewire network (not many use it AFAIK, but I do), some devices like (I think) iPods, and, most importantly, DV), and the fact that Cinelerra isn't included in Debian-proper doesn't go too well with the rapid software rotation either. In effect, I cannot get video onto my drive with an upstream kernel (there are alternative kernels by Holger Levsen, which do the job), and cannot edit video at all.

So, when I have a problem with digital multimedia processing, on a 64-bit Debian system, why not try a 64-bit Debian-based probably-stable distribution tailored towards digital multimedia production, eh ? I also briefly contemplated getting arch linux (NO: unstable as well, and cinelerra, in a comunity repository, might disintegrate after a few updates there too...) or Ubuntu hardy (NO: pulseaudio etc), but 64 Studio just seamed a lot more lovable. Well, we'll see. I'll probably install it tomorrow and spam you all with a boring update on whether it does what I want or not.

If all goes well, you will be able to see a very confusing film by me from roughly this Sunday, 18:00z.

New blog style

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:37:26 +0000

Since I started this blog, I've wanted to make it look the way I wanted, even though I didn't really have an idea what that could be. I have now, after reading what Pascal Klein has to say on the subject, crafted a design I think is nice and elegant, and emphasizes the content enough in a beautiful way. To be honest, it still needs some work

While I chose the precise text style manually, for colours I used the Tango project's palette and drew inspiration from that same project in designing the header graphic and the icons. I am going to use Tango emoticons and a Tango RSS icon as well soon.

Here you have some example code, including my font choices:

body {
    font-size: 81.25%; /* 1em = 13px IF font size is set to 16px */
    font-family: "Liberation Serif", "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
    background: #2e3436;
    padding:0;
    margin:0;
}

blockquote {
    font-family: "Liberation Sans", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size: 0.923em;
    ...
}

pre.sourcecode {
    font-family: "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", monospace;
    font-size: 0.769em;
    ...
}

Note that the default fonts are all libres, and included in a number of GNU/Linux distributions

Where's that web SVG support ?

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Sat, 17 May 2008 10:34:34 +0000

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are a promising technology. We've all known for years that vector graphics are, scalable as they tend to be, a great thing and often more useful than raster-based image formats. SVG in particular is nice because it's

all text
an XML-based format, and thus hip in the industry
an open format
an open XML-based format, and thus portable and good with stuff like XSL-T.

Web browsers like to boast about their SVG support, it being a hip technology pushed as a web standard by the W³C, and the support isn't bad. Recent versions of Gecko (Firefox etc), Opera, KHTML and WebKit have all implemented a working subset of SVG and are able to display simple images correctly. Some browsers (at least Firefox and Opera) have decent support for XSL-T style sheets, allowing you to display an XML data sheet graphically in a browser by linking a suitable style sheet at the top — I never expected this, but I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that last year. Also interesting is the support of ECMAScript within SVG, making it possible to play tetris in a vanilla IceWeasel.

What was this stuff called again?

We're talking about scalable vector graphics within a WWW context. The fact that these things are scalable could be used to our advantage, n'est-ce pas ? Let's say you have a website styled with only ems for measuring distance, no pixels or other absolute stuff. Being nice and accessible, having the whole website scale when you hit Ctrl++ or Ctrl+-. Something like <img src="foo.svgz" alt="An illustration of bar" style="width:20em"/> should be just what you need. So, which browser supports that ? Bingo, not a single one !

There is a standard, portable way to include SVG in websites: you use the <object> tag, like so: <object type="image/svg+xml" data="foo.svgz" ...>. This works in pretty much all modern browsers (if you don't count IE7, but why would anyone call that bastard “modern” ?), but it doesn't do what I want it to do: it doesn't scale the graphic. At all. It stubbornly uses the size in the SVG file. If you're lucky, zooming with change the font size in the image, but only the font. What's the point of that, I ask you ? Why bother with scalable vector graphics support if you can't scale them ? Maybe we should call them scriptable vector graphics when using them on the web...