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I’ve set my laptop up as a dual-boot system now, so that I can do cross-platform development. Usually when you hear things like “I wish [program] was available for [operating system]“, it follows this pattern: “I wish [windows program] was available for [Open source operating system (or OSX)]“.

I wish there was Banshee for windows.

Now, originally (as with many linux music players and media management systems), it feels like Banshee was born out of the sentiment, “I wish there was iTunes for Linux”, but I’m using iTunes right now, and you know what? It’s not as good, and it’s not really iTunes’ fault, nor is it Banshee’s.

It’s Quicktime versus GStreamer.

You see, iTunes uses the Quicktime backend in order to play music, which gives it support for MP3, AAC, and (given a plugin) OGG files, and some others.

Windows Media Player also has its own backend, which provides support for MP3 and WMA, and given plugins a bunch of other filetypes.

GStreamer is one of a few media backends that run on many open source distributions, and powers most of their players, including Banshee. It has three basic sets of plugins: The ‘Good’, the ‘Bad’, and the ‘Ugly’. ‘Good’ plugins are for formats which are free and open source (Like OGG and FLAC). ‘Bad’ plugins are those that are free and open source, but that aren’t stable enough to be considered ‘good’. The ‘Ugly’ are codecs which have licensing issues, e.g. they may not be free of patents, etc. (thanks Anonymous for the correction)

With the GStreamer backend, one can play virtually any kind of file at all, as long as it is not encrypted.

What I noticed was that because MP3 lost its luster for me a while ago and I switched to FLAC, I can now only play approximately a quarter of my music library from iTunes on Windows.

Now, about a year ago I would have encoded all my files as MP3’s at 192 bits per second, and beyond that I would not care about the quality loss because I couldn’t hear it in the resultant files. This gets problematic however, because I write songs to CD’s. Taking a song as WAV, converting to MP3, and back, twice, can cause a drastic loss of sound quality because each conversion compounds the loss. FLAC, on the other hand is a variable bitrate format, so that if there is not much “happening” in the song, it will be a very small filesize, but the more detail there is, the higher the bitrate will raise. Theoretically, one should be able to convert from FLAC to WAV and back a hundred times without any problems.

I’m not a huge sound buff, but geez… I wish there was GStreamer for Windows.

I’m doing research this semester on the structure of the internet, specifically by studying bandwidth information between bittorrent users. In order to do this, I’ve been collecting packets this morning using WinDump.exe, a windows port of the unix tcpdump command.

This program effectively spews out information for every packet, in or out, that touches the selected interface. Here’s something I noticed this morning:

The internet ebbs and flows. Like the endpoint computer is a pristine beach on the sea of information, packets rolling in and out in bunches; the local computer responds to everything that comes in, and a quarter of a second passes before the next incoming wave arrives. And while it may be something people have remarked upon before, this is the first time I realized how true it is: I’m watching the waves crash in and out as I write this. If the browser is like scuba gear for safely navigating the water, then TCPDump and WinDump are the beach towel, so I can sit here, sip my powerade, and enjoy the view.

this is nice.

I was cruising with FX and the brothers last night, mind racing, Reliant K booming on the sound system, through a bit of a thunderstorm. It was quiet–no rain, nothing, just the occasional flash and boom like some kind of Shutter of God’s Camera (They say you cannot observe something without changing it)–and FX makes like he’s shouting to the heavens, says, “I’m here! Come to me!”. Now I tell him it’s a bad idea, because we’ve learned from every movie ever that Aliens will destroy all of humanity on a whim.

So then I get to thinking.

Why is it that aliens always seem to pick on humans for some incidental reason? Let me give a few examples. In Stargate (and its derivative series), Humans got picked on by the Goaul’d because humans are easy to regenerate. In the 4400, humans got picked on because the aliens… well, just because. Y’know, they had all this technology for making people super-powered and crazy, and it would be a crying shame to let that go to waste.

So here’s my thought: What about other alien species? Why us and not them? Because of our simple bodies? Just because we’re easy to modify or regenerate doesn’t mean we don’t have feelings!

I propose anti-discrimination abduction legislation. I think that species should be abducted on a merit scenario, not on incidental things like the color of our skin, the shape of our eyes, our amazing livers, our prehensile tails, etc.

Actually now that I reflect on it, there is one show that had a merit-based abduction–or at least visitation. The Vulcans first appeared on Earth in Star Trek because Zefram Cochrane’s Phoenix hit warp speed and they saw it. In that show we earned our visitation. That’s pretty cool.

Other alien species should totally learn from their example.

… what, you don’t have a prehensile tail? Freak.