Concern

Most of the time I buy music on CD, partly because I find DRM and intellectual “property” rights an asinine topic, and partly because I can’t stand AAC files encoded at 128kbps (I’ll rip each CD at 256kbps). I bought a few songs on iTunes, and a few albums (I used to buy whole albums sometimes; now I just go a la carte if there’s one specific song I want, not necessarily caring about the freedom or quality), and always disliked the quality, and even bumped into DRM issues when just trying to use stuff I bought.

So, Apple’s new “iTunes Plus,” where songs are DRM-free AAC encoded at 256kbps, sounds like the perfect solution. It only took $30 to update the parts of my library that I could, and though it still hasn’t finished downloading all the songs (it is stuck on some Brian Eno songs, one of which is 56MB (!) — it looks like the ITS is under some heavy load at the moment), I have to say that I like it so far.

The higher bit-rate makes a difference. A big difference. It’s hard to elucidate how they differ, but the higher bit-rate sounds a lot better. I haven’t done any A/B comparisons yet, but I can’t see myself ever buying music at a low bit-rate again. Double the size be damned; disk space is plentiful and cheap.

I don’t have any practical use for DRM-free tracks (I still just use iTunes or my iPod), but it’s a nice feeling to know that none of that lunacy is present in those files, and that Apple trusts me as adult enough that I’m not going to go right out and send these files to thousands of people on the Internet.

I’m wondering: is ImageMagick basically the most complete, fastest way to resize images on Linux? Especially considering that you might want to resize a variety of image formats. Because, with less-than-full-frame digital camera images, even producing reduced-size images at terrible quality takes a long time.

Also, do you happen to know if it’s possible to get “file system events” — such as close-write, move, and delete — from a Samba server? Of course, one can hack the source to add this, but I was curious if there was a built-in way to do this already.

Hey lazyweb, how do you debug memory leaks in C++?

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Wherein my headache for an evening is turned into a benefit: Avoiding libtool minefields when cross-compiling.

This was a crazy, fun week. Finally getting the opportunity to meet people I’ve known only online was great, and I’ll echo what Mark said, that it felt a whole lot like hanging out with old friends, even though I really only met them for the first time.

I’m not quite sure what the point of the whole thing is, though. I mean, I get it that a lot of the conference isn’t sitting in uncomfortable chairs, listening to dry technical talks (some of which were just over-the-top stupid), and that it’s more making connections and meeting people, though I fail to see how all these nervous computer geeks can really make much in the way of connections — maybe that part is for the marketing dweebs.

The sessions from the open-source track were great, though. Eben Moglen gave shared some great insights (in one official session, and one informal talk that I was fortunate enough to be able to sneak into) into free software, licensing, and where it’s going w/r/t proprietary vendors. Simon Phipps’ talk on free software and Sun’s new strategy was great, though I personally needed no convincing of anything, other than the genuineness of Sun’s intentions. The panel with Geir, Mark Reinhold, Tom Marble, Dalibor, Tom and Mark was a good exploration of where the community may be going next.

I still have to maintain the general disdain I have for the unwashed masses of Java “developers” that exist out there. Free software was a small sideshow in this giant Java circus, with the majority of the people flocking to silly “technologies” that happen to be the popular buzzword of the day, but we can’t expect many more than the top hackers to be interested in open, solid platform foundations.

The first day, during the keynote, I had an idea for a business venture. You can email me if you want an inbox full of this crazy idea.

Will I do it again next year? If I have someone to pay for it, sure. Otherwise, I might just show up for fun and parties after.