2006-08-28

Open formats reaffirmation

I very nearly got burned by a proprietary format again. In my recent mission to collect, collate, and back up my data, I stumbled upon an old collection of .SNG files that I had long since thought I had lost (with sadness). These were recorded a DOS Midi sequencing program from back in the day, circa Windows 3.0's intro, when I was a bit more into music and had a Midi box to connect my digital piano to my computer. I used it to record and later transcribe some songs I learned and even managed once to capture some of my dad's old songs he knew from his more serious piano playing days (sadly, didn't record enough of them).

Well, I found these song files and discovered that they are completely obsolete, undocumented and unsupported. I started to sweat a little and spent a good solid night looking for something, someone, anyone(!), to convert them to normal Midi files. Nothing, nada, zip. I checked the Voyetra site the company that made the sequencer and thankfully they're still in business. Posted in their help/faq/support area was a notice that the format was completely unsupported... along with this note:
NOTE:
We understand that a lot of SPG users have created libraries over the years (some with thousands of SNG files) that they need to use in newer systems. These users had a good chance to purchase the discounted. Upgrades that we offered for almost a decade. Unfortunately, at this time "Digital Orchestrator Pro" is a Discontinued product that is no longer available.

I read that to mean "you didn't keep shelling out for our software so tuff shitz for J00". Incidentally I was using a program much older than the one they mentioned here. I was furious and almost fired off a little former customer "feedback". But instead I kept searching and finally found a solution to my problem which ended up being their solution. They basically said I had to install my old DOS program version of the program, get it up and running, load the SNG files in (one by one) and re-save them. WTF! I don't even know where that stuff is from 15 years ago and countless moves. Heck, it came on 5.25 inch floppies and I don't know anyone that has one of those drives anymore. They didn't even have a simple program available that would simply convert or extract the Midi track items out of their own file format. No, you had to use the full blown DOS program, get it working, load the file in, then export it within the program. This blows my mind. As some consolation though, they did at least provide a version of the program (Sequencer Plus Gold) for free on their FTP site, with no manuals.

So I downloaded it and went through the paces to get it installed. Get this, I had to find some 3.5 inch floppies to copy the disk images too because it would only install from disk. Luckily I keep some around and even luckier that I had the foresight to a 3.5 inch drive added to my new computer (combo drive with the little media card readers, pretty cool). Installation wasn't a problem, but getting it to run was a little tricky with the whole WinXP compatibility mode stuff. Eventually, and after some scares, it ran. I spent even more time figuring out how to work it (this was pre standard menu interface) and then correcting for the fact that it was a "newer" version of the program I used and I had to figure out a correction to some of the differences. (It did something special with track 1 and the output Midi files would be incomplete or just empty.) After figuring out the right tweaks to make to the imported songs files, I was finally able to save all the tracks individually to Midi. At last. They even play in Windows Media Player. Hallelujah.

I guess I should have had some kind of inkling back then that I should have taken some steps to future-proof my data. I've lost a lot over the years due to negligence. But back then, the stuff was still relatively new. I was young and foolish and still of the opinion that so long as I kept the data, I'd be in good shape. Hah. Hindsight 20-20. I know that i still have a bunch of Wordstar, Word Perfect, DBase III, and a slew of other stuff sitting in my collection waiting to be salvaged before it really gets too late. Sadly, it will have to wait, because they're all on 5.25 inch floppies. I'm sure I'll find one of these drives somewhere, right? I'm having a similar problem with my zip disks, though I'm less worried about that at the present moment.

Anyhow, the (obvious) lessons to be reaffirmed are:
  1. Use open, documented formats, or at least industry standard ones.
  2. Always migrate your data (ALL of it) to newer media.
Final notes for anyone who happened to have used Voyetra Sequencer Plus:
  1. download their Sequencer Plus Gold (sp_gold.zip), unzip it and copy each disk image to a separate 3.5 floppy.
  2. the floppies are labelled disks 1, 2, 3, and 4 but this is wrong, it should be "install" disks 1,2 and "driver" disks 1,2. take this into account when going through the install.
  3. when installing, select just the sequencer option, not the midi equipment drivers.
  4. on WinXP, I set the install and the programs to Windows 95 compatibility
  5. When firing up the program, there would be a loading message and then it would just hang there. I thought the bloody thing was broken and did several re-installs... but once unintentionally I let the window sit there and some 15 minutes later or more it actually run.
  6. experiment with how to work their menus, eventually you'll get the hang of it. basically to load: F for filemenu; M for mode (click until mode is SNG); highlight .sng file (best to move the .sng files to their song directory beforehand); L for load. To save: same except put it in MIDI mode and S for save. I used the default options when saving to .mid.
  7. Prior to saving the songs, make sure you have no real song information in Track 1. Use "J" to "jump" the track to another number
  8. For my files, I would delete all tracks but one, and save each track separately, but you not need to do this.

2006-08-22

Firefox bound

Ever have something nagging at you for the longest time and yet you do nothing about it and just try and deal with it. I do that all the time. I'd always been bugged that when entering web forms in a browser, namely Firefox, I didn't have my emacs-style keybindings for editing text. And yet, I did nothing about, not even something as trivial as doing a web search. I think there's a certain amount of learned helplessness in there somewhere. Well, now that I've set up my work Instiki, I will be doing more and more text entry into my browser than I used to and enough was enough.

Thank the maker! My solution was within a few keystrokes reach. As usual, I feel like an idiot for not looking this up ages ago.

Sadly, those keybindings don't seem to work in Blogger. Curses!

ADDENDUM:

Speaking of binding Firefox, I had an issue when I upgraded to 1.5 and Thunderbird as well. They didn't work together by default on my workstation. Now... there's a reason for this. The IT guys were so overworked that our workstations are way out of date. Not their fault really, there are other political reasons why our systems stay out of date. Anyhow, I ended up installing it locally in my home directory and using it there. When I clicked on a link in the email client, it would try and bring up epiphany, and when i clicked on an email address in the browser, nothing would happen. I did a web search and all the pages pointed to making sure the "Default Browser" was set properly. I changed it everywhere I could with the control panel(s) and such. None of it work. So I got stuck with doing the cut/paste method of following links and I was irritated for months. Fed up I finally cornered an IT guy for help and he was able to dig up a couple web pages that had the solution. Ugh! I did web searches but he used one or two different words in the search that I did not (nonobvious ones like "force") and was able to get the result whereas I was not. I applied the changes and voila, all fixed in a snap. What a difference a search makes. I feel like a n00b. In my defense, he had done that fix before so remembered what to look for, but still.

Oh, a solution can be found here and it didn't involve any system or window manager or desktop "Defaults".

Rails rocks

I hadn't done much in the way of web stuff since the days I maintained some personal static research logs at my lab way back when. I wouldn't even count that as web stuff. Had a cursory knowledge of HTML by inspection, never learned Java, nor PHP, nor pretty much anything else. wget was my friend when I wanted or needed to do anything fancy. I did some digging, looked at some complicated-looking scripts, dabbled with a cgi script or two but not a lot. I'd always wanted to play around with it but never put much effort.

That sort of changed recently when I finally had some cause to investigate it for work related reasons. I'd been a scripting fiend for a decade and fell smitten with Ruby over a year ago. I'd been hearing about Rails (who hasn't) but only read enough to get an idea of what it was. Well, now I have dug a bit deeper, had time to play, and I have to say that it is way cool. Even without any formal or informal experience with other types of webdev platforms, I can already feel that I'd rather learn this than those others (save maybe Java but for different reasons). I was set up very quickly, ran though a neat tutorial, and marvelled at the relative ease and quickness with which I was able to get something working. I felt the excitement. I hadn't actually looked forward to getting home to play on my Linux box to play for a long time.

It didn't stop there, either. Before I knew it, I had Typo and Instiki installed in a snap. Those systems are just insanely cool, especially to a webdev n00b like me. I love that they come with their own servers ready to go via Webrick or tapping into Lighttpd. Instiki is now going to be a part of my work logs; it's just convenient to have a wiki where I can collect tips and results. As for home use, I don't really have much in the way of a web application or set of them, it's just to play around with. Next step, find out how to access my home Linux servers from outside. For some reason the port forwarding isn't doing the trick. I suspect my ISP is blocking those ports but I won't rule out my doing something wrong.

2006-08-18

Labels at last

So it looks like I may keep using Blogger afterall. I kept telling myself, "come on, they're not that stupid, what's the holdup?". At long last, Google has finally stepped up to the plate and updated Blogger (now Beta.Blogger of course) and one such valuable upgrade is the addition of labels. For the longest time, I'd been confounded by the lack of any significant features added to Blogger, most notably, the lack of categories or tags. The lack of that feature really makes a blog inaccessable. I mean, if you stumble upon someone's blog and happen to dig an article and want to learn more on what they have to say on the subject via categories, then manyally sifting through the archives is a miserable option. Even site search is a poor substitute. Categories give topics an identity in a way that keyword search cannot (at least currently). Further, a listing of categories gives the entire blog a kind of identity and at the very least hints as to whether other articles on the site would be of interest.

It's not that I think anyone would be interested in this blog, but even for personal use, down the road, it would be nice to at least peruse the different things I had to write about a given interest at the time. There are still tons of cool features that area available to the likes of Wordpress and Typepad and others but for now, the simple category listing is a what I was looking for. I don't necessarily think they display or handle their "labels" elegantly at the moment but I'm happy it's there.

The synchronicity here is that I'd only last week started playing around with my own web servers and webdev stuff on my home Linux box. Some work projects had me playing around with web-works and through that I became more interested in the whole web-development thing. I finally got around to playing with Ruby on Rails and subsequently Typo after reading about them for the past year or so. So far, I think they're fantastic. I'd been imagining setting up something more focused and porting it to a hosted site and such, I have a few ideas in mind, but for now I'm content with the minor dribblings that I have here on Blogger. Perhaps someday after (or if) I develop more webdev chops I'll make a more serious attempt.

2006-08-03

Enough with the mp3

MP3's by themselves don't really piss me off. They were an important piece of online history. What irritates me is that it's the de facto standard for all players, especially portable ones. It's a licensed beast and it's also old. There are newer, modern, and arguably better encoding formats out now that have the extra advantage of being royalty and license free. Ogg is probably the most popular of these formats right now, having the backing of the geek community to keep it going strong. Problem is, I can only play it back on my computer and I don't want to be tied to my computer to listen to music. The vast majority of portable players, boom boxes, car CD players and that ilk don't support it... but they do support MP3. I wish they would just switch or add Ogg. Most notably, Apple should have at least have included it in their iTunes/iPod. I mean, the freaking encoder would be free for them to include, so what the heck? The second iTunes supports Ogg is the second that others will start to follow suit and this whole MP3 format thing, which has admirably served it's purpose, can finally start to step aside and let a modern public format prevail.

Ok, I know, pipe dream. Companies are more interested in DRM than free public formats, and I know that they only grudgingly support MP3 because it is so wide spread. Feh!

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Happy with the Linux distro choice

These days I find myself rarely booting my Linux box (laptop) but when I do, I become more and more pleased with having picked Ubuntu. It is definitely the low maintenance distro that caused me to install and keep it in the first place. I'm still interested in Gentoo but until my office workstation uses it, I'm just as happy to not use it since it would require a lot more tinkering which at the moment I'm just not willing to do. I sit in front of Linux all day and with all of my other personal projects I just don't feel like booting up Linux at home unless I need to log in and such. That may and probably will change in the future, or at least I hope so. But for now, I'm pleased with Ubuntu and I think that so far it's the best distro that I've had at home.

What prompted this? I hadn't turned on my laptop in a month or so, and like clockwork, there was a new Ubuntu release. It updated without a hitch and I noticed that it did indeed correct some of the glitches that I had seen before. I later experimented with ripping a CD to mp3 to discover that it could not. Apparently, the philosophy of Ubuntu prevents the mp3 encoder from being installed by default due to the whole licensing BS. A little bit of due diligence and web searching through the forums and the solution was there in front of me. Install stated packages and voila it works. I read a lot of press about the helpfulness of the Ubuntu community and my experience so far has led me to agree.

Now, is it fully dumb-user friendly? No, I wouldn't say so. But for someone like me with a lot of *nix experience who at the moment doesn't want to take the time to tweak and tweak, it's as close as I've found.