Enter MOG.

While definitely not a newcomer to music streaming services, coming from a music-oriented blog and community way back from 2005, MOG is nowadays probably one of the largest industry-backed services of its kind. Their claimed library of 11 million songs is impressive, and from a quick search, I could easily find all but the highly obscure artists or those difficult to license (no Metallica or The Beatles here, but it has some missing from Grooveshark: Pink Floyd, The Chemical Brothers and Korn).

The first thing I noticed is how well organized the music is. No duplicates here, everything is nicely tagged, all albums have high-quality covers and everything is easily browseable.

The other impressive thing when compared to Grooveshark is the high bitrate streams and downloads. Everything is 256-320 kbps, and you can really tell the difference from Grooveshark’s (probably) 96-128 kbps. The albums are flawlessly ripped, no skipping or cut up tracks, the quality is really top notch from what I’ve seen so far, be it on mobile or the site.

Speaking of mobile, the app is highly streamlined with very little eye candy, contrary to Grooveshark’s more intuitive mobile client.

The asking price of $5/mo for web/STB/TV/Roku/Boxee/Sonos streaming is very reasonable. For $10/mo, though, you get the mobile (iOS/Android) clients, which is just $1 more than Grooveshark’s Anywhere. You can sign up for a 14-day trial here.

All in all, I’m very impressed so far with MOG and will be putting up my final impressions once my trial is over.

I could say this for Python or Ruby as well (and I certainly prefer using them if given the choice), but Perl is much widely adopted across many different platforms (perhaps because of its age). You can be almost certain a modern server will have at least Perl 5, while you can’t say the same for Python, and good luck with Ruby.

Sure, you can shoot yourself in the foot easily with Perl, and TMTOWTDI causes confusion, but the beauty of Perl is that you can easily start with the features you’re comfortable with and use everything else as you need it. Ruby also has this distinction.

A common complaint I hear is that Perl code is difficult to maintain.

I can say this for any language. If the author wasn’t a sadist that purposely obfuscated code, and the code is well documented, there’s no reason why Perl code would be any less maintainable than any other language.

AWK would also be a good choice for some things, but Perl has a more standard syntax, is of more general use and is (I think) comparable in speed.

Here’s what I’m thinking: (sorry for the disorganized post, just writing stuff as I’m thinking)

The “radio” itself would be nothing more than a headless Bluetooth (or other protocol) interface for the smartphone to hook up with. The front face would simply be a dock for your phone, and maybe a few additional buttons and knobs for volume, calls, etc.

The reasoning behind this is simple: I already own a pretty decent computer (my smartphone), why should there be another one to function as my radio? Not to mention, my smartphone has many other features that are only found in very expensive car audio solutions.

So this would cut costs tremendously on this device. I don’t see how it could cost more than $100, if that.

Moreover, there’s the issue of security. You purchase a very expensive radio and you hope it has a removable face plate, which you then have to stash somewhere or take with you, or even mask with ridiculous solutions such as this one. This, of course, rules out very expensive LCD radios out there, which are cool to have, but incredible thief magnets. With my proposed solution, your radio face plate would be your smartphone. You already carry it around all the time, and never leave it inside the car. This solution would help you remember to take your phone with you, and also serve as a great car dock for your phone, of which there are no clear winners in the car market.

This also solves the OS issue. Unless you’re building your own carputer, pretty much every car radio manufacturer uses their own proprietary operating system. With your “Smartradio” (TM?) you’d be using your phone’s OS, which you already know and love (Android, of course).

Of course, this would mean you’d need specific car apps. Most phone manufacturers ship with specific car-mode interfaces, and this works fine. Like I mentioned above, the Smartradio would interface via Bluetooth to your phone, which means with A2DP your phone’s audio would sound in your car speakers. This is already a feature of many expensive car radios out there. There’s really no need for a separate microphone cable, as most smartphones today already do a good job of capturing sound and cancelling out noise.

Another interesting connection would be an OBD-II Bluetooth hookup, which today works using special devices and software.

So about the apps… It would be great having a single app that joins all these features into one: calling, radio, navigation, OBD stats, etc.

Existing alternatives

From a quick Google search, this is what I’ve been able to find.

• Building your own carputer would give you the features I’m looking for, but it will also cost you a lot of money and work putting it all together. Not to mention it’s a thief magnet (unless you hide it somewhere) and you still have no where to put your phone.
• Parrot Asteroid. Essentially an Android smartphone reshaped into a radio with a big screen. Expensive, thief magnet, nowhere to put your phone.
• Pioneer AppRadio. More like what I’m looking for, the unit is essentially dumb and driven by your smartphone, but it’s still surprisingly expensive ($300+) because of the screen and the Pioneer brand. Plus the apps that can be used must support the Pioneer APIs, which is… meh. Also a thief magnet, and you still have nowhere to put your phone.

Let me know if there’s anything else I’m missing, or if this is already done.

I’ll be working on some mockups of how this might look, and hopefully be posting them here soon.

After installing and configuring NFS in Arch (a bit more involved that I would’ve liked but not too painful), and installing the NFS client service in my Windows machine, I was able to connect and browse the share, but had no write permissions (despite it being configured as rw).

This was of course related to the awesome Unix file permissions. Depending on the UID/GID the client authenticates with, it will have the permissions as specified by each file’s mode. By default, the Windows NFS client connects with -2/-2, which maps to ‘other’ on the Linux side, so you’d need write permission for ‘other’ on every file. This is a problem unless all your files have it, but mine default to 644 (read-only for ‘other’), which is a pretty common and safe mode.

There’s a couple of ways I tried to fix this, and only the last one worked.

The NFS server has the ability to force all anonymous connections to a specific UID/GID. This is done using the following share options:

/export/home 192.168.137.0/24(rw,nohide,no_subtree_check,async,all_squash,anonuid=1000,anongid=100)

What all_squash does is basically treat all clients as anonymous, whereas anonuid and anongid assign a single UID/GID for these anonymous connections.
For some reason, this didn’t work for me. I’m guessing it has something to do with the Windows client, but I still couldn’t write to the share.

Luckily, I found the following tip/hack: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sfu/archive/2009/03/27/can-i-set-up-user-name-mapping-in-windows-vista.aspx

This simply forces the client to identify with your chosen UID/GID (instead of the default -2/-2), which is basically what I needed. You could remove the all_squash and the other options, but I left them there anyway, it works great. This tip is for Vista, but it also works on 7, not sure on previous Windows versions.

Now I have access to all my Linux files from Windows again, and without bloody Samba. The only thing I’m still figuring out is how to automatically connect to the share at Windows startup. I’ll update this post when I have a reliable method.

Cheers!

In the following example I get the selected text and transform it so that it can be used in an SQL list (used as values inside an IN clause). For example, selecting the following text:

594410186
594410082
594410187

… and pressing Alt+G, converts it to:

'594410186',
'594410082',
'594410187'

Which saves me a few seconds of copy/pasting the text in an editor and applying the regex manually. Did I mention I LOVE AHK?

Here’s the snippet:

GetSelectedText()
{
   tmp = %ClipboardAll%    ; save clipboard
   Clipboard := ""         ; clear clipboard
   Send, ^c                ; simulate Ctrl+C (=selection in clipboard)
   ClipWait, 1             ; wait until clipboard contains data
   selection = %Clipboard% ; save the content of the clipboard
   Clipboard = %tmp%       ; restore old content of the clipboard
   return selection
}

; Enclose each line in '$1',
; Used to format a list of strings for SQL
Alt & G::
  selection := GetSelectedText()
  newStr := RegExReplace(selection, "m)^(.*)$", "'$1',")
  StringReplace, newStr, newStr, `r`n, `r, All   ; fix newline
  SendInput %newStr%{Backspace}                  ; paste everything and delete last comma
  return

I haven’t heard a lot of chiptune, nor do I know much about the scene, but these are by far my favorite tunes from that culture. If someone knows others that are equal gems as these, please share.

DataChild of SAE – Tune 1 (IT | MP3 V2)

Zoef of FLT – Tune 2 (XM | MP3 V2)

Now, the IT and XM files are in module format that (unless someone converted them afterwards) are the original files as exported by the artist’s software, meaning they’re the lossless versions you should be listening to. In order to do so, I recommend downloading foobar2000 and the excellent foo_dumb plugin, or use any module file player of your choice.

Some years ago I converted and edited both these tracks to V2 MP3s for my own amusement, and to be able to play these universally. You can download these from the links above as well. I took the liberty to loop the tunes twice, and add some fade out at the end.

You can also find these files on scene.org (the original installer is found here) where you can download these and more sound files, and I definitely recommend you checking out that site as well as pouet.net.

A little bit of background regarding these two files…

They both come from a game rip installer circa the year 2000 of the game THPS2, from the infamous warez group Class. The installer itself is much more memorable to me because of the quality of this music than the game ever was. ^_^
Both of the authors were actually members of other groups: Zoef of Fairlight, a much more senior group still active today in some way or another, and DataChild of Share and Enjoy, an excellent music-only group, AFAIA.

So there you have it… Enjoy, let me know what you think in the comments, and please share any other gems like these.

Nuestra lucha es por el respeto a nuestro derecho a gobernar y gobernarnos, y el mal gobierno impone a los más la ley de los menos.

Nuestra lucha es por la libertad para el pensamiento y el caminar, y el mal gobierno pone cárceles y tumbas.

Nuestra lucha es por la justicia, y el mal gobierno se llena de criminales y asesinos.

Techo, tierra, trabajo, pan salud, educación, independencia, democracia, libertad… Éstas fueron nuestras demandas en la larga noche de los 500 años. Éstas son, hoy, nuestras exigencias.

The quote is an excerpt of the “Manifiesto zapatista en Náhuatl”, of which you can read the full version here.

Here’s a great Manu Chao poster with the quote:

So it made me rethink again the basic method I use to protect what in turn protects my online data: passwords. I won’t mention other alternative forms of authentication, because I don’t deal with them on a daily basis.

Here are some of the main rules I follow when it comes to passwords:

• Never use the same password with more than one account. I have actually broken this rule on a few occasions, but mostly for throwaway accounts. However, if what you need protecting is important and you wouldn’t want it to get into anyone else’s hands, make sure to use a unique password for every site/system you access.
• Always use a complex combination of letters, numbers and symbols as your password, at least 8 characters long. Make sure not to include any word available in the dictionary, any personal information (dates, names, etc.), or anything related to the specific account (same username/password >.<). Alternate between capitalization, number sequences (never in order) and special characters. Some might even suggest using characters outside of the ASCII set, but this might give you problems with certain systems, so YMMV. Good password: #-slUpfoLu!9. Bad password: 123abbey.
• If possible, use a memorable sequence of characters. A random string such as “\sVSS’rEXsO-1cL$Z3jF” is a pretty damn secure password, but how convenient would it be to have to type that some time? Or how hard would it be to memorize? I have been using this mnemonic password generator for the past few years, and it’s been great. It generates fairly complex strings, that are easily remembered through practice. It gives you the actual pronunciation of the string to help you with that. I usually spice up the generated string by setting some letters uppercase and changing or adding a few special characters and numbers. I can easily remember several passwords generated by this tool in case I need to login manually somewhere. But I rarely do, because I…
• Use a password manager. All the above rules would be pretty hard to follow if you didn’t use a password manager. I’ve been using KeePass for several years now, and have been pretty happy with it. It runs on all major OS’ (including smartphones), and it supports several authentication mechanisms to access your password database. If you just use a single master password, though, make sure it’s very, very, hard to crack, as you definitely don’t want this slipping into anyone’s hands. Another great password manager that gets security right (but fails terribly at UI) is LastPass. I’ve been using it mostly for web sites and it’s been an invaluable tool for me. It has a plugin for all major browsers and even a mobile app. Definitely worth the $12 yearly price for the Premium upgrade.

There are plenty more considerations when it comes to security, but these are the major ones I follow for passwords.

Anything I missed / could do better? Let me know in the comments.