Okay, after spending the last half hour doing A/B tests of 160kbps, 192kpbs, 256kpbs, and 350kbps .ogg files, I don’t think my ears are good enough to hear that much of a difference. I think I’m going to go with 256kbps, but I’ll give everything a listen at home through speakers and headphones and then decide. Maybe my ears suck, or maybe it’s the noisy sound card in this machine. We’ll see.
Okay, Monkey’s Audio:
27 File(s) 458,098,103 bytes
Ogg Vorbis 256kBps:
27 File(s) 144,111,480 bytes
Defiantely an advantage on file size. I think there’s an advantage on sound, too. The .ape files (Monkey’s Audio lossless) sounded brighter. Hard to tell. Time to get a spectrum analyzer…
While I was at lunch I decided to use Exact Audio Copy to rip beefcake’s drei down to some .ogg files using Ogg Vorbis 1.0. So far I’m pretty impressed. I went with the standard 256kBps VBR for a first try. At first listen on my notebook here at work it sounds like a 320kBps MP3 but with better high frequency sounds. It also pulled the whole disc down into ~150MB. Not bad…
Lately I’ve been desiring to rip a number of my most listened to CDs into some sort of compressed format. That way it’ll be easier to listen to around the house. I’ve now got a notebook and some Aiwa USB speakers in the kitchen. My I-Opener and a USB->TOSLINK adapter would work well down by the television. Obviously the PCs could act as their own players.
Sounds good so far, eh? Now comes the hard part… Deciding on a format. Monkey’s Audio is a nice lossless codec, but it’s Winamp support is a bit dodgy. Works, but not well. MP3 is just sounding tired. You can always tell an MP3, at almost any bitrate. Ogg is sounding good, has great support from software players, but I can’t find some good recommendations as far as settings go. I think that 256kBps VBR is going to work good. Going to 350kBps VBR will add an estimated 25%, and I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Perhaps I need to do some listening tests, then some decoding (to wave) and run the files through a spectrum analyzer vs. the original wave.
Anyone have enough experience with Ogg or various other codecs that they can make a recommendation? Hopefully I can find a codec that will be good for a few years to come. I know that lossless would be best, but it will also be about 300MB per disc then.
I’d like to take a vacation to Alaska later this year. Not your normal cruise or touristy thing, though. I want to fly from somewhere near here to Prince Rupert, BC (YPR) and then take the Alaska Marine Highway Transit System’s Ferry to Ketchikan, AK (KTN). Spend maybe three or four days wandering around Ketchikan, then return the way I came. The ferry is only $43 per person plus $48 each way for a two person outside cabin. The cabin wouldn’t be necessary, just nice for the view. It looks like airfare will run about $400 round trip from DTW to YPR. Not bad… For a rather nice hotel (Cape Fox) the rates are $139 – $149/night or, The Gilmore Hotel, a more standard place is $90/night for two twin beds. No one was answering the phone at the Super8. That all comes out to about $666 for travel and accomodations if you figure four nights. A little more for the cabin on the ferry if needed. Add food and random other expenses and it sounds like a rather cheap vacation for such a far off place.
There’s the flights, the view of the inside passage on a six hour ferry ride. A couple days to wander around the town, hike, hit up the parks, giggle at the tourists, etc.
Sounds like my kind of vacation… Would anyone else be interested in going? I might do it alone, I’m not sure, though…
Hrm. It seems I may have broken part of the web space at my new host. Well, not broken per say, but close. I tried installing Gallery with safe_mode turned on. It allowed me to create a gallery, but it promptly broke itself and left a directory that I don’t have access to hanging out there. That might not be so bad, but safe mode keeps even a PHP-based file manager from deleting it. I uploaded one and tried. I figured if it was running as the same user as created it (whatever Apache user) it’ll be able to delete the file. Wrong. If the host is willing to turn off safe_mode everything will go fine, otherwise I’ll be looking for another host that offers a bit more flexability as far as server configuration goes. This place is great so far, but some things seem limiting. I’d also like to direct gallery.nuxx.net to nuxx.net/gallery, but I think that will take some work as well. If it’s possible here…
What a wonderful storm we had today. I arrived home from work just in time to see the deep purple, grey, and blue clouds boiling up above my house. I wandered around outside a little, came in, then the downpour started.
It was just so wonderful… The lightning, the rain, the wind, everything just right.
Tonight I started work on two projects. Well, one of them is actually a continuation of something I was doing about a year ago. Tonight I put the first coat of paint on the door leading from my laundry room into the garage. It was half painted the original builder’s tan, and the other half was the aweful flat gray my uncle painted most of this place when my grandparents lived here. Now both sides have an initial coat of the green smokish color that my kitchen and laundry room both are.
The other thing I started back on was building a bed. About a year ago I decided that I wanted a nice solid wood bed. Since nice solid wood beds are prohibitively expensive, I decided to build one. It’s a solid oak mission style bed. I think it will be finished in a fairly standard darker oak color to match the furnature that is already in my bedroom. Some new hardware on the furnature, a new ceiling fan, lamps, and some other accessories and the bedroom should look good. It’ll also be nice to have a queen sized bed instead of the twin that I’ve had my whole life. If you’re interested in seeing pictures, they are in the newest catagory at the standard place.
Ahh… Whatever boneheaded move was made by Liquidweb has been set right. They said they did an Apache upgrade to fix a security hole. It looks like they didn’t test everything that they have that ties in with Apache. Ah well. It’s back to normal, I can’t complain.
Whee! To make the day even better, it looks like my hosting company, Liquidweb, went and made some changes to the PHP configuration on the server that my domain is on.
Currently going to the photo gallery gives this:
Warning: SAFE MODE Restriction in effect. The script whose uid is 1209 is not allowed to access /home/nuxx/public_html/asdellhouse_albums/.users/userdb.dat owned by uid 99 in /home4/nuxx/public_html/asdellhouse/platform/fs_unix.php on line 53
Warning: fopen(“/home/nuxx/public_html/asdellhouse_albums/.users/userdb.dat”, “r”) – Inappropriate ioctl for device in /home4/nuxx/public_html/asdellhouse/platform/fs_unix.php on line 53
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: geteverybody() in /home4/nuxx/public_html/asdellhouse/init.php on line 175
Now I’m sitting on hold, waiting for whoever in support to get back to me. Perhaps they are fixing it? I hope so… Who knows, though. I’m starting to see the reasons why it’s nice to have change controls entered for work to be done. Maybe an ISO process isn’t such a bad thing…
So yesterday I get home and my garage door doesn’t work. Hrm. Power failure! Another one… It seems that there was a scheduled power outage that I wasn’t informed of. So that makes what, 8 hours in the past two weeks?
Well, I just got off of the phone with the DTE Ombudsman for my area. It seems that my area had the power pulled from it to keep from overloading (and probably burning out, I’d assume) equipment. Supposedly there is a new substation going online this weekend or next week. I rather hope that this new substation will keep power on like normal. Fortunately I’m going out of town this weekend with fade_the_fallen so I won’t be using much electricity. I’ll down the firewall, array, file server, throw the thermostat to 78 or 80, etc. Pretty much try to cut usage down to really close to zero.
Pictures of the trip should be available when I get back. I might even post while I’m there… Who knows…
Well, it seems that the fibre channel array may be working fine after all. Kinda. I ran it through the works with ATTO Disk Benchmark and I started seeing performance numbers that made more sense. But there was one really wierd thing. The write speeds peaked off at about 20 MB/sec while the read went up to about 95 MB/sec. Need to figure this one out… Maybe that’s why the drive just felt slow. I think it could also somehow be a limitation (of a setting?) on the controller. I’d like to rebuild the array, but I just don’t have the time to do a reformat / reinstall right now. Oh well. I’d check other settings, but my copy of GAM for Windows got messed up. Some random service is missing…
I got to work about 30 minutes ago. It’s quiet here right now. Just the sounds of my keyboard (and someone else’s) clacking away. Lunch today should be nice. Brian and I are supposed to meet up with Al over at a local Indian place. This particular place has a nice lunch buffet for a reasonable price. Maybe they’ll even have the fried cheese balls in syrup. I still swear that those things are doughnuts and not cheese.
Coffee just isn’t waking me up this morning. Maybe coworkers will. If they get here before I pass out.
Yesterday I learned that we have a rather nice Cisco lab downstairs in this very building. A fully stocked CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE lab, along with a bunch of other random stuff. Not bad. I think I’m going to pick up my CCNA, simply because it looks fairly easy and there’s never anything wrong with having a second cert and learning a bit more.
I think I’ll go grab another cup of coffee and take a little walk around. There’s a bunch of stuff to be done around here today, so I need to get going on all of that.