chris@FRANK:~$ uptime
22:25:03 up 393 days, 3:19, 1 user, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01
Sometimes there just aren’t words to describe certain things…
Monthly Archive for April, 2007
I found Can you tell 128kbps AAC from the original? Take the test! via Digg quite fascinating today.
Since the iTunes Music Store opened, a lot of people have complained about the DRM-infested low-quality music they sold. I’ve often countered that the vast majority of users couldn’t tell one level of high-quality music from another1.
Finally, it looks like this simple experiment has proven my point. If you look at the stats, on roughly every track about half of the people were wrong when they tried to pick the lower-quality and the original tracks apart. If you further take into account that there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll simply guess correctly every time, that means that in fact a huge majority of people don’t have a clue which track is the original - we’ll conservatively say 75% of the overall tested population.
Have you taken the Apple Challenge? Blindfold your ears and see if you can tell the difference between the encoding…
By the way, the site withstood the Digg effect by hosting their audio files on Amazon’s S3 service. Very cool!
- I used to have a friend that ripped all his CDs at outrageous bitrates - like 400+ - and claimed he could easily tell the difference. Personally, I think it was just the drugs having rotted his brain, but whatever… [back]
Sorry for the downtime today… I made the mistake of attempting to migrate back to my Media Temple (gs) account.
What Happened
The migration went well, and I got everything up and running without any problems. Great, off to Starbucks! An hour later I return home, click refresh… And get a Wordpress error that it can’t select my database. Great, what now?
I log into my Media Temple account, and see that the database is still listed there. Flip to phpMyAdmin, and notta. Database isn’t listed.
The Problem
I submit a trouble ticket and wait about 15 minutes without a result. Fine, we’ll call their 800 number. I get in the queue and their automated system tells me I’m #6 and the estimated hold time is about 9 minutes. Ok, that’s not too bad, especially if they’re having a problem…
21 minutes later, I get a technician. Robbie was quite nice and knew right away what my problem was. Apparently there was a problem with the database permissions, and they were having to re-set permissions on a large number of newly-created databases (including one of mine that had been created at least 24 hours previously). An admin was working on it, and it should be about an hour…
My Verdict
It looked like (mt) had gotten the kinks worked out in their new (gs) system. The last downtime report claimed less than 15 minutes, and I hadn’t even noticed it (nor had my site monitoring service, Site 24×7). I finally decide to switch back, and promptly get kicked in the gut (or somewhat lower) for my trouble.
I don’t care if they haven’t charged me for this service since I started in October… It’s not worth it. Goodbye, Media Temple. I’ll have my bags packed by tomorrow.
I totally missed NCIS tonight. I didn’t actually get home from work until after 7:00, so my evening was really thrown off-kilter as it was. Somehow, I just relaxed on the couch watching some old Remington Steele DVDs and totally missed it when 8:00 rolled around.
Don’t you love it the week before a vacation, when you’re running yourself even more ragged than usual trying to make sure everything’s ready so you can waste a week trying to relax? Ugh…
Someone please tell me that tonight’s episode was a re-run. Anybody?
Using CURL in XAMPP
There appear to be a lot of misguided people on the intarwebs claiming all sorts of varying things you have to do to get CURL to work on a Windows-based XAMPP install. I’d like to clear them all up here and now.
Using CURL in XAMPP
It’s really quite simple - uncomment
extension=php_curl.dllin yourphp.inifile, then restart Apache1.A lot of confusion seems to stem from the fact that there are multiple
php.inifiles in a standard XAMPP install. This really isn’t as confusing as you’d think it would be, assuming you - and I know I’m going out on a limb here - read the documentation.There’s a straight-forward XAMPP FAQ Entry about their php.ini stucture. For those looking for the easy fix, ignore everything but the /apache/bin/php.ini file. That’s the only one that counts, regardless of which PHP version you’re currently using.
What about all the .dll files you need? Well, you don’t need them. Everything you need to run CURL on a XAMPP install is included in the download. Stop downloading extra crap and sticking it all over your system. XAMPP knows what it needs, where it’s at, and how to use it. End of story.
This is all based on the XAMPP Basic Package for Windows, version 1.6.1, released on 4/18/2007. YMMV.