Headphones

Posted on June 11, 2007

I’m not a huge audiophile. I don’t feel the need to spend tons of money on stereo equipment. For me, the cost of the equipment outweighs any improvement in sound. That said, I still like listening to music. I hate speakers that sound bad. The speakers on my TV are pretty bad – they buzz at certain volumes and frequencies, but my issues with TV is a whole other topic.

I listen to music two places primarily, at home on the computer and during the commute/walk to and from work. Walking to work, I use my Cowon A2 media player and Koss ear buds. I don’t know the model number of the ear buds, but I’ve heard them referred to as “spark plugs”, which is due to their look. The Cowon came with its own ear buds, but they kept falling out of my ear and they sounded bad. I got the Koss ear buds because they have foam tips that fit in the ear canal, which (mostly) blocks outside sound and keeps the buds in place. Also, they are the best sounding ear buds I’ve ever experienced. They have a much better sound than I would expect from such small speakers.

At home on the PC, I use a pair of Optimus LV-20 headphones I picked up at Radio Shack ten years ago for about $15. They’ve got a volume slider on the cord and the sound is very good. I’ve had friends who spent more on their headphones and I don’t they sounded as good. OTOH, I think some of that may be because they sounded “different”. Different != bad. It isn’t bad, it’s just different. Anyway, I’ve been pleased with the headphones. Now, after ten years, the left headphone has a loose wire and I can’t see any obvious way to fix it. I move the wire one way and there’s no sound, but move it another direction and it sounds great. Anyone who’s dealt with rabbit ear antennas will get an idea. The problem is there is no easy way to solve the sound problem. I could cock my head to one side while holding the cord at a certain angle, but this is a pain in the neck, literally and figuratively. I plugged the Koss earbuds into the PC so I can listen to the music, but the cord is too short to use in the long run. I get paid this week, so I will be searching for some new headphones.

Mainly I’m looking at Amazon’s selection because the stores downtown have a poor selection, in my experience. I like headphones with big ear cups that swivel on two axis. Having a volume control on the cord is a big plus for me. I see they have cordless headphones out now, but I’m not sure about the sound quality and how well they work with Linux. I don’t know what brand I’ll get yet, but I do know I will spend more than $15.00. At the other end, I saw some on Amazon for $1500.00. I can’t even comprehend spending that much on a set of headphones. I’ll probably end up spending $40 – $80.

Comments and Spam Karma 2

Posted on June 11, 2007

Recently, this site has been getting a lot of spam comments. They never make it public because WordPress will hold suspicious comments in queue to be moderated. Nice feature, however when you get 30 – 50 spam comments a day, it’s tedious going through them all to see what’s legit and what’s spam. I don’t get many comments on my site, but the ones I do get I want to make public. Holding them in moderation is a good way of filtering signal-to-noise, even if it is a bit time-consuming on my end.

However, over the past month or two (probably started in April), I noticed a definite growth in comment spam. Previously, it would happen in spurts of 20 – 30 comment spam (is there a specific term for comment spam?), but lately it has been very consistent with no letting up. I’ve been casually looking into WordPress plugins for dealing with it. I tried a field that had the user do a simple math equation before commenting, but this didn’t stop the spam, and since the level of spam stayed consistent, I figured the spambots were getting by it (hence it was worthless to me).

A couple of weeks ago, Charity noted her blog was getting a lot of comment spams as well. Some people posted recommending Spam Karma 2 (SK2), giving it high marks, so I figured I woul try it out as well. I downloaded it and installed it, and I have to admit, that it is very good at capturing comment spam. I don’t get enough legit comments to tell how well it works with those.

When I installed it, it looked at all of the comments in the past and it left them where they were, but it didn’t give them a karma score. It put them on a special page and on the page is a button that says “Moderate Selected”. This is what I get for not RTFM. I assumed that meant it would take the selected comments and assign them a positive Karma score. What happened was I selected the comments presented, clicked on “Moderate Selected” and the comments were gone from the list. I assumed this meant everything was okay and they weren’t on the list because they had positive karma. What actually happened was they were deleted. I’m pretty sure they were deleted. They’re not on the board anymore and they aren’t on any of the SK2 pages. Oops. I haven’t checked the database yet, but I’m pretty sure they’re gone. I’m not too worried because I backed up the DB in early May. I can restore all but the most recent comments. Of course, I better check on that, but I’ve been a bit lazy on that.

In other words, the vanished comments that you obviously miss so dearly ;-) will be back soon…probably.

Version control

Posted on June 3, 2007

A lot of coding projects, but not all, use some type of version control. For years CVS was the big thing, though it apparently had some shortcomings. A few years ago, Subversion came out to address some of those problems. I don’t know what the problems were. I’m just going by what I’ve read. Sourceforge offers CVS and Subversion for projects to use. Projects don’t have to use them at all. They can just release the files and packages if they want. However, if a project has multiple developers or users who want to be on the bleeding edge, then version control is good idea.

Since CVS is supposed to have problems, I figured I would try out Subversion. I spent most of the wee hours trying to figure it out and failing. Over the past hour or so, I think I got it. I started the project on my PC at home. With svn (actually with RapidSVN – a GUI Subversion client for Gnome), I imported the files from giraf-wc/ into the Sourceforge repository. The problem I had was if I created or altered a file in giraf-wc/ I couldn’t get svn to update the repository. What I had to do was checkout the repository into a new directory on my PC called giraf-co/. I probably could have cheked it out to the giraf-wc/ directory, but I didn’t want to take the chance of losing any files.

Anyway, now I have svn working fairly smoothly. RapidSVN is a great tool once I figured it out. I would hate to have to do all this via the comand line. Maybe a tool like that would change Linus’ opinion.

Hooray

Posted on June 2, 2007

Yay! After spending some time with it, I was finally able to get Apache working with PHP on my PC again. While it had no problem with plain HTML files, for PHP, my browser would ask if I wanted to download the file and open it in a text editor. HTML would open like a normal webpage. Since my browser had no problem with PHP on other sites, it was apparent it was my setup was the problem. It turns out it was a matter of enabling the php5 module for Apache. One issue solved. Now it will be easier for me to work on development of Giraf/Lingo.

In other important news (to me, at least), I sent in a registration for Giraf with Sourceforge on Friday, and today it looks like they accepted it. You can check it out here. I guess this makes it somewhat official (even if it is ranked 21,017 at sourceforge). I also guess I better get working on it.

As a sidebar, the Sourceforge registration process isn’t what I expected. I figured it would be automatic after filling out a form, but it isn’t. They want to know about the project and what the developer hopes to accomplish. Kind of interesting. On the other hand, I don’t know what kind of decision process they go through. It might just be a matter of making sure everything is filled out correctly.

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