Steve Speak

OK, so we have heard about some pretty wacky lawsuits over the years. It seems like there are a never ending supply of stupid (ops… I mean common sense and ethically challenged) people looking to make some free cash at someone else’s expense. You know what I’m talking about… people driving with coffee and then suing because it was hot and burned them… or people suing an auto or aircraft maker because they lost control while driving drunk. I could go on and on.

Well, here we have another one I ran across, and it pretty much blew me away again. Think maybe we should take up a collection to send Ms Bay home to the comet? ;o)

“Russian sues Nasa for comet upset” article.

Well… at least it’s good for a laugh or two.

In the coming Windows Vista (the OS formerly known as Longhorn… Mmoooo!), Microsoft is promising the ability to access applications and desktops over the Internet without a virtual private network.

Considering their past and current track record, is anyone but me just a tad nervous about trusting M$ to VPN their data around the internet?

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1842176,00.asp

This topic, as the title states is somewhat of a rabbit track from what I was going to post. I WAS going to post the details of my stereo install this weekend in my Miata. I’m still going to do this, but it might take a while. To give you some idea how this all went, I’m debating between “Frankenstein Stereo Install” and “Stereo Install Nightmare on Steve Street”. I’m sure I’ll come up with something better when I write it, but you get the idea…

Well, as an aside, when I got my stereo, I started to browse the manual, and I made some interesting discoveries. My stereo reads v1.x ID3 tags, and my titles weren’t showing up. I soon learned that iTunes defaults to v2.2. Interesting… I didn’t even know what a ID3 tag was, let alone the differences between versions. I was about to find out.

ID3 tags are the embedded information in your MP3 files which give various information, such as the track title, artist, album, genre, etc. I knew this info was there, but not much about it. Basically, v1.x tags are put at the end of the MP3 data, and are delimited by the number of characters per field. The fields are also very limited in length, most to 30 characters (not enough for even all your track titles, let alone other information.) Also, there are a lot less fields available. The advantage to putting them at the end, is they are easy to change. The disadvantage is that you have to read in the entire file to see them.

Well, v2.x came along an fixed much of this. They are prepended to the front of the file, and are stored in 256 byte ‘frames’. Apple smartly pads this area of the MP3, so they can change information without re-writing the whole file. This kind of takes the best advantage of v1.x, but at the beginning of the file, so they are quickly accessed when browsing files.

If you want to see the tags… you can actually open an MP3 in your text editor… look at the start or end, and you should see some familiar info. You can read all the gooey details about this at:

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/id3tags00.php

I started to wonder, sweat, and worry…. will my newly purchased stereo even be able to show the track names now? I found information out there about ID3 tag editors, so I guess I could go through thousands of songs and edit them to v1.x… ekk! Then I found that iTunes has this nice feature under Advanced – - Convert ID3 Tags…. YAY! The only problem with this is that in many of my MP3s I have a lot more information stored in them (I record a lot of Internet radio programs, and often store notes about the show content in the notes field… also a lot of my tracks have long titles.) If I converted them to v1.x, my data got chopped off, or erased.

Then I started wondering…. what happens if BOTH tags are present? Since an MP3 file seems to work equally well with the appended info, or prepended info…. why couldn’t their be both? I searched and searched… and really couldn’t find info on this. One article said something about append/prepend when talking about the specs… so I started to DL tag editors, hoping I’d find a way.

I stuck gold!!! I found two pretty nice apps, which actually do a lot more. But both can be set to go through your libraries of MP3s and convert versions of tags, as well as put BOTH! Whoo hoo!

MP3 ID3X
http://www.three-2-one.de/321apps/main/global/index1.htm

MP3 Rage
http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MP3Rage.html

I picked the later one… not because of its ‘totally awesome’ skull logo (not sure what is up with that… maybe I need to read about its history or something), but because it does SO many other things too.

It seems to work quite well… it went through my entire music collection in about 10 minutes or so, and now I have v2.3 AND v1.1 ID3 tags on my MP3s.

Problem solved for now! Now back to lamenting and resting from my VERY involved stereo install process…

It seems that most of the time when a Mazda Miata is being referred to, it usually has a name. I guess this must be because they are so much fun, that they just become members of the family.

Well, here is my problem… my Miata has no name! It is a ’95 M Edition, Merlot Mica. I just love this color, in fact it is my very favorite. I’m really lucky to have found one of these. They only made 3500 of them. Its over 10 years old, but is in great condition.

Back to the name dilemma… When I first got it, my brain made an instant connection to ‘Merlin’ the Merlot. That has kind of a ring to it. But, when Mark (his Miata is named UBY, derived from the license plate) and I did a bit of looking at the Miata registries, it seems that MANY other folks had the same idea. Well, my Miata is just too special to have that common of a name. Yet, I’m going to resist giving it a ‘unique’ name, following the traditions of California, such as ‘Sparkle-star Moonbeam Shiraz’. But, I really need help, as my wife has suggested ‘Trixie” (I’m just not sure what she could mean by that!!!)

So, can you help me come up with a great name for my racy little friend?

So, you recently purchased your dream phone/PDA/swiss-army-knife/mp3 gadget, and is it ever cool. You fire up iSync and let it rip. Then you start browsing your contacts and realize that it only brought over a portion of the information you have stored in Address Book.

What up?

Well, Apple’s iSync compatibility list is fairly ‘binary’ in the sense that it only really tells you that your device will ‘sync’ or not, and if it sync’s AB, iCal, To-Do, etc. But, it doesn’t really tell you WHAT fields in those programs sync, or how complete the data is.

So, I started thinking (actually being on a quest to get said new geeky device…): Wouldn’t it be great to have a list of devices and some rough map of what they sync? Sure, everyone doesn’t need every bit of info in their Address Book, but it would be nice to see if the primary things you need will be coming across in a sync.

I posted on the Apple Discussion Board, and got a lively thread going there. Many folks were quite interested in the idea. So, I threw a web page together to start the tracking. So, if you have such a device…. test it out and get the results to me.

http://www.cgwerks.com/whatsyncs/

After writing the last post, I started to wonder just what a ‘kudo’ is anyway. Well, much to my amazement, its not those little snack thingies after all. I’ll have to quickly cancel that order I just had sent to Mark.

Well, according to my little on-line dictionary:

kudos (as in “praise”) n. : an expression of approval and commendation; “he always appreciated praise for his work”
WordNet 1.7 Copyright 2001 by Princeton University.

Well, hello world, I guess… or at least the few people who might wonder into my cyber space. (Not including the friends I’ve dragged, kicking and screaming in here so I have at least a few visitors.)

Now I just have to think of something cool to say, and find some time to write it up. No problemo, right?

Anyway, many thanks to our good friend Mark for setting this up for me. Kudos dude!