Month: December 2005

Name That Tune!

If you are anything like me with the music (who knows very little about), you will appreciate the convenience of being able to know what song is being played on the radio at all times, that is, if you are listening on your Mac or PC.

Name that tune with Tunatic

Tunatic is a tiny software that is capable of identifying pretty much any modern song within seconds of listening to it. It analyzes the music that’s being played, compare the data with a server and fetches the name of the song and the artist. The downside of this software is that it relies on the speaker of the computer (I guess that can be the upside if you are listening to the conventional radio). That means if you speak when it samples the music, it will take your voice into consideration… not good.

All in all, this little app has been able to identify most of the music I threw at it (nothing fancy though; it failed to identify non-English songs as well as Jazz). Another application the company makes is Tunalyzer, which is an app that sits in the background and analyzes everything in your music folder and sends the meta data back to the database that Tunatic uses. The idea is to sample as much music as possible with the right tags that people give to their music.

iTunes Faces Open Source Challenge

iTunes has been dominating the mp3 market in terms of legal music download service. On top of that, I personally also believe that its by far the best music organizing application than most of the software out there. But a new open source challenger just showed up in the scene — SongBird Media Player.

It sports an interface that looks just like iTunes (what isn’t?). But it also includes a few features that’s lacking in iTunes, for good reasons.

SongBird screen shot

Apple Address Book Woes

I have always been a big advocate for Apple’s technologies. But one thing has really annoyed me about Apple’s Address Book. Its import and export utility is simply not well written to import from popular address books used by other companies.

When I was working on PCs, I have always used Yahoo’s Intellisync utility to synchronize contacts between Microsoft Outlook and my address book on Yahoo. The utility works so seamlessly that I’d be happy to pay an annual subscription fee just for that feature. But when I completed dumped Windows and started using my PowerBook full time, I started to experience nightmares trying to keep address books in sync between my cell phone, Yahoo address book and Apple Address Book.

For starters, I’ve always used Yahoo as my master calendar and address book center. Whatever updates I make, I always make it on the master list first. but there are times when I just don’t have access to the web! That’s when things start to get out of sync. To Yahoo’s credit, it exports to several different formats no problem (except when dealing with Chinese characters, which is a complete mess). The problem starts when Apple’s Address Book import utility falls short on its promise.

When importing LDIF files that was exported from Yahoo (which is the most perfect format in that I can finesse the Chinese characters so that they show up correctly), Apple gets it almost right except that it labeled everything as “work” by default. I simply can’t find a way to change that default setting. It’s annoying as hell.

As for importing csv files, first of all, Yahoo messes up the export with garbage Chinese characters. Then upon importing to Address Book, Apple messes up the field mappings, making only a few things match up. I tried once correcting all the mappings, and then Address Book crashed. God damn stupid Apple!

The same goes to Apple’s iCal, its own calendaring software. I so wish it can work seamlessly with Yahoo’s calendar, which has been working just the way I want it to. Apple’s iCal, on the other hand, prints awful, lacks some key features I need (which I use all the time with Yahoo calendar) and doesn’t really sync with anything else.

I guess the point of what Apple’s doing is simple — it wants everyone to use its paid subscription .Mac service. It’s a great service except that I already have a great server that meets all my hosting and emailing needs. Plus at $99 a year (or $179 for a family subscription with up to 4 accounts), I can’t really justify using it simply for calendaring and address book syncing.

I guess I should try using Mozilla Foundation’s ThunderBird and see how that really fares. At least with open source software, everything gets updated much faster. It will take another major OS upgrade for Apple to introduce the next major version of Mail and Address Book. And for me, I am getting increasingly frustrated with both apps. Love live open source!

Intelligent Design Not Fit for Classroom

Today a U.S. District Judge rendered the teachings of Intelligent Design unsuitable inappropriate for classrooms in America.

It’s odd for anyone to even consider teaching what clearly belongs to theology and religion in the realm of science. NPR (again) did a very well researched story on the subject matter. And of course, not that I have anything against people of religious faith, but I think politics, religion and everything else should just leave science alone. How sad is it that it took a court to decide what’s science and what’s not. And furthermore, IF the court ruled in favor of the creationists (or the pro-intelligent design camp), where will American scientific creativity and curiosity go? Isn’t exploring the unknown a crucial key to driving technological and scientific advances? By having Intelligent Design in the science curriculum, it’s basically just saying that some things are impossible to find out, and that’s attributed to the Intelligent Design.

Just leave science alone!

Awesome Animes

I finally got to see Appleseed last night (Thanks, Jason!). The whole time I felt like I was watching a hybrid anime of the original Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix and Robotech. I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I think I enjoyed Ghost in the Sell 2 more than I did Appleseed mainly because of the quality of graphics in Ghost in the Shell 2 (I had trouble following the subtitle while comprehending the rather complicated issues the movie was dealing with).

Nontheless, Appleseed was a pretty cool movie with decent plot lines. I wished the motion capture was more “anime-like”. A lot of it looked “captured” and almost too realistic for the anime-feel of the movie. Jason mentioned something about the toon shade renderer used in the movie, but I didn’t notice anything aweful, just some bad hue choices in a few scenes.

A few days ago I also saw Howl’s Moving Castle with Grace. I think Hayao Miyazaki definitely makes Grace chuckle more than most of the anime directors I like. As much as she enjoyed Howl’s Moving Castle, I think she still prefers Spirited Away and, of course, Totoro. I hope that guy never dies and keeps making more films.

Now I gotta watch Steamboy to satisfy my 2005 anime wishes. Damn it I wish I had money then I can just buy them!

Let the Good Times Roll

We had a good time with Jason and Alicia again tonight. And this time we got to see a picture of Jason that’s totally unrecognizable.

Bryan, for some reason, was not comfortable with them tonight though. He’s seen them before, but he would just blast out crying whenever he sees them being too close to him. That doesn’t really happen when Michelle or Chee-hoi were here. Maybe that was why he cried so hard last time. Maybe Bryan is more used to the plain Asian facial features; their bolder features make his sensitive eyes hurt… Hah hah…

I also got to take out my teapot set today. I have only used that thing maybe 10 times the entire time I’ve owned the set. I oughta use the damn set more often. They cost me a fortune to have them brought over from Taiwan (thanks to J.J.).

It started raining heavily as Jason and Alicia were leaving. I love rain… so long as I don’t have to be soaked in it. I find the dripping sound on the ground soothing. This is the only time I like water (and drinking it, showering in it and toilet flushing with it), other than that, I am with my cats on this one — water sucks… getting wet sucks even more.

Reclaim Memory from Firefox

I still keep an eye on the browsers, even though now I have 1GB of RAM installed, for their memory leaks. Firefox and Safari are nortorious for leaking memory when too many tabs are open for too long. But thanks to this blog, there’s now a way to reclaim unused memory space back from Firefox:

If you minimize Firefox, it will (automagically) reclaim memory that it’s no longer using.

IT WORKS! Firefox was using 180+MB of RAM even though only 3 tabs were open at the time. By simply minimizing the window, the memory usage went down to just above 110MB. Nuts.

But seriously, a browser that requires 100+MB of RAM to run is just crazy. When Firefox is first launched, it only takes about 85MB of RAM. It creeps up as more and more tabs are opened/closed… etc. And the longer you run Firefox in one shot straight, the more memory it will take up over time. The same issue applies to Safari. But at least now there’s a work around for Firefox.

Damn you, Apple Safari team.