XML-RPC Home Page. The source of wonderfulness. This is a set of standards that blogging uses that lets you construc remote procedure calls with XML encoding. Need to learn this.

Blog HOT or NOT. Another cool artifact of blogging. Rating others. There is an entire site devoted to it. I signed up all our sites. FWIW.

The W3C MarkUp Validation Service. How valuable. A free utility from the w3c to see if your html is OK. Interesting to see how well most sites do. Learned a bunch

Andromeda Streaming Jukebox: MP3 server for PHP & ASP

Clean up your Web pages with HTML TIDY. I keep making html ugly. Here is a beautifier.

Brad Silverberg. Another incredible site. PIR apparently mines information and trys to cross reference people. Does an amazing job with Brad Silverberg of course, but I'm not listed. Interesting idea. Basically it looks at citations in books and other periodicals to build a database of related folks. Cool.

AvaQuest People Mine. Wow interesting to see how Google information can be datamined. First example I've seen of a third party build on top of Google. Fun to run a query on your own name. It found Rich Tong and John Ludwig correctly!

Google Weblog. If you can believe it , an entire blog on what's going on a Google. Again, thanks to blo.gs for helping. Blo.gs is really the google of blogs. Makes me wonder what google is in the world of blogs. There is lots more semantic information than links.

dive into mark. The most watched site on blo.gs. Very beautiful too. I like how he does his site map and also his graphics are very clean. Good thoughts on RSS, etc. as well. His titles for his navigation pane are great too. I must be getting to be more of blogger, I recognize more and more names in the community. dive into mark/November 26, 2002. This must be the techie post at his permalink address. Not sure I understand much of it, but Ludwig talks about the blog ethos. Here is a great illustration.

blo.gs: most watched blogs. Pretty useful, here's a list of the top twenty most "added to your favorites" blogs. You need that pesky fix blo.gs thing to get the nice + sign after them to add them. Next step is to use blogrolling to add them dynamically to the site.

phil ringnalda dot com: blo.gs microtools. This is one of those favorites in the sky. Some cool tools here, although the blo.gs site doesn't actually have an add link to favorite interface for some reason.

tb-standalone - Standalone TrackBack Just what I need to get blogger version of tongfamily.com to understand trackbacks purposes: 1) it allows non-Movable Type users to use TrackBack with the tool of their choice, provided they meet the installation requirements; 2) it serves as a reference point to aid developers in implementing TrackBack in their own systems. This tool is a single CGI script that accepts TrackBack pings through HTTP requests, stores the pings locally in the filesystem, and can return a list of pings either in RSS or in a browser

The Game of Risk

Been playing this with the kids since Alex got it for his birthday. Naturally Connie, being a living buddha and a hard core game player since 5 years of age, always wins. So, here are some places to get some strategy help. Like chess, I only win because of the Internet: La Strategia del RisiKo!. Actually, it is in English, but some good hints here. A bunch of computer clones of Risk. Some nice freeware from when I'm on the plane. Risk FAQ. Of course there is an FAQ about the game.

Christmas is coming, time to look at bikes

MTBReviews 2003 Kid Bikes. Has the best listing of kids bikes. Shopping for bike is starting. They need a good 20 inch wheel mountain bike with gears. Here's a quick review of some of the major ones. I'm looking for aluminum frame, 7-speed, 20 inch wheels in a hardtail:

• Marin Hidden Canyon. This got the nod in Bicycling Magazine. $219 7-speed, suspension fork and side-pull brakes. REI should carry it, but it is not on their site and you can also find at Velo Bike.
• K2 Zed. This one also meets all the specs at $220 list price. It has a 7005 aluminum Unigender frame, Spinner Exceed-210 fork with 50mm of travel, 7-speed Shimano Tourney/SRAM GripShift with double chain guard cranks. We can go to REI to get it at $219
• Giant MTX 125. Similar to the K2 in specs with ALUXX aluminum Lite Beam frame, Shimano Tourney and Sram MRX 7 speed shifters. You can find them at Performance Bike Shop, Velo in Seattle. And while you're there, admire the TCR Composite Team, which is a replica of the ONCE/Eroski bikes that did so well in the Tour de France.

There is also a road bike to consider at H.H. Kid Road Bikes. Wow, there is actually someone making high quality road bikes for kids. Nice find. This is a 20 inch wheel with a frame. I wonder how you build it up? There are some other choices as well, but these are steel frames:

• KHS Raptor. Hey does everyone get their bikes from the same place. This has nearly the same specs, but is steel. $205 SRP. Heavy-Duty TIG-Welded Frame, Mozo M-20 Suspension Fork w/MX Front Fender, SEC Twist Shifter and Shimano 7 Speed Freewheel
• Haro V20. Steel though. SR Suntou XCC suspension fork, SRAM MAX shift levers, WTB threadless aheadset. THe threadless headset is pretty cool.
• trekbikes.com: Kids. It is too bad Trek doesn't make anything like this.

quartzified.NET :: halo [Disappear the light is fading]. Weblo.gs produces a great what logs have been updated in the last day list. Great for just getting a sense. Here's good insight into a 17-year-old's life and how these online diaries work. I love the look and also the fact it is hard coded as a 6 point font web site. Means only kids can see it. would be cool tied to a Wildseed Skin

Web Hosting, Web Host Buyer's Guide and Directory of top hosts and reviews. More on Ensim and also about Rackshack, the underlying hoster for Tranquil. Interesting how hosting is now tiered in terms of distribution. Rackshack. It is like the .com revolution never started when I look at a page like this. It is also cleare to me the revenue model when you see how the pricing works. For instance, you can get an Intel Celeron 1.3GHz hosting machine for $99/month. This has 60GB hard drive and 400GB transfer, so if you can sell it for say $20/month to 6 people, you begin making money. I love the way that they have the number of available servers listed as well. . What this means to me is that if Mark ever decides to get out of the business, I should probably just get one of these servers for myself :-) For instance, for $30/month, you get a 300MB virtual server. Wow, that's great.

Ensim - Appliances. I spent some time figuring out how you could host something. Tranquil uses Ensim's WEBppliance software. Wow, a neat box. I wonder how they are doing. Makes me want to get one going for myself. Maybe we could get Ludwig to run the WEBppliance for Windows version on The Ludwigs. posted by RT @ 8:51:00 PM 

Had a great turkey dinner today. The brined turkey really works well, although it makes the dark meat taste almost cured. The white meat really comes out super well. Did it on the Rotisserie that we got. Took 2 1/2 hours for a 12 lb bird. Best tip of all. Connie cuts a little hole in the skin to put the wingtip in, then you can tie a string around the wings. With a rotisserie, the wings kind of wiggly around and it is hard to get them to stay together.

CSS Introduction. Ok, I'm finally going to make my sites look good and to do that I need to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). AGain, thanks to google, here is the top CSS tutorial. Wish me luck!

blo.gs. This is the second biggest blog trakcing site. It is amazing, There are currently 54,661 weblogs being tracked for 886 users. Wow! I like this site because it shows what is being updated in real time. And you can see the whole community there. Plus there is a neat ie5 pane that you can use to brows the entire world as it changes. Very cool.

Sage, Orange, and Clove Rotisserie Turkey BBQ Recipe It's Thanksgiving Time, so it is time to try some new recipes, I've got a new gas grill. Never thought I'd cave on that, but now I can rotisserie, here's a recipe I'll adapt to the event. I'm doing a brined turkey with this, but the rub here looks great One whiff of the orange, clove, and sage in this recipe is guaranteed to drive the neighbours wild. If you don’t have a rotisserie, grill this 12- to 14-pound turkey over Indirect Medium heat for 2-1/4 to 2-1/2 hours. For the rub: 2 tablespoons granulated orange peel 1 tablespoon dried sage 1 tablespoon kosher salt 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1 tablespoon vegetable oil 1 turkey, 12 to 14 pounds 2 small oranges, washed and dried 12 whole cloves 6 medium garlic cloves, crushed 1 bunch fresh sage, tied with cotton string To make the rub: In a small bowl combine the rub ingredients. Set aside. Remove the pop-up timer, as well as the neck, giblets, and any excess fat from the turkey and discard. Rinse the turkey, inside and out, under cold water and pat dry with paper towels. Pierce the oranges several times with a knife and insert six whole cloves into each of them. Put the clove-studded oranges, garlic, and sage into the turkey cavity. Truss the turkey with cotton string. Pin the neck skin flap to the body with two or three small trussing needles. Skewer the turkey lengthways through the oranges and centre on the spit. Rub the entire exterior with the rub mixture, pressing it into the skin. Set the spit on the rotisserie and let the turkey rotate over Indirect Medium heat until the internal temperature reaches 170°F in the breast and 180°F i the thickest part of the thigh, 2-1/4 to 2-1/2 hours. Turn off the rotisserie. Wearing barbecue mitts, carefully remove the spit from the rotisserie and place it on a cutting board. Loosely cover the turkey with aluminium foil and allow to rest for at least 20 minutes. Remove the spit and discard the oranges, garlic, and sage. Carve the turkey into serving pieces. Serve warm. Makes 12 to 14 servings. Thanks to www.weber.com

Using Blogrolling's PHP option on your PHP enabled weblog. I'm converting to using PHP so that the blogrolling stuff can be read by google. This works on all the geekfishing.net related sites, but not for my current tongfamily.com since it doesn't have PHP :-( If your blog supports PHP and allow_url_fopen you can call the data from Blogrolling directly bypassing JavaScript. This has the distinct advantages that it loads text into your page before display so it can be read by search engines and other robots that can't read the JavaScript code. To use this you must know your way around PHP. I won't answer any support questions on how to set-up your blog to use PHP or similar tech support requests. That's what you pay your ISP for.

Rss Readers. Another thing to study are RSS readers. Since all these blogs we now have generate RSS, it would be kind of nice to consume them as well.

lgf: the lowest of the low. A great site and also has a nice PHP script to show you dynamically where people are coming from to get to your site. I'll slam into tongfamily, geekfishing, etc. soon.

hitormiss.org : Daily Crawl. Another incredibly cool cgi script thing that I found on Anita's blog. This lets you know where you've been by the time that you visited. Blogrolling is great, but this is even cooler. This is basically blogrolling, but happens on your server, not in some meta-server. The most incredibly thing about this program is that it is actually 14KB. I didn't know anything could be useful and that size.

Converting to Movable Type

Just a note to folks, I'm converting this blog over to MovableType. I'm not going to be updating this as much over the next week before I do the full flip. If you want to see the upcoming blog, checkout New Tong Family. For a while I'll run the posts in parallel, but not sure I'm going to be that disciplined about it. MovableType is just so much nicer.

Random Thanksgiving Thoughts

We all have much to be thankful for. My biggest this year is that I can sit and think with guys like Ludwig about what the next big thing is. Here are a couple of observations, just an outline, I'll fill in later, but wanted to get thoughts down.

1. The miracle of Sourceforge. Open Source drives modular code. You have to think about it from day one. The code is very small (gallery.sourceforge.net) is a 1MB program in total, but the desktop loader is 2.5MB. What do you make of that. Folks should have an internal sourceforge.
2. Building great consumer products. It's about hardware and software integration in consumer products. In personal productivity, it's about applications and operating system.
3. The great pillars of consumer products. For desktop productivity, it was spreadsheets, a narrow, but great need and word processing, a broader more diffuse one. For today's consumer, I think it is about gaming (like spreadsheets, same deep but narrow at 30% penetration) and photography of all sorts. The ether of the last revolution was email, in this world it is blogging.

Gallery :: your photos on your website. On geekfishing, we are using Gallery now for photos. Seems like a nice applications. Here's a note on how to password protect individual albums, so some can be public and others require registration and only certain people are allowed to see it. See the very last post as a nice way to do this

Geek Fishing. Finally got this master site up and running. For those of you who are wondering about the name. It refers to our boating trips on Lake Washington. Instead of fishing for, well fish, we go looking for errant 802.11 wireless signals. It is amazing what you can see on a cruise on the water. Hence the term Geek Fishing. As, our little Calvin says, the geeks are winning!

More on getting photo gallery to work right: Gallery

Right now I'll stay focused on getting a decent photo gallery thing running. Went through the basic MovableType File Upload stuff. it is OK for a few photos, but it wouldn't really scale to larger sets. I need something that will take my c:\pictures directory and be smart about doing essentially a projection on this up to the web with thumbnails, etc. So, I'm off to get Gallery running on my non-standard, Apache on Windows installation. Here are the detailed notes:

1. PHP Gallery. Take the download from there and extract it into the main Apache directory. This is c:\program files\apache group\apache\htdocs on my server.
2. Follow the readme and edit httpd.conf with the directory override.
3. Follow the instructions when you execute http://yourhost/gallery/setup. BTW, this is a great way to do setup, actually have it check to see what is available.
4. Mod_rewrite.soApache for Windows doesn't have the rewrite_mod loaded by default, so download and edit httpd.conf and put it in the modules directory. BTW, if you net start apache and it fails, check the eventlog, it is pretty good about telling you what line of the httpd.conf failed. YOu have to add the lines: AllowOverride Options FileInfo LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so AddModule mod_rewrite.c
5. Netpbm. This is a download and then setting the path. You have to install from here as these are nicely tuned for Gallery and don't require recompilation.
6. JHead. These let you read the headers that digital cameras put on JPEGs. Very nice and convenient. It is just a DOS program, so you just copy it somewhere and remember the path. I used c:\program files\gallery\jhead.exe to be neat since I didn't want them in the htdocs file.
7. Unzip and . There are both unzip and zipinfo that it needs to process, so these are commandline DOS or Unix things that you have to download.
8. Cygwin. This is where unzip is as are lots fo the utilities that come with Unix, so that you can make Windows feel like Unix. A little confusing how it works, but it is pretty cool to install into c:\cygwin and have Unix with a BASH shell on Windows!
9. Gallery Remote. Install this Java desktop program to do drag and drop additions of photos.

Well, another late night, but it appears to work on my Windows/Apache machine. It is a better idea than Movable Type because it really is all about bulk photos rather than just one at a time. Only bummer is that it doesn't really have the notion of time and date and archiving like a blog. But, it is far more efficient for slamming massive pictures on the web and has a nice user interface too! Tomorrow I'll put it up on Geekfishing and then I'll have to spring for more disk space! BTW I found blogdex - the weblog diffusion index. I need to start looking at RSS feeds and so forth at some point.

Tong Family gets a slight update

Did you notice that lots of the starter junk is gone from the front, And also search moved to the menu pane. Most current blogs have a tighter format than mine, so I'm gradually switching over. Next step is to start using (and learning CSS), so that I can move the menu pane to the right and also reducing font sizes. Most current webs look like 10 point at most. This site is 12 point. Also, I'm going to remove the navigation bar that FrontPage creates and use the right pane instead for that to be like most blogs, then I'll be ready to move off of a FrontPage extensions required system to one that just needs PHP or Perl and Mysql.

Installing MovableType on Windows MovableType Installation. This is a good list of things to do, although at 2 AM, things get a bit blurry. Main things are to get Apache loaded, then ActivePerl, then to hook Perl up with Apache by editing httpd.confg. Instructions for Apache and Perl on Windows: Installing Apache. OK, on the way to inOn the way to installing MovableType on this machine, so I need to follow these directions. The tricky part is actually hooking up Apache and Perl together. Requires a couple of tricks. The most important is to install ActivePerl in the c:\usr directory so the path directive to /usr/bin/perl works properly in most scripts. Very clever!

boardom :: View topic - b2wap.php hack. Ok, a cool way to get the last set of posts from a b2 blog via a wap interface.

boardom :: View topic - [Request] People Who Are Not Logged In See Nothing. A good description from the author himself on how to get B2 to be private. Good for personal and family photos and news. Lots of different ways to do it. You could:

• Use .htaccess with apache
• Use the new filters command. The code is noted in the above post so that a there is a private tag to mark a particular post as private.
• There is setting categories correctly so that only certain people can see certain categories.

Getting a local Apache server to work on XP

I'm going to create a development server that mimics what is GeekFishing so here are some notes on how to make it all work similarly. This will also let me install things like the PHP DBG module that require major hacking that an ISP normally doesn't allow. .htaccess on Windows. This is how to add .htaccess to Windows Apache.

Password protection

This has come up several times. So, here's quick tutorial. HTpassword generator. This is an all in one generator of htpassword which is a file you put in a web server to protect a particular directory. Creating .htpassword. This is how you create a file. Htpassword Line Generator. This is how you create a hash for the file itself, so there are no clear text passwords in .htpassword

PHP Editing and Debugging Freeware

I'm tired of using wordpad and sticking in echo and print_r statements in PHP to figure out what is going on, so here is a search for a good debugging environment for PHP. I spent hours tonight trying to get the debugger to work. Let's just say the freeware stuff is much less advanced than even sdb was during the early Unix days. Oh well: Keith's PHP Editors. The top hit in google. This is the place to find a good editor. It is too large a list for me. PHP Edit. The top google hit for PHP Editing. Google is so nice in that it orders things for you by popularity. I'm giving it a try now. I spent hours trying to get this to work. I finally got singlestepping to work but only by using the latest development release 0.7.86. The "stable release" 0.6 doesn't appear to have anything that functions properly. There is essentially no documentation on how to get this to work except for a Word document that is part of the help files. It only talks about setup. I only got the local version to work, not the version that let's you talk with a remote web server. Also, there are strange error messages and things that make it unclear. The worst part is the windowing behavior is very strange for the output windows. So, I'm still on the search. OTOH, it has a nice help function for writing code and a helper function for filling in arguments, etc. So, it is a darn nice editor, but not a great debugger. PHP DBG. The top hit for a PHP Debugger. I noticed it is included in PHP Edit as well. This is the backend to phpedit and also phpcoder which I also tried with little success a month or so ago. The main issue is that you have to edit the extensions directory of PHP which is something I'm not sure Tranquil Hosting will let me do. So, perhaps I'll just have to debug locally. Ide.php. The top google hit for PHP IDE ide.php. It is a web-based editor for quick development of server-side code. It offers a rapid prototyping environment, letting the user test and save snippets of code with minimal overhead. It doesn't have any debugging capability built-in.

MovableType Tips, Tricks and Traps

Continuing the search for incredible tips on MovableType. There are an amazing number of things to wade through. In order of discovery, these are: MOvable Type External Resources. Where my search first started. There are some very nice hacks here mainly by Kevin Shay and Brad Choate and Adam Kalsey. Plus some good site refereances and also things on desktop client tools. Still can't find a email2blog utility. There is im2blog but not email. Could be hacked but I'm amazed there isn't interest. Brad Choate dot com. He seems to be an important guy in the MT blog world. Also has a very nice site. Like the design and the hacks he has. Staggernation. A nice collection of plugpins not mentioned on Movable Type. MovableBLOG. A really cool support Blog for MT. [the girlie matters]. A very nice looking blog, plus some great tips and tricks on MT.

PDA Your Movable Type Blog If you run a weblog using Movable Type, then you can easily make it available for PDA readers. It takes under 30 minutes to set it up. Wow, Movable Type sure is beautiful. The only thing really missing is mail2blog, but here is blog2avantgo2pda

Wiki, Wiki

Wiki. Yet another strange technology for collaboration. Will it never end. This is some kind of content collaboration system. Earthweb on Blogs. A good article about how IT should handle blogs and what they might be good for.

Scoop || What is Scoop? Now that the search has begun, it is incredible how many blog and near-blog tools there are. There are photoblogs (see previous entry), there are bulletin board like things like PHP NUke and then there are things like scoop, which I'm just understanding... Scoop is a "collaborative media application". It falls somewhere between a content management system, a web bulletin board system, and a weblog. Scoop is designed to enable your website to become a community. It empowers your visitors to be the producers of the site, contributing news and discussion, and making sure that the signal remains high. A scoop site can be run almost entirely by the readers. The whole life-cycle of content is reader-driven. They submit news, they choose what to post, and they can discuss what they post. Readers can rate other readers comments, as well, providing a collaborative filtering tool to let the best contributions float to the top. Based on this rating, you can also reward consistently good contributors with greater power to review potentially untrusted content. The real power of Scoop is that it is almost totally collaborative.

Photolog in MovableType

FIVE STEP PHOTOLOG. Ah ha, this is how you do a photolog using MovableType. It is amazing how clever people can be. You basically overload the fields in MovableType so that the main image is in the main entry, description is in additional entry and the Thumbnail goes into the Excerpt. This technique should work anywhere where you have three fields like this. Too bad, b2/Cafelog doesn't, there is no excerpt, but I bet I can find three unused fields and then generate the right template. I had a chance to study this and it is a good way to overload things. The main issue is that it is far from automatic. If this works OK, then I'll have to see about writing or finding a batch loader, that snarfs everything from a local folder, then shrinks them to web friendly (e.g., 100-200Kb) and creates the right entries.

Web Services are real

OK, I admit it, I don't understand the gigantic .net initiative at all, but I do get it when certain sites really do begin to act like services I can call. Here are a few:

1. Google Web APIs - Home. This is very cool, you can programmatically call Google via an XML RPC. Just need to register here and then see how it is used. MovableType uses this and I'll want it on tongfamily.com, etc.
2. Amazon Web APIs. A similar story with Amazon. These are now a MovableType plug-in as well.

Movable Type Installation Help. These are great instructions for how to turn blog templates (called blogplates) into MovableType compatible layouts. You can find these kind of layouts at Blogplates or from Miz Graphics

Blog Templates

Ludwig has given me the mission to become an expert of MovableType. There is alot to learn. I've through a.lifeuncommon.org which is probalby the most well designed site I've seen in a long time and stumbled onto these blog template sites:

1. Miz Graphics!. A general purpose site for templates.
2. . This is a webring of weblog/journal designs plus some information on how to implement them for your own personal journal.
3. Simple MovableType Templates. The basic choices from the authors of MovableType. It is neat to see how these are really just a set of style declarations unlike b2 Cafelog which mixes the content layout with the styles.

MSN Hotmail - Message AT&T Broadband is an amazing company. They cut off my service two weeks ago when they silently updated their system. Had to spend a couple of hours figuring it out, then a journey to their service center in north Seattle. Told me I should have gotten something in the mail. Now it looks like I'm going to end up with two cable modems, given the email I just got. See below...and it will take them a year I'm sure to figure out they have spent more dollars on me... From: "AT&T Broadband Customer Care" Subject: *Important* Please read to ensure your cable modem service is not interrupted Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 14:14:16 -0700 DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. IT WAS SENT FROM AN AUTOMATED SYSTEM AND REPLIES WILL NOT BE ANSWERED Dear AT&T Broadband Internet Customer: AT&T Broadband is dedicated to providing you the best in broadband services. As part of our ongoing commitment to service, we'd like to notify you of an important technology upgrade needed for your AT&T Broadband Internet service. To provide you with improved service capabilities and continued network stability, we are upgrading your cable modem. This new AT&T Broadband approved modem is the first step in offering you the next generation in high-speed cable Internet access. It will allow us to offer you a wider range of services and features that are not available with your current cable modem technology. You will soon be receiving a new Motorola SB4200 cable modem in the mail, along with step-by-step self-installation instructions. Installation of the new modem is straightforward and will not require us to send a technician to your home. However, should you require assistance, a specialist from our Customer Care team will be available by phone to help you. Your new modem should arrive within 2-3 weeks. If you do not receive your modem within this timeframe, please contact Motorola's Customer Support at 1-800-436-2025. As a token of our appreciation, you will receive a $5 credit to your AT&T Broadband Internet Service bill if you replace your cable modem by December 31, 2002. The credit should appear on your bill within two billing cycles. We are committed to delivering the high standards of service and quality you've come to expect from AT&T Broadband. Thank you for your continued support.

Rain Tire Recommendations From the Roadbikerider.com web site, some more winter tires to look at HEY UNCLE AL: I've decided to start criterium racing a little early in the season. I live in California, so the weather is usually just wet, not icy or snowy. I'd like a recommendation for a tire that would have good traction on wet pavement. Just for reference, during the regular season I use Michelin Pro Race tires on a pair of Ritchey WCS wheels. -- Matthew B. UNCLE AL FIRES BACK: Well, you just got a glowing recommendation for Vredestein Fortezzas from Tim in his letter above. I haven't tried those tires and, in fact, I don't ride much on wet roads here in high-and-dry Western Colorado. You should remember that when you ask for my all-wet recommendations. But I do know of two tires specifically designed for cold-temperature and wet-road training and racing. These are the Michelin Axial Winter and the Continental 3000 4 Season. An ex-Motorola pro tells me the Michelins stick great in the rain. Both manufacturers claim to use different, softer compounds for a better grip in wet/cold conditions. But this also causes these tires to wear pretty fast if you leave them on for riding in dry/warm conditions. Both tires come in 700x20C and 23C. I recommend the 23s so you can run lower pressure, say 90-95 psi, for even better traction.

Bicycle Tires Updated

Here's an update from the bike tire explorations: TUFO | Product Line. Saw this first on Sdeals. This is a tubular tire that fits on a clincher rim. Interesting idea. Weighs 335 grams but this includes the tube, so it compares with say 180 grams for a Veloflex Pave plus 70 grams for Michelin A1 tubes that I run and rim tape (my Ksyriums don't have these, but normally these are 20 grams). So, it is quite a bit heavier, but you can inflate it to 200 psi. The Elite Road is 315 grames and 25 pounds, so worth a try sometime. Veloflex Pave. I've been running these for about two weeks now. Boy, are they fast. Much faster than the Continental GP 3000's I was running. Hopefully, these will last longer than 1500 miles as well. But, they are very, very slippery on the road in slick Seattle. These are 22mm tires not 23mm so are much smaller, weigh 180 grams (wow, that is light!) and can be pumped to 105-120 psi (wow!). Vittoria Open All Weather. According to Brad, Lance Armstrong likes these an awful lot for when it is bad out. I might try these are some cyclocross tires. These are $70 from posted by RT @ 11:32:00 PM 

PHP password protection

Here is something that Michelle has asked for. When I convert Tongfamily.com over, I'm going to add this as well. By adding one line to each page, you get password protection.

• Cookie Password Protection in PHP. This is freeware for the simple case, but costs $20 otherwise.
• List of password protection scripts. HEre are six other similar things. Need to look at all of them.
• HP Resource Index. Another help site for PHP scripts with its own complete list of tools as well.
• Hotscripts Listings. Amazing how there can be three separate script development sites out there!
• PHPUserLogin. This looks like a nice freeware utility.

Mailing List Servers Another thing I've been looking for are mailing list servers. Right now I'm using Arrow from Jadebox which is Windows based, but does require you have your client up and running all the time. This is limited to 50 users I'm going to try EZMLM - Easy Mailing List Manager which is yet another open source program for doing this. This uses SQL and can scale to 500K subscribers apparently. Nice for geekfishing.net right? I had a chance to look at it and the main issue is that it requires all kinds of Perl things to be loaded. I haven't studied it long enough, but it looks like somethings are easy to add ex-post and without the system admin thinking about it, but somethings are very hard.

Photo Gallery and Digital Photo Management Here is the final project, finding a good photo gallery and digital photo management system. There are web based ones like PhotoWorks, but I've found them to be super slow or cumbersome. So, I'll start collecting a list of hacker ones. Here's a start:

1. alexking.org

PHP Bulletin Boards Now that the blog project is well on its way with the next steps being to get four other sites up and running and to try movabletype on tongfamily.com. The next step is to understand bulletin board software that's out there and then album and photo archiving. Here are a quick list of PHP-based bboard systems I found from a quick search. Need to check them all out:

1. Phorum.org Phorum is an open source web based discussion software application written in PHP.
2. phpbb. phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customisable open-source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.
3. PHPBB2. This is what Michel uses over at B2 Cafelog

InternetSeer Web Site Monitoring Service. This is the number one hit on Google for doing site monitoring. Right now it is hitting the b2 blog mail monitoring url every hour to get email into the blog at Geek Fishing

boardom :: View Forum - Site showcase. OK, now I'm in the middle of posting my brand new b2 hack on the bulletin board. A proud day. I have to figure out how to package it so that you can all download it though.

PuTTY: a free Win32 telnet/ssh client. Oops that last listing was for a Unix-only client, here is the top Windows version from Google.

OpenSSH. This is the replacement for telnet. It is amazing how many old Unix utilities like ftp and telnet are still being used. Heck, I learned how to use it in 1975 when I was a teenager. I guess that dates me. At least, some things aren't obsolete. I'm switching to ssh since it is more secure than telnet and here is the top utility there.

APD |. It is pretty frustrating to be writing PHP without a debugger. Here's one that some folks pointed out. I tried another debugger a while back and it was terrible. APD is the Advanced PHP Debugger. It was written to provide strace/truss capability for profiling and debugging php code, as well as providing the ability to print out a full stack backtrace. APD does not support interactive debugging, but instead writes data to trace files. APD provides event based logging, so that varying levels of information (including function calls, arguments passed, timings, etc.) can be turned on or off for individual scripts.

PHP_CodeDoc - Class: Mail. Wowk, this is a super useful site, they go into every routine that is built with PEAR and document what they are doing since the code itself isn't documented. Very useful.

ALT-PHP-FAQ - How can I set the include path and other settings that are fixed in php.ini without having access to php.ini?. The include paths on tqhosting are busted, so here is a way to change it if I can access .htaccess or maybe I'll ask mark@tqhosting.com

PEAR :: Manual: Mail_RFC822. Eureka, I discovered that I had just forgotten the declaration that asks for the right file that is require_once 'Mail.php' That's is. Then you can use the method Mail::parserecipients("strong") to get the list. Wow, amazing how i figured this out just when I went to bed. The problem is that code fragment documented here, doesn't have the require_once piece since it is so obvious to PEAR programmers.

SecuriTeam.com ™ (Weak MySQL Default Configuration). Ah one last thing is the security on mysql. By default it has a root login with no password. The e-php changes this, so you have to switch it back by editing the config.inc.php file. See the link above.

TAASC: MySQL Basics -- A Tutorial. The MySQL installation now can't connect to apache, so the search goes on. Here is an installation manual.

Web installer. OK, this is very strange, why it didn't work, but I installed mysql, iis, perl, php and then used the e-php installer and now pear seems to be there. This installation helps me to install a "package" for us.

>e-novative> PHP (ePHP) - the PHP for Windows solution. Wow, a single installer that lays down PHP 4.2.3, Apache 1.3.27, MySQL, etc. Pretty neat. I need to get my Pear installation right. There is a bug right now that I can't figure out and the docuemntaiton is terrible. It has the parse RFC 822 function I need, but I can't figure out how to get it to run. Documentation is terrible.

Parsing email

Well, it occurs to me that there must be quite of few people who have written code like this, so a search reveals:

1. PHP: mailparse functions - Manual. These are some routines from the main PHP server itself that let's you parse the entire stream. Pretty useful like mailparse_rfc822_parse_addresses. Not super well documented, but about what I need.
2. Pear Mail_RFC822 Parsing. This is from PEAR, an application library for PHP. Seems to do a similar thing to be downloaded from Pear Packages

PHP: Documentation. I'm learning how to parse an email, grab the email address in the From line and then look it up in a MySQL database. To do that, I've printed the source and now I need to learn PHP finally. Usually, Iearn just by reading code, but this is a little harder, so it's off to teh PHP tutorial section. PHP: Regular Expression Syntax. The tricky part is going to be to do the regular expression search. This is very powerful in PHP with the Preg_match(pattern, string, matches) command that let's you do a regular expression match. In Unix, I would write it as looking for all the legal characters before an "@" sign which is the user name and all the characters after which is the domain name. So if the string says, "From: Richard Tong ". The trick tonight is to figure out a regex that would match it and give me "richtong" and "hotmail.com" out of it. Then, I can suck out this and do the Mysql query on the b2 stored email name. Alternatively, I could write a low level thing that searches forward to the "@" sign in something that has From: at the start to find either white space or something that is either an < or a [ and then backwards to the same. I'm going to have to look up valid email identifiers to figure this out. Or look in the POP3 parser class. I have to look at the RFC 1939 POP3 Protocol document to see how the message format works. This is actually RFC 822 Text Message Formats

wapblogger - a WAP interface to Blogger, LiveJournal and other smart weblog-style tools. Wow, how cool, you can post to a blog via your cell phone. Sign me up. You just have to navigate to http://wap.ubique.ch/wapblogger/ from your phone and I'm off and to the races!

Geeklog - Documentation 1.3x. Hmm. Yet another blog tool. Nice thing about this one is the automatic theming. Wow, there are an amazing number of tools like this developed in the last year. This like cafelog and movabletype is about a year old.

SiteWorks Professional - The Complete PHP/MySQL Driven Site Administration Suite. Here's a tool that just uses PHP and MySQL. Wow, just what the doctor ordered. I love the Internet!

PHP Builder. I'm probably going to settle on PHP or Perl as my scripting language. PHP is tempting because it is pretty easy to integrate into Windows servers which I need in this transition period. Here is a great site of tips on it.

PHP Builder. I'm going to convert tongfamily.com from a FrontPage plus IIS specific site with blogger on top to a pure blog over the next could of months. This is going to be a big project given how many dependencies there are on Microsoft technology right now. Here's a short list of things to do:

1. Remove the current dependencies. Right now I use ASPs for includes on the main page and FrontPage specific navigation. I'm going to start ripping these out so that I will fall back to Server side includes (.shtml) and also simplify the navigation.
2. New Content Tool. Right now, I'm thinking that the main publishing tool will be a blogging tool. Either Movable Type or cafelog. This will make it easy to update it regularly.
3. New Layout Tool. I've been using FrontPage for the layout and right now most people appear to be doing raw HTML level hacking. I need to find a tool that has some WYSIWYG in it, but isn't as confining as FrontPage. Ironically now that I merged Blogger into the original FrontPage theme, I'm hacking away at HTML anyway. The issues here are doing nice graphics layout and being able to put the blog within it.
4. New Photo layout. Right now I'm using ACDSee into a FrontPage thing on the way to just using FrontPage 2002. Now I'll stop that and look for a nice auto thumbnailer publishing tool. If you know of any email Rich on that.
5. Link checking and Navigation Bar building. Probably the best tool in FrontPage. I haven't found an analog to it yet.

Wish me luck!

Telling the world about a new web site

Well, now that we have Geek Fishing up and running, it's time to do another review of web tools to get things published and into search enginers. I did this a few years ago, but the world is always changing. Here's

1. Jim Tools. Last time around, I just punched into submit-it. This has since been sucked into BCentral and isn't free anymore, so a Google search for Free Site Submission Tools got me to Jim Tools.
2. Get Ready. As Jim says, the first thing is to make sure the header for the site is right. See his points there, but it essentially helps you to write tight Meta tags. I'm going to update this for Tongfamily and for geekfishing.
3. Submit it. A great directory of free submissions. Beware that this will mean spam city for whatever mail account you submit to it.
4. Site Search. This is a great rapid way to see if your site is indexed in the top 15 sites.
5. This gets you to some of the second tier sites. It is not clear what's the best free tool to hit directories like google and yahoo. I'm going to have to do more research on that.

Home Networking and Broadband Argggghhhh!

I'm going to be so glad when Dynacenter has a product! I've been down for two days at home and Connie has been telling me about it.

1. First of all, the only error diagnostic is that you can't browse or connect. The modem is completely unhelpful. Just a bunch of blinking lights and who knows where the manual is. Reminds me that to be successful, there has to be an easy out of band way to connect to things. Ideally, a cable modem should have a telephone line connection to so it can dial out for help.
2. Then of course, half the 800 numbers that AT&T has published in their various documents don't work. And, they don't list themselves in 800-555-1212. You in fact get three 800 numbers in that directory for places in Florida and California that you can't even dial. Only way to find the number is to either watch a TV ad, or search the good old paper yellow pages. BTW, the number is 877-824-2288. I'm sure all this will change now that Comcast has bought AT&T Broadband of course :-(
3. So, then you get to stay on hold for hours. Particularly since yesterday, Tacoma and Spokane had widespread outages. So, the first call yielded the fact that I was supposed to have gotten a new modem in the mail and lots of mailing about it. No surprises that they can find me for my bill, but not to get a new modem. Apparently, the Motorola Cybersurfer we got three years ago is obsolete (I'll have to do a google search to figure out what they've change in their infrastructure. The only way to get a new one fast is to actually drive to north Seattle. Only took an hour of my life. The woman said, please bring a bill. Took about an hour to find a paper copy. Said, don't bother bringing the equipment. I asked her a few times if they would actually have stock.
4. Well, I got there and boy, what a scary place. Not exactly a friendly retail environment. More like visiting a communist post office. Anyway, the woman there was nice. Wanted the modem and scanned it. That's just a reminder that like flying (I have to do a blog entry about that) that you have to bring everything with you. I got a modem and a "virtual technician CD-ROM."
5. Back home, I unwrap it all and plug it all in, the various lights go blink, blink, I can see a new DNS server etc., but no joy on Internet or mail access. So, I actually read the freaking manual (RTFM is the term). No joy. Even install their virtual technician thing. And, that think fails to load. So, off to another phone call.
6. OK, the very nice woman, says, oh, I see the cable modem (so they have a pretty good management system), but it is not registered. She says, please start a browser and type, "http://ras.s1.att.com" or something like that. Huh? Then, you get a magic screen asking for a 20 digit account code and a pass code which is the last six digits and it works. Seems as though, you need to actually register the modem in order to make it work and I asked her how are you supposed to know the magic URL (reminds me of how the hotel broadband connections work) or the magic account codes.
7. Then you have to turn the modem off and on and she has to wait for her system to update.
8. As I sit here and meditate, seems like it will take years for them to amortize what they just spent on me for another cable modem (since they only lease the thing for $3/month incremental, so even it just costs them $50, it will take 18 months to work that off) plus my phone calls which I'd estimate at say another (3 calls x 15 minutes), must be another $20. No wonder, this is such a hard business

In any case, it is interesting to think about how this should have all worked. It is also clearer to me why folks like Intel would dearly love 802.11 WiFi to just work. I'm decent at computers. I can't imagine someone who is actually going to have to do a self-install with an older machine.

Wireless Media Server. A great point by John Ludwig about a wireless media server that uses FM to broadcast rather than something fancy. Of course, who wants 16KHz limited FM. He makes a point of the FM range compression. I didn't think that was true normally. Also, most 128Kbps Mpeg3's are limited to 16Khz anyway.

Post to many blogs. I just love this tool from Brazil. Now, I can post to multiple blogs at the same time. In this case, you'll find this message on Tong Family and Geek Fishing at the same time. Useful for sending to multiple places at once I think.

Geek Fishing. This is our new shared web page for Ignition affiliated folks who are interested in learning how to use Blogs. It is amazing how much interesting information is over there. It uses b2 cafelog as the tool. Longer term, I'm going to put Movable Type onto that server and then move www.tongfamily.com over.

Tom's Hardware Guide PCs & HowTo: Reader How Tos: Build a PC for TV - How To Build a PC for TV, Continued. Martin is thinking about building one of the home theater PCs. Here's a good guide using a piece of hardware I have. The main problem is that the SS-51G is a great box, but won't look good in a cabinet.

cornerhost: low priced, reliable hosting with a human touch. Another boutique to consider. $10/month is the basic plan plus $3 for mysql.

Teen Open Diary. A teen oriented blog system. Claims there are 20,000 blogs on it. Wow.

Antville. Another example of the blog economy. This is a special tool for highly scalable blog hosting. They currently have 2700 plus blogs on a server of which 1300 are accessible. That is amazing!

Weblogs Compendium - Hosting. this seems like the definitive list of blog oriented hosters. No ratings though. Will troll through and see what is there. Interesting to see Tranquil is tops in a google search for blog hosting

BlogOmania :: There's always room for one more!. It had to happen, here is a hoster that specializes in blogs. More food for John Ludwig and I to think about. Anyway, I'm going to sign up for either their $30/quarter plan which is 200MB, 4 MySQL databases, 2 mailing list. Of if Tranquil Hosting supports things, I might just do the $25/month, get 2GB of data so I can put all my pictures, etc. up there.

Radio Free Blogistan Blog Tool Comparisons. These I find more useful than just the checklist that Blogcomp has. Here is one about Radio vs. MovableType vs. Blogger. Basically concludes that Radio is the best of the bunch. Amazing what a year of development can yield though. These products aren't that old at all. Bottom line quote: Radio is much easier to get started with unless you are experienced with FTP, web servers, CGI's, chmod permissions, and so on. Movable Type offers a few more vital blog features, particularly multiple authors and multiple blogs. Either is a viable way to develop a sophisticated blog. (Radio even offers a few templates based on Mena's popular MT template designs!)

DVD Playback on your PC Now that I've got DVD backup working, the next question is playback. There are two issues, how to get great DVD playback and how to get great DiVX playback. Here's what I've learned DVDs on Your PC. OK now that the DiVX works, the questions are how to get a nice DiVX player that understands AC3 and also a DVD player that knows it. Looks like WinDVD 4.0 and PowerDVD 4.0 are the two winners there. You want to get the latest version that playback DTS, Dolby Digital and have support for the new Dolby Headphone which tries to give you 5 channel surround sound with just two speakers. There are trial versions of each around. It seems like kind of a tie, with a slight favor to WinDVD. I've tried both and both are much more mature than ever before. powerdivx.com - AC3/SPDIF FAQ. PowerDivX is the best player for DivX movies. Here is the FAQ that explains how to get AC3 from PowerDiVX. There is a lot of detailed stuff about getting the right DirectShow filters in place...

1. Which software do I need to install for AC3 playback? Download the audio filters from Doom9?s site, unpack and install. Make sure mpgaudio.ax is installed properly. If this isn?t installed properly then you might get an error message stating DirectShow can not render the file.
2. An alternative AC3 playback set. Download Tsunami?s (3.9.3) or Nimo?s (5.0 b8) filter pack, quick search on Google should find it. Use caution and select a custom install of the InterVideo filter. Otherwise the installer could replace other filters you have already installed like Xvid or Divx. The filter version that?s often shipped with PowerDVD and WinDVD only support 2 channel/stereo mode.
3. How do I make sure the filters are installed properly? To register the filters
   1. open a DOS window
   2. type cd windows\system32\ or whereever your Windows system directory is. On Win9x and ME, you will need to cd windows\system instead of the system32 directory.
   3. type regsvr32 /s ivivideo.ax
   4. type regsvr32 /s mpgaudio.ax
   5. regsvr32 /s iviaudio.ax (This registers all 3 filters for the Windows OS).

DVD to DiVX backup guides

In the quest to backup my DVDs to a highly compressed DiVX file, I found lots of really great sites that explain what to do. I ended up picking the method that is more complicated but hopefully gets really great high quality DiVX with Dolby Digital (also called AC3), so it is just like a movie. There a ton of approaches. Here is the one that I use. Definitive DVD Backup Resource. Seems like the place to find the geeks who understand this stuff. He has a freeware download called Gordian knot. I've just downloaded and am installing it. Wow, this is pretty complicated stuff. It is way more complicated and under the covers I'm afraid, but at least Documentation explains a little. It is basically a bunch of freeware utilities stitched together. It is very complicated and you have to follow every step exactly. A typical conversion took me 4 hours on a 2.4GHz Pentium IV. So, you need some serious horsepower to make this work. DiVX and AC3. Here is a more complete guide on what to do to get Dolby Digital stitched into a DiVX file.

Here were some other sites I found very helpful

1. Easydivx. OK, here is a DVD to DiVX backup "utility". Need to try it, but highly rated on cnet.com. Can't wait to backup it. Will try tonight and I'm afraid it failed because there is some strange incompatibility with DiVX 5 with no fix that I can find. I actually now think it you can't install both EasyDiVX and Gordian Knot together. They use the same routines. When I uninstalled both, then Gordian Knot worked. EasyDiVX looks the simplest, but probably has the lowest quality.
2. DVD Digest Articles - DVD to DivX (XviD) Conversion Guide. Easiest to understand conversion guide so far.
3. RipHelp.com. Yet another great rip helper. Amazing how many sites like this there are.
4. The how to guide to backing up your entire DVD collection??. Yet another guide using another set of utilities.
5. Jaspovs DVD to DivX ;-) conversion site. Here's another dummies guide.

Nokia Launches 9 New MMS Wireless Phones. Well the other shoe had to drop on the new Nokia line for this fall. Here it is. The new Nokia 6800 sure looks cool. The way the flip opens to make it a console is pretty neat. Not available until next year though. See it below Here's the rest of the line...Nokia today announced six new handsets set for release early next year. The new phones boast MMS and J2ME and reflect the company's growing commitment to combining devices with content services. Here is a brief look at the upcoming models: The Nokia 6800, is optimized for efficient text input. Aimed at the enterprise market, the Nokia 6800 also comes with color display, SyncML support, email and Web connectivity, and a stereo FM radio. The dual band Nokia 6800 is expected to start shipping in the first quarter 2003 in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The second device, the Nokia 7250 is a swanky designer phone with built-in camera. The tri-band device also sports a color display and a stereo FM radio. The Nokia 7250 is expected to start shipping in the first quarter 2003 globally. The next phone, the Nokia 6100, purports to be the world's smallest and lightest GPRS, MMS-enabled phone. This model is a triband world phone with a color display and a slim, streamlined shape. The 6100 should hit stores by the end of 2002. The Nokia 5100 phone includes a full color display and sports a chic design. The luxury phone is optimized for those with an "active leisure lifestyle" (polyester not included). This phone will ship in Q1 2003. The Nokia 8910i is an MMS, Java, Bluetooth, HSCSD and GPRS device in a sleek titanium-case. This premium phone will be available in Q1 2003 as well. Finally, the Nokia 2100 is a budget phone designed for low mobile penetration markets in Europe, Africa, and Asia Pacific.

a day late and a :: dollarshort.org. Mena is the author of Moveable Type along with Ben her husband. Here is here award winning blog.

JavaScript: need Scrolling side navigation bar. The one thing that is missing when I start the conversion over to a non-FrontPage web site is creating the navigation bars. A quick search shows there are bars aplenty. Here is quick list... http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/smith_menu/smith_menu.html http://www.treemenu.com/ http://www.webreference.com/dhtml/hiermenus/instructions/noframes/step1.html http://webreference.com/dhtml/dynomat/hiermenus3/ie/index.html http://www.bratta.com/dhtml/scripts.asp?url=scripts/scripts.asp?id=28&ac=7&order=created http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/navigate1.htm http://www.ivanpeters.com/

NetMagazines.com: Lowest Price Guaranteed with 1353 Titles!. I ordered a few magazines from them. They seem to have the lowest prices. Just make sure to use their various coupons and things. Their rack rates are the same as say Amazon, but not if you take advantage of their sales.

Google Rank back to 4. Hooray, my Google PageRank is back to 4. I'm so happy!

Freeware website software search continues OK, now that I've got b2 running on my machine along with PHP, I thought I'd try some other content management systems. This next one is a challenge since it requires an apache server PHP-Nuke. Another content management system to look at. Makes things look like a big bulletin board. Might be a better metaphor for certain hobby sites that Dynacenter is considering. This one is PHP based and is GNU licensed. Need to give it a try. The main issue is that it requires Apache. So, I'm off to load the Windows XP version of Apache. Wish me luck! Apache. Here it is, started the download, now I'll just have to see how it works. Otherwise, its off to find a Linux box.

Next PC to Buy I'm also going to put a new graphic card into Grace's machine. Want to get an nVidia, but this piece shows, the new NV30 is the one to wait for in November. Otherwise, it's a midrange Radeon. The couple of clipped articles here should give you an view for what I'm thinking. ATI Increases Graphics lead over nVidia. With the launch of the 9700 and the 9500 PRO, ATI is going to make life a bit more difficult for the market leader NVIDIA, whose GeForce 4 Ti series is clearly behind, technologically. Because DirectX 9 still has no meaning as of yet, this lag in technology doesn't make any difference in practice for the moment. Thanks to its higher bandwidth and the four vertex shaders, the 9700 is clearly better than the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 in all areas. The biggest weakness of the GeForce 4 Ti chip is the big loss in performance when using anisotropic filtering and FSAA. Here, the 9500 PRO clearly beats the GeForce 4 Ti 4600. For example: a GF4 Ti 4600 achieves 53.6 fps in Unreal Tournament 2003 at 1024x768 with 4xFSAA; at the same time the Radeon 9700, at 4xFSAA, reaches an impressive 99.5 fps without anisotropic filtering, and still manages 69.2 fps with anisotropic filtering. If you observe the standard performance, the 9500 PRO makes the swing up to the level of a GeForce 4 Ti 4400. However, it remains a question whether the 9500 (non-PRO) will be able to beat its direct competitor, the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 series, because the latter has a much better fill rate in the multitexturing context. With regard to price, both of these will be sure to put up a hard fight. And that's the decisive aspect for the consumer in the end - the price. If you look at the market, GeForce 4 Ti 4400 cards are to be had for a street price of around $190-$230. Ti 4600 cards cost around $220-$300. ATI's official price for the 9500 PRO is $199, and the 9700 should cost $299. However, expect the street prices to be significantly less. A Radeon 9700 PRO, for example, which is sold in the ATI shop for $399 is offered elsewhere for $315-$350. The air is getting thinner for NVIDIA. Compared to R300, NV25 has begun to show its age. In standard performance, as well as with the use of FSAA and anisotropic filtering, ATI has made a significant lead for itself, and the gap will only widen when DirectX 9 is launched. Now, all hopes are placed on the much-awaited successor NV30, which should be launched in November. So the times remain exciting, and NVIDIA is sure to have a few surprises in store for us.

Tom's Hardware Guide CPU Guide: Hot Contraband: P4 With 3.6 GHz - Comparison Of All P4 CPUs. I can't believe it, but it is time for me to think about upgrading computers again. Our main server is a Pentium IV 450MHz. The screamer of three years ago. Grace has a very fast 2533MHz that I'm addicted to that uses the Northwood "A" core, so it's time to get upgrade the motherboard and processor for the main server and also get connie a new desktop. The question is when. Thanks to Tom's Hardware, it's pretty clear the next big leap will be Prescott running at 3.5GHz to 5GHz with a 166MHz bus or 666MHz effective bus. That's a June 2003 machine. Wow, that's going to be a fast machine. So the question for me, is wait until next year to do the upgrade or just get a Pentium 2.5GHz with 845G motherboard now. Will depend on pricing. I'm thinking right now that increasing performance by a factor of 5 is probably worth it to get another functioning machine. Then in June, we'll swap the guts out of one of the boxes or get another mini-PC.

High Quality MP3 Encoding

OK, this was one night project to figure out how to do really high quality. Some would say archival MP3s. Boy, did I learn a lot between 1AM and 10PM. Suffice to say that encoding is very complicated. The summary of what I learned is:

1. MusicMatch is the easiest encoder. It uses the standard encoding that is Ok. The best setting for it is 192Kbps MP3. There is also a variable bit rate encoding that theoretically should be better and you can set to about 50% to generate an average 160Kbps. One interesting thing is that the standard 128Kbps actually cuts off all frequencies above 16KHz. I didn't realize that!
2. Exact Audio Copy. This is a freeware ripping tool that can use Lame. Hard to figure out to use, but has all the features of a MusicMatch but is much slower. I love the various features it has particularly being able to spawn an external encoder like Lame (see below).
3. LAME MP3 Encoder Now considered one of, if not THE, best MP3 encoder around, LAME started as an open source development project to improve psycho-acoustics, noise shaping, and encoding speed (for more on psycho-acoustics, see our MP3 Codec section). It wasn't technically an encoder (hence the name) and was built as an open source license patched against the ISO source and patent held by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft to avoid legal trouble. In 1999, they developed their own psycho-acoustic model called GPSYCHO that sought to improve upon the ISO demonstration model. Finally, in May 2000, anything resembling ISO source was replaced and LAME emerged as its own encoder, shaped by the creative genius team of open source developersBut, it is complicated to install and use. First you need to get Lame itself, then you need a ripping tool like Exact Audio Copy.
4. List of recommended LAME MP3 encoder settings - the highest quality MP3 encoder.. These are the LAME recommendations that seem most up to date right now. Here are the relevant ones...
   • Very High Quality +
     • --alt-preset extreme. (bitrates 220-270 kbit/s -- usually averages around 256kbps)
     • --alt-preset fast extreme. Faster (Very Slightly Lower Quality): (bitrates roughly the same as above). This seems the most like --r3mix in that it cuts off at 19.5KHz. The theoretic for CD quality is actually about 20KHz so that is about as good as you cand get. With disk space so cheap it isn't clear why you wouldn't use this. Of course, then you wonder why not use 320Kbps constant bit rate by that argument. That is still not bad. Compressing a raw 1.44Mbps stream by a factor of 5.
   • Very High Quality
     • --alt-preset standard. (bitrates 180-220 kbit/s -- usually averages around 192 kbps)
     • --alt-preset fast standard. Faster, slightly lower quality possible. (bitrates roughly the same as above)
   • High Quality
     • --r3mix. (average bitrate ~190kbit/s (150-230kbit/s) (Due to the new "--alt-preset standard", the "--r3mix" setting is obsolete.). I'm going to use this as my default "low quality encoding from now on.
   • r3mix.net :the truth about ripping & mp3 encoder quality (lame, eac, fraunhofer)This site appears to have the best information about doing great encoding even though it is no longer being updated. The classic trade-off between space and quality for mp3-archival quality is: cbr 192kbit/s by any Fraunhofer encoder (audioactive, radium codec, mp3enc, ...) Remarks: Decent sound quality, but not perfect so no archival quality. Clearly audible encoding artifacts on some music when using hq headphones. Everytime you see a vbr encoder take a bitrate >192 to encode a frame, you know that 192 is not sufficient for that part of the music.
   • EncSpot by GuerillaSoftEncSpot is an application which reports useful facts about your mp3 collection. The most famous feature is its ability to guess which encoder was used to encode each file. It will also give you a general idea of the audio quality of the file. For files encoded with Lame (and that's what everyone's using, right?) EncSpot can read the 'Lame Tag' which gives detailed information on the switches used when the file was encoded.

Discussion of Audio Compression. I've been doing a lot of MP3 encoding. Finally decided to see who had actually tested it. This is a wonderful site with lots of information and ont much beauty, but it sure is helpful.

Rolling Requiem. Pretty amazing what the Internet can do. This was a project to play Mozart's Requim around the world on September 11, 2002. From right here in Seattle too.