from the command line in linux… or generating them from Wavs…. So, I’ve got this CD that I’ve made and is up for sale at lulu.com traditional hymns done as “chimes”. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recording to hard drive, editing and getting the wav files as good as possible and I’ve uploaded them, but I also want to make the individual songs available as mp3 downloads too. AND I want to give a preview, either a low quality mp3 of the whole, or a high quality 30 second clip…. Hmmm… how to do it.
Tag: time
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Flash Player 9 for Linux
Now… available in Beta form… The Linux version of the Flash player has been stuck at 7 for some time, while many sites require flash 8 for video/etc… (The page to find the beta download is here.)
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Linux Permissions Headache
Yikes, what an evening….. it started innocently enough in the afternoon. I have an old Mandrake 10.0 server that I was upgrading clamav on (recent security update). While I was at it, I was reviewing the anti-spam setup to see if I could get any better success with filtering junk mail. spamassassin has had an update since I updated this one last and also it seemed that dcc was installed, but not in active use *(no indications that it’s being used at all.) So, I set about trying to fix that and install the latest spamassassin. Somehere along the way something BAD happened. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure how, but at one point I was root having just installed the rpms for spamassassin and then exited to my user account. Promptly on switching back to my user account I got a “permission denied” error. Eh? Ok, well let’s su again and see what’s up…. “permission denied” uh oh…. ls “permission denied” most everything actually….. permission denied.
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Would you like spyware with that? Apple too….
These stories come up from time to time. A free giveaway of some sort and it turns out that there’s spyware or a virus embedded, company gives a big “whoops” and fixes things by replacing them…. McDonalds had a promotion going where up to 10,000 people could win a flash based mp3 player they also received a trojan horse preinstalled…. They’ve apologized and are swapping the infected players and giving information on how to clean up a pc with the keylogger. According to f-secure it was infected with the QQPass password-stealing trojan. Just imagine how things would have turned out if the Greeks had looked that gift horse from the trojans in the mouth first…..
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Using DNS servers other than your ISP’s
As I mentioned earlier, Bellsouth seemed to be in the midst of a big DNS meltdown when I got up this morning. I spent some time getting various bellsouth customers “worked around” the issue by setting up an alternate DNS server for them. For starters…. DNS translates addresses like google.com into numbers (like 72.14.207.99) Think of it as a telephone directory lookup service… you can’t pickup a phone and punch in the letters of someones name to call them, you have to dial a number and first you have to see what the number is…. in networking, the computer does the DNS lookup for you when you type google.com in your browser bar. (Or when the browser tries to load it’s home page for instance.)
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Vista kill switch may push people to linux
It’s not really a surprising headline. I think anytime a proprietary vendor tightens the screws a bit to limit piracy they are going to force people to other, competing products. Especially when there’s a significant cost difference involved. If there are three t-shirts for sale, one for $5 with no logo and another for $50 with a brand logo (we’ll say nike) and yet another (pirated) with a nike logo for $10 and everybody thinks the nike logo is cool and in… they’ll buy the $10 “pirated” shirt unless they know that it’s pirated and are morally compelled to spend the $50. If piracy is cracked down on and you have a choice between the $50 logo shirt and the $5 no logo shirt….. hmmm I’d rather have $45 extra dollars than a swoosh on my shirt.
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Preventing the automatic update to Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 7 is set to be released this month (October 2006) and it will likely be an automatic update for Windows users either November or December of this year. (I’m thinking November.) Now, it’s been a long time in the making, at one point Microsoft said there wouldn’t be another version past 6 of IE, but… it’s finally coming and some people will not want it installed automatically until they’ve had more time to investigate it and test with their critical uses.
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IE7 coming within the month, Firefox 2 RC2 out as well
It’s kind of interesting to get to do a “browser wars” kind of post where I mention a new release of two browsers coming out about the same time…. The release of IE7 is coming within weeks we are reminded by zdnet. It’s noted that it will be rolled out through automatic updates not long after it’s official release. Incidents.org is less than enthusiastic about the release suggesting that no matter how much of an improvement over IE6 this new release will be it’s bringing us features that have been in competing browsers since 1996 and diversity of browsers is a good policy.
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More audio recording musings…. Samson Zoom H4 Handy Recorder
So, I mentioned a few weeks back that I was really starting to look again at audio equipment. I have a planned project that I would really like to capture high quality direct to digital audio for and the old tascam portastudio cassette based system from years ago just won’t suit get what I hope for. (And setting up a stereo mic pattern and the tascam as a mixer and a laptop isn’t really something I WANT to have to go through – field recorder is the goal and it would suit a few other purposes as well.) I wouldn’t mind having multitrack capabilities and for all purposes I’ve looked at the Boss BR-600 the last few weeks and thought I had found a suitable device…. 8 tracks, built in condenser mics to make it easy to setup and capture on the spot. And compactflash based (I was hoping for something nice and quiet like a flash/memory card based recorder.) But, there are some things about the Boss that have discouraged me….
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Public CWSandbox (es)…
Around the time of this latest IE exploit hitting the web, there was also mention of some publicly available CWSandbox sites for the submission of malware. It’s an analysis tool that can give you a report of how the malware behaves and what it would do if run in a “non-sandboxed” environment. There are a couple up now it seems. One incidents.org reported is https://luigi.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/submit.php, Sunbelt has one at http://research.sunbelt-software.com/submit.aspx and they have alternate URLS….