I decided I should fix it, envisioning a long call to tech support and if I was lucky I would be able to ship it off for some indeterminate amount of time and eventually receive my (a) Wii back. While I dreaded this I have heard that Nintendo’s technical support is quite good. Luckily I didn’t have to experience it.

If I was going to go through the trouble of calling a technical support agent I wanted to at least know why it wasn’t working and while that would be unlikely to speed up the call I would know when I could lie and say, “ok tried that and it didn’t work” versus actually trying it out.

I have always been interested in packet sniffing but have never really had time to get into it, but at some point in the recent past I installed Wireshark and played with it. I sat there watching my laptop talk to my desktop about the printer. I felt bad that they were talking about my printer behind its back, but didn’t have the heart to let him know. Last weekend I started up Wireshark again and started sniffing my Wii traffic (by the way it smelled bad). The Wii sat there querying my primary DNS server, but never received a response from it, it also never bothered to try the secondary DNS server. So I removed primary DNS and setup the configuration so its only DNS option was the secondary one and like magic everything worked. While I am still not sure why my primary DNS server didn’t respond or why my Wii didn’t try the secondary it at least works. Its a great feeling when one of your random curiosities actually ends up having a practical use. Not to mention it probably saved me an extremely long tech call that would of had a good chance of not fixing anything.

The best thing about this is I finally got to see how my site works on the Wii with The Ultimate Gamer Pack Theme and wow it looks great. I thought the theme would just be a basic plain white theme that increases the text size or something to make it more readable on a TV. Instead, the Wii theme really makes it look like a page designed for the Wii with a similar button and content layout and easy navigation.

Since I am speaking of Wordpress themes, be sure to check out the most impressive wordpress theme I have seen, the Commodore 64 Command line theme.

Heck every article on Slashdot Tuesday must have had the HD-DVD decoder hex key in the comments section a couple hundred time.

I have tons of posts about half done, but have been to lazy to finish them up. Now Pokemon is out so I am spending a considerable amount of time on that, then I get to run off to Washington DC for a week (I wonder if I can yap at some congress people and tell them to support this bill, I don’t know how that works). I’m going to try and pump out those other posts though, we will see if I get the motivation.

In case anyone was curious he said that they don’t currently store any information about the label and that they find this works in the indie artists’ favor. In the sense that people put in popular music they know and get out artists which sound the same, many of which are indie. My thinking was that it would work the same, (i.e. still put in popular music), it just would only play the indie music. It would definitely narrow the scope of what would be played though.

He also said it was a popular request and that a lot of their staff is made up of indie music artist and that they are committed to presenting music that can’t be found on commercial channels. Hopefully, they will get to stay in business and continue to provide such an excellent service.

Pandora may be one of the best things for the music industry. If you have never used Pandora before, basically it learns what music you like and then plays similar songs. It allows listeners to find new music that you may actually buy, seems like an ingenious asset for the music industry. This is oppose to typical radio broadcasts which simply play the same songs over and over again until they are stuck in your head and you decide you like them. I suppose in the later case the music industry has a lot more control over what will become popular, but in the former case, I believe, you are much more likely to enjoy what you are listening to enough to buy it (something Pandora also makes easy to do).

Of course the RIAA, their non-profit front group Sound Exchange, and a few judges have decided that Internet Radio needs to be squeezed for cash or die.

It seems everyone who has some relation to Internet radio thinks they are going to shut down and are hoping the rate change will be reconsidered. My original idea was that Pandora could shift to entirely indy music and avoid the charges, but someone posted a comment on their blog stating the same thing. It turns out that Sound Exchange collects revenue for all artists whether they are big label or not. I don’t know if they have an opt out policy or if you can sign your own deals with each artist you want to play, but the default is to pay them no matter who you play. Oh well, I am still going to ask them for a setting that allows me to only play indy music. Assuming they stay in business I don’t want any of the money going to the major labels. Likewise, I would never buy anything from the major labels so it isn’t worth my time to listen to their music.

It seems to me most artists would love to have their music on any station, AM/FM or Internet. Especially something like Pandora, that matches listeners with songs they are likely to enjoy.

By the end of the year the music industry could be at its lowest point in quite a while. The standard radio we have come to know and love (or, in my case, hate) will still be around. There will only be one satellite radio station, and almost every small Internet radio station will be gone. At least the music industry can keep their business model.

BTW, Librarians are hiding something.

One note: Not to completely bash on standard radio, I listen to talk radio all the time, its just every station that played even half decent artist in my area went under so I don’t actually use AM/FM to listen to music.

One thing I did do was install Edubuntu on my old computer. My father gave me a dual PIII 450 with 512 mb of ram before he moved away. It was his baby and now its mine. For the last couple of years I had it running Suse 8 and used it as a web server and Linux programming box. I almost always connected to it through SSH, but my son would use it at times and play games. Now that I am paying for this web server and have shell access to it I didn’t have much use for it anymore, so I installed Edubuntu on it for my son.

I have used Ubuntu many times of my laptop, I love it and it runs great, except the wireless networking never worked well and it got to the point that I couldn’t stand having to run a script every time my computer hibernated and occasionally log into the router from my desktop to delete the corrupted lease. Hopefully this will be better in Fiesty Fawn.

With Edubuntu I started off with just the live cd because I didn’t want to waste time installing it. My son loved the games and it worked perfectly so I decided to go ahead and install it. A short time later it was ready to go.

I can’t think of a better thing to do with an old computer. This computer would never run a usable windows OS, but with 30 minutes of time I had a completely usable computer set up for my son full of educational software and games. I spent several hours a couple days later downloading patches, configuring themes, downloading codecs, etc, but this was primarily for fun since it didn’t effect my son at all and I don’t actually plan on using the computer. If you have youngins in the house and a crappy computer you couldn’t go wrong with an Edubuntu install.

I will probably put Fiesty Fawn on my primary desktop when it comes out. There is a Linux only app I have been dying to play with.

There also should be a new ugly banner at the top for people who try and view my site in IE6 (or early browsers), since I have no intention of making my site work with old browsers. It may not be there, I don’t have an old browser so I can’t verify it.

The problem is several fold. His article is basically a rehash of the articles on The PC Spy listing the bests of specific categories, however, the original article wasn’t really about lightweight applications. It was about the programs that slow down Windows the most. There were a lot of complaints about items like Firefox (which will cache all the pages it visits until it runs out of memory) and Trillian (by no means lightweight, but an great application). Lifehacker escalated the problem by listing them not only as lightweight apps, but as open source substitutes. Not all of the programs he listed are open source and ’substitutes’ for what? Some you can assume are substitutes because there are dominate programs in that field, i.e. Foxit Reader as a substitute for Adobe. Others aren’t really substitutes at all. For example, uTorrent is the lightweight substitute for torrent downloads instead of… Sure there are popular bit torrent programs out there, but none of them hold a dominate or ‘default’ position that you would find substitutes for.

This got me thinking though. What exactly is a lightweight application and how would you measure that? In my opinion a lightweight application is something that I can quickly open to perform a quick task. The most important factor in a lightweight application then is launch time. Next to that would come factors like limited memory usage and low footprint (i.e. doesn’t try and take over my desktop, doesn’t take up much hard drive space, doesn’t pop anything up when I boot up my computer, etc.)

I wrote up a quick little c# program that launches other applications. I measure the memory usage, peak memory usage, and processing time. I’m not exactly happy with it or rather I don’t trust it right now, but I should probably try it with non-web based applications. Because I am not happy with it I spent a lot of time procrastinating talking about it. I decided I would finally finish one of my half done blog posts and this one got picked.

I decided to see what the lightest weight browser was. I used the code to take the average launching time of each of three browsers (IE 7, Opera 9.1, and Firefox 2) 10 times with three different start up options (Blank page, MSN.com, Google.com). Each browser was freshly installed and configured with no bookmarks, clean cache, no history, and set to launch a blank page by default. I ran it on a Athalon 3200+ with a gig of ram and XP home SP2.

The reason I chose this test was that I wanted to see which was the best ‘default’ browser. A major factor for the best default browser is how fast it opens. Currently I have IE7, which I never use, Firefox, which is my default but rarely gets used, and Opera, which I use all the time. The reason firefox is my default is because if I click on a link and Opera isn’t open, it is likely I just want to check out real quick, I want this to be as fast as possible and I feel Firefox does that.

Here are the results:

It’s the average of 10 runs, but I think the network causes too much distortion in the msn/google data. It doesn’t seem right that the simple google page takes longer to load than the busy busy msn page. I blame the network for this. I also can’t explain why the local blank page takes longer to load than msn in the case of Opera and Firefox. Caching maybe? Not just page caching but process caching. Not sure. However, if we just compare the local blank page between the three programs we have IE 7 as the fastest, followed by Opera, then Firefox. I am not suprised that IE is the fastest, but I was suprised that my clean, extensionless firefox install took longer to start than Opera.

So will I switch my default browser? No, I don’t trust or like IE and even if the data is correct and even if Opera is slightly faster than Firefox, Opera is set to continue browsing from where I closed it (like Session Saver for Firefox). So in the end Firefox is still the best choice for me to quickly open up a webpage.

I will probably try this on some other set of applications if for no other reason than to find out if my program really works and if the huge variance I saw in the browsers was due to the network.

Anyways you can easily set up your own database. The first step is to get the data, which is still available for download. You can either download the 10, 400 mb zipped text files separately or through bittorrent. Once you have the data you can do whatever you want with it, write perl scripts or examine it in any language you want. The real problem is that the files are so huge and it is hard to move around in a flat file like that. So I would recommend tossing them in a database so you can pull out the information you want, whenever you want, and in reasonable quantities. I wrote a bit of code in Java that just grabs each line from the file and puts it in the database. Simple and could probably be cleaned up to remove duplicate queries and such. If you really wanted to be efficient you could start collecting statistics as you were putting it into the database.

You can grab the java file to save some time, you will need to edit it for your configuration and grab the mySqlConnector or whatever database connector you use. Use, modify, redistribute at real it isn’t anything impressive and probably has bugs. I suggest you import into a local database, otherwise it will take forever to send all the queries over the Internet. If you want to put it on a separate server somewhere you should probably parse the file into the database locally, dump the database, FTP it to the server, and then source it in. If you don’t have MySQL installed grab XAMP its perfect for this kind of stuff.

Speaking of data, I really really want the Google N-gram data, to bad its $150.

I also installed the Wordpress Ultimate Gamer’s Pack, which is suppose to render the site nicely for the PSP, Wii and DS.

Finally, I used the Mii editor over at Joystiq to create a nice icon for my about page.