Is Microsoft back at the innovation business, or is it just a huge iPhone?

Well, you be judge of the new product Microsoft is planning to release in the next few months... it sure looks cool, even though I'm not so sure how willing I'd be to just put beer cans and coffee mugs on top of my new fancy US$10.000,00 coffee table... is it really a good idea?? is it just a blown-up iPhone, or is Microsoft actually back at being revolutionary and inventive??

mp3, iTunes, standards and taglib

I have a somewhat large mp3 collection. And, specially since I got my iPod, I really like it all to be organized, correctly tagged, with Album covers, all of that. I use iTunes to manage my collection and perform all these annoying tasks, specially because it's supposed be trustworthy and compatible with the iPod. The problem is I work mostly on Linux, so whenever I'd come to the lab and rip a few songs from my iPod to listen on Amarok most covers would get messed up. It would recognize correctly about half the cover and just gray out the rest. Weird, right? Specially because it worked perfect on the iPod. So I grabbed pytagger, which I'd hacked around a bit because of another tag-related problem I'd had before, to try and find out what was going on. I ended up with this little script to extract the cover art from .mp3 files (it creates an AlbumArt.jpg file on the dir of the mp3 file, note that it doesn't replace the AlbumArt.jpg file if it exists!!!). And they got extracted just perfectly well. But the AlbumArt.jpg files weren't enough because, even though Amarok would recognize them as the album cover, it would still use the messed up version when specific songs were being played. Damn!!! So I dug a little deeper to find the problem: taglib was reading the wrong size for the image. That's why it would read only half of the image or so. The id3v2 2.4 specs say that the size should be written using synchsafe integers (with the most-significant bit always set to zero), and taglib abides to that. Apparently, iTunes doesn't (and neither does pytagger)!!! So, all my mp3's (that have id3v2 2.4 tags) aren't compliant with the standard. Thanks a lot iTunes! Since I wasn't about to retag ~6000 mp3 files, or risk not being compatible with my iPod, I hacked taglib to do the wrong thing and act like iTunes. Find the file /taglib/mpeg/id3v2/id3v2frame.cpp, in the taglib source dir and change the line

  d->frameSize = SynchData::toUInt(data.mid(4, 4));

to

  if (d->frameID=="APIC") 
    d->frameSize = data.mid(4, 4).toUInt();
  else
    d->frameSize = SynchData::toUInt(data.mid(4, 4));

It's a horrible hack, but I'll have to live with it until something changes (either iTunes gets fixed, or I downgrade all my songs to id3v2 2.3 or 2.2, which would probably be the best solution). Hope this actually helps anyone facing the same problems I was.

The iGasm, just priceless!!!

Ok, that's the new iGadget out there... I don't even know what to say... just hilarious





But it's actually serious, and Apple is suing them because the ad is too similar to the iPod ad...

American Idol 6

OK, yesterday season 6 of American Idol ended with a blast, and 17-year-old Jordin Sparks was the winner. I didn't actually watch the show, but I read about the finals being yesterday and got a little curious, because it seemed the race was pretty tight. So, I went to our great friend YouTube and basically watched the performances from the Top 6 to form an opinion. I think it was really fair up to the Top 3. They were all really good, but I think that the best one was Melinda Doolittle, who didn't make it to the great finals. Eventually, it was a battle between the best entertainer (Blake Lewis) and the best singer(Jordin), as Simon put it. And Jordin came out on top.

Since I actually spent some time seeing the performances, I selected 4 from each singer (best song first) to put here... check 'em out!

By Jordin Sparks:
- I Who Have Nothing
- Broken Wing
- I Am a Woman in Love
- This Is My Now (actually, didn't like it so much... but it's interesting to compare with Blake's version.)


By Blake Lewis:
- You Give Love a Bad Name (Awesome, I guess this performance is what actually got him all the way to the end)
- This Love
- This Is Where I Came In
- This Is My Now (Once again, just to compare)

By Melinda Doolitle :
- I'm a Woman
- Nut Bush City Limits
- Trouble is a Woman
- Mend a Broken Heart

OK, I'm gonna put more than 4, 'cause they're all great, and not at all similar, as other contestants'!!!
- I Believe in You and Me
- Have a Nice Day
- As Long As He Needs Me
- Sway
- For Once in My Life [Her Audition!!!!!!!!]


* Keep in mind that I didn't actually watch the whole season, so I may have missed something really good... in that case, I'd love some new pointers...

Fracture [Movie]

Fracture, Gregory Hoblit , 8,5/10

It is so seldom that I'm actually (positively) surprised by a movie, that I always try to write a little bit about it. Yesterday (cheap ticket day) I went to the movies with a couple of friends to watch Fracture ("Um Crime de Mestre" in portuguese). It had a lot of stuff going for it, actually... pretty good cast, with Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling; very cool trailer, interesting premise... and a pretty good director, with at least two noteworthy movies: Fallen, and Primal Fear (well, actually Fallen falls a little short of what it could've been... but Primal Fear will always be the movie that put Edward Norton on the spotlight with that amazing performance!!). So, in retrospect, maybe it surprised me because I expected too little of it. But, whatever the reason was, it was a great surprise... one of the best thrillers of the year, hands down! Great performances, great plot, almost flawless script (but hey, who's perfect right?!), holds the tension 'till the very end... it's a really great movie, worth watching any time (not only on the cheap ticket day!! :-) )

Why do I hate (auto)biographies? And the one I didn't hate...

OK, so I've tried reading biographies: actually, the whole concept of a biography seems appealing, you admire someone and want to read about their life, how they got to be who they are. But, for some reason, I really don't like reading biographies. I've tried (auto)biographies of great people that I admire, Gandhi, Che Guevara... of important, relevant people such as Winston Churchill, or just of great writers such as José Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I haven't actually got to finish any of those: and I don't usually start a book and leave it before finishing... so, why don't I like them?? And why do I love this one in particular: Ecce Homo, by Nietzche.

I guess I don't like biographies because they usually go into so much detail about the dullest things... what do I care if Che Guevara had a flu when he was 11? I guess it's really hard for the writers to really set apart what's interesting to a ley person from what's only relevant to scholars and such... or maybe I just haven't found anyone famous that I was that much interested about... so I probably hate biographies because I can't get past the first few chapters of any of them... it's so damn dull!!! Where they were born, their uninteresting family problems, schools, bla, bla, bla... One of these days I'll just try starting from chapter 8 or something and see where it goes from there...


OK, the post is too long already, guess I'll talk about Nietzsche some other time...

My Grandma's Balcony

By the way, this is the view from my grandma's balcony...

Hair update.

So, just to keep some kind of a track record, this is how my hair looked like a couple of weeks ago:

That's a picture I took in Rio, at the hostel we were. After that, I I've already redone these braids a little differently, but the funniest picture is the one I took with no braids... my hair is huge!!!!

Tomorrow I'll take some pictures of how it looks like right now (no, I'm not walking around looking like that on the right).

On the coming of death

It's funny how many books used to be written simply about some fact, feeling or concept, and how it would affect someone, or people in general. Nobody does that anymore, I guess because all the great topics have already been taken, and quite wonderfully written about. I'm writing all this to talk about two books I just finished reading: The Death of Ivan Ilitch (Tolstoi) and The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death (Victor Hugo). They both deal with the approach of unavoidable, inexorable death: in the former caused by a mysterious ailment, in the latter by human stupidity, arrogance and intolerance (well, more objectively by the death penalty). They are both wonderful novels written by two genius, arguably the best their respective countries ever had to offer. Both near contemporary, well at least they shared a century. Both are opinion-makers, they don't write merely for the beauty of writing: they want to pass along their ideas. But each pushed by very different reasons.
Tolstoi puts his own ghosts in his writing, by facing the fear of death and, worse yet, of life wasted. He harshly criticizes what was believed to be a "good" life by his fellow russians, a decent life indeed. The slow decay of respectable judge Ivan Ilitch into despair and almost-inhumanity caused by the certainty of death-to-come is a horrible and disturbing thing to read about. But most disturbing is his ultimate realization and evaluation of how he lived his life.
Victor Hugo is also harsh in his attack on death penalty. He describes the last days of a dead-man, for after the sentenced is pronounced he is indeed dead. He is a nameless convict. Hugo doesn't go for the easy solution of creating some sort of bond between the reader and the convict by describing him as particularly nice, or wrongly accused. No, he is guilty. Of what, we don't know, but certainly of something awful. The only shred of humanity in him is his daughter, the 3-year-old girl orphaned by each and every french person that allows such cruelty to go on. I don't remember seeing such a well-crafted, beautiful defence of something that ultimately shouldn't need defending, as this novel, together with the impressive 1832 preface (that, luckily enough, was reproduced in my edition of the book) Hugo wrote. And I recommend that everyone that ever stopped to think about the fairness and morality of the death penalty read it.

For free, at the Project Gutenberg (well, in the original french)
The edition I read, in portuguese: (Livraria Cultura).

Ilhéus and free WiFi

So, I came to spend mother's day with my mom at my grandparent's place. They live in Ilhéus, a very nice town in south Bahia (will post pictures later, but Google is your friend). Like any other geek MSc. student with a lot going on at the same time, I missed Internet (actually, I didn't miss it yet, since I just got here... but I knew I was gonna miss it pretty soon). But, after dinner, while everybody was watching the soaps, I came out to the balcony to work on some stuff I had to write. Well, since optimism is one thing I have a lot of, I just start looking for WiFi networks on the neighborhood... found three of them, and guess what?!?! One of them was open!!!! God bless unsecured, free WiFi net access!!!!

AACS And the Stupidity of Lawyers

OK, for everybody that doesn't really follow computer/security news out there: the security scheme for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray (the competing formats for DVD successor) is broken. One of the ways to break it was to recover an encryption key, a special number used to decode the contents of the discs before playing. Every player on the planet must have some key that is able to decode discs, and a few Hackers were able to extract one of them. The number was published online on a few geek-news sites. Intimidating take-down letters were sent to websites hosting this number to force them to take them off the web. Of course that didn't work quite as expected, generating more revolt and catapulting the number into stardom. The story was covered in the NY Times, for example. For completeness sake, the number (in hexadecimal notation) is "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0". A few really creative ideas of how to publish it came up, but I guess my favorite so far is this song [YouTube]. This is a really perfect example of how stupid people can be, making a celebrity of something they were actually trying to hide...


UPDATE:
OK, I guess I now have a tie for favorite [YouTube].

Blog Language

I decided to change the language of my posts to English. The main motivations behind this are the following:

1-) Most people that would read this in Portuguese also speak English and will be able to keep on reading.
2-) Many of the people who I wish could read this aren't from Brasil. So I guess it's only fair that they get the chance to read it too. I guess English is the common ground here.

So English it is from now on... hope you enjoy it and I don't make too many mistakes.

Bonequinha de Luxo [Filme]

Breakfast at Tiffany's, Blake Edwards, 8,5/10

Mais um clássico que eu já devia ter assistido há muito tempo. Um filmaço de 1961 com a Audrey Hepburn, certamente uma das mulheres mais bonitas que já passaram pelo cinema, e baseado num livro do ligeiramente maluco Truman Capote. Boa apresentação, não? Pois o filme faz jus a ela. Não sei muito bem por que, mas esse filme concorreu ao Globo de Ouro de Melhor Comédia(?!?!?) de 1962, apesar de não ser lá muito engraçado nem leve. Na verdade ele tem um personagem principal feminino super bem desenvolvido, uma "call-girl" de luxo que começa a estabelecer uma estranha relação com um jovem escritor (que não escreve muito, tendo que ganhar dinheiro por outros caminhos) que se muda para o prédio dela. Contar mais é estragar o filme. Mas uma interpretação inspirada de Audrey e uma história muito bem desenvolvida torna m o filme impredível. Ah, sim... e "Moon River" é linda!!! Confiram abaixo:

Uma semana sem Firefox

Bem, eu nunca tinha gostado muito do Firefox 2. Inchado, cheio leaks de memória ("features") e instável. Ontem, depois dele travar nada menos do que três vezes comigo no espaço de uma hora (versão 2.0.0.3, para os mais curiosos), eu vou tentar o Camino. Instalei ontem, configurei e vou testar por uma semana... vamos ver se o Firefox perde seu lugar cativo no meu dock.

Hi, I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC.

Muito bom!!! :-) Paródia dos comerciais da Apple "Hi, I'm a Mac... and I'm a PC" com o Super-Homem e o Homem-Aranha!!!! Aqui! Ah, procurem as seqüências, parte 2, 3, 4...

Homem-Aranha 3

Uhuu!!!!! Hoje tem Pré-Estréia de Homem-Aranha 3, 00:02 da madrugada de quinta para sexta-feira. Estarei lá torcendo para que eles não estraguem essa trilogia que está indo tão bem!!!! As primeiras críticas já saíram aqui: aparentemente a opinião geral dos críticos é mais ou menos a esperada: o filme é meio inchado, um pouco aquém da enormidade de dinheiro que foi gasta. Mas ainda assim deve ser bem legal. Realmente a decisão de utilizar tantos vilões (3 ou 4, dependendo de como você conte), ainda incluir umas complicações pessoais (Gwen Stacy ) é questionável. Mas eu ainda mantenho a fé de que o filme deve ser, no mínimo, bom. Eu acho que teria sido melhor simplificar, mas eu confio no talento do Sam Raimi pra segurar as pontas!!!!

O trailer final está disponível no YouTube:


Abraços e Bom Filme para todos!!!!