After quite a bit of hunting around, I found one absolutely kickass pair of headphones for work: the Ultrasone HFI-550. They’re great for a work environment because they’re sealed headphones, which means that if you’re like me and play stuff loud, you won’t disturb your workmates because sealed headphones keep the sound in. The sound quality from them is superb: they’re up there with my beloved Beyerdynamic DT531s for serious listening. They’re also comfortable: I’ve worn them for hours on-end with no problem or fatigue at all.

For Australians, the best thing about them is that thanks to AusPCMarket, you can actually get them in Australia for a reasonable price: they’re USD$189 at Headroom, but you can get them at AusPCMarket for A$231—including shipping. Considering that equivalent competing headphones (such as the AKG-K271) are around the same price range in the USA but are quite hard to find in stores in Australia for anything less than about A$330, A$231 for these things is a bargain.

And, of course, the day I got these nice pair of cans is the same day that I managed to code my way out of a coding slump, and get back into deep hack mode. Coincidence? I don’t think so…

The optical LED for Apple’s Mighty Mouse emits a cute little picture of a mouse if you look hard enough, and apparently this has always been the case for all of Apple’s optical mouses. Kudos to them for the little design touches! Now if I could only find another Logitech MX-300, which is the best weighted and most comfortable mouse I’ve ever used.

(Man, you know you’re a total nerd when you start talking about the weight of your frigging mouse.)

I’ve been on a bit of a headphones splurge lately: anyone who knows me will know that I like my music, and I love my gadgets. I like in-ear headphones for travelling since they’re small, unobtrusive, yet can still give excellent sound quality. While nothing beats a nice pair of full-head cans for comfortable listening, they’re a little bit awkward to tote around. Interestingly, I’ve found that my experiences with in-ear headphones have been quite different from most of the reviews that I’ve read on the ‘net about them, so I thought I’d post my experiences here to bore everyone. The executive summary: make sure that whatever in-ear phones you buy, wherever you buy them, be prepared to bear the cost if you don’t like them, or make sure you can return them.

Note: For comparative purposes, my preferred non-in-ear headphones are the Sennheiser PX-100s (USD$60), IMHO one of the best open earphones in its price range. I don’t consider myself to be an audiophile at all: I think I know sound reasonably well, but I’m not fussy as long as the general reproduction is good. A general guideline is that if I state that something lacks bass compared to something else, you’ll be able to hear the difference unless you’re totally deaf, but I’m not fussy about whether the bass is ‘soft and warm’ and all that other audiophile crap. For serious listening/monitoring, I currently use Beyerdynamic DT 531s, and previously used AKG-141s. The Sennheiser PX-100 nor any of the headphones below are any real comparison to these beasts: the 531s and 141s are meant for professional monitoring with serious comfort; it’s a whole different target market.

So, here are some in-ear headphones that I’ve tried over the years:

• Apple iPod earbuds: Mediocre sound quality, trendy white, comes with iPod. Stays in the ear reasonably well. Not enough bass for my liking, but that’s no surprise considering they come for free. That said, they’re a hell of a lot better than the earbuds that come with most MP3/CD players; the Sony PSP also came with trendy-white headphones, and they sucked a lot more than the iPod earbuds.

• Griffin Earjams (USD$15): Designed as an attachment to the iPod earbuds. This doobie significantly changes the output of the earbuds so that you now get a good amount of bass, with very little treble. Not good enough: I like bass in my doof-doof music, but I don’t want to hear just the doof-doof-doof, you know? If you’re tempted to get these, I’d suggest trying Koss’s The Plug or Spark Plug in-ear phones instead, which are just as cheap, have just as much (if not more bass) reproduction, and don’t suffer so badly on the treble end.

• Apple in-ear Headphones (USD$40): I really liked these. About the only thing I don’t like about them is that they don’t fit in my ear well enough: they’re fine for a couple of minutes, but after about 10 minutes I realise that they’re falling out a bit and I have to wiggle them in again. I don’t find this too much of an annoyance, but no doubt other people will. If you plan to do exercise with your in-ear phones, you will definitely want to give these a very good break in and find out whether they come loose during your gymming/running/skiing/breakdancing/whatnot.

  I’m fairly sure the loose fitting is due to a different design they use: the actual earpiece/driver seems to be much bigger than the other in-ear headphones I’ve tried here, and I guess they’re designed to be used further away from the ear rather than being stuck deep into your ear canal, as with the Sony and Shures I tried (and no doubt like the Etymotics in-ear phones too). The nice thing about this design is that you don’t have to stick them really, really deep, which is the main reason I like them. I find the Sony and the Shures want to be too deep for my comfort level; see below.

• Sony MDR-EX71SL (USD$49): Available in white or black. After much internal debate and agony, I got the white model. (Trendy or street-wise? Trendy or street-wise? Trendy it is!) This was the first model I bought after the Apple in-ear headphones, expecting to have seriously better sound. After all, everyone knows that for audio, more expensive always means better—especially those gold-plated, deoxygenated, shiny-looking, made-from-unobtanium Monster Cables. Anyway, I was fairly disappointed with their sound quality: less bass than the Apple’s iPod earbuds. Well, OK, let’s be honest: I’m sure they do sound really good if not far better, but I’ll never find out, because I really don’t want to shove them in my ear that far. Unlike the Koss Plug series, these Sonys don’t come with foam earpieces that can be inserted at a comfortable distance, so I think you have to put the earpiece far deeper into your ear than I did. In the very unlikely scenario that I did insert them as far as they were meant to go, they sounded pretty crap indeed.

• Koss Spark Plug (USD$20): The sequel to Koss’s suspiciously cheap older model, which was simply named “The Plug”. The Spark Plug’s just as cheap as The Plug, but supposedly better (or at least different). For $20, I don’t think you can complain a whole lot: they give you a pretty good amount of bass (comparable to the Griffin Earjams), but they’re definitely lacking at the high end, though not as much as the Earjams are. I find the foam earpieces that come with these fit my ear pretty well, don’t have to be put in that deep to deliver that doof-doof bass I’m looking for, and they’re also reasonably comfortable. They’re not quite as comfortable as Apple’s in-ear headphones, but still, better than I’d expect for a piece of foam stuck into my ear. If your sound-playing device has an equaliser, you can likely correct for the Spark Plug’s lack of treble response by putting it on an Eq setting that boosts the treble a bit: I found the Spark Plug to be sound pretty good on iPod’s Treble Boost or Electronic Eqs. A good, safe (and pretty cheap) buy.

• Shure E3c/E4c (USD$179 and USD$299): So, I found the Apple Store stocking one of the most acclaimed in-ear phones I’ve ever read about, which would be the Shure E3c. (Note: the ‘c’ in E3c stands for consumer, and basically translates to “trendy iPod white”. The Shure E3 is exactly the same, but is black, and therefore faster.) Additionally, they also had the Shure E4c in stock, which are far more pricey than the E3c (and therefore better). Unfortunately, I put both of these headphones into the same category as the Sony MDR-EX71SLs: I’m sure they’re as absolutely awesome as all the glowing reviews say, but I’m just a wimp and refuse to shove those damn things that far into my brain. Oh yeah, on a not-very-relevant note, Shure changed the packaging between the E3c and the E4c. The E3c had a (gasp) easy-to-open plastic pack, but apparently Shure have since been attending the American School of Plastic Packaging, and used them evil blister packs instead.

• Griffin EarThumps (USD$20): Released at the start of 2006, I managed to find a pair of EarThumps calling me at my local AppleCentre, and I like them alot. They’re pretty cheap (they’re sure as hell not in the Shure E3c/E4c price range), and they sound great. The bass production is nearly as good as Koss’s Plug series, and they actually manage to produce pretty decent treble too, so you won’t have to play around with your graphic equaliser too much to make these sound decent. Additionally, they appear to have the larger drivers that Apple used for their in-ear headphones: this means that you don’t have to shove them so far in your ear. In fact, these were even easier to get into your ear than Apple’s in-ear headphones, and were much less annoying to put in than the Koss ‘phones. They’re also reasonably comfortable and stay in your ear quite well, and come in both black and white models if colour-matching your iPod is an important thing to you.

For on-the-road listening, my current preferred earphones are the Griffin EarThumps: small enough to fit next to an iPod nano in one of those evilly cute iPod socks, with good enough sound and a good comfort level. I was previously using Koss’s Spark Plug, and before that, Apple’s in-ear headphones. The EarThumps are a set of earphones that I can heartily recommend to friends, since they’re reasonably cheap, and more importantly, I know that they won’t have to shove some piece of equipment halfway inside their brain to get any decent sound out of it.

Scott Johnson has an excellent comment on the Lambda the Ultimate forums titled “Different levels of mutable state badness”:

The vestuble: Non-mutable state. Just so we have a frame of reference. (Some may argue that this is Heaven rather than the outermost circle of Hell, but in Heaven all the problems are already solved. :) )

1st circle: Mutable state which is not externally observable (given the programming model). Such things as variables cached in registers and other optimizations performed by the machine.

2nd circle: “Monotonic” mutable state. Discussed a bit in CTM, these correspond to variables which can be bound separately from their definition (but once bound cannot be re-bound), lazy evaluation, etc. In general, preserve referential transparency, and are well-behaved.

3rd circle: Linear mutable state. Mutable variables which are accessed from only one place; and generally aren’t subject to aliasing. Examples include local variables in functions (ignoring the issues of lexical closures which might alias such variables, and call-by-reference), “private” variables within objects, etc.

4th circle: Managed mutable state. State in a database or some other system which provides transaction semantics and other means of arbitrating access to the shared variables.

5th circle (getting hotter): Aliased mutable state. Mutable variables/objects which are “used” in numerous different contexts (and therefore aliased)—and thus frequently used as a backdoor communications channel (often unintentionally). Often described as a “feature” of certain OO languages (much the same way pointer arithmetic is trumpted as a feature of C).

6th circle (even hotter): Global (unmanaged) mutable state. As bad as the previous, but as the state is globally exported, you don’t know WHO might be messing with it, or where.

7th and 8th circles: Currently unoccupied, though I await suggestions. :) Feel free to interpose suggestsions above too, and we can demote intervening circles to fill in the gap.

9th circle: Concurrent mutable state. The obnoxious practice of mutating shared state from multiple threads of control, leading into a predictable cycle of race conditions, deadlocks, and other assorted misbehavior from which there is no return. And if a correct solution (for synchronization) is found for a given program, chances are any substantial change to the program will make it incorrect again. But you won’t find it, instead your customer will. Despite that, reams of code (and TONS of middleware) has been written to try and make this tractable. And don’t get me started on a certain programming language which starts with “J” that saw fit to make EVERY object have its very own monitor….

Aww jeah, this little program wins some seriously awexome geek points:

That, folks, is GLTerminal. It emulates the curvature of ye olde green and amber CRT tubes; what you can’t see in the screenshot is that it can also emulate particular baud rates (all the way from 110 to 19200), complete with the ghosting effect of the slow phosphor updates that the old terminals had. I leave you with one of its Preferences windows:

The traditional solution to providing a high-availibility Internet service is to throw a bunch of (preferably geographically diverse) servers together and set up a round-robin DNS record that will somewhat balance the load between them. However, if your Internet service supports real-time collaboration between users, as in the case of a bunch of clustered worldwide Jabber servers, a round-robin DNS solution doesn’t work very well, because it dramatically increases your server-to-server traffic as users will end up logging into different servers.

Assuming that scalability isn’t too much of a problem and that your main goal is high availability, what you really want is a failover queue of servers for a single DNS record: first, try server1; if that fails, try server2; if server2 fails, try server3, and so on…

The traditional solution for this is either (a) run your own DNS server and use BIND 9’s obscure rrset-order option to define a round-robin order, or, if you’re uncomfortable with doing that, outsource your DNS to a managed DNS hosting service that supports failover monitoring, such as ZoneEdit or PowerDNS, which can be expensive.

However, Horms suggested a brilliant little solution: use one of the many freely available dynamic dns services. Write a simple script to poll your servers in order, and update the dynamic DNS entry’s IP address to point to whatever the first server you’ve detected as online. You can still point users to the normal hostname in your domain, by adding a CNAME record that points to the hostname provided by the dynamic DNS service.

We’ve used this technique in practice for several weeks and it’s worked extremely well: so well, in fact, that we cancelled the outsourced DNS failover service that we had before, because it didn’t update as quickly or work as reliably as it does now. Writing the monitoring script is the hardest part of this solution, and that’s pretty easy: if you’re really curious, email me and I’ll be happy to lend the monitor script that we use.

When you buy a bunch of CD jewel cases, at least one in every ten will be broken or cracked.

(While I’m at it, don’t buy the crystal-clear jewel cases. They look cool, but they’re a right beeyotch to open up so you can slide in the inlay…)

I have a lot of friends on the MSN Messenger chat network that I quite enjoy talking to, but unfortunately my favourite instant messaging program — iChat on Mac OS X — can’t talk to MSN. (Linux people, keep reading, I promise this post will get more relevant to you despite my reference to iChat.) iChat, can, however, talk to Jabber servers. I’ve known for a while that many Jabber servers have the capability to bridge networks, so that you can talk to people on all the other chatting networks (ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, and Google Talk) by simply logging into a single Jabber server. However, I never bothered configuring iChat to do this until today.

I’m very happy to say that one of the first guides I found on Google about how to set up iChat to talk to MSN was on the Jabber Australia site, which is also one of the most professional Web sites I’ve seen for a free, open service. The process was quite painless and nearly completely Web-based: the Jabber Australia site imports all your current MSN contacts into your new Jabber contacts list, so you don’t have to re-type them all in. The Jabber<->MSN bridge even sends across all your buddies’ icons, so I can see iChat proudly displaying pictures of all my mates. Very schmick.

Step the second: I also have friends on Google Talk, and since Google opened up their servers to Jabber federation in January 2006, that means I also get to chat with all my friends who have Gmail accounts and never bother logging into the IM networks. (Muahaha, and they thought they could avoid me!) Now I’m finally gotten into the 2000 era and have one chat client that can talk to any of MSN, ICQ, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and AIM; woohoo, clever me.

However, the story’s much bigger than just simple chat network interoperability. Google’s move into the IM market by unleashing Google Talk might have seemed rather underwhelming when it was first announced: after all, it was just like Skype… but Google voice chat was Windows-only when Skype is Windows/Mac/Linux, and oh yeah, it also had, like, none of Skype’s user base. However, Google Talk has one massive weapon behind it: open standards. In the past few months, Google has done two very significant things:

• They’ve opened up their servers so that they can interoperate with other Jabber servers.
• Published their voice-call protocol as an open standard, and even provided third-party developers with a library (libjingle) that can be integrated into any IM client.

The second point is huge: in one move, Google has brought voice capability to the entire Jabber federation chat network. (And, if you haven’t used Google Talk, the voice quality is damn good: better than Skype, and possibly on par or better than iChat AV.) The implication of this is that there’s going to be a big split in the short-term between the official ICQ/Yahoo!/AIM/MSN clients and everyone else (i.e. Trillian, Gaim, AdiumX, etc). The official clients will, of course, only work with their own network since they want to lock you in, but every other IM client that doesn’t currently support voice chatting — which means everybody except for Skype and iChat AV — is very, very likely to be putting Google’s voice protocols into their own chat clients. Look a couple of years ahead, and I think you’ll find that every IM chat client is going to have voice support, and that they’ll be divided into two camps: the ones that support Google’s voice protocol because it’s an open standard, and everybody else.

The thing is, right now, that “everybody else” is really only one other group: Skype. There’s also iChat AV, but that’s small fry compared to Skype, and since Apple piggybacks off the AIM network right now, they don’t have a large interest in locking customers into one particular network. (It’d be relatively easy for Apple to migrate all their .Mac accounts over to a Jabber-federated network just by throwing a couple of Jabber servers up for their .Mac users and publishing a new version of iChat that talked to that.) This means that it’s more-or-less going to be Skype vs Google Talk in the next coming years, and while Skype has absolutely huge mindshare right now, I don’t think they have a hope of holding out, because they’re the only damn network right now that absolutely requires you to use their own client. The one killer advantage that Skype has compared to Google Talk is that you can use Skype call-out and call-in to do phone calls, but once Google gets SIP support into Jingle, Google Talk will have that capability as well. Unless Skype do something radical, they’re going to be extinct in a few years as developers start pushing Jingle support into every single IM client.

Heh, not a bad situation at all: in one move, Google’s not only guaranteed some measure of success for themselves in the IM market, but they’ve also made the world a slightly better place by giving users client choice and software choice thanks to open standards. One voice protocol to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them…

Mike Evangelist (yes, I do believe that’s his real name…) is calling for a boycott of HD video products, due to restrictive digital rights management schemes that the industry is intending to push on to consumers.

There are plenty of folks out there speaking out against DRM, of course. One thing that distinguishes Mike’s opinion from the rest of them is that he’s a former executive at Apple. What’s also interesting is his opinion on CSS (the encryption mechanism used for consumer DVDs) and FairPlay, which he wrote in his blog comments:

CSS never bothered me that much because everyone in the industry knew it was just a placebo to satisfy the movie studios. Nobody expected it to actually do anything. AACS on the other hand is being designed to work, by some very smart and very serious people.

I view the DMCA as a criminal conspiracy that should be prosecuted under RICO statutes, but of course it wonít be, as the conspirators are in charge.

But the big difference with AACS is that they can change the rules after the fact. If you buy an high definition DVD, youíll have no certainty what rights you will be granted in the future. Itís insane.

PS I find FairPlay to be a reasonable compromise, but it doesnít work for me because I want to play my music from my server using devices that donít support it. Hence, I buy my music elsewhere.

It appears that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be adopting AACS as part of their rights management schemes, unfortunately.