Thanks, gfurry!

Having to go over hundreds of CDs each time I want to listen to a specific album can really take its toll on your music listening experience, so making all your music available at your fingertips anywhere in the house is great. Beyond that, the sound quality playing well-ripped lossless sound files with good equipment should be better than with any CD player. Basically, playing music with a CD player often introduces various artifacts (such as jitter etc.) – due to mechanical moving parts and lack of good error correction. On the other hand, because while ripping the CD the software can “double-check” that it’s getting a good copy, and re-read the original CD several times if needed, the end result is often better quality music playback.

My CD ripping setup:

1. Plextor Premium U external CD drive – this is an excellent drive for ripping music, especially because you can only use the Plextools (see below) with Plextor drives. These drives have long been discontinued, but you can still try and get one on eBay etc.
2. Plextools software – excellent for ripping, if you have a Plextor drive. Similarly to EAC, this program allows you to rip your CDs without worrying that CD scratches or defects will produce a bad file. Basically, these programs perform some advanced verification and error correction algorithms to make sure the ripped data is exactly the same as the original one present on the disk. Make sure that you setup Plextools correctly so all of the advanced ripping algorithms I mentioned are turned on. Plextoor is reportedly faster than EAC, but both are really considered the industry standards for this sort of thing.
3. FLAC – the lossless music format of choice, especially if you want bit-perfect copies of your music and widest possible support across various platforms. Plextools can rip to FLACs out of the box, which is great.
4. Freedb – this service allows you to automatically get metadata about your CDs, so you don’t have to manually enter the names of your album, artist and the tracks for each ripped CD. Again, Plextool works with Freedb out of the box.
5. MediaMonkey – an excellent media player, great for managing big music libraries. MediaMonkey has many useful features, but automatic tagging is probably one of the most useful ones. This allows you to automatically fix or complete the metadata of your songs and even find album covers.
6. Sonos – multi-room digital music system. Basically, you setup all your music on one of your computers or a network storage device and then add a small box to any place in your home you’d like to have music at. Then you can have Sonos wirelessly play any music in your library at any location in your home, or have it synchronize all locations to play the same music. Sonos also comes with a very nice remote control to wirelessly drive the whole thing.

So, my ripping flow is as follows:

1. Insert a CD, have Plextools pick it up and get the metadata from freedb
2. Rip the CD, my file naming convention is “Artist\Album\Track # – Track name.flac”
3. Use MediaMonkey to fix the metadata if needed, add album cover etc.
4. Play the music on my machine with MediaMonkey, or throughout my home with Sonos
5. Enjoy!

Sounds simple and easy, right? Not always. There are several problems you might encounter, some of them are:

• Unicode problems, especially with non-English CDs
• Damaged or scratched CDs
• Missing or bad metadata, especially with classical CDs

I will post my solutions to these problems in the following posts.

For now, I’m off to listen to some music

Anyway, over the course of this past year I added a few new features to ColorZilla (mainly because I needed them for my own work ), but because 2007 has been a very busy year for me, I just couldn’t find the time to properly test and release the new stuff to the public. Now, with Firefox 3 just around the corner, I finally took a bit of time to put everything together and release ColorZilla v2.

So, here’s what’s new in ColorZilla v2:

Webpage DOM Color Analyzer
Basically, this feature started with several simple questions – what colors are in use on any given Web page? What HTML elements use them and what CSS rules define those colors? So, Webpage DOM Color Analyzer analyzes a Web page and produces a palette of all the colors on that page. By hovering on any color, you can see what elements use that color, and by clicking on a color you can see a detailed listing of all the CSS rules that apply that color to DOM elements. You can even click on a CSS rule have ColorZilla open the corresponding style sheet file with the rule highlighted.

You can save the page colors as a ColorZilla palette, or open the palette in ColorZilla Online Viewer.

ColorZilla Online Palette Viewer
The online palette viewer is a simple webapp that can be used to view a color palette, bookmark it and share it using any number of bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks etc.

It works by providing a simple semantic URL that describes a set of colors:
http://colorzilla.com/colors/COLOR_1+COLOR_2...COLOR_N[/PALETTE_NAME]

Each color should be specified in a hex notation similarly to CSS, so for example red is FF0000 and yellow is FFFF00. The ‘palette name’ portion of the URL is optional.
Here’s an example of a palette URL:
http://colorzilla.com/colors/ff0000+00ff00+0000ff/Simple+RGB+Palette

Click here for an additional example.

When viewing palettes online, you get an online eyedropper (that works in all browsers!) that displays color information in many different formats for any color in the palette.

The online viewer can be opened from the ColorZilla Webpage Color Analyzer, or from the ColorZilla Palette Viewer dialog. The simple format of its URL also allows using it with any other application or Web service – all the application has to do is to generate a list of colors, append it to colozilla.com URL and launch that URL in a browser.

Additional features

1. Firefox 3 has a new Full Page Zoom functionality that allows viewing pages at any zoom level and handles both text and images very nicely. With Firefox 3 ColorZilla will use this new functionality for its internal zoomer.
2. Firebug support – until now, ColorZilla allowed you to quickly open the selected element in Dom Inspector. Now, if you have Firebug installed, it will also allow you to quickly open it in Firebug.
3. Ubuntu support was added. Basically, because Ubuntu’s Firefox was compiled using a slightly different compiler, ColorZilla eyedropper didn’t work unless you installed an official Firefox build from Mozilla. This version solves this problem by providing two versions of the eyedropper module, one built with the newer compiler (gcc4) and one with the older one.
4. ColorZilla is now compatible with Firefox 3
5. 3 new languages were added – Indonesian, Korean, Norwegian. Thanks to the BabelZilla team!

ColorZilla v2 (v1.9) is still in beta, but should be stable enough for everyone to try. Check it out and let me know what you think

PlainOldFavorites 1.0.1

• Compatible with Firefox 3
• Catalan, Czech, Danish, Greek, Portuguese translations – thanks to the BabelZilla team!

FirefoxView 1.0

• Firefox 3 compatibility
• 24 new translations: Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, Persian, Finnish, Galician, Gujarati, Hebrew, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Slovak, Turkish, Ukrainian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional) – thanks to the BabelZilla team!
• Graduates to version 1.0!

So, check the new versions out and let me know if you see any issues.

Also, stay tuned for the new version of ColorZilla coming soon – unlike its two siblings above, ColorZilla’s new version will be a bit more major

I believe this is indeed a very significant step forward, especially taking into account the launch partners who are already on board.

Naturally, a lot of comparisons between OpenSocial and Facebook Platform have been made, mostly having to do with the fact that Facebook Platform is closed and proprietary, and OpenSocial is open and standards based. While I couldn’t agree more, after reading the OpenSocial documentation carefully, I couldn’t help but notice that there’re several Facebook Platform features missing from OpenSocial – mainly having to do with app management, permissions etc. To try and make some sense of the differences, I created the following table, comparing the two platforms side by side.

Conclusions – first, OpenSocial is only at its 0.5 version, and I’m sure it will be significantly improved and extended in the near future. With that said, looking at the features side-by-side today, it’s clear that OpenSocial currently provides two basic functionalities – containment and access to container data. It doesn’t provide any of the higher level functionality present on Facebook – things like application directory, application permissions and privacy settings, spam controls, additional application links and hooks, ‘app addded’ news posts etc. Each container site will need to implement most if not all these functionalities independently, as they obviously address pretty common needs and problems. This also means that within each container there will be slightly (or maybe even significantly) different app virality, discovery and distribution dynamics.

One thing is for sure – OpenSocial makes developers’ life much much easier. Unlike Facebook platform, OpenSocial doesn’t require learning new markup and query languages, and the specific platform quirks associated with many of the proprietary mechanisms. Also, with OpenSocial developers won’t have to work hard to figure out how to easily push updates to user profiles, or how to include dynamic images or initially interactive flash elements into the profile box. On the other hand, many of these restrictions were introduced by Facebook for a good reasons (at least in their opinion), and it would be really interesting to see how removing these restrictions will affect end-users’ experience.

I’m personally really looking forward to seeing what effect OpenSocial will have on the Web and how Google’s recent move will affect Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and other big players, and what will be their response. Exciting times!

With that said, you should always have scalability and performance in mind – know what steps you can take to improve performance if your site becomes popular.

If you have a scalable architecture, adding more servers and upgrading the existing ones should definitely solve many performance issues, but before you start buying more hardware, there are several simple things you can do to improve the performance of your existing system:

1. Minify your JavaScript files
Your JavaScript files often contain comments, white space and other unneeded characters. Minifying these files means removing these unneeded characters, which can reduce the size of your files by 5%-30%. Smaller files, faster transfers, better response times. A nice utility for minifying JavaScript files is JSMin.

2. Compress served content
Vast majority of modern web browsers supports compression, which means that your server can compress the document before it sends it to your browser, and the browser uncompresses it upon arrival. Compressing your HTML, JS and CSS content can dramatically reduce its size – by up to 70%! Again, smaller files mean better response times and happier users. The method for enabling this functionality really depends on your web server, but with Apache 2.x you can add something like the following to your .htaccess or httpd.conf files:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/x-javascript

3. Force aggressive browser caching
Without caching, the browser would load all your JavaScript, CSS and other files over and over again for each page of your site your user visits. A better scenario would be for your browser to ask your server whether the requested file has changed, and if not, just use the local cached copy it already has. The problem with this scenario, that the browser still has to issue a HTTP request for each file, even if such request doesn’t lead to the whole file being downloaded. The best thing you can do is to tell your browser to keep the files cached forever, always using the cached versions and never needing to contact your server. Here’s how this works:

1. Tell your server to send out special HTTP headers with your JS and CSS files. These headers will tell your browser to cache the received files forever. With Apache, you’d typically add the following instructions to achieve this:

   Header set "Expires" "Mon, 28 Jul 2014 23:30:00 GMT"
Header set "Cache-Control" "max-age=315360000"


2. When including the JS/CSS file in your HTML, append a dummy version number to file’s URL:
   <script src="myscript.js?v=1"></script>
3. Once the browser loads the file once, it will never bother your server again (at least not until 2014!). If you change the file and want to force users’ browsers to load the new file, just increment the version number in your HTML:
   <script src="myscript.js?v=2"></script>

4. Use CSS Sprites
CSS Sprites is a really nice technique for reducing the number of image requests for each page. Basically, you can combine all your logos, icons and graphics into a single image, and then use CSS to specify which portion of the combined image corresponds to any specific page image. So, for each page, your browser only loads one larger image instead of many small ones. Decreasing the number of HTTP requests for each page speeds up the page loading times. More info about this technique can be found here.

We’ve been using some of these techniques on FoxyTunes and recently I’ve also added many of these small optimizations to Flickriver, in order to help the site cope with the increasing traffic, without needing to spend more money on additional servers.

A great resource for learning more about these and additional techniques is the “Exceptional Performance” area of Yahoo Developer Network.

All the photographs are uploaded to Flickr and create a living documentary of camera’s travels.

In Ami’s own words:

This Friday I’m going to hand the camera to my friend Y. That’s where the T7’s unusual journey will begin. Y, who’ll be the camera’s new custodian, is an amateur photographer among other things. On Sunday he’ll take his own picture with the camera, along with a clip from that day’s newspaper. He’ll upload the picture to Flickr. It doesn’t matter where, provided that he does one thing: upload all images under one tag: “katze-blog”. That way, anyone who wants to see the pictures can key “katze-blog” in Flickr’s search engine and join the photo journey. That’s all.

Photo journey? Exactly so. Y isn’t going to keep that amazing camera. Instead, he’ll hand it on with the box (and this text) to a certain friend. Now the story starts over. Whoever gets the camera can keep it for a week. On Friday they have to pass it on. But before they do that, they’ll upload to Flickr (katze-blog) at least one picture of themselves with a newspaper and a date, and several others – all of them taken by this little naughty camera. They should not forget, of course, to put them under the appropriate tag so that we can all see it.

And on Friday they’ll hand this little treasure to a new user.

Ami’s post announcing the Nomadic Camera Project can be found here.

I was very fortunate to be the third one in the chain to get the Nomadic Camera – after my friends Yaniv Golan and Amit Knaani.

You can see the Nomadic Camera photos I took so far on Flickr and on Flickriver. All project photos are added to the Nomadic Cam group pool that also has its own Flickriver view.

I’m really looking forward to following the Nomadic Camera travels – first here in Israel and then, hopefully, all over the world.

—————-
Now playing: Bob Dylan – Like A Rolling Stone
via FoxyTunes

So, I added a new top navigation toolbar to every page on the site with links and menus that directly lead to almost any piece of content available on Iosart.com. Also, I moved some stuff around and created a new front page which is now more dynamic and lightweight.

Doing some work on my website got me thinking about the technological choices I made back when I first created it versus what I’d use today, if I had the chance to start things from scratch.

Iosart.com website dates back to early 2004, when I realized that I need a place where I could post some of the stuff I was doing – my photos, plugins, articles and so on.

It’s interesting to compare the technologies I used back then with what is considered the state of the art today

• My initial site was written in static HTML with some Server Site Includes for templating. Today, I would definitely be using PHP for everything
• I wrote my photo gallery system called KPSS in Perl. Again, today I would definitely use PHP for stuff like that. Better yet – today I’d use the Flickr API to create my own view on my Flickr photos. Bear in mind that in 2004 Flickr was still in its infancy…
• My blogging software at the time was Nucleus – Wordpress wasn’t yet the undisputed king of blogging platforms.
• I posted some of my academic papers as raw PDFs . Today, I’m posting such things to Scribd and then I can take their widgets and put a document on my site in a nice doc viewer widget.
• I had “Links” page where I manually collected some of my mostly used links. Again, del.icio.us and other social bookmarking services still weren’t very common. Today, it really makes more sense to manage everything in some bookmarking service and show the most common links on my site using a widget.
• Finally, I had some pages with tutorials and I wanted to allow people to add their comments or questions. Because I wasn’t using any CMS (Content Management System), I created my own script that allowed adding user comments module to any static page. Today, I’d just use a Wordpress based page for this, which would also solve the terrible spam problems I experienced during these years.

In fact, today I’d seriously consider basing my whole site on Wordpress. Beyond blog posts, Wordpress allows creating custom ‘pages‘ which can optionally have comments, their own custom templates and so on.

Anyway, it’s really interesting to see how much has changed in only three years. New “best of breed” tools and services have emerged – Flickr, del.icio.us and Wordpress are only a few examples. Things are getting better all the time with services such as Ning, Amazon EC2 and S3 and many others.

Now, one can really focus on the content instead of infrastructure. And, once the infrastructure becomes a non-issue, the creativity can really blossom.

I think Flickr has great user interface, but after using it for a while I could think of quite a few things I wanted to add, tweak or just do a bit differently.

Enter Flickriver – my latest personal project. It’s new website that offers a different approach to viewing and exploring Flickr photos. Basically, it encompasses several of my ideas for how Flickr viewing experience could be enhanced. As I said, I’ve been thinking about these ideas for a while now, so I used the recent holiday to go ahead and implement some of them using the Flickr API – and this is how Flickriver was born.

Here are a few examples of what Flickriver offers:

• River of photos view – on Flickriver, the photographs are always displayed as one continuous stream – you can view thousands of photos without ever needing to hit ‘next’ and waiting for the next page to load! This is also known as “infinite scroll”. I noticed that with paged interfaces, I’d typically see a page or two of any specific view and then give up and move on to something else. With “river of photos” I can see much more photographs, or even all photographs in a view, quickly and conveniently. For an example, you can see the most interesting photos stream from a couple of days ago
• Large images – I believe that size really matters when you truly want to appreciate the beauty of photography – thumbnails just don’t do justice to many photographs, making it so much easier to miss a great photo. So, all photographs in Flickriver streams are always displayed in large size.
• Black background – I believe that most photographs just look much better on black. I think that the photograph (and not the background) has to be the brightest thing on the page – this really makes great photos “pop out” and look even more beautiful.
• User most interesting photos – when I stumble upon a new Flickr user, the only view I get on Flickr is “user’s most recent photographs”. But what if the most recent photographs are not very good, while other, older photographs, are really outstanding? How can I discover these great photographs? I believe that “user’s best photographs” is a very important view for discovering and exploring users. Flickriver adds “user’s most interesting photos” view, allowing you to quickly see user’s best work. Check out my most interesting photos for an example.
• Photos of user’s contacts – this is an additional Flickriver view not available on Flickr. Basically, Flickr can show me what my friends and contacts are posting. But what if I want to see what the friends of my contacts are posting? This additional Flickriver view is a great way to discover new people and photos through other people. For an example, you can see photos from my contacts here.
• Most interesting Pool photos – similarly to user views – Flickr only shows the most recent photos added to any given group pool. Flickriver allows you to also see the most interesting photos in any pool. Here is an example for the 24 hours of Flickr project pool.
• Keyboard navigation – when viewing a Flickriver stream, you can press j/k to go to the next/previous photo. Hitting space also allows quickly jumping to the next photo. So, you can quickly go over many photographs with Flicrkriver just by pressing space and going through the pictures one by one. When you’re using keyboard for navigation, Flickriver adjusts the view so only one photo is visible at any given moment.

These are just a few of the things Flickriver enhances. Beyond that, Flickriver has many additional Flickr photo views – user recent photos, favorites, sets, user and everyone’s photos by tag, everyone’s most interesting and recent photos, group and pool photos and much more. Also, Flickriver follows the Flickr URL structure as much as possible, so you can easily go back and forth between the two.

I added several tools and extras to enhance Flickriver – you get a link creator that allows you to quickly create a link to any Flickriver view and post it on your site and there’s a mini-Flickriver widget that you can embed on your Webpage. There is a bookmarklet and a Greasemonkey script – both allow you to quickly jump from any Flickr page to the corresponding Flickriver view. Finally, there are ’share’ buttons that allow you to post any Flickriver view to StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg and Facebook.

That’s it for now, I hope you enjoy Flickriver as much as I do

For my final course paper I decided to explore both artistic and scientific aspects of photography. I did quite a bit of research for the paper and learned a lot in the process. Anyway, the paper was lying on my hard disk for years and I thought this might be a good time to share it.

The paper is called “Photography – a new art or yet another scientific achievement“. Here’s an overview of the main topics:

• Part I – History of Photography: Camera Obscura, Reflex Mirror, Optical Glass and Lenses
• Part II – Technology of Photography: Light Sensitive Materials, Daguerreotypes, Roll Film, Color, Digital Photography
• Part III – Photography as Art: Pictorialism and Impressionism, Naturalism, Straight Photography, New Vision of the 20th Century
• Part IV – Photographic Techniques: Stereoscopic Photography, Infrared Photography, Panoramic Photography, Astrophotography, Pinhole Photography

I posted the paper online as browseable HTML and PDF.

Also, I posted it to Scribd – “YouTube for Documents”:

[View full screen]

The title image for the paper and this post is “Milk Drop Coronet” by Harold Edgerton – an electrical engineer who began to take photographs as scientific experiments. That’s science and art for you!

Enjoy!