here’s a discussion on how to detect and eliminate xing encoded mp3s. the title is great: Program to delete Xing encoded mp3s?

also here’s a thread on testing your hearing frequency (with audio files and methodology.

points to pcabx, a free program written by arny krueger, of pcavtech fame. pretty neat. there’s an listening training section for audio-technical training. also, and this is interesting, there’s also a page on musical-artistic listening. it’s amazing to be actively surfing the net for over five years, and still finding incredible useful stuff.

ms product activation because of .net? the register seems to think so… makes sense.

Well Minister, if you asked me for a straight answer then I shall say that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one time with another, in terms of the average of departments, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say that, at the end of the day, in general terms, you would find, that, not to put too fine a point on it, there probably wasn’t very much in it one way or the other, as far as one can see, at this stage.

ha, ximian (gnome guys, formerly helix code) advertises on google for kde searches. hmm, here’s the google self-service advertising system. looks pretty cool. when’s redhat, sun or ibm going to start advertising on “windows” (or “help fixing windows” or similar stuff for that matter) keyword?

ars technica has a discussion on the new cnet ads.

the qikdrive uses 8 standard pc100 ecc sdram to provide up to 8gb of solid state storage space. it uses an external power supply to help keep state. $5,000 is a lot to pay for it, but the super performance probably makes it worth it for any memory intensive usage (web/db, media editing, etc). has drivers for linux and free bsd too.

wow, amazing. these genetically modified goats produce spider’s silk (via milk). they’re guarded in a us airforce concrete bunker. this quote is particularly funny:

Nexia is tackling a materials-science conundrum that has stumped even DuPont for 20 years: how to synthesize spider silk. Milking the spiders themselves is out of the question—they’re cannibals. “Put a bunch of them together and soon you end up with one big, fat, happy spider. It’s like trying to farm tigers,” says Turner.

ok, who wants to milk the spiders this morning?

mozilla usenet post on how a patch to nsXULElement.cpp speeds up mozilla seamonkey page load time by 21% (wow).

sun bitchslaps .net in style.

super fun /. David Korn q&a – interesting microsoft anecdote c&p’d for your pleasure

Was the story about you embarrassing a Microsoftie at a conference true? Specifically, that he was insisting that their implementation of ksh in their unix compatibility kit was true to the “real” thing and trying to argue the point with you. The argument ended when someone else finally stood up and informed the speaker who he was arguing with.

Just curious …

Korn: This story is true. It was at a USENIX Windows NT conference and Microsoft was presenting their future directions for NT. One of their speakers said that they would release a UNIX integration package for NT that would contain the Korn Shell.

I knew that Microsoft had licensed a number of tools from MKS so I came to the microphone to tell the speaker that this was not the “real” Korn Shell and that MKS was not even compatible with ksh88. I had no intention of embarrassing him and thought that he would explain the compromises that Microsoft had to make in choosing MKS Korn Shell. Instead, he insisted that I was wrong and that Microsoft had indeed chosen a “real” Korn Shell. After a couple of exchanges, I shut up and let him dig himself in deeper. Finally someone in the audience stood up and told him what almost everyone in the audience knew, that I had written the ‘real’ Korn Shell. I think that this is symbolic about the way the company works.