Browser stats for USC.edu from finals week last December:

Web browser                 Page views      %
Internet Explorer/6.           4832922    72.70%
Internet Explorer/5.           1130105    17.00%
Gecko                           242722     3.65%
Netscape Navigator/4.           174118     2.62%
Safari                          155681     2.34%
Netscape Navigator/3.            58450     0.88%
Internet Explorer/4.             27761     0.42%
Netscape Navigator/2.            25670     0.39%
OS                          Page views      %
Windows XP                   3,240,173    49.69%
Windows 2000                 1,360,074    20.86%
Windows 98                     853,311    13.09%
Mac                            470,978     7.22%
Windows ME                     343,354     5.27%
Windows NT                      165055     2.53%
Windows 95                      53,439     0.82%
Linux                           25,844     0.40%
Sun                              8,904     0.14%

Gecko-based browsers finally beating out NS4, although it’s still hanging in there with an inordinately large percentage. (combination of user labs, ancient machines, and software.usc.edu)

  • No end in sight to dollar’s descent – of course you won’t see these kind of headlines in CNN/Money, back to Wal-Mart citizens, nothing to see here
  • Rubin Gets Shrill = latest Krugman Op-ed

    In a paper presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Economic Association, Mr. Rubin and his co-authors Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution and Allan Sinai of Decision Economics argue along lines that will be familiar to regular readers of this column…

    “Substantial ongoing deficits,” they warn, “may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy. . . . The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits.” In other words, do cry for us, Argentina: we may be heading down the same road.

  • My So-Called Blog – Emily Nussbaum writes a long feature on teenagers and online journalling

    J.’s sense of private and public was filled with these kinds of contradictions: he wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn’t care if people read them. He wanted to be included while priding himself on his outsider status. And while he sometimes wrote messages that were explicitly public — announcing a band practice, for instance — he also had his own stringent notions of etiquette. His crush had an online journal, but J. had never read it; that would be too intrusive, he explained.

  • Two Against One – high-school bi-sexual love triangle ends in a murder. TV movie material for sure
  • RipDigital – will rip your CD’s for ~$1/CD. OK if you don’t have any neighborhood kids you can pay to rip your music I suppose.
  • EACCUESheets – 4 types of EAC CUE sheets
  • GapSettings – tutorial to use EAC to extract and burn exact CD copies
  • The proper way to do things? Looks like exporting a non-compliant CUE list, FLACing from EAC, and then batch LAME-encoding on the server end (the hardest thing is doing the metadata transferring). Hmm, can EAC just output a batch-file output?

Weekend project: figure out the best way to rip/encode the rest of my CD collection. At this point, I’m thinking that instead of using MAREO w/ EAC (encoding on my WinXP Athlon XP 1800) I should take advantage of my mostly idle (current uptime load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00)Xeon 2.4GHz processor and try to find a good way to encode w/ that. I’ll be doing FLAC, hopefully with a way of retaining in/out points, and then a compact lossy format for the iPod and streaming.

Upcoming Shows:

In Feb: Midtown, The Jealous Sound, Mates of State, Notwist, SAGE Francis/Joe Beats (Non-Prophets); In Mar: Ninja Tunes (Amon Tobin, Kid Koala, etc), In Apr: Squarepusher