Why Rockbox Your iPod, iRiver, Gigabeat, or Archos Audio Player

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Jun 212007
 

I have been stimulated into writing this by a slashdot article (not worth linking to) where people were arguing about the merits of installing Rockbox onto a compatible audio player … such as the iPod. Some people seem to think that replacing the standard iPod software is heresy!!

Or at the very least are complaining that Rockbox does not work the same way as the standard firmware.

I am in a somewhat odd situation … I bought an iPod after I was aware that Rockbox supported the iPod (and specifically avoided the 80Gb Ipod as it wasn’t supported at the time) to replace a rockboxed iRiver iHP100 (more commonly known as an iHP110) that was suffering from a lack of battery “oomph” (and yes I had tried replacing the battery). I spent probably just a couple of minutes in the native firmware before switching to the Rockbox firmware because I did not want to re-encode several thousand OGG-encoded tracks.

Now obviously I cannot criticise Apple’s interface or functionality on the iPod because I have not really used it.

However I can say that the Rockbox firmware is a perfectly adequate interface to run on an iPod and is getting better every week. Some of the features the Rockbox has include :-

  • Multi-codec support to play MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, WAV, … encoded files. I haven’t pulled down the full list but you really cannot get an audio player offering more codec support on a portable device. Not everyone needs this of course, but it is nice to have the choice.
  • The default Rockbox interface is kind of ropy on the iPod, but it is “themable” and some of the themes are pretty good … just have a look at the Rockbox Themes website (I have linked to the iPod Video themes)
  • Numerous “plugins” for playing games, displaying photos and other miscellaneous things. I must admit I don’t use them too much, but being able to play Jewel whilst bored waiting somewhere does come in useful.
  • The standard mass storage method of storing audio tracks in a way that can be easily accessed outside of iTunes does mean it is easier to copy some tracks to another computer easily. Of course I mean the freely distributable tracks!

Rockbox does have some disadvantages … the battery life is relatively poor compared with the native firmware (but very much better than an iHP100 with a tired battery!), and if you have a lot of investment in iTunes you will suffer from the lack of support (although the Rockbox database will track down files stored on the iPod whether they were put there by iTunes or just copied).

The most sensible advice for an iPod user thinking about making the switch is just to try it out. You may like it or you may not, but you don’t have anything to lose as you can always go back to the standard firmware. In fact as you can easily switch from one to the other, you can try out Rockbox gradually over time … go back to the native firmware when you are lost, and go back when you are feeling adventurous.

Another advantage that the existent Rockbox provides, that many people miss is that it may just put some pressure on Apple to improve their native firmware. If Apple notices that many of their iPod customers install Rockbox, they may be inclined to take a look themselves and start implementing features in their native firmware to “keep” their customers … surely something that would be good for all iPod owners.

IT: The Spam Problem

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May 192007
 

Just fixed the scripts that create (and update) my spam report. I decided long ago not to block spam (previously it was difficult to block it properly because of how email was setup; I could properly block it now but it would ruin the report), so I could produce an archive of spam and do some basic analysis on the content. I’ve been running the report a few years now (the oldest spam in hand dates to roughly June 2003) and it now shows the expected trends … the number of spams is growing and the size of each spam message is growing (because many these days are image spams).

Apart from the existence of spammers themselves (if they were to vanish overnight, nobody would mourn), there are two major contributions to the spam problem :-

  • People unwittingly providing the spammers with massive supercomputer with an enormous amount of network bandwidth available. Almost every
    spam you and I get has been sent via someone’s infected computer. If you don’t have a router between your computer and the internet,
    buy one online in the next 15 minutes. Whilst there are other things you can (and should) do to make your computer more secure, a router is
    probably the biggest single thing you can do.
  • ISPs who don’t bother to deal with infected machines. In the old days, if you were to warn a network administrator that they had a machine
    with a possibly dangerous infection sending large quantities of network traffic, they would move heaven and earth to fix the problem. Today
    an unfortunate number of ISPs would rather let the spam go through than possibly annoy a customer.

IT: Software Patents and Microsoft Bullying Open Source Developers

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May 192007
 

Microsoft has recently claimed that open source software breaches exactly 235 software patents. Apparently open source developers “burn down the patents system”. Well my response to that is “well done open source developers”. Software patents are the biggest scam out there … bigger by far that all those scams we receive in our inbox every day. I quite happily say that companies trading on their portfolio of software patents are amongst the slimiest examples of capitalism and that even Microsoft were not that bad. Of course now they seem determined to join them.

A bit of tedious history … patents were first introduced as a mechanism to protect individual inventors from being ripped off by large companies. The 19th century is full of examples of individual inventors being ripped off by large companies. So patents for “hardware” inventions are not necessarily bad things.

Software is somewhat different. Software developers utilise software libraries written by others without inspecting the libraries for ‘patent violations’. When writing new code, they will come up with solutions to problems without realising that the solution they come up with has been used before. For instance one of the many algorithms for sorting is the insertion sort; it is not the most efficient sort, but is efficient enough (and probably more importantly is a stable algorithm) and is so simple that it has probably been re-invented many times. Certainly I thought of it back when I wrote a database engine for the BBC micro. There are many examples of software patents that are this simple.

For example, Microsoft holds a patent on a mechanism for navigating a web page in a graphical browser using the keyboard which requires that the ‘current link’ is highlighted in some way. Not only is there an example of a web browser using this mechanism before Microsoft’s patent (Lynx … a text browser that does exactly what is described in Microsoft’s patent), but it is a mechanism that is so obvious that it has been invented many times independently. Text editors on text terminals in the 1970s (and earlier!) used some sort of highlighting to indicate the current ‘active point’ on the screen and many of these editors were developed independently. So Microsoft’s patent here is a development of prior art (the only new thing is the graphical interface), and the basic concept of pointing where the ‘active point’ is, is one of those things that is obvious.

Back to Microsoft’s claim that open-source software is in breach of its patents … what exactly are these patents ? Well Microsoft doesn’t appear to be letting anyone know, which is kind of underhand as it stops open source developers from attempting to remove the problematic code. Linux Torvalds also points out that Microsoft hasn’t released their own source code to see how many patents they might be in breach of. Who knows ? Perhaps Microsoft has taken open source code and then patented concepts developed by open source developers … certainly it is known that Microsoft’s TCP/IP software is based on the BSD TCP/IP network software. Linux also points out that Microsoft has probably used many technologies developed by IBM such as demand paging and the like.

Most sensible people seem to believe that Microsoft’s tactic here is to spread FUD over the use of open source software to encourage people to use their own software. Perhaps they should spend more time on making their software better rather than indulge in dubious legal practices.

IT: A Rambling Look At Ubuntu Linux 7.04

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Apr 282007
 

This is intended to be quite a long piece and may be saved before it is fully completed. Some of the content will be more general ramblings on Linux in general rather than specific to Ubuntu 7.04

I recently installed Ubuntu 7.04 (not without a few problems that most people are unlikely to encounter) and thought it worth rambling through a few thoughts that occurred to me. Most of the ideas are related to how Ubuntu would come across to less experienced users although to be frank I find it difficult to put myself in their shoes. One point to make fairly early is that Linux distributions have conflicting goals … they need to appeal to the less experienced user without putting off the ones who have been running Linux for years, compiling their own kernels and generally getting used to the deeper levels of Linux. One idea here is to have two “sides” to every configuration screen … one for the easy options and one for the advanced options. This does not necessarily need to be implemented as a GUI window that can be turned over, although that is not a bad idea.

I installed using the “alternate” installation CD and did not bother with the “user-friendly” partitioning options, so I can’t say much about the normal installation CD or the partitioning experience. However it is worth noting that partitioning is a somewhat tricky concept to someone new to Linux who has not necessarily done much in the way of partitioning under Windows. Also selecting different filesystem types (ext2, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, etc.) is not something that the average user will be comfortable with.

Mind you Linux installation is not exactly difficult. Those who claim it is, are frequently overlooking just how difficult XP is to install. Either they are already used to it, or have never installed it in the past! Of course installing Linux is trickier than running the Windows that was installed in the factory on the average PC.

Incidentally, whilst I understand that setting up complex partitions and filesystems is inevitably going to take a while, my configuration took as long to setup as the rest of the installation! This is somewhat extreme!

So the ordinary user has managed to work their way through the installation routine and has rebooted the system. They are now faced with a blank screen with just a ‘username’ prompt in the middle. It would be nice here to have a one-off prompt in a seperate window here to explain that the user needs to login with the username and password they created during the installation and a brief explanation of why logging in is a wise mechanism

So the user logs in and is presented with a fairly typical GNOME screen which is quite blank. It would be quite nice to start a “What To Do Now” screen here. The GNOME help feature is quite useful when started, but it should be started for new users. However advanced users may prefer to “turn it over” to get a more complex default index with content that applies more to them. This could be nothing more than a single item on the help screen titled “Advanced Users” to give instructions on how to do it (something like dpk-reconfigure yelp advanced-view) … a command line command here is appropriate to indicate a barrier that should be climbed before it is appropriate to “turn this page over”.

One other thing on a series of documents explaining Linux to new users. It could explain some of the typically installed applications … which ones to use to do what, and where to find them in the menus. It could also explain the reason for the funny names … that many of the applications are created by programmers and named by them, and not to let their sometimes peculiar sense of humour be offputting.

Traditionally Ubuntu has avoided including proprietry codecs for common multimedia formats such as MP3. This is for genuinely legitimate reasons and I am not suggesting this changes, but the help screens should have a number of entries relating to this. “Playing Proprietry Encoded Music And Videos” should point to a help screen saying why these formats are not included by default and simple instructions in installing them. “Why Can’t I Play MP3s” and “Why Can’t I Play DVDs” should give a short explanation and point to the instructions on installing them. By all means make the point that priorietry formats are evil, but be helpful too.

Oh! And don’t lie in help screens. At one point Ubuntu claims that their package manager is the only way to install software. This is obviously not true to advanced users and could eventually be seen as not true to ordinary users too. Just say that it is strongly recommended to install software using the package manager as an obvious mistruth makes one wonder what else is wrong.

Ubuntu comes with a fairly easy way of enabling “desktop effect” with an appropriate warning about their stability. However it only enables compwiz and I wanted to have a quick look at beryl. This was acomplished fairly easily, and I suddenly had access to a great deal more desktop effects. Some very interesting eyecandy it was too, some of which I can see could be quite useful.

However the preferences screen was a little swamped with different configuration options. Whilst beryl is most definitely in an early phase of development, it would be wise to look at this. Not that all of the options should be removed, but going back to a phrase I used earlier, “turning over” the options screen to keep the advanced options hidden from most users should be considered. It also needs far more explanation of what all the options are. Perhaps a button to “grow” a simple explanation into a longer more detailed explanation.

What if things go wrong and the new user needs assistence ? Well there are two parts to this … problems during the installation that results in a system that cannot be booted, and problems that crop up after installation.

For the second, there needs to be a section in the help screens on obtaining assistence. This should assistence in obtaining information about the broken system (perhaps Linux needs a tool like “Sun Explorer” which generates a compressed archive containing the output of many different diagnostic commands such as fdisk -l, cat /proc/cpuinfo, etc). Also explaining how best to phrase support requests … anyone who has done technical support knows the problems that can come about because of badly expressed problem issues.

Ubuntu helpfully has pointers to sources for free online support, and to commercially available support. However it would be useful pointing out the basic difference between the two … free support can be of as high a quality as commercial support, but you cannot be certain of getting a response. Whereas commercial support has the downside that it costs money.

Finally (well … if you are lucky 🙂 ), Ubuntu comes with a fine graphical package manager called Synaptic; whilst as a crusty old Unix veteran I prefer the command-line equivalent, it does do a pretty good job. However a new user looking at Synaptic could be a little overwhelmed by the number of packages that are available. Synaptic has a series of ways of viewing the package repositories which can be helpful in finding what you want; why not add an additional default view (with a prominent button saying “See the rest”) that has just one (well perhaps up to five) “best of breed” package listed for each application.

A new user is less likely to be overwhelmed when installing software if they visit the package manager and see “3D Modeler” -> “Blender” instead of the current situation where “Blender” itself consists of half a dozen packages that they need to hunt through several hundred applications to find.

IT: Crippled SATA Drives

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Apr 282007
 

Just in the process of adding a couple of new SATA drives to my system. On unpacking the new drives I was somewhat surprised to see in the jumper settings that an option to lower the speed from 3Gbps to 1.5Gbps was enabled. Now the manufacturer probably enabled it for a good reason … possibly some older SATA controllers have a nervous breakdown when the faster drives are connected up, but I do wonder how many people have fast drives connected to fast modern controllers but have overlooked the switch and are running their equipment at a slower speed than is necessary.

It would be a good idea for disk manufacturers that do something like this to include a bigger warning about it. A little piece of paper with a big headline (“This Drive Is Configured To Be Slow And Safe”) and an explanation would be consumer friendly thing to do.

If you have newer SATA drives it may be worth spending half an hour hunting down their model numbers and googling for the manuals to see if they can be jumpered to a lower speed, and then checking if that has been done. You may get quite a speed increase by changing the drives!

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