obfuscated.org

So, Amazon has its very own MP3 store now. I’m generally happy with iTunes, but Amazon claims to be cheaper and free of DRM, so I gave it a go.

Finding albums/tracks to buy works pretty well the same way that finding CD’s works on Amazon. If you’re familiar with that, it’s a no brainer.

A considerable bummer is that Amazon doesn’t currently link the reviews of CD’s to their MP3 counterparts. There’s the “Also available in CD Format” link that will give you as much, but that’s a whole lot of clicking to do. Amazon really should make this happen on their own. (They already do for books between hardback/paperback/audio book.)

One thing that did catch my eye was price. Isn’t Amazon claiming to be cheaper than iTMS? Almost $2/track doesn’t exactly strike me as cheaper. A quick trip over to iTunes cleared things up for me.

So, track for track:

1. Autumn Leaves: $1.94 on Amazon, Unavailable individually on iTunes
2. Love For Sale: $1.94 on Amazon, Unavailable individually on iTunes
3. Somethin’ Else: $1.94 on Amazon, Unavailable individually on iTunes
4. One For Daddy-O: $1.94 on Amazon, Unavailable individually on iTunes
5. Dancing In The Dark: $0.89 on Amazon, $0.99 on iTunes
6. Bangoon: $0.89 on Amazon, $0.99 on iTunes

Full album: $8.99 on Amazon, $9.99 on iTunes

As iTunes selection is said to be three (or is it six?) times larger than Amazon’s, I’m sure there are examples to be found of things working out the other way around, but this at least explains the rather high price tag on some of the files.

There are handy links to download individual tracks and entire albums. If you’re going to download an entire album, you have to use their downloader application.

The installation is painless enough. You download a disk image file, open it up, double click on the installer and you’re done.

Why it has an installer application as opposed to just dragging the app bundle to the Applications folder is beyond me. I’m sure the conspiracy theorists out there will chalk it up to spyware or similar, but Gruber didn’t find anything immediately amiss after the install, so I’m comfortable enough with it.

When you buy an album, Amazon gives you a “.amz” file that you feed to their downloader. The browser should open it automagically for you in the downloader application. I saved it to the desktop such that I could take this lovely screen shot for you:

One odd thing I noticed is that as soon as you fire up the downloader application, it erases or at least moves the .amz file. Here’s to hoping that it deals with failures or being shut down gracefully. I’d hate to think that you have to finish your download before you stop the app.

The downloader itself is a pretty pedestrian little application. This is probably for the best, though. If all you’re doing is downloading some files, flashy is a bad thing.

A nice touch at the end of the process is that the downloader automatically imports your album in to iTunes. (I’m not sure how this would work for individual tracks. Presumably you’d have to do it yourself.)

So far the process has been pretty simple. Let’s assume away installing the downloader, because you only have to do that once. To download an album on Amazon, you have to do the following:

1. Find the album on the site.
2. Click on “buy”
3. Download the .AMZ file
4. Run the downloader application

There are various “are you sure you want to buy this?” steps thrown in, but they can be skipped on subsequent purchases if you want to.

To accomplish the same thing with iTunes, you have to:

1. Find the album on iTunes
2. Cilck on “buy”

And you’re done.

Clearly iTunes is easier, but Amazon is close enough (especially considering that steps 3 and 4 could be condensed in to one step) that the better price and lack of DRM sells me on the service. (I don’t say this lightly, as I spend a lot of time every week making computers behave correctly and would rather not have to put any effort in to doing the same for software that I’m not paid to write.) I think that from now on if I’m going to buy an album online I’ll definitely check to see if Amazon has it before I buy on iTunes.

Oh, one last thing: Somethin’ Else is a great album. The five star rating that it has on both iTunes and Amazon (on the page for the CD) is well deserved.

It’s been a long week. There’s a cold going around Mayflower. Stephanie is just coming off of it and I seem to be merging on to the expressway to Chicken Soup land. Good times. On a Friday night during these exciting times we go to bed early. Or at least we want to. As soon as we turned out the lights, we saw alien craft out our back windows.

What the? Oh, wait: we live in Los Angeles. It’s a film shoot.

Stephanie did a quick bit of sleuthing and found out that a show called “October Road” is shooting all over town this weekend. They’ll be down at the good old Aztec/Brass Elephant all day tomorrow.

The coolest thing? They made it snow. The whole block and all of the lawns along the street were covered with snow and the houses all had Christmas decorations up. It was pretty surreal. There was even a contraption up on a crane to make snow fall during the shoot. (I apologize for the horrible picture here.)

Here’s a better shot of the giant area lamps that they were using to light the entire block up:

There was a pretty good crowd doing more or less what I was doing: Watching the Hollywood people work and taking pictures. None (or very few) of the people in this shot were involved with the shoot. They were all just locals taking in the strangeness.

The only actor there whose name I recognized was Laura Prepon. She seemed nice enough, agreeing to take pictures with the people standing around when she was done working. I didn’t really want to wait around for that, so here’s a very blurry shot of a famous person.

Anyway, fun times in Monrovia, I guess. I’ve lived in and around LA for 13 years now and I’ve never really watched a film shoot happen. There sure is a lot of waiting about.

Stephanie just told me about Mike Rowe’s previous life on QVC. There’s some amazing stuff out there on the Youtubes. Check it out.

Top Gear is on BBCA. 8pm. Mondays.

Dear Project Euler,

Damn you. Give me my free time back.

XOXO,

Corey

Man, home repairs sure do suck. I’d hate it if something like this happened to me.

I know I threw that party for my boys and said we were “done” years ago… but that really needs to be put into context, you see. When I said “done” I meant “done with the hard part,” which was convincing you to let us tear up your bathroom. I mean, we knew once we got in there wasn’t going to be any finishing for years. No, in retrospect, I guess I could have been clearer about that. But that’s ancient history, now. I mean, you’ve got a new toilet to look forward to, someday! Right, and a shower, if we get to it.

I wondered the other night how straightforward a task parsing roman numerals (up to 4999) is. As revealed by about 30 seconds of Googling: pretty straightforward. Here it is in Python:

import re

ROMAN_RE = re.compile("""
    ^                   # beginning of string
    (M{0,4})            # thousands - 0 to 4 M's
    (CM|CD|D?C{0,3})    # hundreds - 900 (CM), 400 (CD), 0-300 (0 to 3 C's),
                        #            or 500-800 (D, followed by 0 to 3 C's)
    (XC|XL|L?X{0,3})    # tens - 90 (XC), 40 (XL), 0-30 (0 to 3 X's),
                        #        or 50-80 (L, followed by 0 to 3 X's)
    (IX|IV|V?I{0,3})    # ones - 9 (IX), 4 (IV), 0-3 (0 to 3 I's),
                        #        or 5-8 (V, followed by 0 to 3 I's)
    $                   # end of string
""", re.VERBOSE)

ROMAN_DIGITS  = {
    'M'    : 1000, 'MM'   : 2000, 'MMM'  : 3000, 'MMMM' : 4000,
    'CM'   : 900,  'CD'   : 400,  'D'    : 500,  'DC'   : 600,
    'DCC'  : 700,  'DCCC' : 800,  'C'    : 100,  'CC'   : 200,
    'CCC'  : 300,  'XC'   : 90,   'XL'   : 40,   'L'    : 50,
    'LX'   : 60,   'LXX'  : 70,   'LXXX' : 80,   'X'    : 10,
    'XX'   : 20,   'XXX'  : 30,   'IX'   : 9,    'IV'   : 4,
    'V'    : 5,    'VI'   : 6,    'VII'  : 7,    'VIII' : 8,
    'I'    : 1,    'II'   : 2,    'III'  : 3
}

def rtoi(roman):
    match = ROMAN_RE.match(roman.upper())
    if match and 0 < sum(1 for x in match.groups() if 0 < len(x)):
        return sum(ROMAN_DIGITS[x] for x in match.groups() if 0 < len(x))
    return None

The most recent Joel on Software is yet another of his oft-linked to industry history/vision of the future bits that again fails to mention the coming Singularity. In it he likens current AJAX applications (using Google’s Gmail as a specific example) to Lotus 1..2..3.. and other DOS standouts doomed by the great leap forward that was Microsoft Windows.

Imagine, for example, that you’re Google with GMail, and you’re feeling rather smug. But then somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and even better, a huge Ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features. Not just cut ‘n’ paste: cool mashup features like synchronization and single-point identity management (so you don’t have to tell Facebook and Twitter what you’re doing, you can just enter it in one place). And you laugh at them, for their NewSDK is a honking 232 megabytes … 232 megabytes! … of JavaScript, and it takes 76 seconds to load a page. And your app, GMail, doesn’t lose any customers.

But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.

[...]

And while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email. And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB.

So what I wonder is this: isn’t this exactly what the GWT is? A relatively feature-rich programming toolkit that compiles down to JavaScript (and eventually pre-compiled JavaScript or whatever, one would imagine), generates code for specific browsers, allows for all the whiz-bang features one could imagine, etc etc.? Is Joel’s only beef that it’s written in that king of the third rate languages Java? If the same thing happened in JavaScript (which is much nicer) would that be OK?

Personally I think Google and the rest of the current purveyors of AJAX are counting on Yegge’s NBL to power the Singularity. But that’s just me.

Both Discovery and The Ocho show ads for Accelerade at least nine times an hour. I’m not kidding. Each and every commercial break it’s “don’t fade. Accelerade!” Turns out that Accelerade is giving free cases out to bloggers to get some of the old internets buzz going. Here’s one account of a “month’s supply” of the stuff:

I did try to come up with a scenario where I’d voluntarily choose to drink Accelerade and I think I’ve come up with it. I imagine a super hot day. I’ve just ridden the Issaquah Alps 100K loop four times without taking a drink. I stagger home, open the fridge and see two bottles. One contains Accelerade and one contains goat urine. In that instance, I would slam down the Accelerade.

I’d save the goat urine to wash the taste of Accelerade out of my mouth.

This fits in with the one first-person account I’ve heard. Stephanie had it and wasn’t exactly thrilled by the taste. I guess she’s not alone.

Anyway, I think I’ll stick with water.