Breaking radio silence to complain about something both trivial and technical, so it’s probably best if everyone skips this post. Unless you write a CD ripper or audio tagger. Then please read this post, because I’m going to explain why you’re wrong. (Someone emailed me about why Quod Libet acts this way, and I figured I’d make my answer public, with the hope it helps things.) History
Decades ago, before there was Ogg Vorbis, people used an obsolete standard called MP3, and tagged it with something called ID3 (in particular, ID3v2). One of the possible tags was TRCK, for the track number. It was stored as a string in “x/y” format, for track number x out of y total tracks. Perhaps this could be improved upon; maybe not (I’ll make a case for not later). Regardless, that’s how hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of files were tagged. Ogg Vorbis Comments
These days we have something better — Ogg Vorbis and its tagging format. Vorbis specified a tag called tracknumber, analogous to TRCK.

TRACKNUMBER: The track number of this piece if part of a specific larger collection or album

Now, this is a bit ambiguous. In particular, TRCK says how you should store the total number of tracks, and the Vorbis comment specification doesn’t. A strict reading indicates you can’t, but then the same standard is designed to be particularly loose about the data stored in the tags. So a lot of programs, including really popular ones, just kept their ID3 format and wrote tracknumber=x/y. Everyone was happy. Then someone — I wish I knew who, so I could write this to them personally — decided trying to parse the track number in this format was too hard, and so decided they would make a tracktotal tag that stored, as a single number, the number of tracks. Whoever Did This Is Wrong
Whoever decided to do this was pretty dumb. There’s a number of false assumptions here, roughly in decreasing order of annoyance:

• When you make a new standard, people won’t follow it (assuming otherwise is one of the stupidest design decisions possible). Lots of programs still wrote the x/y format. Quod Libet still does. I think it’s a better format. So now all that happens is everyone needs to implement both formats.
• When you make a new standard, people won’t follow it (as bad as it is, they made this mistake twice). Anything that does Vorbis tags probably does ID3 tags, and ID3 isn’t going away any time soon. So you still need the x/y parser no matter what.
• When you make a new standard, people get it wrong. So now we all need to support totaltracks, tracktotal, and x/y.
• Every other new tagging standard uses something much closer to x/y. Apple’s MP4 metadata, for example, uses two bytes in a single trck value. APEv2 uses Track=x/y. This is pointless differentiation.
• x/y is not hard to parse. There’s a horrible function called atoi that does it, and a lot of better ones.
• Using a simple numeric string still needs atoi and friends, because you don’t want “2″ to sort after “11″.
• You’re just trading parsing for reconstruction later. Quod Libet displays “Track [tracknumber]” which gets it right every time. Otherwise you have two strings “Track [tracknumber]” and “Track [tracknumber] of [tracktotal]” (no, you can’t just have “of [tracktotal]”, that ruins i18n).
• Users would rather enter a single “tracknumber=1/21″ than “tracknumber=1; tracktotal=21″.
• All else being equal, tracknumber=x/y is shorter. Maybe not a big deal, until we see a proliferation of discnumber (requiring disctotal, and totaldiscs), partnumber (requiring parttotal, and totalparts), and …

The result is that every program still needs to understand x/y — even if every Vorbis file used the new format — and the new format, and also needs to do the work to construct track numbers in the new format, assuming it wants to use them. That’s why Quod Libet converts everything to x/y format. I urge authors of tagging applications and CD rippers to abandon stupid standards. Instead, you should be spending time fixing your ID3v2 readers and writers, because they all suck too. P.S.
If anyone knows what program is putting ISO-8859-1 values into Vorbis tags, please let me know. I have spiked cluebat for you. A Summary of Other Things
I moved into a new apartment building next door to my old one, owned by the same student co-op, so it doesn’t actually seem like I moved at all. School started and is going well. I saw DOOM earlier this week for free, and enjoyed it. I’ve learned a lot about Python i18n over the past few months and am writing a brief howto explaining how to do it properly.

Making an arab version of The Simpsons can be nice to introduce them in Arab world. Renaming Homer as Omar, or Bart as Badr, can be good if those names are going to help people understood better the roles. Calling them Al Shamshoon is a bit too much. But of course, changing chapters to susbtitute Duff beer by soft drinks and doughnuts by Arab kahk cookies is completely crazy. I strongly think that our world is not going to be better by givin each group just what they want, but by making everyone understand and respect other cultures. And sorry, Homer is a pig.

The Internet Advertising Bureau thinks the UK spend could be over a billion for the first time. It's now 5.8% of the national advertising spend and is growing at a pretty remarkable rate. Is Christmas coming early for online? OSCommerce - the future will be templated. We're doing more OSCommerce work and 2.2 MS2 is a fairly typical PHP application, with some structure, but also lots of spaghetti code. The next version is looking a lot better, including this announcement from the lead developer. Templating and styling has to be the most-requested work. I find it a little worrying that OSCommerce is not more openly developed, but it'll be good when the new release ships. Jakob Neilsen has announced the top ten web design mistakes of 2005 and "Legibility Problems" are number one. This isn't a surprise to me. Many websites, including some big names, are totally broken if your browser defaults are light text on a dark background, because that's easier on your eyes. I once spotted the Disability Rights Commission getting this wrong. Even planet.debian.org is missing a:link color: ... . The second top mistake is bad linking, including:

"In particular, don't open pages in new windows"

.which is another thing which I find irritating on many sites. If I want a new window, I'll pick the link for a "new window" from the context menu, or by shift-clicking. Does Mozilla or Firefox or something have an "ignore _blank link targets" option yet? It's only a matter of time. My own company's web site has been updated and I've tried to take these on board. We don't do any of the worst things, but there are always things we can do better. Our site isn't that high a priority - there's so much else to do. The W3C's internationalisation working group has issued a note on working with time zones. I get a lot of unusual time zone requests while programming, but I'll remember these explanations and I think I usually follow the recommendations in s1.5 anyway. Also from W3C is a Working Draft of "Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0" which they'd like feedback on, if you use or develop for mobile web devices. At first glance, it seems that many of the items are stronger versions of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. PlayStation chipping is legal in Australia but not in the UK, where it was ruled illegal last year. Chipping is the practice of adding a part to the games console so that it can play imported titles. If the chipping and the risk of breaking it costs less than the difference between imported and domestic releases, some people will want to do it. It's competition between markets. I remember similar things for the old cartridge-based machines of my youth. UK law-makers seem to be trying to kill off that trade in favour of foreign companies that want to tightly control the consoles long after they've been sold. The ruling from Australia might bring the start of a backlash against the increasingly restrictive UK laws, but it's more likely that the EU, US and others will press Australia to fall into line. Copyright seems to be one of the few areas where free trade is being reduced, rather than increased. And finally, I remember the feeling of getting sparc32 Linux working.

8th Ave at 3am is a pretty scary place. Port Authority had closed the subway entrance, so after my bus got into NYC, I had to find another way in. Naturally, I wandered the wrong way, but I found an entrance after a while. On the way out of NYC (last Wed), I had some time to kill before my bus left, so I wandered around a bit. I wanted to check my mail, so I stopped into a Starbucks figuring they’d have an open access point. I’m not sure whether theirs was amongst the 8 or so active networks that showed up when I scanned. The strongest signal came from an AP with an ESSID of “Porn Palace”, so that’s the one I used. I assume it was one of the fine establishments operating across the street, selling various adult toys and videos. Ooh, almost 5am already. Tomorrow’s going to be fun.

Isn’t it ironic: I just wrote Tapu, a game for my mobile phone and spend quite some time typing 450 playing cards for it - and then, before ever having played the game, my cell phone, a SonyEricsson T630, gets stolen! And that in a very bold way: At night, from my dorm room, while I was sleeping there. And since the theif did not take my laptop or other expensice stuff, I assume he was not planning on stealing, therefore he (or she) is most likely from my dorm. Which makes me uncomfortable.Also uncomfortable is the Siemens S35 that I still got lying around here, and so is the fact that I had to order a new SIM card, that I had to notify the loss at the police station and that I lost some contacts on the phone.Out of frustration (ok, it was planned for a while now, but this gave me the rest), I bought myself a new camera (the old one went to pieces, as previously blogged). Now I own a shiny new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5. It’s not a pocket size camera any more, but the 12x zoom and the large lense was just too tempting. It was actually at DebConf 5 when Ralph Amissah enthuiastically showed me his Lumix, making me interested in this kind of Camera.
I uploaded a few pictures, though nothing special yet. Have a look at this zoomed in picture versus this wide angle picture for a demonstration of the 12x zoom and compare these two pictures, both fully zoomed in, first one with image stabilizer, second one without. Again, for zoom demonstration, the wide angle view.

Although I have to say that moc (and its client/server idea) is appealing, eventhough one cannot connect to a remote server but to a local one, my player of choice is cplay. It is simplicity and usability at its best. And it is a frontend with FF/REW capabilities, with a playlist and filelist navigator, does not stop playing the current song when you navigate the file dirs... Try it and fall in love.

I think amaroK could become a really good music player (I rarely use any KDE stuff, but it's quite appealing), but it's still missing a few bits and pieces:

• Volume normalization just isn't there, for some strange reason. This also kills the usefulness of the crossfading.
• It doesn't understand that "Foo" and "foo" is the same group, despite sorting case-insensitively.
• It has no good way of being controlled from multiple users/places at once.
• The suggested tracks (via last.fm, it seems -- at least I've configured that) are very variable; just entering group band name on last.fm seems to get better results.
• It's too cumbersome having to choose either information about the current track or the collection.
• It seems to have odd issues with non-ASCII characters in filenames.
• I'm not sure if you can update the collection without having X (I'd like to do that server-side from a cron job).

I like it, though, even though it has everything and the kitchen sink. I wouldn't really be surprised if suddenly a P2P client was integrated into this. :-)

This time of year it's great to curl up in the evening with a feather comforter and a good text file. I recently read all of Andy Hertzfeld's stories about the origin of the mac on folklore.org, pretty much straight through in chronological order during one long night. Only at the last story did I find out that he'd turned the website into a book. Reading a whole book in one sitting online is not a novel experience for me, though it seems to be for many, but doing it by accident is. My enjoyment of quantities of text online does sometimes come out in my own weblog postings, which are probably long enough, if not good enough, to be their own book. This weblog at least occasionally violates 8 of Nielsen's 10 weblog usability guidelines. The only one I think I should fix is point 5. Another book I read online recently is Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software. The contrasts between how Karl suggests doing some things and how projects I'm involved in work are sometimes large (he suggests voting on technical issues for example), sometimes due to differences in technology (the debbugs bug tracker makes conversations and other email-based use of a bug tracking system work much differently than the BTSes he describes using), and sometimes pointed to things that could be improved. More often though, he seemed spot on in extrcting and highlighting best practices. For example, he does a great job in pointing out that simple, consistent naming conventions, like #404093 for a bug report and r1021 for a repository revision, are more important than they appear. I also enjoyed reading some reviews of Katamari Damacy, which sounds like a truely unique and fun game. I'm looking forward to playing it (probably under emulation) one of these years.

Joey, I strongly suspect that the reason that Ubuntu loves converting packages to use dpatch is because the version control tools that are being built in their secret workshops will be aimed around keeping patches separate, and it's reasonable to assume that Ubuntu will be heavily supporting the Wig-and-Pen dpkg source format, considering the originators of the format (and the fact that it looks like pretty decent technology).

Speaking about text-mode mp3 player. I'm using moc (available in archive) and its main advantage over orpheus is that it is NOT a frontend, so it can easily rewind/forward songs. Try it ;)

vorlon announced 'Bits from the release team: the plans for etch'. Yay, let's try to keep a promise about schedule :) Another good news is aba becomes Relase Manager (although he has already worked as same as release manager :) ) My personal TODO for Etch is to find and solve problems around a transition from EUC-JP to UTF-8 on Japanese environment. Most parts are done by Debian people and other distro such as FedoraCore, but I'd like to clarify problems again and try to solve them. Yesterday I changed my LANG to ja_JP.UTF-8.

• I needed to convert filenames written in EUC-JP to UTF-8.
• Programs using GTK+2 and Qt work well.
• GTK+1 applications (such as xmms) have Mojibake. I took beep-media-player instead of xmms. :)
• Some of double width characters (box, arrow, and so on) of EUC-JP are displayed as single narrow width on X terminal (mlterm, gnome-terminal, and konsole). I found I can avoid this on mlterm by enabling 'Enable variable width'.
• zsh couldn't allow to input and complement UTF-8 characters. zsh-beta allows partially.

Like alphascorpii, I’ll be at Berlinux in Berlin next weekend as well as at Linux-Info-Tag in Dresden the following weekend. At both events I’ll present the Website Meta Language (WML) in a talk (similar to the WML talk I held at Oscomtag 2005, only more detailed) and in Dresden I’ll also hold a workshop about understanding and efficiently using command line shells (based on the Shell Efficiency talk at DaLUG last month). It will be focused a little bit more on shell beginners and intermediate users than on shell cracks. At Linux-Info-Tag they should better have a look at Sven Guckes’ zsh workshop. After Dresden, I’ll be on holiday for a week.

I feel that I still owe a few answers on the recent Galeon discussion on Planet Debian and apparently also other planets, so here they are… (But I try to keep them short. :-) First, Erich’s question Why are not-gnome users complaining about Gnome? — Because some people do not use GNOME but do use GNOME applications like Galeon. They don’t use them because GNOME is cool, useful, user-friendly or what else — they use them because these applications are cool, useful, user-friendly or so. They would also use them if they were plain GTK or maybe even KDE applications. For example, I also use Gnumeric or AbiWord, because I like them and not because I like GNOME. (Which — in general — I do btw.) I also use KDE applications although I don’t like KDE in general. (I don’t like KDE for much more emotional reasons compared to Galeon 1.3 btw., so I won’t rant about that. ;-) ark is a nice example for a KDE application I like. Unfortunately some distributions seem to have dropped it. At least I missed it recently on some box. Then there was Gunnar Wolf’s question if it wasn’t Galeon 1.2 which went off the path. He maybe right, since I’ve never seen a Galeon version before 1.2 and the fact that the former Galeon lead developer dropped Galeon for the very spartanic Epiphany also suggests that. But since Galeon 1.2 took the right path in my eyes, Galeon 1.3 seemed at least to change (back) again to some wrong path from that point of view. We’ll see if Kazehakase really keeps following the “right” path. JFTR: Interesting to read were also the discussion between Og, Erich and some more in Og’s journal as well as Wouter’s postings on the subject. Oh, and in general: Thanks for the really nice discussion. Rants seem always to get more constructive responses than just asking for them. That’s one reason why I like to rant. ;-) Another reason is that it frees your mind if you know that people have read about what bothers or annoys you. So also thanks to all who followed the discussion (or still are following it if it hasn’t ended yet ;-).

Now playing: Roxette — The Look

Nobse’s blog posting about his ITP the text mode menu- and window-driven front-end to mpg123, mpg321 and ogg123 orpheus made me curious since I was also unsatisfied with the audio players I used so far and mostly ended up in using mpg123 -Z *.mp3, because it works fine and is not as resource-hungry as XMMS. And for CDs I usually used a self-written perl wrapper around the command line tools of cdtools (mostly cdir and cdplay). I first installed orpheus from sources on my SuSE box at work today while waiting for a windows box to upgrade to some service pack. At home I took nobse’s debian packages sources and recompiled the package on my Woody running desktop. After installing the required build dependecy dpatch from backports.org, the package compiled through without any problems and I now have a very useful and slim text mode audio player. And orpheus and aumix look fine together inside transparent aterms.

Now playing in orpheus of course: Jean Michel Jarre — Je Me Souviens

Meme time again. Let's ask google what I need...

• erich needs to leave -- true
• Erich needs something to get back into this match -- which match?
• Erich needs suppressing fire -- yeah, I'm so HOT, I need to sppress fire
• Erich needs to strongly reconsider her approach on the beer/lemonade thang -- except that I'm not a 'her', I do drink too much lemonade.
• Erich needs the names, social security numbers, and pay rates of returning and new students currently on Preservation funds. -- ??
• Erich needs to Be a little less self conscious. -- yeah, inconsciousness rules!
• Erich needs someone, too -- yeah, I do.
• erich needs a room/place -- well, not need, but I'd like to have a place inside munich
• Erich needs friends, ex's, maybe a girl for his looove interest. -- "maybe a girl"? oh, I'm pretty sure about that...
• Erich?????Needs a nose, indeed -- uhm, what about the big thing in my face?
• erich needs to get over his feeble little infatuation with jill -- first I need to find out who this jill is
• Erich needs bad spanking. -- no, not exactly...
• Erich needs an assistant to come and help him with this London thing -- uhm, which london thing?
• Erich needs to be fed. -- Well, I'm underweight, so I hear that often.