cygweb

We're getting another snow storm today, and I didn't even bring my boots to work. I may have even packed my snow brush away. What a pain.

And I just put together my new lawn mower and started raking the lawn to get it ready for spring. Sheesh...

Not much to report from this weekend: I had to work most of yesterday. Keith and I did play some one-on-one UT2003 last night and had fun. The server seems to work well!

The tour dates listing at DreamTheater.net has been updated, and it includes a Jones Beach show on July 11th (a Friday). I'm thinking a road trip will be in order unless they announce dates in central/eastern PA.
Cool!

I was recently donated a computer that happened to be a suitable replacement for my old dual-P2-300 server, Cosmic. I moved some of Cosmic's hardware into it, built it with Mandrake 9.0, configured Zope on it, and moved the site over just a few minutes ago. I'm getting to be an expert at this now, and it looks like everything's working. Maestro (the server for the last few months) had been stable except for one unexplained crash; I've been Folding on the new Cosmic for about two weeks and it has been solid as a rock. So now he will run with the site. Zope seems to run faster on Linux, so this is definitely a good thing! Let me know if you see any problems.

I don't listen to a ton of independent music, so I'm probably not in the best position to bash the RIAA. I definitely think they've bought a lot of politicians and legislation in an attempt to keep music distribution a private enterprise. For the last few years, I think they've manipulated the market to create the self-fulfilling prophecy of "lower sales" that they blame on "piracy".
I regularly read Slashdot (duh, why else would they have a block here? And why does this site's layout look a lot like theirs? ;) ), and George Ziemann's plight has come up several times there. Please visit his site if you're interested in hearing the tactics the RIAA uses to quash the marketplace for independently released music.
One of my pipe dreams is to release my own CD someday. I can only hope it's legal to sell my own music when the time comes!

Well, I got to use my new lawn mower on Monday finally, and it worked very well. I just put down some Scotts HALTS on the lawn yesterday. It was in the 80's yesterday, as well as today. What nice weather!

Too bad it's supposed to take a turn for the worse tomorrow and Friday - rain and high's in the 40's. My wife and I will have a holiday from work Friday and were hoping to get outside to enjoy spring, but, alas... I wish The Matrix Reloaded or X2 were opening this weekend.

I'm still playing around with WCYG from time-to-time. FB2K/OddcastV2 is proving to be a highly stable streaming platform, and I just moved the FB2K source instance to Maestro. (It's also the Icecast2 server.) I'm getting to be a ReplayGain fan, and will be working to re-rip my CD's that I originally ripped as MP3s (like many of my Rush CDs) as Vorbis files this time around. I plan to stream nothing but ReplayGained Vorbis files if I can help it. I have a pretty decent library of CD's - there's enough variety there for me, for sure.

Now that DST is in effect and we have more light after dinner, we're getting outside a little more every day. I think I'll put the deck furniture out tonight - my wife and I like to relax out there after our little one is in bed...

I figured I would upgrade Mandrake Linux from 9.0 to 9.1 on Cosmic so that, among other things, I would be running a version of Imagemagick that I know works when resizing photos with Zope. When I went to restart Cosmic, it just beeped at me, so I figured it just needed a new motherboard battery. That didn't work, so I started pulling boards out. It turned out that my old faithful Matrox G200 wasn't working anymore (at least according to the motherboard), so I put in another video card and installed Mandrake 9.1. For the moment, this server is running on Maestro (thank goodness I left Zope intact on it) until I verify everything's working on Cosmic.

My wife Melissa's birthday is next week, and as an early birthday gift we went to see a concert last night at the Whitaker Center's Sunoco Performance Theater featuring The Badlees, Sister Hazel, and Jared Campbell. Melissa has two of Sister Hazel's CDs, one of which seems to always be in her car, and we've heard The Badlees on the radio and at downtown events (but never stayed long enough to actually watch them). It turned out to be the best $20 show I've seen in a long time.

The Harrisburg area's first Best Buy store opened a few weeks ago, less than a mile away from a Circuit City store that opened about a year and a half ago. I visited them the Friday they opened and was impressed by their selection, but not their prices. Being in the market for a new TV later this year, I looked at their 32" and 36" HDTVs. All the TVs I was looking at were running the same loop, and its original aspect ratio (OAR) was 16:9. On some of the 4:3 sets (what I was looking at) the picture was horizontally squashed. Playing with the menus, I found that the sets were getting their picture from a coax feed, not from the component video jacks that would be required for a site-distributed HDTV feed. The display source was anamorphic widescreen 480-line interlaced (480i) NTSC - DVD resolution. I was a little disappointed that the store decided not to pump HDTV feeds to these sets so that their picture quality (PQ) could be compared. The most popular HDTV resolution is 1080-line interlaced (1080i) - more than double the vertical resolution of DVD.
I went back to the store with my wife on Friday so that I could show her some of the sets and play with their remotes a bit. I asked one of the salesmen if there were plans to hook the HDTV-capable sets up to HD feeds, and he said that they didn't have any HD feeds in the store yet. That meant that all of the HDTVs in the store were running DVD-resolution programming: certainly nice looking, but hardly enough to convey the PQ necessary for someone to make an informed purchasing decision. And if they weren't feeding the sets HD at the store's launch, I wonder if they even laid the cabling infrastructure required to support feeding HD to each set.
Circuit City and the local Tweeter do run HDTV feeds to their HD-capable TVs. I'll definitely do my TV shopping somewhere other than Best Buy until they get serious about the technology they're selling.

While testing a new IE patch at work, I decided to implement a few changes to the site. Some I had been researching, like an RSS 2.0-compliant feed, and finding a way to list the most recent posts to the site (both articles and comments) so that that comments to older articles were not missed. Here's what I've done today:

They updated the list of tourdates for the Dream Theater / Queensryche / Fates Warning tour yesterday, and some shows were added for our region. The one that interests me the most is the July 15th show in Baltimore. It's a Tuesday, but since Baltimore is only about 1.5 hours from here, it's definitely doable.

I've changed my stream's source from FB2K/Oddcast V2 back to Winamp 2.91/Oddcast V1. I was getting random dropouts in the stream that seemed to correspond with song changes with FB2K. I love its ReplayGain support, but I'm interested in a pristine stream more than anything. Luckily, the Vorbis input filter that comes with Winamp supports RG tags and has a limiter. I've got that stuff enabled now and turned back on crossfading. It sounds pretty cool. You can check it out with your streaming-Vorbis-compatible player (Winamp 2.80 or later, FB2K, XMMS, etc.) here. Please chime in if you've checked it out, even if you think it sucks... ;)

I've been listening to Rush's Presto a lot in the car lately and I find myself EQ'ing it quite a bit to get it to sound good. Their first album for Atlantic, and first with producer Rupert Hine, Presto hasn't ever been reissued or remastered. It ranks among my top 5 Rush albums, probably because it was the second studio album they released after I became a fan in '86. I will probably be recording a cover of the title track sometime in the next year; it's one of their most dynamic songs ever.
I'm using Sound Forge to attempt my own remastering of the album. I'm boosting the bass and the overall level. The original recording has a lot of dynamic range, but it sounds a bit thin compared to later albums. I think Counterparts and the MFSL version of Moving Pictures are the best sounding Rush CDs; I hope to make it sound more like them. When I come up with a good recipe, I'll share it here.