Source: tinfoilmusic.net

The uTorrent forums are all in a tizzy today as Bram Cohen (creator of bittorrent) and Ludvig Strigeus (uTorrent creator) announced that Bram has acquired uTorrent. The response has varies from negative to really fucking negative with the odd person being neutral and one or two telling all the haters to move along if they don't like it.

Personally, I think the same thing. If you don't like it, go elsewhere.

I use uTorrent and quite like it, but Azereus works just as well for me (at the expense of chewing up resources at a pretty good clip).

Their combined statement after the jump. 

This is Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, and Ludvig (Ludde) Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent.

Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and µTorrent AB have decided to join forces. BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent's expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.

What does this mean for the µTorrent community? Not much, at least not at first. The intention is to maintain the website as it is, and keep the forums and community active. Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.

The existent µTorrent and BitTorrent communities are immensely valuable to us, which is why we are announcing this here first to make sure you're all the first to know about the news. The plan is to continue to foster the health and growth of the community that has been critical to the success of µTorrent. Thank you in advance for your support.

Bram and Ludde

Stolen from here .

Source: tinfoilmusic.net

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article about the perceived lack of quality coming out of compressed music files. The article states:

"For the past 100 years or so ... every new format that came along was an improvement over the previous one," from 78s to vinyl to tape and high-grade cassettes, he says.

After CDs arrived and files became digitally encoded, he explains, there was a push to make files small and still "fairly listenable." The technology used to create MP3s - "lossy" compression - strips away what might be viewed as "unnecessary audio information," he says - information that can, in fact, contribute to richness.

I've got more to say after the jump.

I'll give them a point. MP3s are certainly a step backwards in terms of sound quality over uncompressed CD audio, and so many people encode them poorly. Whenever I rip, I set it at 256bit straight out, none of that variable bitrate crap that can really destroy quieter passages in the program. That being said, I am hard-pressed to tell the difference between a CD and a quality MP3. My speaks & 'phones may not be top of the line, but Dynaudio don't make crap speaks and my Koss Porta Pros are good phones. It's also very true that I suffer some hearing loss, so I'm probably not the best judge.

Complaining about the sound quality coming out of an MP3 player with the stock earplugs is pointless. Stating that the poor quality sound coming out of the devices is the fault of the format is missing the point. The stock phones that come with any portable device generally suck, and the lofty iPod isn't immune either.

Another small point I would like to make:

For his own use, Mr. Goddard, like Willens, favors WAV, a "lossless" compression format that renders sound accurately but has some drawbacks - notably the tremendous amount of storage space it requires: some 50 to 60 megabytes per song, versus about two for an MP3.

WAV is not a compression format. It's raw audio. FLAC is the only lossless compression format listed in the article. And if this fellow is compressing a 50-60MB WAV down to a 2MB MP3, no wonder it sounds like shite, it's probably sitting at 128bit.

I'm not advocating for MP3 to become the dominant format, but let's not forget that most people listening to music are listening to it on sub $500 bookshelf stereos with over-EQ'd speaks and quasi-subs that do more harm to the musical qualities of the program than any music format ever has. Or those horrid little Bose clockradios. Ugh.

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It is with great pleasure that I announce the new and much improved tinfoil.music locate at http://www.tinfoilmusic.net. We are still working on adding functionality, but it has much more promise than the old site. So please update your bookmarks!

Running a large(ish) media news site for a number of years has its ups and downs. Yesterday was a down day as I was greated by a nonfunctional tinfoil.music when I went to check up on it. Totally fucked, not a thing working.

For those who want more information on what happened, I will post that below. I don't want to bore all five of my readers.

Tinfoil.music has been a labour of love for years. It started in 1997 back in the halcyon days of the web. Back when men were men and high-speed was bonded 56k modems. The initial site was nothing more than some poorly crafted HTML and even worse animated GIFs. Still, it was all done by my hands, and I enjoyed learning it, in creating it and setting it forth on the unsuspecting web inhabitants.

It went through many redesigns as I learned more about the hidden intracasies of HTML, DHTML, PHP and Javascript, as well as that amazing Photoshop program. I <3 Adobe products. Except for Go Live, really Adobe, what the fuck were you thinking?

In early 2001 I decided that things were getting a little difficult to manage. The site was easily numbering in the hundreds of pages. Managing the little advertising I had was difficult and I had no way to interact with the users. At this point I decided to go with a Content Management System. Back then, there were few non-commercial choices. I can remember Slashcode and phpNuke. I was hoping to use Slashcode because I knew it was successfull in running one very large site (Slashdot) but constraints set upon me limited me to phpNuke. Still, phpNuke worked well and has served my purpose without much complaining. Sure, I've had to customize the living fuck out of it, but that's fine because I enjoy that shit.

Over the years as phpNuke grew to be more and more popular, it became obvious that there were real problems with the code. As I became more adept at modifying it and actually understanding what it did, I started to see that it was really just one hackjob after another, and not all of them were mine. There was the daily reading of the Nukecops forum for security alerts and third-party fixes to the code that the author of phpNuke never fixed or incorporated into future revisions which means that a fix for a bug in, say, 5.0 was still present in 7.1 and all versions in between.

It was frustrating to have to reapply all the same fixes upgrade after upgrade and sometimes I missed one or two.

In the years that phpNuke grew, tinfoil.music grew as well. I've made numerous friends out there and many people have helped with making tinfoilmusic what it is today. First there was Skip, a buddy of mine from the BBS days who was my first co-editor. After some time The Skinnydevil came along and has been contributing such amazing content. Always the professional, he brought some legitimacy to the site that I could never bring myself. He also brought with him one Tom Barnes who was quirky and couldn't quite get the hang of the administrative backend, but he's good people and brought a very unique and much appreciated viewpoint to the site. Mikee has been my go-to guy for years when it came to the real coding in the background and has contributed more recently on the content side as well during my many absences.

Then, after a breakin in early '05, I installed some security software called NukeSentinal and the Chatserv patches. This shit was amazing, it blocked all of the evil spammers and blocked every hack attempt. It was then that I realised just how often people were trying to crack tinfoil.music. Some weeks I wouldn't get a single attempt. Some weeks I would get literally dozens.

It was most amusing, until yesterday when the really did get in.

I'm not 100% certain how they got in, but they were able to get into the database that runs the backend of the site. Not only did they get into that, but they got into my backup database as well! I'm quite certain, that given the evidence in the log files, that it was a concerted effort, a focused attempt on the part of the perp who wanted to take the site down.

It's difficult to wake up and see so much work stolen for no real reason. Tinfoil.music, I like to believe, is a public service. It's not out there to agravate the general public nor do I believe that the very people who hacked the site would have if they had actually sat down and read what we were trying to do.

My day job is IT management. I do know a couple of things about computers and things tech. In my day I have dabbled in the dark arts and whenever I broke into something, I and the crew I ran with never did any harm. We would simply leave a note in an obvious place stating that we got in, how we got in and what they needed to do to fix it. There was respect amongst we the hackers and they the admins. We believed that the admins weren't necessarily bad people for leaving a hole open. We did not believe that the admins deserved to be broken into because they were stupid enough to leave the door unlocked. Rather, we believed that the admin was human and prone to human error like everyone.

Todays hacker is similar, or so I am lead to believe. Still, there is the odd one that is cynical enough in his or her life to fuck with the admins just because they were admins and the hacker wasn't. Life has treated the hacker poorly so he/she is taking it out on everyone who crosses their path. It is too bad, but it is human I suppose.

As much as I would like to see the perp who did so much damage to this project of mine fall beneath my boot, I can't really blame the fucker. It's unfortunate that his life is such that he is able to extract some pleasure out of hurting others in some way. I feel sorry for the little fucker, really. His actions, however, have forced my hand. I am finally ditching phpNuke for something that has actually improved in time. I'm switching to Joomla, which is a fork of Mambo. It's community driven without an egotistical ass at the helm. I have a much better feeling about this new direction for tinfoil.music and I do hope that all those who have helped me in the past and enjoyed the site will move forward with me as well.

Thanks all!

Ok, so, let me get this straight. On Thursday Toronto played New Jersey Devils. In the first period it was tied 1-1. In the second there was a frenzy and the period ended 6-3.

Toronto, how in the name of fuck did you manage to let New Jersey tie the game, only getting 4 shots on them, and eventually letting NJ win in the shootout?

Pricks, the lot of ya.

In my brief time on MySpace*, I've discovered a number of things about it. Understand, I don't claim to be an expert, nor do I pretend to know much about it. Shit, son, I'm just writing for the sake of writing. You know, talking for the sake of being heard.

First of all, about 40% of MySpace is made up of teenage girls who attempt to look older than they are. Hey, better that than hanging out at the mall getting all giggly and shit.

Another 20% of MySpace is teenage boys trying to impress said teenage girls. Again, better that than breaking into my house or stealing my car, yano?

Then there's the 10% that's pretending to be teenage boys to impress the little chickies. That shit ain't cool, but such is the internet, I suppose. Doesn't mean I wouldn't castrate each and every one of them if any of them tried that shit with my daughter (who is 5 months old, so thankfully more interested in all things shiny than she is in MySpace.)

Then there is the real people. The artists who are trying to spread their music, good or bad. You're putting your craft out there for people to (hopefully) enjoy. That takes nads. You people make MySpace worth the bandwidth, even if your music sucks dead cat anus.

There is also the fans, without whom the artists would find the very excersize of posting on MySpace a waste of time and effort.

Of course, there's the hacks like myself who sign up because we music journos like to hang out with the artists, get free CDs and shit.

Then there is the remaining 398% of MySpace that is full of Emo/Goth shit. Have you ever read the blog of an Emo/Goth? Jesus Fuck, I've not seen such bastardization of the english language, and believe me, I bastardize it on a regular basis so I speak from experience. These Emo/Goth kids are pros, man. Pros at writing inane and indeciferable missives that stretch on for seemingly endless run-on sentences. I've attempted to read a few, to muddle my way through them and I come away with nothing more than a headache to show for it. Then there's the comments! People claiming to know exactly what the author was writing about when even the author him/herself doesn't even know with 100ertainty what it is about, other than to whine about some hardship in the most obtuse way possible.

*sigh* maybe I'm just getting too old.

Fucking blogs. Who needs 'em?