A recent comment on my post about DP SD2 files not opening correctly shed some light on how OSX determines what application will open a file, regardless of the extension. For instance, I have JPG’s that open with various applications so clearly there’s more to it than just the extension
Jargon Scott Says:
December 31, 2007 at 6:42 am eMaybe you need to reassign the type/creator info for the files. SD2 files created by DP are type “Sd2f” and creator “MOUP”.
Thanks, dude!
From MOTU’s support faq
What is the Mac file type and creator for Digital Performer files?
Digital Performer project files have a Mac file type of “PERF” and a creator of “MOUP”. If you have DP files which have become damaged or corrupt in some way and they can no longer be opened by Digital Performer because they are grayed out in the File > Open dialog, the file type and creator may need to be reset to their proper values. This can be accomplished with third-party file utilities like FileBuddy, FileType, and Quick Change, or using the SetFile command in Terminal (OS X Developer Tools must be installed).
Good ol’ File Buddy. File Buddy is like a Turbo-Charged Finder. It gives you acces to invisible files, meta data etc, that are normally hidden from you thru OSX unless you’re in the Terminal. Definitely a good thing to have around.
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According to Ars Technica, according to Variety, according to Nielsen Soundscan (I know, jeez.), holiday “Album Sales” are down majorly this year.
This appears to be whole albums, not total sales. I’m going to go see if I can track down the info on the overall market for music sales altogether. Although it wont surprise me if that information is really hard to find…
Update: The numbers are indeed hard to get a hold of. The RIAA’s numbers are a year behind and Nielsen’s numbers are under Lock and Key, and I can’t find any way to validate how accurate either of them are, not even compared to one another.
Also, is this announcement only referring to actual physical copies of albums or online too?
I’ll be back later if I can find some better numbers, or at least some interesting alternate illusions.
Update:
The Variety article has no link to any sources. I swear, these days, sources should be mandatory for anything that wants to call itself “professional journalism,” since everyone’s always making such a big stink about the difference in Journalistic Integrity between major publications and “New Media.” (Had to say that. Now back to the information or whatever you want to call it) (more…)
Some people are quick to look for problems with the idea of listening to books rather than reading them from paper. Screw those people. Those people are technophobic butt-heads. Audiobooks are awesome and have allowed me, someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy reading for its own sake, to digest some really amazing, life-changing stuff, i wouldn’t have ever been able to complete in book-form (unless I was serving time in the Pen or something).
Someone pointed out to me recently that in hearing something read, you do miss out on part of the interpretive process that goes on in the imagination of a reader as he/she imagines the words being verbalized etc, and to that, I must say I cannot argue, unless we’re talking about an Audiobook read by its author. In that case, the imaginative process seems to me more like an extra layer of interpretation, even if it also serves as some sort of pleasurable intoxicant to some people. Surely confusion, vagueness and the need for the reader to otherwise choose-his-own-adventure in some way can all be important tools in writing, but I must admit, they’re probably lost on me, not because understanding such things is beyond my ability, but because I don’t enjoy reading books, so I will probably never have the pleasure of experiencing them.
I imagine that if we ever develop 3-dimensional Movies, traditionalists will say that something is being lost: the part of the viewing experience that requires you imagine 3 dimensions, and they will be right.
The AudioBooks I’ve read(? Listened To?) absorbed recently and can completely recommend are:
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut – This is simply amazing. I can’t recommend this enough. One of the best pieces of art I’ve ever experienced. I would be selling it short if I tried to explain it so I’d better not try. I can say that the overall mood of the book is a sort of existential bittersweetness, it’s fun, funny and sad all at the same time. It makes me wish I was a writer.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – This is very entertaining. I don’t want to compare it to Slaughterhouse, but… Let me just say that it is totally worthwhile and I’ve listened to it twice!
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – Oh My God. This thing is hideous! It’s a total chore to bare the torture and misery in this story. Really the whole book seems like an excuse for the author to explain his theories about social economics, but dammit, they’re excellent theories! For that reason it’s worth it, but I felt like I was being punished through much of it. Stories about misery due to love, abuse, addiction etc are one thing as they are filled with humanity and passion throughout. This is just violence. If you aren’t familiar with the ideas in this book about Government, war, industry, The Media, personal perception, sanity etc, then you pretty much MUST read this, but eat light. It’s horrible. This book makes me think G.O. was a bit sadistic. Maybe he wanted to punish us for something.
Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch, read by David Lynch This is interesting. David Lynch talking about his creative process is sort of adorable. He also talks a lot about his practice of meditation, although he doesn’t elaborate on it much which was annoying to me because I’m learning about that stuff right now and I’m looking for guidance. Short interesting and funny in a quirky way.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, read by Richard Dawkins I was pleasantly surprised by how good this was. It’s not an all out attack on faith as much as an attack on the arguments christians often make to justify their beliefs. After hearing this get plugged on the radio, and hearing Dawkins debate Christian Apologists and what not during the promotional period for this book, I really thought it was going to be a lot of cheap pot-shots at christianity, but it turns out there’s some real fuel in there. This has made me question whether or not to continue describing my beliefs the way that I do. I definitely want to read Listen to his books about Biology and Evolution now. He’s a charming writer.
The Theory of Everything by Steven Hawking, read by Steven Hawking This starts off being very digestible and quickly plummets into being very difficult, at least for me with my pea-sized brain. I will need to do this again, but I don’t know that I’m ready 
David Sedaris Box Set, read by David Sedaris with Amy Sedaris, list of individual titles below. I listened to much of this on the way to and from Burningman so I don’t know which stories are in which books. All and all, this stuff is great. Short Stories are great for commuting/traveling.
Barrel Fever and Other Stories
Holidays On Ice
Naked
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
It’s been nearly 3 years since I began to imagine what might be possible if social data was distributed and could serve as a backbone for a new era of Web applications, particularly in the area of Media Discovery.
The closest things to moving in the direction of Distributed Social Networking that we’ve seen so far have been FaceBook’s application platform, and now, Open Social… I say they are closest because they are (or are going to be) actually adopted by the public at large. Of course, they’re both pathetic examples of Openness.
In much of the reading/learning I have done this past year about The Semantic Web, the idea of “Walled Gardens” or “Silos” comes up a lot. I find it so frustrating that the “Web 2.0″ era seems to be all about leasing people ladders. It’s all about maintaining an addiction to access rather than tearing down walls.
The Web 2.0 way seems to me to be:
1. make some catchy little widget.
2. populate it with users (buy registered users if you have to!)
3. sell it, or rather the registered users you’ve acquired to Google or Yahoo or Ebay or Newscorp whomever else is buying eyeballs that day.
It’s an economy based on ‘registered users’ or ‘active users’ or whatever. Basically, Eyeballs. The incentives for development are based on the Silo/Walled Garden approach. I know there are some major exceptions to this, but basically it’s true: Web 2.0 is contrary to a “Web of Data” or Semantic Web because the currency of Web 2.o is “Active Users.”
For this reason, I think that if anything major is going to happen in the way of the Semantic Web finally hitting the streets, it’s going to ride in on the back of a disruptive technology. I mean disruptive of course as in disruptive to the googles, facebooks and myspaces, not to the Web itself or to People.
I realize that the Semantic Web is way bigger than Social Nets, but if we’re going to talk about the SW “becoming real” anytime soon, I think it has to be about Social Software. (And of course, Semantic Web technology is ‘real’ already just not widely used) (and I could be totally wrong of course)
So in response to the quote below, I don’t think 2008 is the year the Semantic Web will become an everyday technology, not after witnessing the last couple years, unless ‘something the kids like’ ushers it in. This stuff is moving so slowly.
Quote from Kurt Cagle over at XML.com
[prediction #5] The Semantic Web Becomes Real. Okay, so maybe I’m getting a little cynical about the semantic web myself, perhaps because too much of it of late has been so heavily tied into RDF, but I think there are some indications that this is changing. RDFa (or Attribute-centric RDF) provides a way of using a microformat like approach to add RDF triples and related items into both HTML and XHTML code, a significant step forward from the way that RDF is used now. There’s a growing movement afoot to use a more XQuery-like rather than SQL-like language for performing RDF SPARQL queries, and I’d not be at all surprised to see a formal sparql: namespace with an appropriate XQuery API published by the W3C within the next year or so.
Again, what this points to is that after more than a decade where each of the pieces of the W3C domain existed largely in independent silos, the realization has been made that in order for these technologies to succeed in the long run, they have to be integratible. Semantic web information is again simply data that needs to be queried as data, needs to be rpesented in a cohesive fashion, needs to be transported acrosss a suitable set of messaging protocols. In order for SemWeb information to become a part of the web, it needs to place nice with the rest of the web; there are signs that this is in fact happening, and this openness (and getting it out of the hands of academics and into the hands of workaday programmers) will go a long way in making the semantic web useful for the average web developer.
Companies/Projects to Watch: I’m going to pass in this space for the moment, as I haven’t seen any SemWeb companies yet that clearly differentiate themselves from the pack. However, I’m likely to come back to this list in my mid-year review.
UPDATE: Possible Fix Here
Was attempting to import some soundbites into a project in Digital Performer 5 and I got this error:
Resource Map Inconsistent With Operation (-199)
There’s not much documentation on this subject out there, at least not that I could find in a minute or two with my high-level googling skills…
The files are from a Digital Performer project, the Project File of which got destroyed by my recent Hard Drive Crash… They are “.mg” Sound Designer II files (which would normally be .sd2 or in the case of DP5, sometimes .L or .R) “(Dot) mg” means they are “merge” files… In DP, you can ‘flatten’ a track by selecting the region and choosing “Merge Soundbites” from the Audio Menu, resulting in one “.mg” file rather than many files, a new one for each edit, you would normally have without the ‘merge…’
They will not open with other programs I have tried either: iTunes, Quicktime (haven’t tried ReCycle, but if I get that installed any time soon I will and I’ll update this)…
One speculation I have is that these .mg files are ones that refer to mono tracks but that were acting as stereo tracks in the DP5 project, due to Mono-To-Stereo effect plugins… See, some of the .mg files work and just two out of around 15 or 20 don’t… their file sizes look good and all… I was just thinking maybe there’s a dependancy thing going on somehow.
Then again, they could just be corrupted.
Any suggestions out there? What the hell is a Resource Map?
Super basic Idea… It makes an instance of the browser that is just for one Site, with it’s own name and shortcut you can stick in the Dock. I think it also tweaks the search form of the Browser to be only for that domain by default too… Not much else, according to this video.
I instinctively try to use Apple-Tab to switch between Open Browser Widows all the time, and since Apple+`(the key above Tab) switches between the open windows of the app you’re in, I have preferred multiple windows over tabbed browsing in many contexts for that very reason.
I could see using this to have a WordPress Browser, allowing me to tab back and fourth between my reading and my writing.
What would make this really cool, is if you could map buttons in the Web App to Commands in the File Menu, Edit Menu etc… I love Keyboeard Shortcuts and would love it if I could bo things like Apple+B for Bold in WordPress’ wysiwyg… Or have Apple+S save the current draft/post.
Anyways… this is another baby-step toward better convergence of the Online and the Offline. More on that later.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C0jaaB2w0U&rel=1&border=1]
Cute little video that might help explain the idea of the Semantic Web to someone who isn’t very tech-savvy… Why not? I try to explain it to people and sometimes find myself making it sound more complicated than it really is so in that way, this very simple explanation is nice.
Video originally posted by Manu Sporny over at DigitalBazaar
I like how it crosses out “More Social Networks…” Haha. Very nice.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGg8A2zfWKg&rel=1&border=1]
I just heard this on KQED while driving and thought I’d pass it along. Einstein’s point of view, in my opinion, is very relevant now.
Here’s the NPR Page I stole this from and Here’s a Link to a recording of Einstein’s Segment, as read by Robert Krulwich who is one of the hosts of the WNYC show Radio Lab
Anyways, here it is:
NPR.org, May 31, 2005 · This essay aired circa 1954.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious — the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty. I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, or who has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with the awareness of — and glimpse into — the marvelous construction of the existing world together with the steadfast determination to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. This is the basics of cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important function of art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and keep it alive.
I sense that it is not the State that has intrinsic value in the machinery of humankind, but rather the creative, feeling individual, the personality alone that creates the noble and sublime.
Man’s ethical behavior should be effectively grounded on compassion, nurture and social bonds. What is moral is not the divine, but rather a purely human matter, albeit the most important of all human matters. In the course of history, the ideals pertaining to human beings’ behavior towards each other and pertaining to the preferred organization of their communities have been espoused and taught by enlightened individuals. These ideals and convictions — results of historical experience, empathy and the need for beauty and harmony — have usually been willingly recognized by human beings, at least in theory.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us westerners in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind.
The pursuit of recognition for their own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the quest for personal independence form the traditional themes of the Jewish people, of which I am a member.
But if one holds these high principles clearly before one’s eyes and compares them with the life and spirit of our times, then it is glaringly apparent that mankind finds itself at present in grave danger. I see the nature of the current crises in the juxtaposition of the individual to society. The individual feels more than ever dependent on society, but he feels this dependence not in the positive sense — cradled, connected as part of an organic. He sees it as a threat to his natural rights and even his economic existence. His position in society, then, is such that that which drives his ego is encouraged and developed, and that which would drive him toward other men (a weak impulse to begin with) is left to atrophy.
It is my belief that there is only one way to eliminate these evils, namely, the establishment of a planned economy coupled with an education geared towards social goals. Alongside the development of individual abilities, the education of the individual aspires to revive an ideal that is geared towards the service of our fellow man, and that needs to take the place of the glorification of power and outer success.
Translation by David Domine. Essay courtesy of the Albert Einstein Archives at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
I haven’t looked too far into it, but…
Looks like it’s only USB 2, and I suspect it would be better for me if it was FireWire 800 but… What do I know… Still looks pretty sweet.
EDIT: I found a YouTube Video of a clicking Hard Drive in action. Look! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKc4qsrhOB8&rel=1]
[end of EDIT]
I found the following HERE I have no reason to doubt that this absolute stranger, calling himself erico, who wrote what is below, is telling the truth in this forum I found.
The Click Of Death is actually the Whack Of Death.
There are two motors in a hard drive. The first is obvious — it’s the spindle motor that spins the platters. In the very old days, these were awesome 1800 or 2400 rpm self-sync DC motors. These were cool toys. Later ones were 3600 rpm DC motors, with external sync via hall effect sensors — 3600rpm, you wonder? SImple. 60 rotations per second, made the clocking easy. Modern ones, spinning up to 15K, are very simple DC servo motors with very, very complicated controllers that sense the speed via back EMF on the motor coils. Very trick, and useless in other projects, but once you’ve got the software, really cheap and fast.The “Freeze the drive” trick is for problems with the spindle motor. A shorted coil in a motor keeps it from spinning. Freezing it can move the coil such that it isn’t shorting, and the drive spins. Whack the drive fixes stiction — a bearing, or a head, sticks to the platter, and it doesn’t have enough torque to spin the drive. A whack breaks things lose, and the motor can spin the disk.
That’s not the problem here.
The other motor is the head positioner. In the old days, these were stepper motors, and the stepper on the ST 3040A was legendary — guys would pray this drive would die so they could steal it. Steppers, however, are only so precise and fast, so modern drives use voice coils to quickly place the heads just so. Originally, there would be either a “wedge” on one of the platters that had tracks that the heads could use to quickly find tracks, or an entire side of a platter was used for dedicated information about where the tracks were. Modern drives use what’s called “embedded servo” information — the information about where the tracks lie is underneath the data, so you don’t lose the capacity of a wedge or dedicated servo.
This leads to the Whack Of Death. To move the heads, a current is sent in the voice coil, and the heads count the tracks as they cross the servo lanes. So, to move 50 tracks in, the coil charges, creating a magnetic field, and since it’s stuck between two really powerful magnets, it moves, and fast. The heads count tracks until they reach 50, then the current stops charging, and the heads stop.
What’s the whack? The whack is the heads hitting the stop that keeps them from moving off the platters completely. What is happening — the heads can’t tell where the tracks are, so they keep swinging, until they hit the stop. This gets noticed, the controller retracts the heads all the way to the center, and it tries again.
WHACK. WHACK. WHACK.
This means: 1) The heads can’t sense position information, and 2) The drive is almost certainly toast. 95% of the time, it’s the head that’s on the servo platter. 5% of the time, it’s a controller or power issue. You can try the drive in another computer, but usually, you ask the $1000 question, which is “Is the data on this drive, that I haven’t backed up recently, despite the lectures every sysadmin has given me repeatedly, worth $1000?”
That being the cost of sending the drive off to the clever guys with lots of toys who can read the data off.
IOW. The drive is almost certainly toast. If the data is really important, you can send it to a disk recovery place, who will charge you lots of money, and send back the data on CD or whatnot. If it’s not, you buy a new drive (or two and a mirroring controller) and resolve to be better about backups next time.
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