michael-mccracken.net

Updates from October, 2006

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  iTunes Skip Count

  mike 6:16 pm on October 30, 2006 | 6 Permalink
  

  It’s been mentioned before, for example on Digg, but iTunes 7 has a new feature that counts the number of times you’ve skipped a track, which is defined as playing the song for at least two seconds but no longer than twenty (after which it is counted as played fully).

  I’m curious how they chose twenty seconds as the cutoff – when I was working on an (unreleased and unfinished) project for generating smart shuffles, I defined skips as not listening past the first fifteen seconds, but didn’t count a full play until the song ended.

  It’s an interesting feature, and it’s apparently kept up to date by some iPods, so I can see it helping me keep bad songs off my small iPod by using it in a smart playlist rule. However, often I find myself skipping songs I really like because I’m just not feeling them at the moment. So – how about the option of a smart playlist rule that lets me define a skip percentage? If I skip a song far more often than I play it, then it’s a pretty good bet I don’t need it on my iPod.

   

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  Supercomputing 2006 BOF: "Is 99% Utilization of a Supercomputer a Good Thing?"

  mike 3:28 pm on October 30, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  For those few readers who are interested in High Performance Computing and might be going to this year’s Supercomputing conference in Tampa, my advisor Allan Snavely and Jeremy Kepner from Lincoln Labs are putting on a BOF with an intriguing subject: “Is 99% Utilization of a Supercomputer a Good Thing?”

  It’ll be on Thursday Nov. 16th at 12:15PM.

  As with all really interesting questions, this has a quick, easy answer that reveals your point of view. My immediate answer is “No”, because of the productivity problems the focus on high utilization causes for many HPC users, mainly through the use of a batch queue. However, when considering the interests of everyone involved (including the people who have to evaluate how money is spent on these systems), the only responsible way to answer is “it depends”.

  It’s an interesting topic that never fails to generate some controversy, and from what I can tell we’ll have some diverse speakers at the BOF (including myself, discussing user surveys we’ve conducted as part of DARPA HPCS). It should be enlightening.

   
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  Back it up

  mike 3:19 pm on October 30, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  My Powerbook’s been back for a couple of weeks now, and I had a good overall experience dealing with OC Data Recovery to get my data off the drive. Their San Diego Location is in Sorrento Valley. I didn’t test their speed, since my main concern was cost, but they managed to get about 98% of my files back by their estimate, and my most important files are fine: my VoodooPad notes, my preferences, and my iTunes purchased music. Everything else is duplicated elsewhere – all my projects and research files, for instance – but some things change often enough that even weekly backups aren’t often enough, like my notes in VoodooPad.

  That’s a relief, but the $2,200 cost should be a warning to anyone who hasn’t taken the time to start a comprehensive backup strategy – if the idea of spending a few hundred bucks on backup media is stopping you, consider that a likely alternative is to wait and spend much, much more to get almost back to square one, without any way of knowing for sure which files are OK or even present until you need them later. That’s not a good scene.

  So back it up.

  Finally, despite earlier reservations, my current backup scheme does use Apple’s Backup 3 – I’ve tested it a few times recently and I’m comfortable with its restoring, and it’s just simpler to use than Retrospect for some things like very frequent backups to .mac and backing up to multiple DVDs. Those programs are the only ones I own, so I can’t say anything useful about alternatives. I’ve heard good things about other programs, and the cardinal rule is to use whatever makes it easiest for you to back up often, starting now, and don’t worry about finding the perfect solution first.

   
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  Dear GMail spam filter

  mike 2:36 pm on October 6, 2006 | 4 Permalink
  

  Dear spam filter,

  I cannot read Russian. If a message is in Russian, it is spam, just like all the other Russian messages I have marked as spam.

  Thank you for listening – your pal, mike