The Major

Blog

  • Yahoo! Unlimited reviewed

    Yahoo! today launched their new Yahoo! Music Unlimited. For $4.99/month (when paying for a whole year), you can listen to their whole music library from your Windows PC. You also have the option to pay $0.79 to burn a track to a CD.

    You access their service with the Yahoo! Music Engine (pictured below).


    The interface is pretty nice. It is much more responsive than iTunes, which I have found to take a decent amount of time between page loads and music imports.

    When I first started the Yahoo! Music Engine, I was prompted to import the music that I already had. I directed it to the C:\Music folder, and it imported all subdirectories, including files encoded in ogg, flac, and mp3 formats. I was able to go about my business exploring the program while it was busy importing my music.

    I decided to put Yahoo! Unlimited to the test right from the start. One of my favorite artists is Dieselboy. I attempted to type “Dieselboy” into the search box on the Y! Unlimited page, but my text would not take. Instead, I used the “Browse By Genre” dropdown box to the right to select “Electronic / Dance” and from there choose “Jungle / Drum & Bass”. I saw several tracks listed, and I wanted to see how quickly their music would start streaming after I clicked play next to one of the tracks. When I clicked the play button, I was informed that I had to download a security update to play the music. The download seemed to go pretty quickly (I am on a fat connection at work). When I next clicked on the play button, the album art simply greyed out. This seemed to be a deal breaker, but having the classic computer mentality, I restarted the program.

    And, I am now successfully listening to an artist I have never heard before “MJ Cole”. Clicking “play” on the album started playing the first song within a second. Again, I am on a fat Internet connection, but this is still impressive. I had been wondering for a while where I could find good Drum & Bass. I have now found that place.

    I have not used any of the other subscription-based music services to be able to compare, but Yahoo! Unlimited does seem to be lacking in one very important area: completeness. As mentioned before, one of my favorite artists is Dieselboy. My all-time favorite is Tool. Searches on both of these artists turn up a grand total of 0 albums. This isn’t a big deal for these two artists, since I have all of their albums stored locally on my hard drive, but it does not sound good for future searches. Other artists that I have searched have missing albums. I understand that this may be very hard to acheive, but what is really needed is for this service to have very close to all the music I would ever be looking for. Then it would really be of full value to me.

    A great part about this program is that it integrates countless radio stations into the interface. You can pick from a standard Launchcast station on the left, or you can choose to “Play Artist Fan Station”, which is supposedly a mix of what fans of that artist will like. In the limited time that I have listened to the Tool and Dieselboy Artist Fan Stations, I have noticed a nice correlation to the artist, and the type of music that is played on the station. I have also noticed something very peculiar. For both artists there are no albums available for download/streaming, but their songs are included in the station mix. I am sure it is some sort of licensing crap, but still annoying that they can play it on the station but you can’t stream the album as a whole.

    Another note about the stations is that it can be rather awkward on some stations to not have the tracks mix together, like in almost any electronic station. The tracks were meant to be played back-to-back, so you are left with an abrupt start and ending to each track. There may be a feature to do this, but I haven’t found it yet.

    Even on the first day that this program has been out, there are plugins for it. One of them is “1337 m1n1 m0d3” (pictured below) which replaces the current inadequate mini mode.

    Overall, this program and service seems to have some growing to do, but being the first day that it is out, I am very impressed. $4.99/month is a bargain, and I think they realize that. This seems to be a limited-time offer. I went ahead and signed up for a year, but my card won’t be charged for another week, so I can cancel if I don’t like it!

  • The New Grammar

    The Internet brings about new grammar questions. A couple of examples are:

    • When opening a parenthesis, and ending the statement within with a smiley, does one end the parenthesis with a seperate parenthesis, or does the mouth of the smiley take over in this role? So this:
      (Hello 🙂
      versus this:
      (Hello :-))
      I generally prefer the second option, but I think the first option looks better but more awkward.
    • When typing a URL, path, or email address into a sentence, how does one put a period in? A period would change the meaning of what is typed, and it can also be unintentionally interpreted as the actual end of the sentence. Example:
      I think you should check out fourmajor.com.
      I think a good solution to this problem would be to instead write the following:
      I think you should check out ‘fourmajor.com’.
      There, now doesn’t that look better?

  • Holy Crap

    I have 3 listeners on my Internet radio station (FourMajor Radio), none of whom are me or my cousin. In fact, I don’t think I know any of them, just by looking at the IP addresses. I am playing some Yo-Yo Ma right now – maybe that was the secret.

  • NES Mod idea

    My brother and I love the classic game Genghis Khan for the NES. I just thought of a way to play on a REAL NES over the Internet. You could make a controller emulator that plugs into a computer’s serial port on one end, and into the Nintendo controller port on the other end. Make the video and audio output go into the computer. On the remote end, have the other user plug a modified controller into their serial port, and transmit it back to the NES video/controller server. There could even be a nice all-in-one window that would display video, sound, and maybe even a clickable controller on the client side. This sounds like a lot of work, but DAMN that would be awesome. I am assuming it wouldn’t be too good for action-packed games, but it would be great for a turn-based game like Genghis Khan.

  • Numa Numa

    It is amazing what a little Numa Numa can do to cheer a guy up.

  • Life Experiences

    Life seems to be a collection of unique experiences. These experiences can exist mostly in the real world, or they can exist in an abstract or imaginary world. When doing something like cutting down trees or soldering a circuit, I consider that to be completely concentrated on the real world. You are extremely focused on one “real” thing, on which you have a unique perspective. One person may see a tree with a thin slice in it, while you may see a strategy well or poorly implemented. One person may see a seemingly random organization of melted metal, while you see an abstract circuit design.

    But when I am in the real world with sensory stimulation that requires little to no concentration, sometimes I can feel like I am completely in a different world. If I am sitting on a couch listening to good music with nothing else in the room to grab my attention, I can be in a completely different fantasy world in my head. A passer-by will see a guy sitting on a couch nodding his head while staring at the floor.

    There are also other situations in which you can feel almost completely removed from reality. One such situation for me is when I am hacking. I am completely concentrated on my command prompt or other related interface. My virtual sense of where I am almost overtakes my other senses. My sense of sight is little more than a tool to transfer information from this other experience to the real-world experience.

    In essence, I sometimes have the feeling that I am in more than one place, or experience if we’d like to use the popular word of this moment, in a given day. My experience hacking can be completely separated from my sensory overload in the real world that is a walk down a city street.

  • Taking off my belt

    Why is it such a social no-no to take off your belt in public?

  • Courtesy in the Tech World

    For a while, I have been trying to get into chatting on IRC. Let’s just say it’s not working too well so far. My main problem with it is that you can literally have a chat room with 100 people in it, and NO ONE will be chatting. What the hell is the point in this?

    Anyway, so last night I went into the #freebsd room on the irc.freenode.net server. I asked a question “Is anyone in here familiar using snort?” I got a response “I prefer to use a tissue.” OK, funny enough. But I wanted to assure them that I actually had a question. So I said “No, seriously, I am trying to educate myself on security tools. Should I be starting with tcpdump?” Then, the conversation proceeded to play off of the “dump” part of my question. I never did receive a response, not even a “I think you’re asking that question in the wrong room.”

    Why are people in the tech community so often hesitant to be helpful? I find this lack of cooperation to be extremely frustrating. I believe it is also quite harmful to the community.

  • A rough idea: Open Education

    Something I have noticed about myself has given me an idea about an alternate form of education. What if you were given a large amount of resources such as access to books, classes, professors, and TAs and you were judged on your worthiness for a degree at a point of your and your adviser’s determining? So basically, you would decide what to study at all times. You could go to a lecture for two weeks, get what you want from it, and put what you have learned towards something else. You could do independent research and learning, and possibly go to professors and TAs to help you understand something or to guide you in the right direction.

    I find that I learn best when I find something that sounds interesting and just see where it takes me. A lot of times I will find myself holding back on learning something that I want to learn because I know I have “classwork” to do. And the classwork is not particularly interesting so a one-hour assignment might take me four hours since I am constantly procrastinating. I am sure this idea has a lot of flaws, but I am just throwing it out there.

  • Happiness

    I remember the good old highschool days. I remember relishing in the fact that I was happy almost all the time. Life was good (for a time). What has happened since then? I have turned into a person that struggles daily with a quest to acheive happiness.

    I think there are several contributing factors. But, the scary thing is that I only think I know how to help myself. I have to test out my hypothesis to know for sure. Welcome to the experiment called my life.