Pierre Phaneuf's Diary

Seems like I'm now a senior something-or-other at Cypra Media, which did cause me a bit of grief. It's a "targeted marketing" company, meaning at the moment that they'll be sending out emails with ads in them to people who, weirdly enough, asked for it.

I would have liked maybe a bit more "completely new and different" maybe, and while they seem open-minded, they're not quite an actual free/open source software company, merely using a lot of it. But C++ and Perl are two of my favourites at the moment (mostly for their ratio of how much I can bend them to my will to how much they suck), and I think I might be in for learning some AJAXy JavaScript hackery in the process, which I've been meaning to do for a while, so that's that. They're Scrum fans there, which is better than being, say, RUP! Still, I'm more of a chaos model type of person, myself. We'll see, I want to try Scrum first, as it doesn't look completely nuts.

So I'll be starting there as soon as tomorrow!

Monday morning, I went to the Préfecture with azrhey (thank goodness!).

Lots of waiting, but that I expected. I didn't expect the person to be so stuck to the letter of the word as to not get the part where my visa says that "I don't have to have a work permit" doesn't meant that I can't have a work permit! azrhey ended up composing a letter to the Préfet saying that his esteemed colleagues at the Consulat de France à Montréal were a bunch of morons or something to that effect, and please let me have a work permit. Which I then had to transcribe nicely.

I managed to screw up signing my own name, too, so really, I'm quite thankful to azrhey for leaving as little as possible to me to do (screw up?).

What an adventure...

Okay, so I'm not writing a music player (yet). One could say my "faith" has weakened, where I am taking the opportunity of a re-ripping of my music library to switch from Ogg Vorbis to MP3. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm a terrible human being, my soul will burn and everything.

A quick reminder on why MP3 is evil and how Ogg Vorbis will save your eternal soul: Thomson holds some patents on key technologies involved in the MP3 format, those technologies being in the form of mathematical concepts. Some people find the patenting of such intangible things to be stifling innovation, that many these concepts are inherent in nature, and that as such, anyone should be free to use them (some comparing this to patenting something like the Pythagorean theorem, as an algorithm to find the length of the hypothenuse of a right triangle).

After some soul searching, I feel that while this is true to some degree, it is not the most evil aspect of software patents. My issues with software patents are two-fold.

First, the way the process of obtaining those patents seems rather sketchy at best, quite regularly granting completely frivolous patents. Upon application, those often get overturned, but still, this costs money, and if I were to be sued over one, I would most likely be in deep financial trouble, no matter how frivolous the patent. In the case of MP3, I do not feel this is one of those, the thing being filled with psychoaccoustics, modified cosine transforms, polyphase quadrature filter, alias reduction formulas, and other such things guaranteed to give me a headache. These guys are no fly-by-night lawyers trying to make a quick buck, from what I can see.

Second, the duration of patents, for a low cost/revenue ratio industry (like software, as opposed to cars, which are expensive to manufacture) anyway, is quite excessive, in these days of rapid technological advances. Maybe that, yes, Pythagoras should have been granted a patent for his theorem, but the question is how soon should it have expired? Again, in the case of MP3, the oldest reference to those technologies I could find (didn't check very thoroughly!) was around 1986, which isn't shockingly old, but in terms of technology, is starting to get a little dated. I'd say that a 15-20 years expiration on that kind of patent wouldn't be too ridiculous either way, and I'm sure smart inventors would manage to make quite a bit of money in even less time.

So, in short, I'm not technically against software patents, but more against the way they are implemented right now. I suppose I also dislike the way some patent holders keep quiet about their portfolio, until everyone is using the technology, at which point they helpfully point out that every bloody living organism owes them money. Those make me angry.

In any case, for most users, patents are a bit immaterial, it's mostly for developers (especially of free software). It inflates the cost of their iPod by a few dollars, but they can't really tell the difference between that and the rest of the cost.

What's material to people right now, though is DRM, the so-called "digital rights management". Ensuring your rights are properly limited and constrained, that the rights of the poor media corporations aren't being trampled on by nasty people that want to listen or watch the content they lawfully paid for (pesky, those people!).

It's too bad this isn't being done with the arguably superior Ogg Vorbis, but compared to many of the other choices, MP3 is the choice with more freedom, compared to the PlaysForSure and FairPlays of the world. Pirates aren't being stopped, honest people get screwed and I forgot my point.

So I updated my version of Max (an excellent CD ripping application for Mac OS X) and tackled my music collection, which has been in a bit of disarray for far too long. No wonder I've been listening to so much Einstürzende Neubauten, all their tracks were there at least twice (because of the umlaut in the band name, plus possibly more copies in the song names themselves).

After some ponderings, I decided that I'd switch to a folder per album, without an intermediate folder for the artist. I'm still not sure about that, but that's probably the easiest to mess with.

The new version of Max, among other things, added support for album cover art. I thought "hey, why not? iTunes 7's cover art browser is pretty swanky, I like swanky", which proved to be a rather frustrating train of thoughts, when all was said and done. Bloody iTunes. Bloody Ogg Vorbis. Bloody everything.

While Ogg Vorbis does support embedding cover art, Max didn't do it. Not that it would have helped with iTunes, this probably not being part of the standard QuickTime meta-data (not that iTunes was worth ass at using QuickTime meta-data properly). But iTunes has its own database to index meta-data, including a folder where it caches cover art. I figured that I could just manually set the cover art in iTunes, and that it'd go there (don't worry, I wouldn't have done that by hand for my whole collection, iTunes can be scripted very easily, thankfully).

But no. It see QuickTime content, thinks "hey, I don't support cover art for those!", and just ignores any cover art you set (even though it let you set it in the "edit meta-data" dialog!). Bastards.

But I'm not completely pissed at iTunes (yet), since it still seems to be working better than Rhythmbox (which I use at work)! I deleted my existing music from the library, meaning only to remove it from the Rhythmbox database. Surely, it would ask my opinion before doing something that cannot be undone, right? iTunes does, so, I'm good, right? Nope, everything gets thrown in the wastebin, which didn't seem to offer an obvious enough "restore" option (but I've been known to miss obvious buttons before, so maybe I'm just cranky). Yeah, sure, the files aren't lost, but they're all together in a gigantic mess. Great.

Okay, so after having given up on that anyway, I looked again in the music directory, to find that it had left some files behind? That's kind of shoddy, isn't it? There's two explanations, and neither put Rhythmbox in good light: either it "missed them" while deleting them, or, more likely, didn't import them in the library in the first place.

The latter being especially fun, as the process to import music in Rhythmbox is as follow: use the "import folder" option, look at the number of songs in the status bar, use the "import folder" again, look at the number of songs again, repeat until the number stabilizes. Wow. Just think if find (or your backup system!) was this unreliable. I'm not worrying too much, this is only my music player, but still, that's pretty craptastic.

Not to mention that the "automatically import music in a certain folder" option in the preferences doesn't seem to do anything? Or anything noticeable anyway...

On top of this, for all iTunes' pre-Mac OS X suckiness in the plugins department (you can only make visualization plugins for it, period), Rhythmbox somehow manages to do worse, by not having plugins at all, and being only barely scriptable (as opposed to iTunes, that can be 100% controlled via AppleScript). Thankfully, they have incorporated Audioscrobbler support, because I'd have would have had to stab myself (by which I mean use XMMS, which is just about equivalent).

Bloody hell, welcome to the motherfuckin' 21st century...

Had the weirdest dreams last night... There was a shepherd who had a small circular aquarium (with water, fishes and all) as a kind of necklace, a plot that had a portable bike pump, terrorists on a bus, which was of course a shuttle from a spaceship that had my mother's side family having a party to a beach where there was some strange deterministic werewolves (yes, at the beach, but I guess it's okay, because it was on another planet anyway). The terrorists delivered their threats in Revenue Canada envelopes, each with our names, almost as if they were sent as couriers by them or something.

It was rather nightmarish at parts, but when I got the Revenue Canada threats, I figured that filling tax forms in my dreams was just too over the top, gave up and took it easier after, facing the deterministic werewolves with cool (that's how I found they were deterministic). No, I can't really explain, you just had to be there.

In other news, I'm drinking (real) Champagne, in bed, in my underwear. If only I had Italian poutine, I could beat my previous record. Whether that's good or bad is left as an exercise to the reader.

Finally, Time Magazine realized my greatness, and made me Person of the Year. About time.

Well, in a way.

Oh, sod off.

Forgot to link to my photos and azrhey's photos.

It rained twice this week, both great thunderstorm. Ironically, azrhey and I got caught in the first one biking home from some shopping downtown, for a swimsuit.... I also scored both of Nouvelle Vague's albums (thanks to azrhey), yay!

After the second thunderstorm, it cooled off the weather a bit, and while I was happy when they repaired the A/C at the office (which was previously swelteringly hot), I found out this Friday that their "fix" had been to simply short-circuit the thermostat, running it full-tilt at all time. Turns out that this is exactly what's needed when you have a heat wave, but that when you have normal temperatures, it was freezing in there. Thankfully, there's a shut-off switch for the A/C when the windows are opened, so that we could avoid freezing to death.

This fancy A/C switch on the windows leads me to another so-called "feature" of our futuristic office space. The lights are not controlled by wall-mounted switched, but rather by television-style infrared remote controls, each of them controlling three ceiling lighting. This "great innovation" leads to such excitement as random turning on and off of lights, as people struggle to find the right button for the light they want to trigger, when they don't simply have the wrong remote altogether. No to mention when they aren't outright misplaced. Decline of civilization indeed.

Saturday, azrhey and I went shopping for a few essential items for our new apartment, such as a fridge and an espresso machine (which, niftily enough, is also a regular coffee machine). We also bought an iron and a mixer. We nearly got arrested after going to Carrefour after we smuggled in our loot from our previous shopping. Upon leaving, we had to deal with security and all, much fun...

Heading to the bus stop, still in the mall, we went past a mechanical walkway that came from underground. Wondering what it lead to, I leaned over to look, and while I couldn't see that, I found myself staring right at a rather hot girl coming up in a low-cut top. azrhey commented that the worst thing was that I was so shiny, I wasn't lying when I said I didn't mean to do that. Well, no, I didn't mean to, but I didn't regret it, despite not really seeing what I did mean to see!