Opera 10 is almost here!

The Release Candidate of Opera 10 landed a few days ago:

I’ve been using the (roughly) weekly builds available on the Opera Desktop Team Blog for quite a while, but since those are potentially-unstable testing versions with features that may or may not make the release, I did not want to comment on it one way or the other until I was satisfied that I could give something close to the final code a decent review.

As you may or may not be aware, the Opera browser is one of the older ones, not the first, but it is the oldest surviving browser still being actively developed. It not only predates Firefox, it also predates Monopo$oft Idiot Exploiter Internet Explorer.

You may have even used Opera and not been aware of it. They are the only worthy browser on mobile phones, and roughly tie the mobile version of Safari (which only runs on the hypePhone) for user share. (In fact, Apple blocking Opera on the iPhone is reason enough to avoid the iPhone in my opinion.)

Opera started out as a skunkworks-type project at a Norwegian phone company back in the early 90’s, version 1.0 was apparently never circulated.

I personally started using Opera in 1998. It was small, so small in fact, that before version 5.0 the installer fit on a floppy disk. It was fast, dramatically faster than IE (still is) or Netscape Navigator (R.I.P.), had bleeding edge support for W3C web standards (still does), and it had a feature that most people probably thought was invented by Firefox, tabs.*

(*Well, actually, better than tabs, a true Multiple Document Interface where every tab was also it’s own window, this can still be activated but it defaults to tabs for the sake of users familiar with Firefox.)

Every release of Opera has had better overall support for W3C standards than any competing browser at that time. Unfortunately a lot of pages were written to humor Internet Explorer’s horrible nonstandard Trident rendering engine and so you sometimes still had to fire up IE. *gnashes his teeth remembering IE 5*

Also, Opera didn’t get a lot of mainstream attention on the desktop because it used to be $39 shareware. IE may be terrible, but everything installed it, you couldn’t get rid of it, and this eventually included Windows 98. (And the IE 4 installer was responsible for corrupting more copies of Windows 95 than I care to remember.)

Opera changed revenue models a couple of times, it became adware for a couple of releases (Opera wrote the code themselves so they didn’t have to rely on spyware), and finally it became freeware for anyone that wanted to download it.

A lot of other things have changed in that time as well, including the fact that Opera now not only has the most thorough standards compliance, but it’s also compatible with most poorly written pages that were created with IE in mind.

Now that we have the history lesson out of the way, what’s going on in Opera 10?

On Windows, Opera 10 is an evolutionary upgrade over Opera 9.x for most desktop users, it’s faster, it’s more reliable, its rendering engine is vastly improved, and there’s even a few new features. In short it’s more, better, faster.

On Linux, users have much more to be excited about. Opera now not only has a native X86-64 version, but also, the Linux version seems to finally use xdg-open by default so that you can open your downloaded files and the folders you saved them to without tweaking the preferences.

Opera 10 on Linux can use either the 32-bit Flash plugin through it’s own internal plugin wrapper (called OperaWrapper) so you don’t have to dick around with a Flash plugin, and my VLC plugin for Firefox worked automatically as well, providing support for most multimedia formats. Also, Opera will now automatically see your IcedTea (open source Java) or Java installation. The Linux version is also now compiled with GCC 4 and QT 4, leading to an insanely large boost in overall application performance from 9.x.

If you browse on a slow connection, you will appreciate Opera Turbo, a feature which uses Opera’s caching servers to heavily compress web pages before being delivered to your system. I tried it on a few different connections and made some notes.

The rest:

Opera Turbo

On slow broadband (~1 Mbps) such as basic DSL service, Opera Turbo can cut the time you wait for a web page in half.

On a 56k modem (I had to use bandwidth capping on my router to simulate this), Opera Turbo cut the time to load the average page by over 2/3rds.

On my connection, (~6 Mbps cable) Opera Turbo actually slowed things down a bit even though it still estimated that it was speeding the connection up. This is likely due to the lag of their server fetching the page and sending it to me since I already have a fast connection.

One thing is clear, this feature is useful for modems, slower broadband, and wireless users (phones and netbooks with 3g cards), but avoid Opera Turbo if your connection is sufficiently fast. It also degrades images by compressing them further using aggressive JPEG compression, so you’ll want to disable Turbo (just click the button to turn it off) before you load any images to be saved to disk.

Bundled extras and Widgets:

Opera still includes the integrated email client which is superb, a serviceable IRC client (which may replace separate IRC clients like Xchat for casual users), a simple bittorrent client included in the download manager (Which I disable in favor of a client which supports bad IP address blocking), and support for Widgets, which extend the browser similarly to Firefox extensions.*

(*Firefox extensions are easier to write and can do more but are also dangerous because they can do anything they want to anything the logged in user has access to, or they can spy on you or do other nasty things, or they may just be poorly written and leak RAM or crash the browser. Opera Widgets can do less, but they are not a potential menace to system security or stability.)

Visual refresh:

Opera 10’s default theme has been reworked to be more aesthetically pleasing. Yes it is just eye candy, but nobody who works with a program for hours on end want the ugly interfaces or Firefox or Internet Explorer.

It still supports all themes that worked in Opera 9.x as well, I’m using IBIS inspire which is a more elegant tweak to the Chinese Opera theme, and I have disabled the menu bar in favor of a Menu button in my tab bar. This leaves me more than enough screen real estate. (About 20% more than Firefox does.) Screenshot here Default skin here

How do I block ads?

I use Fanboy’s ad blocking list and user CSS from here. Opera natively supports ad blocking, and you don’t need any silly extensions, you just tell it what to block, those lists do precisely that. Saves you the annoyance of ads, saves you bandwidth, saves you time spent looking at crappy pages packed full of advertising.

Opera Unite may not make the cut for Opera 10:

One thing that Opera Software is working on (that I’ve played around with in the weekly builds is called Opera Unite which, when finished, will allow even the least computer literate people to set up their own file sharing server and streaming music server running inside the browser, and secure it simply by adding a passkey that you can give to your friends. (Or use to remotely access the files you choose to share at a friends house or perhaps at work.

This feature is NOT in the Release Candidate, and the builds that do have it are marked Opera 10.1, so it will eventually be here and if you want it now then you have to use a desktop team weekly build.

Another favorite feature of mine is Opera Sync:

You can get it in File/Synchronize Opera. This was actually introduced in 9.5, but you can have your bookmarks and other data stored in your My Opera account so that if you use another computer, the two copies of Opera stay “in sync” with each other.

In closing (phew!):

There’s definitely a lot about Opera that should interest any Firefox or Internet Explorer user. While Opera 10 doesn’t have the sheer scripting speed that Chrome and Firefox do, it’s not pokey either. In fact, things like Document Object Model operations blow those both away, so the Javascript War is a bad thing because it encourages developers and users to only focus on one area of browser performance when in fact the speed of the engine as a whole may not be well rounded. (What good is fast script execution if the browser can’t parse CSS and HTML fast enough to keep up with itself?)

I will rate Opera, on my totally opinionated 5 point scale. 1 being the most hideous browser there ever was (Internet Explorer) and 5 being subjectively perfect, Opera gets a 4.8, there’s still a few quirks and things that aren’t as great as they could be (though the new stuff I’m interested in is in their pipeline). User interface is clean, download size is small, performance is great, rendering engine is excellent, and it has a complete suite of tools that Firefox and Internet Explorer lack. Their track record on security is nearly impeccable.

Will Opera 10.1 be *the* browser suite to beat? I’d say 10.0 is already giving the other guys a good run for their money.

New gadget for me, a Sandisk Sansa Fuze

Newegg was running a sale on these a few days ago and I got a 4 GB Fuze for $39.99 and free shipping:

The geek in me had to have it just for the Ogg Vorbis support even though I had a bad experience with the Sansa View. Long story short, the View has sluggish performance, buggy firmware, and limited format support. (WMA “Standard” codec, and MP3 for audio, and h.264 for video)

MP3 has been an incredibly resilient audio standard since it was introduced in 1991, and has gone on to be the premier audio codec of nearly every online music store, sans Apple iTunes which uses the MPEG Forum’s “official upgrade”  to MP3. This codec is called MPEG-4 AAC.

That having been said, MP3 its showing age and although it was an acceptable format 10 years ago, times change, formats improve, and out with the old. AAC is not the only thing you can replace it with though. MP3 is far from efficient  even with the best encoders, it has severe limitations that just cannot be fixed without breaking decoding compatibility. This is why AAC has been standardized by the MPEG Forum, and it’s probably the second most likely format to be supported in hardware after MP3 and WMA “Standard”. (Tied for devices supported, but there’s no real customer demand for WMA, Microsoft just muscles it onto every player.)

This is where things get sticky, because Microsoft also just so happened to develop an MP3 competitor (if you can call it that) called Windows Media Audio. Most WMA files use the original codec because it’s the only WMA codec that has any kind of hardware support outside of the Zune, which also supports WMA Professional and Lossless with some limitations (2 channel stereo, 44.1 Khz playback). This may limit you if you use a stereo dock. Even though WMA Standard is promoted by Microsoft as “Better than MP3″, this is just patently untrue, and for this reason and the issue of having an undocumented proprietary format and only one encoder (Microsoft’s), even Windows die hards are better off just pretending Windows Media Audio never existed.

The last codec on the list (I saved the best) is Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis is fully documented, unpatented, public domain, royalty free, and open source, and otherwise all forms of “Do anything you want with it, and nobody even has to pay us”. Even though Ogg Vorbis is clearly superior to even the best of its competition (AAC), and doesn’t cost anything to license, it has had slow uptake due to not having a major corporate backer that can bribe hardware makers, and not having the mind share of MP3. But trust me when I say that out of all the codecs promising “Same quality as MP3 at around half the bitrate”, Vorbis is the only one that really delivers.

I’ve gauged all popular codecs for transparency with the CD source and here’s what I came up with:

(Terminology: VBR = Variable Bitrate / CBR= Constant Bitrate.  Most encoders use VBR quality settings to provide consistent quality throughout the file, and you should use this if at all possible with very rare exception. Modern codecs (AAC and Vorbis) are not designed to operate in CBR mode and you really should never try it. Obviously, the higher the bitrate in each given codec, the better the audio technically sounds, but file size also increases. There’s a point of diminishing returns where you won’t want to go any further and an average person could not tell the CD from the lossy file, this is what “transparency” means. The codec which can achieve transparency with the lowest bitrate is there fore the “best” codec.)

Lame MP3 at VBR setting 0: Average bitrate is 270-300kbps, you hardly save anything vs. 320kbps CBR (and honestly may as well just use that to err on the side of caution. Other MP3 encoders do not achieve transparency for me at any bitrate.

WMA “Standard” 9.2 at VBR q98: At this point the artifacts are gone and it sounds about like the CD, the problem is the files average about 350 kbps.

AAC: VBR at q 0.60: At this point, you get transparency good frequency response and the bitrate is around 225 kbps.

Ogg Vorbis with the AoTuv encoder: VBR quality 5 gives transparency and excellent frequency response, the bitrate will be averaging 160 kbps (!!!) Don’t use the official libvorbis encoder as AoTuv is a highly optimized fork and you will always get better results.

Despite marketing claims, there are no codecs which deliver transparency at 128 kbps. AoTuv’s Vorbis encoder does better than any of the rest.

(BTW, at low streaming bitrates, Vorbis at q3 (~112kbps) or q4 (~128 kbps) will give you the file sizes necessary without the warbling and other distortions of competing codecs.)

I apologize for the long primer, but these are the audio codecs supported by the Sansa Fuze:

It took me a while to re-rip all of my CDs in Ogg Vorbis q5 (I have a lot of CDs!), and I’m still not done, but I estimate Vorbis is not only saving me between 30-50 megs per CD vs MP3 at Lame V0, but also slightly higher quality.

Which brings me to the Sansa Fuze:

After the disastrous experience with the Sansa View, I was not really sure I wanted to buy another Sansa product, I was pretty underwhelmed by that thing. The price was right on the Fuze and it claimed Ogg Vorbis support, so I bought it, and I’m not regretting it so far.

The Sansa View was giving me the following problems with firmware alone:

Sluggish menu browsing.

Rebuilding the database every time you add a few CDs worth of music to it took forever.

Sometimes eats the database for no reason.

Sometimes it doesn’t update the free space remaining when you delete files. (Requires a format to fix this)

Mass Storage Class transfer mode support was only added in a firmware update *after* it was released and anything you added in this mode, the player failed to organize into album playlists automatically, meaning you had to fall back to Microsoft’s Media Transfer Protocol, which is not exceptionally friendly to anything but Windows. (Linux has extremely spotty support for it and the Mac doesn’t know what it is at all).

Finally, it would play AAC audio files, but always in the wrong order due to an incomplete tag reader. The player had to have the AAC audio codec because it’s what most h.264 videos use, but they crippled playback of AAC audio files to get out of paying for playback royalties and patent licenses. Since MSC mode never works right, and you more or less have to use it in MTP mode anyway, that means Windows Media Player was the only way to properly sync the fucking thing, Windows Media Player doesn’t even know what AAC is and even if you have Windows 7 and WMP *does* know what AAC is, the device tells the player it only works with WMA or MP3 so Windows Media Player will “sync” it by transcoding all your AAC files into WMA. (AGGGHHHH!!!!)

No Ogg Vorbis support.

Personally, I think the Sansa View was such a shoddy device that they should apologize by giving anyone that actually bought one at list price a free Fuze.

In contrast to the View, the Sansa Fuze gives you:

Menus don’t lag.

Doesn’t eat the database, free space updates properly.

Proper MSC support which you should select as soon as you power the unit on. MTP is some nasty, nasty shit.

In MSC mode, you can drop your music folders onto the device’s MUSIC folder and next time you power it on, it’ll figure out the playlist by itself provided you tagged the files properly, it also supports folder hierarchies so you can organize your folders like /MUSIC/Metallica/Ride The Lightning, this drove the View firmware even nuttier but it works now.

Album art: Include the thumbnail for the album art in the appropriate folders as a jpg file and the Fuze will display it.

Proper support for all AAC profiles (including High Efficiency AAC if you must). Proper support for Ogg Vorbis. Proper support for FLAC in or out of an Ogg container (lossless compressed files, but these are massive).

Linux and Mac friendly (in MSC mode). Previous Sansa players have been pretty much dependent on Windows.

Smaller, lighter, and longer lasting battery.

The internal storage can be expanded with Micro SD or Micro SDHC (High Capacity) cards, they’ll show up as two removable drives should you plug a card in and mount it in MSC mode, just make a separate “MUSIC” VIDEO” and “PICTURES” folder on the card. The View supported Micro SD/HC cards and I retasked the 16 gig card from my View for use in the Fuze. (Formatted it first).

The FM tuner has about 50% better range.

All and all, this really is a lot of player for my $40. I recommend it to anyone, especially if you use Ogg Vorbis and want a reputable brand of player that supports Ogg Vorbis or FLAC (Not many name brands do and the ones that do tend to be far more expensive). So the Sansa View sucked, every company has a bad product once in a while, but the Fuze is everything the View should have been and more. Vorbis is catching on, more hardware makers are throwing it in every year, and we should reward the companies that are respecting our freedom to choose above the powers that be that are pushing to maintain the status quo. (It’s free for them to do so and it makes for more happy customers)

——-

Side note:

In the legalese of the included instruction booklet, there’s reference to what Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM can do to your player if you have DRM’d WMA or WMV (video) files files on it.

“Content providers are using the digital rights management technology for Windows Media contained in this device (“WM-DRM”) to protect the integrity of their content (“Secure Content”), so that intellectual property, including copyright, in such content is not misappropriated. This device uses WM-DRM software to play Secure Content (“WM-DRM Software”). If the security of the WM-DRM Software on this device has been compromised, owners of Secure Content (“Secure Content Owners”) may request that Microsoft revoke the WM-DRM Software’s rights to acquire new licenses to copy, display, and/or play Secure Content. Revocation does not alter the WM-DRM Software’s ability to play unprotected content. A list of revoked WM-DRM Software is sent to your device whenever you download a license for Secure Content from the Internet or from a PC. Microsoft, may, in conjunction with such license, also download revocation lists onto your device on behalf of Secure Content Owners.”

So if you are a fool who buys DRM’d Windows Media files, and someone cracks the Windows Media DRM software on your portable, Microsoft can take control of your property and force it to not be able to play the songs you bought. Likewise, they can also revoke your license to play all of your subscription WMA files on the device. You agree to let them do this and to trojan in the blacklists whenever you think you’re just downloading songs from Rhapsody or Napster or whatever.

This invasive bullshit is enough reason to avoid Windows Media. I only want the device to play Ogg Vorbis, I would have paid them extra to not include Microsoft stuff on my player. :P

Every player does this though unless you’re using custom firmware like Rockbox. You just can’t have a garden without a few of Microsoft’s stinging nettles popping up, can you?

Wine 1.1.28 finally supports installing SecuROM-infected games without crashing

Thanks go to Alexandre Julliard at Crossover/WineHQ for this patch I believe.

I’ve been frustrated for a while now because of Sony’s SecuROM. For those that don’t know, it’s another kind of DRM malware, not as bad as Starforce, but that’s certainly not because they haven’t been trying.

Some games that are infected with SecuROM and other copy restriction malware install OK but crash Wine when you load the game, even though you have a perfectly legal copy, even if you put the original disc in the drive as it asks. It will keep saying “Please insert the original disc”, if it even starts without crashing Wine. Some older versions will see Wine and assume it’s a debugger or an attempt to bypass the copy restrictions, like YASU (integrated with Daemon Tools on Windows) uses to fool SecuROM infected games into mounting in the virtual disc drive it creates. (Side note: I think having to insert the disc is enough of an annoyance that these cracks actually abound on Windows when the user has actually bought the game)

Up til about last year, you could usually get the game installed and then go find a no-disc fixed EXE somewhere that would get the game you paid for and legally have the right to use, to work. I don’t even know how many laws that violates, and I don’t really care. I’ve never much appreciated Big Media pushing me around like some kind of software pirate just because I want to play the game I purchased on a non-Windows system.

Anyway, back to the issue, you could install but not play (unless you cracked the game’s EXE), but at least it installed. Then some greedy corporate fuck got the idea “What if we put SecuROM into the installer?”, so now you can’t even get it installed to later apply the fixed EXE.

The irony of it all is that you can still install the game then apply the no-disc EXE perfectly fine on Windows. This got me wondering if perhaps someone is merely doing this to crash Wine since it would have no affect at all on “software pirates”  on Windows (no copy restriction ever does hold them back for more than a few days, if that).

I say this because Bethesda Softworks certainly seems to be hostile to free software, they have a few decent games, but their engines always use like every feature of DirectX, their in-game music files are all MP3s (even Microsoft has been known to use the patent and royalty-free Ogg Vorbis in its in-game music!), and they’re getting to where they infect every title with some kind of customer-unfriendly DRM.

The original release of Oblivion didn’t even have copy protection at all though, mind you,  it would install and run just dandy, or at least as well as old pre-1.0 Wine could run it. Wine’s Direct3d 9 implementation has gotten much better lately and game texture details and performance rival the real DirectX 9 on Microsoft Windows in many cases.

So the only thing that was holding you back from playing the Game of the Year Edition (Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles expansion packs included) that’s currently at every Walmart for $20 was the SecuROM infection that was introduced (actually this was in the installer for the standalone expansion disc pack earlier on).

I’m now happy to report that Oblivion GOTY Edition is working on Wine with no cracks and no Microsoft DirectX files. The installer takes a while to load, so be patient, and the second disc’s installer will throw an error that you can just click to get rid of and ignore.

I ran the game on High at 1680 x 1050 with show frames per second (HDR off, this still hurts performance more on Wine than Windows).

It’s not really a benchmark as much as a ballpark guess, but Wine performance seems about 5-10% slower than XP and about equal to Vista. This is pretty awesome considering just how visually heavy Oblivion is, that Wine is a compatibility layer on a totally foreign OS, and that Windows is poorly documented and has surely caused a lot of blood, sweat, and tears for the Wine folks.

Another thing that disturbs me:

ZeniMax, who owns Bethesda, also bought id Software, which in the past has always supported Linux with native versions of their games and didn’t use malicious or overly-invasive copy restrictions such as SecuROM. I have to wonder, with their new owners, if that Linux support will fade and if the damned filthy Sony DRM will encapsulate DOOM 4 and other future id Software titles. I would certainly hope that John Carmack would not let himself be pushed around in such a manner.

So you may want to pop the cork on the champagne and cancel your Cedega subscriptions:

About the only reason to keep Cedega around was because they licensed the copy protection compatibility modules and so problems like this didn’t affect them. Once you get past that, Cedega often does not run as well as Wine and while Wine is free, Cedega still costs something like $55 a year I believe.

Wine still does not run *every* Windows program out there. Some (like Winamp and its plugins) are so heavily dependent on the Win32 API that they’ll probably never work right, but seriously malfunctioning  programs on Wine are becoming more of the exception than the rule these days, and I think Wine 1.2 is shaping up to be a fair replacement option for XP holdouts and maybe even a few overburdoned Vista systems.

If anyone is interested, I think this patch is what finally turned the tide on SecuROM-the-Wine-killer:

“ntdll: Add a ret to DEFINE_REGS_ENTRYPOINT to make copy protections happy.” -source Wine 1.1.28 changelog

Get Wine for your distribution here.

SoundConverter on Linux mutilates the MP3 files it creates

So I’ve been playing around with SoundConvertor on Ubuntu which is a front end for LAME, and a lame frontend for LAME as it turns out. :P

MP3 has some well known problems as you may be aware, which is why newer codecs like AAC and Vorbis and Windows Media Audio were created. One of these shortcomings is the so-called Scale Factor Band 21 problem. Put simply, it affects MP3 encoders in Variable Bitrate mode and causes a bit of file bloat when encoding audio above 16 Khz.

Various solutions have been proposed to this in the past, including eliminating everything in sfb21 completely by using what is called a “lowpass filter”, the encoder can simply throw everything away above 16 Khz and not even bother to encode it. This is the default for Real’s Helix MP3 encoder.

That solution figures that most people “probably” won’t hear those high frequencies on most sound systems, most of the time. The problem is that eliminating everything in this band can cause subtle distortions, so most encoders also have a mode that lets them selectively encode audio that is relevent to what is currently going on at that point in the song, if it won’t bloat the file too much. This helps with things like drum solos and such. Fruenhofer’s official encoder does this by default, Helix can do it with the -HF2 switch, and LAME can do this with the -Y switch.

The argument over what to throw away and what to keep is still subjective and going this route can still (though rarely) cause distortion in the resulting MP3 file. (Although I would say that LAME -Y handles these situations better than most).

The only way to ensure that the resulting MP3 file is of high quality is to encode at least *some* of sfb21. LAME’s psychoacoustic model (npsytune formerly known as gspycho) will strive to keep enough of sfb21 to keep the MP3 file from sounding distorted, and from V0 (Extreme quality) to V2 (Standard quality), Lame will adapt the lowpass to mitigate file bloat but at the same time, not carve too deeply into the frequency range you’re liable to hear. (Beyond V3 there’s really not much of sfb21 left and it has the -Y switch built-in) LAME’s developers have worked long and hard to fine tune these quality settings so that at V2 (Standard) you’d be hard pressed to tell the CD from the MP3 file.

Enter SoundConverter. I had SoundConverter suggested to me by an Ubuntu user when I asked if there was an easy way to batch transcode my lossless FLAC files to MP3, I’ve never much bothered with MP3 until I got an MP3 player (My old iPod accepted AAC files, this Sandisk Sansa does not), but I noticed that when SoundConverter on Linux converted them, they didn’t sound rich and full, they sounded flat and distorted. Nothing at all like when you use LAME directly or LAME frontends on Windows such as Winamp or Foobar2000.

A little investigating answered my question nicely:

This is the first 25 seconds of Seether’s “Driven Under” from Disclaimer II in a spectrogram as encoded by SoundConverter which claims to be using LAME 3.98.2’s “Extreme/Insane”  V0 quality (as seen in Foobar200’s spectrogram):

SoundConverter's "LAME 3.98.2 V0" Click for full resolution.

Lame 3.98.2 V0 Click for full resolution

What’s immediately obvious is that Gstreamer’s LAME plugin / SoundConverter are using a hard cutoff at 16 Khz whereas the real LAME V0 (again, EXTREME quality) faithfully represents the track up very close to 20 Khz.

What has Gstreamer/ SoundConverter saved us by mutilating our MP3 file? Well, its “V0″ file is 8.02 megs and LAME 3.98.2’s is 8.97 megs, SoundConverter’s hard cutoff file mutilation has saved us a whole smegging 0.95 MB, roughly 11% of the file size.

If you’re really worried about saving space, the real LAME and V2 would probably still sound better at around the same size, or less than, SoundConverter’s Extreme setting. Some pinheads that are developing Gstreamer and SoundConverter think they know better than the user (or the people that made the fucking encoder for that matter) what settings to use. Not only that, SoundConverter arbitrarily picks five VBR quality modes you can select from where LAME itself has TEN.

This “Users are idiots and confused by options” disease is clearly spreading even further than I thought.

It looks like you’re going to have to drop down to using shell scripts for batch encoding of MP3 unless you want the unholy union of Gstreamer and SoundConverter screwing up everything you encode into MP3. I wouldn’t trust anything that’s using Gstreamer’s LAME plug-in as a backend as it seems they all do the 16 Khz lowpass.

Edit: Seems like SoundKonverter (the KDE counterpart to SoundConverter) addresses LAME directly and isn’t as dumbed down as SoundConverter. Defining your own profile and choosing VBR quality 75 seems to correspond to LAME V2 (Standard quality) which is all I really wanted to begin with. If you don’t feel like dicking around with shell scripts, hauling in 200 megs of KDE to get SoundKonverter seems to be your other option.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever needed the KDE version of anything.

Mandriva Users: Penguin Liberation Front is down/server failure

Site says they’ll be back Monday, but til then or if not, you can paste this in to a terminal as root to add PLF sources:

USA Mirror:

For x86 users:

urpmi.addmedia –distrib http://mirrors.zerg.biz/plf/mandriva/cfg/2009.1/i586

For x86-64 users:

urpmi.addmedia –distrib http://mirrors.zerg.biz/plf/mandriva/cfg/2009.1/x86_64

France:

x86:

urpmi.addmedia –distrib http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/plf/mandriva/cfg/2009.1/i586

x86-64:

urpmi.addmedia –distrib http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/plf/mandriva/cfg/2009.1/x86_64

Spain:

x86:

urpmi.addmedia –distrib http://ftp.cica.es/mirrors/Linux/plf/mandriva/cfg/2009.1/i586

x86-64:

urpmi.addmedia –distrib http://ftp.cica.es/mirrors/Linux/plf/mandriva/cfg/2009.1/x86_64

Obviously that’s not all of the mirrors, but it should work til zarb.org is back up along with EasyUrpmi.

I would never want anyone to be deprived of their MP3s and DVDs all weekend. :)

Do 64-bit web browsers perform faster than 32-bit browsers?

I saw that as one of my search engine redirects in my statistics, so I’d like to say….

No.

Click here to see 32-bit IE 8 vs 64-bit IE 8 on Sunspider.

This tells us a couple things.

1. Internet Explorer 8’s scripting engine has been improved, a lot. Speedwise it’s now in-line with Opera 9.6 or Firefox 2. Although every time Microsoft nudges up to a bar that was set by their competitors 3 years ago, their competitors move the bar ahead another mile.

Opera 10 is in the 3,500 ms range, Firefox 3.5 will be in the 1200 ms range, and Google Chrome 2 Beta is coming in under 800 ms. So clearly IE 8 is no speed demon, but it’s much less torturous to use than it used to be.

2. Just recompiling something as an X86-64 binary usually has no improvement on the performance and in some cases may even make it worse.

The point of the X86-64 architecture was not to make your web browser (or any other particular program) faster, it was to (A) Allow your OS to recognize and access memory addresses above 4 GB and (B) Allow applications to use more than 2 GB each. I think we have a while before web browsers take two gigs of RAM, the worst I’ve seen yet were Safari and Firefox bloat to around 500 megs, and should they actually go crazy and leak infinite memory, then letting them go beyond a 2 GB barrier could prove to be trouble. :)

So why does Microsoft include both versions of IE?:

Users that have used 64-bit Linux distributions can answer this one. 64-bit browser will cause all kinds of plug in hell.

This is less of a problem on Linux, mostly because all open source plugins can be recompiled, and the types of people that work on distributions like Fedora tend to be more of the mind of “So what if we broke Flash?”. Yes, there are hacks like nspluginwrapper to get some things to work, but these introduce stability problems and were created long after the distributions started shipping a 64-bit Firefox that couldn’t use Flash, JAVA, etc.

So a better question would be “Why didn’t the Linux distros ship a 32-bit browser?”

My guess is because that requires pulling in a backwards compatibility subsystem (32-bit shared libraries), which would cause the base system to no longer fit on a CD (boohoo) combined with the stickign of fingers in ears and pretending 64-bit plugins exist for everything.

It’s worth noting that on modern 64-bit Linux, this problem is nowhere near as bad as it used to be, 64-bit plugins exist for Flash, JAVA (through Iced Tea), and your media codecs. But for the first 4 years, it was a real pain in the ass.

So another question could be “Why does Microsoft ship both versions?” ;)

Well, the 32-bit version is obviously there to spare the end user the plug in hell, while the 64-bit version is there cause it doesn’t take up all that much extra space and clearly having a 64-bit OS without all components having a 64-bit version would clearly not be “correct”.

Eventually 64-bit plugins for IE will exist and Microsoft can shed the old 32-bit antique version for good.

In any event, they include the 32-bit backwards compatibility in Windows whereas you’ll need to go get the libraries yourself on Linux cause they thought they’d be cute and leave them out to save space on the disc.

If an Ubuntu developer actually reads this, why don’t you guys cut out that stupid brain damaged .Net wanna-be (Mono) (about 60 megs) and that stupid notes application which as near as I can tell is the only thing that uses it that comes with Ubuntu (5-6 megs) and ship 32-bit compatibility by default?

So there you have it:

The benefits of a 64-bit web browser are mostly dubious, I’m sure though that they can most likely take advantage of some of  the extra security of the X86-64 environment, but they can also be slower and go berserk and eat all your RAM.

Mandriva 2009 Spring Kicks Vista7 back to /dev/null

With my latest foray into Windows 7 build 7100 (official Release Candidate from MS Technet) I was experiencing largely the same errors/issues/bad performance as I had on the unofficial 7057 and 7077 wherein everyone replied “Hold your horses”

One of my test systems, this Athlon64 3200+ with 2 gigs of RAM and a Geforce 7650 GS was to see how 7 performed on hardware that was reasonable 3-4 years ago, and overall it failed terribly.

The requirements for 7 are the same as Vista, because it more or less is Vista, and its slow boot up, sluggish response, and overall poor user experience at some times even makes Vista look downright speedy/stable. Even Windows fans have nothing new in Windows 7 of any substance that hasn’t been or won’t be ported back to Vista, or in a couple cases XP. (IE 8)

But where Vista7 brings these systems to their knees with their overall top heaviness and their DRM systems that do things like poll my hardware every 30ms to make sure I haven’t attached any “piracy devices” or intentionally crash the system if the driver reports any odd voltage fluctuations, Mandriva basically brings this system back from the dead and manages to bring most of Vista7’s killer features and a lot more that Vista7 still can’t do.

Note: I am mainly talking about GNOME, because I use GNOME, some or all of this may not apply to KDE, don’t ask because I probably won’t know.

Boot Time:

This is something Microsoft says they’ve improved, and it takes over a full minute to boot both Vista and 7 on reasonable hardware like my newer Core 2 Duo machine and about 1:30 to 1:45 on this older system before I can log in. As far as I can tell, Vista7 actually makes no improvements over Vista in this area.

Bootchart on Mandriva is kind of flaky as it doesn’t seem to have properly timed Mandriva’s new SpeedBoot in 2009 Spring, but Mandriva 2009 Spring got my old Athlon64 system from power on to log in screen in 15-18 seconds using the same “stopwatch” method as I used on Vista7. (Boot a few times and report the range).

File System:

Ext4 is available, I don’t know if it is the default since I never use defaults, I’ve been playing around with it though and I have to say that disk performance is extremely fast.

Users of Ext3 should format the volume and make an Ext4 one in its place, it’s worth the inconvenience of backing up files.

(NTFS even on Vista7 becomes fragmented, Microsoft just adds another background task to defrag it and spin up your hard drive late at night, assuming the thing is even on.)

Audio stack:

One of Vista7’s main features over XP is timer-based audio scheduling, per application volume control, and better device selection.

Pulseaudio on Linux has technically provided this for some time, but I believe that Mandriva is the first to actually get it right. Those who have tried to use all the features I’ve mentioned in other Linux systems know that it tended to be temperamental at best, but with the new timer-based approach and the per-device and per-application controls in the mixer applet, I’m happy to report that Mandriva is on par or ahead of the curve set by Mac OS X and Vista7.

Users of laptops should perhaps even notice some extra battery life (We’re probably talking a few minutes at best, but it is a nice side effect of timer scheduling).

Compositing effects:

Vista7 of course have Aero Glass which is nice, but really can’t be customized past what color you want, and still can’t give you proper management of multiple monitors or virtual desktops.

X and Compiz can do both this and more, and you can make them look like exactly whatever you want if you use Emerald themes (I’ve even seen a few Aero Glass themes that look eerily accurate).

Mandriva includes the latest Compiz Fusion 0.8.2, which fixes some particularly annoying bugs that could crop up from time to time and increases the smoothness of the various effects. The shoddy video cards list has been updated, so users should never run into a situation where Compiz starts up, kills the titlebars, and then bombs out, no matter how bad their video card is. (It works on all Nvidia cards past Geforce 6 that I’ve tried *shrugs*, not so much with my older ATI cards)

Desktop Cube and Window Picker and Minimize/Maximize plugins by default, whatever you like if you use CompizConfig Settings Manager (I recommend the simple-ccsm).

Miscellaneous other mentions:

Mandriva 2009 Spring has everything you’ll expect in a modern desktop operating system, and if it’s not there (codecs and such in the Free edition), you can get it from your repository in Mandriva Control Center, or after adding Easy URPMI’s Penguin Liberation Front repository.

Desktop Search is provided by the latest version of Beagle, and users of Vista Search (or the ones that disabled it for being a resource hog) should be pleasantly surprised by Beagle, it indexes your home folder (Documents and Music and Pictures and such) so your search results tend to come up immediately.

If you have a monstrously powerful rig, you can also set Beagle to index your email, your instant messaging conversations  (through Pidgin), your Firefox history, etc.

Overall:

Mandriva 2009 Spring seems to have all the features one would want from Vista7 without the sucky undertaste of DRM, while managing to take up 5-6 times less hard drive space, a third the memory, and managing to work exceptionally well even on XP-era hardware that Microsoft abandoned long ago.

Mandriva 2009 Spring also clearly one-ups Ubuntu, especially in the area of Pulseaudio (which is often buggy and unreliable in Ubuntu Jaunty), users that this affects should move to Mandriva immediately.

PS: Don’t forget to have some Wine with your cheese. :)

Obligatory Screenshot

Rice Rice Baby! Pimp your startup sequence with Bootchart!

Here we’ll talk about Bootchart, it’s hiding in your apt repo:

My bootup sequence

OK, so we’re obviously looking at a graphical representation of my custom kernel booting up.

I mainly post this for two reasons:

1. XFS filesystem kicks ass.

2. The guy over here posting about booting up on Ext4 in 43 seconds, which I have no clue how he managed to bungle his system that badly or arrive at the idea that this was good performance.

I have no idea if he just has no idea what he’s talking about, if the Ubuntu kernel is that messed up, or if Ext4 really is that much slower. (I suspect some of all of the above).

The first thing we see from this audit is that the Ubuntu bootup sequence is (surprisingly) quite lean and mean.

The second thing to take from this is that XFS has damned good I/O performance! (61 MB/sec! on a 7200 RPM hard drive is essentially near platter speed)

Third, my system booted in 21 seconds which is fantastic.

Lessons to take from this:

1. XFS is still a great choice. Even at 15 years old it gives Ext4 a pummeling.

2. We get to laugh at someone who is bragging about having a 43 second boot.

How to profile your system:

sudo apt-get install bootchart pybootchartgui

reboot

It will generate a graph in PNG format every time you boot (until you uninstall it) and save it for you in /var/log/bootchart, very useful for probing what is causing startup delays, or for all around geek cred.

I’d like to note again that anything past Ubuntu Jaunty Alpha 5 is capable of having /boot on XFS, so all you need is your SWAP and a root (/) with everything on it in XFS, there’s also additional tools (including a defragmentation tool for if you ever want to play with it) in the xfsdump package. ;)

Epiphany is my new web browser, goodbye Firefox!

For those that don’t know, GNOME has an official web browser, and it isn’t Firefox:

Epiphany is the official browser of GNOME.

For a while I ignored it largely because Firefox *does* work, but it’s been quite obvious for a while that Linux is an afterthought for them. Debian fixed up a lot of the more patently Windows-centric crap including the broken Extensions manager. Their reward? Mozilla’s legal department started harassing them about modifications to make it work better (at all in some places) on Linux, and rather than get into a fight, Debian renamed theirs IceWeasel. (Ubuntu still gets preferential treatment even though they have all of Debian’s modifications and some of their own.)

But after doing some benchmarks a while back comparing Firefox 3 in Ubuntu with Firefox 3 for Windows in Wine, and finding out the Windows binary was still better than the Linux native (Someone else came to the same conclusion), I decided to go shopping. What are our options?

Opera was the first thing I tried to replace Firefox with but ended up abandoning it for a few reasons:

1. It *is* proprietary, even though it is freeware.

2. It’s even slower than Firefox in many cases.

3. It’s built with QT which makes it not fit very well into GNOME.

4. It still has trouble with plugins. It cannot embed Totem’s Mozilla plugins, it has a really buggy plugin wrapper for Flash on X86-64 that even tries to wrap the new 64-bit player(!), and it can’t find your IcedTea (free software version of JAVA) installation.

5. It can’t figure out how to open common Linux file types, or even open up a folder for that matter. (Hint: xdg-open you idiots! If you can’t be bothered to figure it out properly, at least use that!)

So moving on, I tried various lesser-knowns such as Kazakhese, Midori (Which will eventually be great but is still incomplete), etc.

Why use Epiphany?

1. It is completely free software, Firefox isn’t.

2. It is an official part of GNOME.

3. Since it’s a part of GNOME, it obeys their Human Interface Guidelines (Firefox doesn’t) and uses GTK+ to natively draw its interface (Firefox uses the much slower and buggy XUL and tries to disguise itself as a native app).

4. It should work with any plugin Firefox does as Epiphany uses Gecko like Firefox does. Even when they switch to Webkit eventually (same as Google Chrome and Apple Safari), the Netscape Plugin specification will still be used. It can also render any page Firefox can.

5. Firefox extensions have a lot of overhead and can be cumbersome to load/unload, Epiphany extensions turn off or on instantly (Yes it has Adblock).

6. They remove the maze of pointless and redundant configuration options and make a browser that you would instantly walk up and just use.

7. There doesn’t need to be any separate themes engine because it simply uses your GNOME theme.

8. They don’t make you agree to a EULA (End User License Agreement) like Firefox does when you open it up the first time. (Bringing you the Windows experience)

9. It performs better and uses fewer resources.

10. I can has awesomebar! (In GNOME 2.26)

How to install Epiphany:

sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser epiphany-extensions

How to remove Firefox if you like Epiphany better:

sudo apt-get purge firefox ubufox firefox-3.0 firefox-3.0-branding firefox-3.0-gnome-support firefox-gnome-support xulrunner-gnome-support

Epiphany

Mandriva 2009.0: Much improved since last year

Last year I gave a mixed review to Mandriva 2008.1 (Spring) and I would like to take the opportunity to retract many of the bad points:
After having gone over 2009.0, both Free (on my desktop) and One (on my laptop), I feel that Mandriva 2009 is much improved, I’ll go over some talking points here.

Installation:

On the Free DVD, there’s not really a whole lot you must mess with, you can if you want but there’s not much return on investment as most of the defaults with the preselected desktop environments are fairly good and you probably won’t need to remove more than a package or two when it’s done anyway.

I chose the GNOME edition, and there’s a few things I want to point out with the installer itself:

1. Mandriva is one of the few distributions that lets you have the  XFS file system on /boot with GRUB as your bootloader, so all you really need is SWAP and one / partition with XFS if that’s all you want. Ubuntu will stop you, complain that you should use LILO as your boot loader instead, clicking continue will go ahead and install then fail to install GRUB, even though you should expect that it would use LILO instead, since it did let you continue and there are no user options to let you pick your own bootloader. The work around ends up being a small  /boot partition on Ext3 if you want to use XFS with Ubuntu.

This has supposedly been fixed for Jaunty starting with Alpha 5, but due to bugs in the Ubuntu installer, I ended up having to work around it anyway, whether Jaunty Final will be any better with that is anyone’s guess, in any event I appreciate Mandriva giving me choices instead of simply assuming I’m too stupid to set up my partitions.

The One CD perhaps has better bootloader options, but you can fix anything you don’t like in Free by going to the Bootloader preferences in the Mandriva Control Center, I have it clear /tmp on every boot and changed it from 10 seconds to 3 for the countdown before booting the default kernel.

2. In the case of the Free DVD, I ended up getting the Server kernel somehow, but in looking around, I noticed that Mandriva has many other kernels you can use (Ubuntu has generic and generic), so I ended up using kernel-linus-smp, which is the kernel straight from kernel.org with no modifications, et up for multi-processor/multi-core systems, I set up Nvidia as a DKMS driver so that it build modules for kernel-linus automatically, so I am impressed.

Ubuntu on the other hand uses heavily patched kernels based on Debian’s already heavily patched kernels, these can produce a better kernel, but they also introduce bugs that don’t exist in the vanilla kernel or even in other distributions.

3. You do have to edit your Timezone and monitor/video card settings or else it may reboot with the wrong resolution and using the unaccelerated VESA driver (And set for New York’s timezone), I selected 1680 x 1050 Generic Monitor with Nvidia 6100 or later, this brings the system up with the 2d accelerated NV driver until you can get around to installing the Nvidia binary module.

Last year, there was no option for 1680 x 1050, and even after installing the Nvidia driver, I still could not get my monitor to go higher than 1400 x 900.

You can get Nvidia and other drivers and codecs by simply enabling the Penguin Liberation Front and Mandriva Non-Free repositories using Easy URPMI, then visiting the hardware configuration section of Mandriva Control Center, it should offer you any packages you need to make your wifi work just by going there with the PLF/Non-Free repos enabled, but to make your video card driver install, highlight it, select run config tool, and then it should pop up offering you the binary driver for it, it’ll ask you to log out and back in, but you should reboot to avoid trouble

(For Broadcom users, just follow the steps for the firmware you need for kernel 2.6.25 or newer here, Mandriva does have the B43 firmware cutter, but you need to visit the hardware applet so it can offer you wpa_supplicant and a couple other things, Broadcom has never been an exact science on Linux laregly because they’re uncooperative and the driver has been the product of reverse engineering)

One already has 3d video drivers and can play MP3, I really haven’t dug into that too much cause my laptop is fairly old.

If packages seem out of date, you can enable the backports repo and update them, I do recommend cherry picking what you absolutely need and then disabling Backports again though.

To get better multimedia/dvd playback, remove codeina and install gstreamer-ffmpeg, gstreamer-plugins-ugly, gstreamer-plugins-bad, libdvdcss2 (lib64dvdcss2 if you’re on X86-64), vlc, easytag, and Banshee (if you dislike Rhythmbox)

4. Compiz is there, but you have to visit the 3d effects applet in the hardware section of MCC, and it’ll download everything you need.

5. If you don’t want to be bugged for your CD every time you install something, disable the CD repositories and it should grab everything from your online ones.

Office:

Mandriva 2009 has OpenOffice 3.0, It’s mostly Microsoft compatible and can even import Office 2007 XML if you don’t mind the formatting being a little off, OpenOffice is fairly standard, it also includes Scribus, Planner, and Homebank, so you should be able to get by without things like Quicken as well.

Gaming:

Mandriva has most of the usual suspects in the repos, a notable exception was Sauerbraten which I had to build myself, pretty much the same deal as in Fedora, if anyone knows of any good place to stuff a tarball, I’d be happy to upload my build.

Wine in the repo is really really old (1.1.4), I installed the Wine from the Mandriva section of WineHQ (1.1.16), but the sound won’t work unless you install libalsa-plugins-pulseaudio, after that, Mandriva will of course support any Windows games which Wine does. (Quite a few more these days than it used to), I’ve got Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Microsoft’s Age of Mythology, Steam with Portal and all the Half Life and HL 2 games, Halo Combat Evolved, good stuff.

Connecting to Windows shares:

Mandriva saw my Windows shares out of the box, and could browse them through Nautilus immediately.

Look and Feel:

Mandriva sports the Ia Ora theme, which is quite pretty, the only things I felt compelled to change are wallpaper and default Compiz settings, you can get ccsm (CompizConfig Settings Manager) and all the extra Compiz plugins and tweak it all you want.

Screen savers? xscreensaver and the Really Slick Screensavers packages will give you dozens.

Overall:

On my completely subjective rating scale……4.9 out of 5.

Never Gonna Give You Up!