Metallica’s new Album “Death Magnetic” has been so utterly compressed to achieve a super high decibel level, that it sounds like complete shit. The good news is though that the version of the album that was released on Guitar Hero III’s download service has a much more dynamic range and as such, doesn’t sound as bad. According to Ian Shepherd, the new album’s “CD release is roughly 10dB louder than the ‘Guitar Hero’ version – almost twice as loud, on average.”  That’s bad, it means that to hear all the sounds in the music, one would have to turn up the player to an unbearable level, in which it is uncomfortable to listen to and/or damaging to the ears.

Waveform comparison between Guitar Hero (top) and album (bottom) versions.

There’s been a “war” between audio mastering technicians to basically see who can make the loudest track. The reason behind the increasing loudness is simple: loud tracks stand out in noisy situations, mono speakers (iPhone, YouTube, internet radio, etc), and on the radio.  Rolling Stone covered this topic last year in an article titled, “The Death of High Fidelity,”  calling out U2, the Artic Monkeys and Nirvana for having overly compressed tracks.

The Associated Press is reporting that Legislators have reached an agreement over the bailout plan.  Senator Bob Bennett said, “I now expect that we will indeed have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate (and) be signed by the president.”   Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee said, “We’ve reached a fundamental agreement on a set of principles,” and it looks like the legislation will get pumped through the house sometime soon, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not provided an exact time frame.   It appears as though most of this is just political crossfire and that there are no actual issues that divide the partisan line.   At least the no oversight phrase has been revised.
It also seems McCain’s “suspension” was mere rhetoric.  He said he was going back to Washington, canceling his interviews and rallys, but as seen on Letterman last night, where McCain was scheduled, McCain canceled that show to do an interview with Katie Couric for the evening news.   Some suspension of his campain.  Video of Letterman below:

As I write this, we’re into the second day of stock market recovery after rumors, and now announcements, by the Feds of a systematic approach to address the turmoil in financial markets.  Can it be mere weeks ago that $4 a gallon gas was the intense focus of political rhetoric?  In both cases the situation was deemed a crisis but statements by the politicians in both cases seem equally disconnected from reality.

To wit:  One Democratic response to $4 gas was to shift “obscene” profits from the oil companies, to the poor U.S. consumer.  Fact is, oil companies made less in gross margin on sales (8.3 cents) compared to electronics manufacturers (14.5 cents) computer equipment (13.7 cents) and Microsoft (27.5 cents).  One might say, well look at absolute dollars, the oil companies are rolling it in.  Fact is, oil companies made $86 billion in profit last year (gasp).  But Financial Services, the very source of the current “crisis” made $137 billion.  And information technology companies made $103 billion.  We live in a free enterprise, capitalistic system.  How does government get to say how much profit I can make as an entrepreneur or investor?  Sadly, the Republican mantra of “Drill, baby, drill” makes no more sense.  Fact is, any drilling we launch now will take years to produce results and will not have an appreciable impact on our domestic energy supply.  Nor will tapping reserves.  Nor will the lame brained idea to waive the gas tax so Americans can drive a bit more on our dilapidating highway infrastructure that is underfunded.

Petroleum is a non-renewable, fixed quantity resource.  As it gets scarcer, prices will go up.  This is a law of nature that anyone taking Econ 101 will encounter in the first pop quiz.  The solution will lie in setting proper conditions for investment and development of alternative energy sources.  It’s a point that’s a bit more sophisticated than the political rhetoric, but tapping American ingenuity, resourcefulness and yes (gasp) the pursuit of profit is gonna be the path out of the energy crunch.  And by the way, higher prices are not such a bad thing.  It forces the issue and provides other solutions to be introduced into the marketplace and begin riding down the cost curve.  A bit more sophisticated, yes.  But could we shift the discussion a bit higher up the intellectual food chain?

Okay, fast forward to today.  I believe we just observed more lame rhetoric get stepped on by the Godzilla of reality.  The Feds have been scrambling in a reactive fashion to respond to the crisis in financial markets. (Which in this writer’s opinion makes $4 gas look like child’s play.)  Just about anyone who knows anything about the topic will agree this is the worst situation since the Great Depression.  The specific actions taken with respect to Fanny and Freddy, Lehman Brothers and AIG were “one offs” as officials scrambled to prevent things from getting worse.  These were not comprehensive, systematic actions.  Yesterday, rumors of just such an approach surfaced.  One can argue the merits of the proposal all day long, but suffice it to say some pretty bright financial professionals, people who are not politically born and bred, are behind the design.  Immediate response by the Speaker of the House  and her colleagues was to berate the idea, claiming the American taxpayer should not be saddled with bailing out mistakes of the fat cats on Wall Street.  The system is all the fault of the current administration (perhaps) and the answer lies in more and better regulation.

Well, a briefing just occurred for the politicos, staged by Treasury and Federal Reserve officials.  My hunch is it was akin to explaining how the corral gate is open, all the horses have run away, and looking to more and better regulation is like closing the corral gate.  Only problem is, the horses are still running away and getting farther and more scattered by the second.  Sure, lets keep the gate closed but let’s round up the horses first or we’ll be on foot for the foreseeable future.  When a potential failure of AIG could be described as the financial and economic equivalent of nuclear winter, I bet the dawn of reality set in.

Guess what?  Today the Speaker of the House is all for the plan.

The intro video for Super Smash Brothers Melee music has been replaced by a youtube user with the theme song from the Pokemon animated series and hilarity ensues.   It seems the two are practically interchangeable.

Sometime last night a “hacker” on the forum 4chan.org also called /b/ and anonymous, managed to force their way into Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo! email that had been the subject of some controversy.  She probably had used this personal email because of the lack of oversight and archiving that goes on for official government emails.  At the root of the this is the “troopergate” scandal, and if the accounts had any incriminating emails.  Too bad that sometime last night both her gov.sara@yahoo.com and gov.palin@yahoo.com accounts had been deleted.  Some are saying this constitutes descruction of evidence.  An overview of the “incident” from pastebin (9.17.08@3:45PST):

1. THE INCIDENT
3. WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR:
5. - Very recently an anonymous poster on /b/ claimed to have hacked Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account.
7. - Sarah Palin used the e-mail address gov.sarah@yahoo.com for public communication. Several media outlets have confirmed this fact prior to this “incident”.
9. SOURCE: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/10/palin-email-privilege/
10. SOURCE: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/09/15-7
12. - The e-mail address that the poster hacked was gov.palin@yahoo.com. This second e-mail address, previously unknown publicly, was used for private communcations.
14. - Yahoo e-mail addresses, unlike .gov e-mail addresses, are not subject to archiving and oversight. This fact has led to controversy from several sources, including fellow Republicans, asking her to release e-mails from her Yahoo account.
16. - The anonymous poster apparently panicked, and released the password onto /b/.
18. - Several other posters on /b/ took screenshots of the Inbox and various e-mails.
20. - Some of the screenshots reference several people in Alaska state government. One of these people is Sean Parnell, Lieutenant Governor of Alaska. Parnell mentions KFQD Radio’s Dan Fagan, to whom he gave an interview about Palin’s ACES initiative. Lt. Gov. Parnell’s e-mail address is verified via an Alaska Republican Central Committee contact listing.
22. SOURCE: http://gov.state.ak.us/aces/
23. SOURCE: http://www.alaskarepublicans.com/centralcommittee.aspx
25. - One of the screenshots references the Yahoo account fek9wnr, Todd Palin, Sarah’s husband who is at the heart of the controversy over her use of Yahoo e-mail for public dealings. The fek9wnr account was verified as being Todd Palin via a public posting to an automotive enthusiast BBS from August 2006.
27. SOURCE: http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/centurionconversions/message/2309
29. - Several photographs of her family were allegedly downloaded from the e-mail account.
31. - A scan of profiles.yahoo.com put gov.palin@yahoo.com’s profile update date at 04/05/2008, long before any VP nod was apparent. If this were a fake, the perpetrator would’ve had to travel into the past and create an account or be very good at guessing who the VP candidate would be 5+ months later, not to mention faking an overwhelming amount of e-mails, photographs, verified private cellphone numbers, and other information.
33. - A good samaritan in the /b/ thread reset the password account with the intention of handing it over to Palin, a process known on /b/ as “white knighting”. This locked everyone else out of the account. The “white knight” posted a screenshot to /b/ of his pending message to one of Palin’s contacts about how to recover the account, but made the critical mistake of not blanking out the new password he set.
35. - Several other people in the /b/ thread then apparently logged in using this new password, and they all attempted to reset the password at once, causing a security trap at Yahoo to automatically put a 24-hour lockout on the account.
38. THE AFTERMATH:
40. - Sarah Palin was likely notified of the breach by morning, as she had then deleted both the gov.sarah@yahoo.com address (the one subject to the disclosure controversy in the media) as well as the gov.palin@yahoo.com address (the one that was hacked).
42. - The outright deletion of the accounts can be verified by attempting to pull up the public profile on both addresses, which both existed during the incident.
44. SOURCE: http://profiles.yahoo.com/gov.palin
45. SOURCE: http://profiles.yahoo.com/gov.sarah
47. - Both accounts were deleted simultaneously, thus linking the publicly-known e-mail address “gov.sarah” and the private e-mail address “gov.palin”.
49. - This outright deletion may have the potential to be viewed as destruction of evidence, considering that the e-mails in the now-deleted accounts are the subject of several legal controversies.
51. SOURCE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/03/AR2008090303210_pf.html
53. - Several ZIP, RAR, and 7Z compilations of the downloaded screenshots, contacts, and photos were made available by anonymous individuals.
55. - 4chan is actively (some say over-actively) banning and deleting any posts of the screenshots of Palin’s account, contacts, or family photos.
57. - An anonymous poster to 420chan, using information from the e-mail account’s contact list, attempted to call Bristol Palin’s cellphone number using the AT&T phone relay service. Several others allegedly called the cellphone number itself and got Bristol’s voicemail. These posts were quickly deleted by 420chan moderators.
59. - A poster on /b/ did a lookup on the cellphone number which returned this information:
61. Type: Cell Phone
62. Provider: Dobson Cellular Systems
63. Location: Palmer, AK
65. - An anonymous individual has uploaded some of the screenshots to a photobucket account.
67. SOURCE: http://s405.photobucket.com/albums/pp134/anoncrack/
69. - A poster in /r9k/ e-mailed the compilations to ABC News producer Eamon McNiff who he/she claims is a personal contact of his/hers.
71. - Someone submitted a summary to Digg. As of this writing it has only 12 diggs.
73. SOURCE: http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/The_Incident_Did_4Chan_Anon_Hack_Palin_s_Yahoo_Email
75. - As of right now the media related to the incident sits mostly confined to 4chan and rapidshare, and thus either deleted, censored or under the radar.

Wikileaks has confirmed the authenticity of atleast one of the emails.  As the account dates back to 5 months before Palin was picked as VP, additionally there would be lots of fabrication and personal information that would have to be obtained for these to be faked.  If it looks real, smells real and tastes real, it probably is.    I just can’t believe Palin uses Yahoo! for her email as a state official.

GOP Presidential candidate Senator John McCain was recently interviewed by a local TV station in Maine, when asked about Palin’s foreign policy experience his reputation of straight talk was put to the test.

Reporter: “You’re sure she has the experience, but again I’m just asking for an example. What experience does she have in the field of national security?”

McCain: “Energy.  She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America. She is the Governor of a state where 20% of our energy supply comes from there and we all know that energy is a critical and vital national security issue. We’ve got to stop sending 700 billion dollars of American money to countries that don’t like us very much. She’s very well versed on that issue and she, uh, also represents is a Governor of a state that is right next to Russia and ah, ah, she really understands Russia and their newly aggressive behavior in the world which is also something that we have to be very concerned about.”

Erm, what?  A Governor from Alaska knows more about energy than say, a university professor, or maybe John Dingell, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee?  Senator, the question was about foreign policy not energy policy, so much for straight talk.

[wcsh6.com]

Over at the MSI Wind.net forums, a prize pool is being set up for an experienced OS X coder to develop native drivers for the wifi and sound card.  The wifi card is a Realtek RTL8102E PCI-E, and the sound card is Realtek High Definition Audio, not sure which chip. (More on that here.) The pool’s currently up to about $250.  Easy bucks for an Apple hacker.

The thread can be found here.

It’s been about 2 years since the last major iTunes update, iTunes 7, and Apple’s newest installment adds a couple of key new features.

• Visualizer, purchased from the barbarian group, called magnetosphere which simply replaces the old visualizer.
• Genius automated playlist constructor, and Genius Sidebar. I’ll get into detail on these below.
• Album grid view.
• Support for the new iPod Nano 4G, and iPod Touch 2G, etc.

The most interesting of these new features is obviously the genius feature.  The sidebar simply integrates into your library showing tracks that you might be missing or ones you might like based upon what’s currently playing.  The key thing is that it shows songs you might already have a lot, as well as kind of “cliché” suggestions.    Playing “Long Line of Cars” by Cake, gives reccomendations of artists like Beck, Doughtry, The Decemberists and Death Cab for Cutie.   It also has suggestions for other Cake songs which are already in my library that I ripped straight from the CD.

But the Genius playlist constructor is probably the one that’s going to be used the most often and will be what people call the “key feature” of iTunes 8.  Too bad it’s only a version of party shuffle that takes suggestions from what users have bought on the music store.  For instance, I have the Guitar Hero soundtrack, and if I select say, “The Light That Blinds” by Shadows Fall, I’d be expecting a nice mix of hard rock/metal.  But the 25 song playlist Genius returns is filled with songs from Guitar Hero, since the Shadows Fall song is from Guitar Hero II.

I’ve been playing with this feature a lot to try and figure out how it works; I think I’ve figured it out.  It queries the music store for a list of songs purchased by people who purchased the original track.  Genius then finds ones with similar genre, etc, and uses party shuffles algorithm to randomly pick songs from that list that are also in the user’s library.  It is not an algorithm that compares song BPM or waveform.  This is why songs that aren’t on the iTunes Music Store can’t be used.  Apple and bloggers pandering Genius off as though its the next incarnation of Pandora.  Searching Pandora for The Light That Blinds, returns no Guitar Hero related songs, only ones similar in genre, bpm, waveform, etc, or as Pandora states it, “similar musical qualities.”

How iTunes Genius works. Probably.

Apple also gets to collect tons of usage data on everyone who uses Genius, making it a great feature for both users and Apple.  But it would be nice to see an algorithm instead of randomly picking related songs from the iTunes Music Store.   (Note: This is all speculation.)

With the Let’s Rock event now over, new iPods released, iTunes 8 and iPhone 2.1 on Friday, it seems a fitting time to compile a list of bugs that Apple needs to fix in the new release.  The iPhone is still the best mobile platform even with these, they’re not show stoppers, but they were incredibly annoying.  Oh yeah, Steve Jobs is still not dead.

The following happen while downloading/installing an app on the home screen:

1. If you try to go to settings, the device locks up till the install is done.
2. Text input lags.  Badly.
3. Updated apps reset their position on the home screen to the last page.

General bugs:

1. After updating to 2.0.0, the mail application quit working for no apparent reason.
2. Text messages will sometimes scroll to the top, with no place to type, and the keyboard will appear halfway up the screen then push up and off it.  Not sure why this happens.
3. Text from SMS app will get “stuck” even when the app is closed and appear ghosted over the background on the home screen.
4. When the phone is woken up and unlocked it will sometimes take up to 5 seconds to adjust the screen brightness.
5. Entering text in the SMS app will occasionally lag, with each letter popping up for about 1 second, regardless of how fast the text is actually entered.

Let’s hope that Apple found someone to fill their “security expert” position.

Edit: It appears someone found the iPod Touch 2.1 software here.

Over the course of my last semester in Math courses, I wrote down funny/strange things my professor had said:

• “Please let me know if you can’t see… I’m talking to myself otherwise.”
• “I had a stapler in my bag but I lost it… somewhere…”
• “I really shouldn’t be tell you guys this…”
• “I couldn’t visualize this stuff… so I did really bad and bombed my exams.”
• “Understand what I just did? Great.  If not… well I tried.”
• “Like on this one we sorta learned something.”
• “That might mean something… I dunno.”
• “If you can’t make math class funny, what can ya do?”
• “After an infinite amount of time I’ll get there, but who wants to do that?”
• “I should’ve learned how to spell but I got lazy.”
• “That one dude who blew houses down… he had to have a strong vector with wind.”
• “Why I chose this problem as an example is beyond me.”

I hope I encounter many more interesting professors who’ve overcrowded the language part of their brain with math knowledge.