Crowded ticket-counters hack

If you’re in a hurry to get your ticket, and all the lines in front of the ticket-counters are crowded, choose the one with the highest number of groups (families, friends, etc.) in it; these are usually easy to identify with a quick glance.

You can probably tell the reason already: in a family, there will only be one purchase (the parent buys tickets for all members), so it’s four persons off the line at one go. It works similarly with other groups. √ Jun 27th, 2005

Odeo first impressions

A few days ago i got an invite for Odeo, the brainchild Evan Williams and Noah Glass (everyone keeps forgetting Noah!), aims to be your one-stop shop for all your podcasting needs. (Thankfully, as noted, “podcast” isn’t a frequently used term in the site.)

Positive impressions and a short intro
Finding podcasts to listen to is a breeze: shows can be tagged, commented on by other uses (think Flickr here), individual podcasts (called “shows”) can be added to your queue to check if this podcast feed (called “channel”) is worth it, and subscribing to channels is a one click process. This is how you find podcasts. You then have to download the Odeo Syncr (a one-time download) which checks your queue when you tell it to, and downloads the podcasts to your computer.

Negative impressions
Now here’s a list of things that bugged me. Odeo is in beta and they’re asking for feedback, so many of these bugs were probably inevitable — here’s to hoping parts of this list (sent Odeo a few minutes ago) are implemented.

• I’m starting with the one that’s too obvious: Odeo’s tagline is “Listen, Sync, Create”; except that the “Create” part isn’t done yet. Uh-oh.
• Poor ID3 tags: there are two points i’d like to make here: first, podcasters, if your goal is having your shows end up in my iPod, please make sure your podcasts are tagged. This should be part of “Podcasting 101”; when your tags are incomplete or non-existent, browsing through them in iTunes/iPod is more difficult than it should be. Second point, is where Odeo comes in: if the podcast received via the Odeo Syncr is poorly tagged (or doesn’t have any tags at all), why doesn’t the Syncr tag it? Use the schema below:
  
  Artist = Channel Owner's Name
Album = Channel's Name
Title = Show's Name
URI (for ID3v2 tags) = Show's URI

Regarding the Odeo Syncr

• A percentage (“% of download complete”) or “time left” indication along with the visual progress bar would be nice.
• No “pause/resume” functionality: almost done with downloading that podcast when your connection broke? tough luck, you’ll have to download it all over again. The lack of such a feature is annoying.
• a desktop shortcut to the download folder is created each and every time it’s running. Look, you’ve created the shortcut the first time, I’ve checked where my files are located but I don’t need it any more. so, there’s no need to restore it every single time.

Miscellaneous

• Until they fix this: if your username starts with a capital letter, when you log-in make sure to replace it with its lowecase counterpart, otherwise you’re getting an error. I would turn my username to all-lowercase but I can’t find an option to do so.
• Dan Cederholm, involved in the site’s design, provides some background info on the team behind Odeo.
• Bonus points to Odeo for their funny 404 page linking to this.
• On the Syncr’s “About” window (see image below) it says that it’s based on BitTorrent technology. This makes me wonder if there are plans to have the user upload/seed the podcasts he receives — we’ll see.

√ Jun 25th, 2005

Puerta's impressive comeback

Today’s Roland Garros men’s final (the first all-lefty since 1946) was a joy to watch. 19-year old Rafael Nadal beat Mariano Puerta [3-1 6-7 (6), 6-3, 6-1, 7-5] to win the French Open. Steven Wine did a fine reporting for the AP, for those of you who missed the match, or want to read more about it:

• “King of clay Rafael Nadal wins French Open at 19”
• “Puerta loses French final but wins fans”

We were really sorry to watch Puerta lose though. Leaving Nadal’s arrogant look aside (which is to be expected from a teenager who beat Roger Federer on the semi-finals, on the day of his 19th birthday), we were rooting for Puerta for another, far more important reason: the Argentinian’s background raises his accomplishment to heroic proportions.

Banned for nine months after testing positive for clenbuterol at the Vina del Mar tournament in Chile in October 2003, he was ranked 440th last August — his current ATP rank is 21 (talk about a comeback).

Some choice quotes from “Puerta continues comeback in Paris”, after beating Guillermo Canas on June 1st to enter the semi-finals:

Despite the setback of sitting out so much ATP Tour action, Puerta insisted Wednesday’s win at Roland Garros did not give him any added satisfaction, and he insisted his focus was fully trained on the future.

“I don’t feel bitter about what happened, I don’t waste my time thinking about the past,” he said. “I have overcome what I went through. It allowed me to be stronger.

“When I was not playing, I went through some very tough times. It was strange not to be allowed to play tennis. I worked very hard to come back.”

And from “Yet another comeback for Puerta on his way to the final”, after beating Nikolay Davydenko on June 3rd:

“I had two years when I was almost out of the circuit,” Puerta said. “I can’t believe that on Sunday I’m going to play the final of Roland Garros. I don’t even know how to explain that.”

Puerta’s suspension began in October 2003 after he tested positive for clenbuterol, a drug whose effects resemble those of anabolic steroids by promoting muscle growth. An investigative panel determined a doctor prescribed the drug to Puerta to treat asthma.

Now, at 26, he’s playing the best tennis of his life.

“I work really hard, six, seven hours a day. I don’t stop. Sunday also,” Puerta said. “When I came back, I was prepared for very tough moments, to play anywhere. I was ready to sacrifice. I never complained about anything. I was humble and prepared to overcome any barrier.”

In his first Grand Slam final in his nine-year career, Puerta, who considers clay his favorite surface, had assumed an offensive role for almost the entire span of the match, being constantly on the attack (and a joy to watch); but, “hampered by a sore thigh and weary from consecutive 3 1/2 -hour five-setters in the previous two rounds” (as Steven Wine points out), and also thanks to some unsuccessful final strikes (he’s got to work that one — lost quite a few points where he could “kill” the opponent), he lost to a super fast and magnificent, on his defensive tasks, Nadal.

Mariano Puerta won at least one fan today, and if he keeps it up that way, the best is yet to come for his career.

Further studying

• ATP Tennis Player Profile
• Yahoo! Tennis Player Profile
• Topix.net News Tracker
• Yahoo! Photo Gallery - Men’s Final (look at the first 4-5 pages — post photo taken from Y! Sports)

√ Jun 6th, 2005

iTunes and ID3 tag management

It’s unclear exactly how iTunes handles ID3 tags when you’re editing a track’s properties.

An intro
For those not following this stuff close, we’ve got —generally speaking— two versions of ID3 tags (and a track can carry them both):

• ID3v1 (actually ID3v1.1): 128 bytes long, located at the end of the file, fields can only carry a limited number of characters, etc.
• ID3v2 (actually ID3v2.3.0 — are there any programs that write ID3v2.4.0?): extendable/expandable (up to 256MB long!?), located at the beginning of the file, no character limit on the fields, support for pictures, etc.

The tests
(Please note that this is iTunes for Windows we’re talking about.)

I did a few tests to find out how iTunes messes with the two versions, by adding/editing the info of a track that had:

• neither an ID3v1, nor an ID3v2 tag
• only an ID3v1 tag
• only an ID3v2 tag
• both an ID3v1 and an ID3v2 tag, with different information on each

The results
In all of my tests, iTunes would only edit (or add, in the case of the first two tests) the ID3v2 tag.

It makes sense that iTunes only wants to “speak” with ID3v2 since it’s the one that supports album art, and “richer” metadata, which is the whole music organizing mantra. We should also note, that in the last case, where the track carried both an ID3v1 tag and an ID3v2 tag with different information on each, iTunes would read the ID3v2 tag and neglect the ID3v1 one.

This is generally good news for me, since all of my tracks are stripped from their ID3v1 tags, and I only deal with ID3v2. Thus, I know that when I have to edit a track’s info from within iTunes, no ID3v1 tag will be suddenly added (as is the case with Creative’s PlayCenter; don’ even get me started with that bloatware).

Something wrong here?
But, there’s something wrong with this behaviour, isn’t it?

ID3v1 may suck, but there are still MP3 players out there (mostly those CD players that can handle MP3 — and that includes most car audio players too) that can only read ID3v1.

You can see where this is going.

You’ve just burned a CD with MP3 tracks using iTunes, so that you can listen to it in your car stereo. And when “…Baby One More Time” (OK, we’re pushing things here deliberately) starts blasting through your speakers , the LCD display reads “ARTIST: brittany spaers”, “SONG: 1 more time”.

You’re certain you’ve tagged Britney’s album properly, and know how to spell her name; you check your iTunes’ library again, and you confirm this.

So what’s happening here?

As we’ve described above, iTunes only interacts with ID3v2, so you’re out of luck in fixing this from within Apple’s music management program (you’ve got to revert to a separate tag editing program, or maybe “Winamp” → “File Info”, and do some manual editing.)

Proposed solution?
I can only see one way of fixing this.

iTunes should always update (if it already exists), or create (if it doesn’t) the correspondent ID3v1 tag when you add tracks to the library, or modify their information. This sucks for people like me who want to avoid ID3v1 tags entirely, because I got no use for’em, but we’ve got to think of people who listen to their MP3s in devices that can only read ID3v1.

A few extra notes on this: since ID3v1 has got some character limits on its fields (e.g. “30 characters max. allowed for ‘Artist’”), these ID3v1 fields would obviously only carry the first ‘x’ allowed characters from their ID3v2 counterparts. And in the case of ID3v1 genres, where you can only choose between 80 predefined ones, if the ID3v2 genre doesn’t belong to one of the predefined ones, then the ID3v1 genre field should be left blank.

In an ideal world, Apple would add an option in “Edit” → “Preferences” → “Advanced”:

Keep ID3v1 tags in sync? [x]

Checking it (as shown in the example above) causes iTunes to behave like we’ve described two paragraphs above.

Unchecking this option, removes the ID3v1 tag (if it exists) when adding tracks to your library, and only deals with ID3v2. Again, it doesn’t just ignore ID3v1, it removes it if present, treating it as cruft.

I’d really like to see the “ideal world” solution applied, but Apple hates extra options, so chances of this being realized are slim.

What happens with the Mac version?
As we’ve noted above, this iTunes behaviour can only be confirmed for Windows (the XP version), as this is how we’ve conducted our tests. I’d love to hear from Mac users if the same applies to their case too. √ Jun 1st, 2005