Mea Vita: Carpe Diem

I have an old Windows NT machine running a mail server which I only use when the main mail server goes down.

I couldn't remember the last time I rebooted it so I checked its uptime tonight:
26,850 hours of uptime.

Click to enlarge

Full screenshot:



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Overview
Yesterday, Apple began selling some songs, from the EMI record label (Frank Sinatra, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, etc), in a new format, called iTunes Plus. Since the new format isn't copy protected it means you can now buy an iTunes Plus song from the iTunes Store and play it on any MP3 player. But, there's one extra, simple, step, you'll need to do to play it on a player other than an iPod; you have to convert the song to MP3 format. Luckily, this feature is already included in iTunes.

One Step Conversion
Simply select a song or a group of songs you want to convert and ctrl-click (right click) on the selection. From the menu, simply choose Convert Selection to MP3. iTunes will make a copy of the original song, in MP3 format, and add it to your iTunes music library.

Details
The "Plus" means several things:

1. No DRM (digital rights management a.k.a. copy protection). This means you can legally make as many copies as you want under the fair-use rules of copyright.

2. Higher quality encoding. Previously, songs purchased on iTunes were encoded at 128 kbps. iTunes Plus songs are recorded at twice that sampling rate (256 kbps).

3. Thirty cents (30¢) more per song. When the iTunes store first launched, 3 songs = 1 Mocha. Even with the higher priced, DRM free songs, that formula still holds true. Plus, you can still buy songs at 99¢, with DRM, if you'd like.

Quality Encoding
In the image, above, you'll see that the original iTunes Plus song was converted, twice, to MP3 (MPEG audio file). The 4.3 MB file is the MP3 with the iTunes encoding conversion rate set to High Quality (160 Kbps) and the 6.8 MB MP3 is an MP3 file with Custom (256 kbps) encoding.

AAC vs. MP3 at 256 Kbps
Personally, I've noticed that the AAC format sounds louder than the MP3 at 256 kbps. It's interesting to note that the MP3 file, recorded at 256 kbps, is smaller than the original AAC encoding format. You can change the default encoding when importing or converting songs through iTunes' Advanced preferences.

I recently moved from a G-5 desktop to a Mac Pro using Mac OS X's default data migration option which is available the first time you turn on a new Macintosh. The only problem was I forgot about the other disk partition I have which is running Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) until all my data was migrated. Now what do I do?

Repartition on the Fly
The answer was simple. I used Apple's Boot Camp beta partition option to dynamically create a new disk partition. Of course, Boot Camp thought it was going to install Windows on the new partition. Instead, I just installed Leopard.

I started using Hamachi's VPN solution a few weeks ago and it's been great. It touts itself as "zero conf" which means it needs no configuration and you can just launch the client app and it magically works through firewalls. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Simply start the app and create a network with any name (up to 64 characters) and it will create a network as long as one with that name isn't already created. Passwords can be unlimited length. Anyone can launch the Hamachi client and join your network as long as they know your password.

The brilliance in Hamachi is two fold. First is the fact that it assigns each client a unique "public" IP address that looks like this: 5.x.x.x. The beauty of IP addresses which begin with 5 is that the IANA has reserved the entire block of 16 million IPs. This means Hamachi's IP addresses are valid but never assigned making them semi-private. Most private IPs are used on home computer's behind a NAT router which usually look like 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x, or 192.168.x.x, or self-assigned IP addresses like 169.254.x.x. The other nice thing is that the Hamachi Root Server is only used to initiate a connection by helping clients find each other. Once the connection is made each client on your VPN passes its encrypted traffic directly to other clients on the same network.

I've worked on Windows computers much longer than I've worked on Macs. As a software engineer, I've realized a couple key issues with Windows.

Windows Registry
This is a single point failure on Windows. The registry database is used to store the settings and options for Windows' users, applications, preferences, and hardware. When Windows boots up, it reads this database of settings. If the registry gets corrupted, it can render Windows unbootable. When applications install and uninstall themselves they update the registry. When a program fails to uninstall correctly, it can leave cruft in the registry which can lead to performance and stability problems. This is why Windows computers really do slow down, over time, as you install and uninstall more and more applications.

How does Mac OS X get by without a registry? Simple, each application has preferences which are stored in preferences folders. For user specific preferences, the folder is stored under the user's home folder. For system wide preferences, the folder is stored in a globally accessible location. The preferences data is a human readable file (called a plist which is short for property list), which can be edited by hand - but manually editing a plist is rare. The plist file is only read when needed - unlike the Windows Registry, which must fully load to complete the boot up process. If the plist file becomes corrupted it can usually just be deleted and the respective application will create a new one the next time it loads.

Networking
On the desktop computer there are basically two operating systems: Windows and Unix.

Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, etc, are different flavors of Windows with roots that go back to MS-DOS circa 1980. Free BSD, Linux, Open BSD, AT&T, Solaris, and Mac OS X all have their roots in unics [sic] circa 1969.

In the world of high-tech, new usually means better, but that's not the case when it comes to security. MS-DOS got its start on PCs in the early 1980s when there was no local area network and there was no need to log into a PC. Unix, on the other hand, ran on mainframe computers which were accessible by multiple users at once. So, from the beginning, unix had the concept of users, permissions, and security.

Retrofitting security into Windows has been its biggest Achilles' heel. Of course, with more than 90% of the desktop market share it's also a big target.

I joke that Windows is an "open system" in that all of its ports and services were left wide open for attacks.