I quite enjoy looking at the puzzle and trying to get the long word, but I lack the patience to list out all the others. A couple of years ago I decided to try to automate doing the puzzle – yes, I know it’s cheating – and here are the results. Read on for some geeky Python stuff.

There are essentially two ways to do this problem: start with the letters given in the puzzle and try to construct words from them (which is what us human types do); or start with a long list of words and see how many of them you can make from the target letters. That involves a lot more processing but less actual thought, so it’s ideal for computers.

There a couple of disadvantages of processing the whole dictionary. First of all, you need a word list. Happily, most computers have one of these. Secondly, it could take quite a lot of computing power to go right through the dictionary. I would have been thrown out of programming school in the old mainframe days for even thinking such a thing. And the program I ended up writing did prove a bit of a hog – it ran for nearly a minute on my old Powerbook G4, but its takes just a couple of seconds on my brand new MacBook Pro. There’s a philosophical point in there, but I won’t labour it.

So, to the program. I used Python for this, because it’s a nice clean way of burning CPU cycles, I mean expressing yourself. And because I don’t know C :-).

And the program is surprisingly concise. I’ve put the whole listing of it online, but here I’ll step through it to show how it works.

The core concept I used in this program is a signature. A signature of a word or a string of letters is a list of 26 numbers, to count the number of times each letter a-z occurs in the word. Using signatures you can tell whether you can make word “A” out of word “B”, by checking whether each of the 26 numbers in A’s signature is less than or equal to the corresponding number in B’s signature. The strategy for the program is to check whether each candidate word from the dictionary could be made from the target letters.

Here’s the part of the program that calculates a signature:

def sig(w):
	l = list(w)
	lettercount = range(26)
	for i in range(26):
		lettercount[i]=l.count(alpha[i])
	return lettercount

This works by converting the string w to a list, and exploiting the count property of a Python lists to count occurences of each letter in turn. This is the only explicit loop in the entire program :-).

And here’s the bit that compares two signatures:

def sigin(small,large):
	return min(map(lambda x,y:x<=y,small,large))

This uses a couple of other cool Python features. The lambda construct is a way of inventing a function that you only use in that line, so it never gets a name. The lambda here just compares two values and gives you a True if the second is bigger than or equal to the first.

The other useful feature here is the map construct, which applies the function its given (the lambda, in this case) separately to every member of the lists its given as arguments. The effect here is to return a list whose members is True if the corresponding member of the first argument is smaller than or equal to the corresponding member of the second argument. The min at the end means that the result is False if any of the individual comparisons are. The effect is to compare each of the 26 numbers in the signatures of two words and tell you whether you could make one word from the other.

One more subsidiary piece of the program:

def get_wordlist(letter):
	wl = open('/usr/share/dict/web2','r').readlines()
	return [w.strip('\n') for w in wl if (len(w)>4) and (len(w)<11) and 0<w.count(letter) and w.lower()==w]

This just gets the dictionary – well, list of words that we know (that’s what the readlines() bit does) – the rest of it strips newline characters, remove short words, long words, words with capital letters in, and words which don’t contain the central letter of the target string.

There’s another neat Python feature in use here – it’s called a list comprehension. It’s the bit in square brackets, which has the effect of turning one list (called wl) into another by selecting members of wl (the bit after the if) and transforming the members selected (before the for).

Still with me? Well, here’s the main bit of the program:

def check_target(letters):
	if len(letters)<>9:
		return 'Argument should be exactly nine letters'
	wordlist = get_wordlist(letters[4])
	tarsig = sig(letters)
	result = [w for w in wordlist if sigin(sig(w),tarsig)]
	result = [(len(w)==9) and w.upper() or w for w in result]
	return  reduce(lambda x,y:x+" "+y,result)

After sanity checking the argument, this gets a list of candidate words from the dictionary, calculates the signature of the target letters, then generates a list of candidate words which could be made from the letters by comparing signatures. The final two lines just format the result by capitalising any nine-letter words, and using another lambda function, glues the resulting list together as a single string.

The result? A concise program which does some seriously heavy lifting. And it’s arguably even useful!

To test this program, you need a Python interpreter on your computer. Macs, Linuxes and BSDs usually have this already. Just pull up a terminal window and type python – if you get something like this:

wairua:~ colinjackson$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jul 23 2008, 11:00:16)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

…you definitely have Python. (Hitting crtl-D will stop the interpreter and get you back to the usual prompt.) If you are using a Windows machine, there are free Python interpreters available. Google is your friend.

Once you have Python working, copy and paste the program into a file called, say, target.py.

The other thing to check is that you have a system dictionary – a long list of words in the English language – available. On my Mac it’s at

/usr/share/dict/web2

If yours is somewhere else you will need to adjust the line in the program which reads the dictionary.

Then use the following command line:

python target.py "carthorse"

And you should see:

ache acher achor ahorse arch arche archer arches ashet ashore asthore cahot cash cathro chao chaos char chare charer charet charr chart charter chase chaser chaste chat cheat chert chest choate chore chorea chort chose corah cosh cosharer cosher coth cothe crash crasher each earshot earth echo erth eschar etch ethos haec haet hare harr hart haste haster hate hater hear hearst heart hearts heat hector hero hers hest hoar hoarse hoast hoer hora horse horsecar horser horst hose host hoster oath ocher ochrea ocht orach orchat ORCHESTRA oshac other rach rache rash rasher ratch ratcher rath rathe rather reach recash rechaos rechar resh retch rhea rheocrat rhetor roach rocher rochet rotch rother sachet scarth scathe scho scrath seah search sech seth share sharer shat shea shear sheat sher shoat shoe shoer shor shore shorer short shorter shot shote socht stacher starch starcher stech stoach stocah tach tache tahr tash tche teach tech thar theca thoraces thore those thro throe tocher toher torah torch torcher tosh tosher trah trash troche

Cool!

Sometime after that, Radio New Zealand puts my radio slot online as sound files in ogg and mp3. Thanks, guys. But, I don’t know in advance what the file names are going to be so I can’t link them directly from my post. In practice I generally link to the download page for the whole of Nine to Noon and leave it at that.

Recently, Hamish wrote to me and suggested that I link my sound files directly from my post. I told him that I was far too lazy, but it has set me thinking – surely I can get a computer to do this.

This is the first in an ongoing series of posts about a little programming project I’ve started to automate the process of adding links to the sound files as they become available. I’ll collect the program together in a page on the site.

If you have any interest, read on and see just how easy free and open source tools make it to throw together something like this.

For now, I’m going to concentrate on the code necessary to read the addresses of the sound files from Radio New Zealand’s site and upload them to my blog. In a later post, I’ll talk about how to set this up as an automatic job that runs at the right time of the week – that is, just after I finish my radio slot.

I decided to write this in Python. That’s not because I’m religious about Python, but because it’s the scripting language I know least badly. Python is open source, it’s GPL compatible, and it runs on the Mac I’ll develop it on as well as on the GNU/Linux server that the program will probably end up running on. And there’s good documentation available on the Net. A primer is here.

As an aside, I want to point out that I’m self-taught as far as Python is concerned. My style is, probably, not the best. Sorry. Any real Pythonistas who might read this – please be gentle. I’m trying to convey a sense of how easy it is to work this stuff out, not convert people to professional status in one hit.

Python’s model is to keep all non-core language features in modules. These are chunks of Python code that you explicitly import into your program. This approach keeps the language clean and simple because you don’t have an enormous amount of other material you have to learn – just the modules you need, when you need them. And it makes the language extensible because it allows others to write modules which you can install. In this project I wound up using several modules that ship with Python and one that is separate.

To get started, I call up python in a terminal window:

taniwha:~ colinjackson$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jan 17 2008, 19:35:16)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

We are now in the Python interpreter. Anything we type from now on will be treated as a Python statement and run immediately, if possible. This is a great way of figuring out what has to go into a simple program. As I get statements to work, I copy them into a file in a text editor. Any editor will do – Textedit is fine. I use BBedit.

There are three basic steps to the program: 1) get the web page with links to the sound files from Radio New Zealand; 2) extract the links to the sound files; and 3) edit them into to the last entry on my blog.

Getting the links to the sound files we do by downloading the web page that they live on and parsing it for the links. Python provides a module called urllib which we can use for this. Let’s get it:

import urllib

Let’s save the address of the web page at Radio New Zealand:

rnzrurl = "http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon"

(This web page only has links to my sound files on it on Thursdays, and only then after I have done my slot.)

Reading the documentation, we find that urllib has a function called urlopen which returns a file handle – it lets you treat a web page as a file. And since this is a file, we can use the read() method on it to get the contents as a Python variable.

page = urllib.urlopen(rnzurl).read()

Now, in page we have a string of characters which is the HTML source of the web page. Maybe it has the sound file links in, maybe not.

(I haven’t covered for the possibility that the website was down or our Net access broken. Let’s keep it simple for now.)

There are lots of ways to find out whether the links we want are in the file, and to extract them. The way I used is with regular expressions, or regexes. Think of a regex as a pattern that you look for in a longer string.

Regexes are immensely powerful but have a fairly steep learning curve. I know just enough of them to achieve what I want, usually by poring over the relevant documentation.

We need a pattern to match the links to my sound files. The sound file names always contain the string New_Technology, and they are embedded in an HTML link statement.

A bit of trial and error on the Python command line got me to this pattern:

'"http.*?New_Tech.*?"'

The * matches any number of characters, and the ? following it specifies that we are looking for the shortest string that matches. The “http introduces a link and the trailing double quote closes it. Don’t worry if the detail isn’t clear; it’s the principle that matters.

Python implements regexes in (of course) a module, called re. The line we need looks like this:

links = re.findall(r'"http.*?New_Tech.*?"',page)

The findall method returns, as you might expect, all matching strings, so that way I the links to both the sound files. They are presented as a Python list.

We should check that there are two links, and we will in the proper program, but for now let’s just plough on. We need to assemble these two links into the correct style to go on the blog:

linktext = ' <a href='+links[0]+'>ogg</a> or <a href='+links[1]+'>mp3</a>'

You’ll notice that the first element of a list is numbered 0 and we use square brackets to pick list members.

Now we need use Python to edit these links into the last entry on the blog. For this, we’ll use a handy Python module called wordpresslib. It’s not part of the standard Python distribution; I found it by Googling, downloaded it and manually installed it into the site-packages directory in the Python library on my computer. Mental note: I’ll need to do that on any other computer I want to run this on, like my GNU/Linux server.

Initially I was getting strange HTML errors – 404s and 301s for blogs I know are there – until I found this page which showed me I had to point to a page /xmlrpc.php under my blog. Here’s the code to set up access to the most recent blog posting:

blogaddr = "http://it.gen.nz/xmlrpc.php"
blog = wordpresslib.WordPressClient(blogaddr,"colin",password)
blog.selectBlog(0)
post = blog.getLastPost()

The Python object post is an instance of a class in wordpresslib. It has an attribute description which contains the text of the post body until the “more”. I always end these with “download the audio” until I edit links to the sound files in.

Our friend the re module comes in handy to split the post before the “download the audio”:

frags = re.split(r'download the audio',post.description)

We only care about the first element of frags – add the link text and a closing full stop, then put it back into the post.

post.description = frags[0]+'download the audio as' + linktext + "."

Now, write it back to the blog:

blog.editPost(post.id,post,1)

and we’re done. Success! And it only took a dozen or so statements.

There’s some more detail to do – although not a lot – waiting for the links to become available on the web page, error checking and the like. And it needs to be put onto a server and set off by a cron job that will run it every Thirsday morning. But, for now, I’ll wrap this up and post the code to the finished program later.

On the right is what this blog looks like in IE6. Two things are wrong. The white background around the green Adium logo shouldn’t be there – that background is set as transparent. IE6’s forerunner, IE5, gets that one wrong as well. It’s ugly, but I can live with that problem.

The really, really annoying thing as far as I’m concerned is that the right hand column displays below the main column, so most people will never see it. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It’s telling that only IE6 of the 50-odd browsers I tested using browsershots.org got this wrong. IE6 is old, and home users will probably have upgraded by now (hint), but many are stuck with IE6 at their workplaces, where IT departments like to control desktop configurations and need a very good reason to change versions. And the statistics for this blog show that IE6 makes up only about 2.5% of visitors, but that might be because the site is barely usable in IE6.

This must be an example of IE not following standards. Lots of websites have separate code – effectively separate web pages – for IE browsers so that their pages render the same way on IE as they do on other browsers.

I’m left wondering why IE was so non-compliant for so long. I’d like to find an explanation besides incompetence or hubris in assuming it could ignore standards and force the web to its bidding. To its credit, Microsoft realises it has a problem in this area and the latest IE8 beta makes a real effort to be more standards-compliant. That leads to other problems for sites with IE-specific code, but let’s not go there now.

In the meantime, I’m faced with trying to debug this thing for an old browser on a platform I don’t own, or just giving in and accepting that some people won’t be able to read it even if they want to. Sigh.

That’s a shame, because the Genius facility on iTunes 8 is rather good – it suggests things you might like and haven’t already heard, and it will build you a playlist of things you already own based on a song you select. Cool. I can see I’m going to use this a lot.

But for now, it’s no good to you if you are running Vista. No doubt Apple will fix this, but in the meantime, hold off on upgrading to iTunes 8 if you are on Vista.

Update: This has now been fixed. It’s now safe to update your iTunes to version 8 even if you have Vista. If you have Vista and an “old” copy of iTunes 8, you may need to remove iTunes and reinstall. Happy downloading!

Further update:The latest whizzy iPod touches won’t work on WPA-secured WiFi networks. This is a biggie – you’d be nuts to “secure” your network using anything else. Don’t Apple test things any more? I suppose we’ll see an update pushed to squash this bug, as well.

Adium is a very nice open source Mac IM client. It does far more different IM services than iChat, which Apple provides. Adium does nearly every services out there, presenting all your contacts and chats through the same interface, with the exception of (and this is a biggie) Skype IM. Helpful New Zealander Eion Robb fixed that for everyone some time ago with his Skype plugin for Adium, and that made Adium cover every IM service I was interested in. Bravo.

Recently, Adium has moved to version 1.3, and a fine version upgrade it seems as well, giving you access to Facebook chat among other things. The problem is that the upgrade breaks the Skype plugin, so someone upgrading Adium in the normal course of things loses connectivity to their Skype-only contacts.

Happily, this is easy to fix. You need to:

1. download the latest plugin
2. double-click the zip file it arrives in (you get a plugin file)
3. right-click the plugin file and select “Show Package Contents”
4. a Finder instance opens showing what’s inside, open the “Contents” folder
5. open the

   info.plist

   file by double-clicking, then open the section marked “root” by clicking the triangle

6. You can now see a list of “properties” and their values. We’re going to edit a couple. You need the value of

   CFBundleVersion

   to read 1.3. Double-click the number and retype as necessary.

7. You also need to add a new value. Click the CFBundleversion property then press the button “New Sibling”. Then change its proerty to read

   AIMinimumAdiumVersionRequirement

   and set the value to 1.3

8. Now just quit out of the Property Editor (red jellybean, you know the drill), close the Finder, then double-click on the SkypePlugin to install. (NB – stop Adium and Skype before you do this.) Works for me!

Thanks to the good folks at adiumxtras for this.

Many of us have laptops that we take with us when we travel for business, and sometimes when we travel for pleasure as well. What other stuff do we take? Over the page, I’m listing the contents of my travel kitbag. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. Laptop. (well, d’oh!)

 

2. Bag. I use an Eclipse STM backpack for informal use or a Samsonite wheelie with telescopic handle when I need to appear more formal or stay overnight. Both have special laptop compartments and both are hand baggage.

 

3. Multiplug when going overseas. I usually put a spare one and 4 way power board in my suitcase as well.

 

4. Wireless mouse. Good for presenting.

 

5. Vodafone 3G card, but only for NZ use because of insane data roaming costs.

 

6. A wireless access point and a short Ethernet cable. Lets me go wireless if all I have is a socket in the wall.

 

7. External hard drive. Backup everyday while away on business, travels in my suitcase.

 

8. Laptop lock. Good for hotel rooms.

 

9. Some USB thumb drives.

 

10. An iPod connector.

 

11. A DVI to VGA adaptor (my laptop has a DVI port only).

 

12. Card reader and mini-USB lead to connect to my camera.

 

13. Noise-cancelling headphones – in my travel kit with eye shades and blow up pillow.

What else do people take with their laptops?

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about how computers store things – what is a hard drive, anyway – and, I hope, convinced you that you need to backup your data regularly. It’s not that hard. Read on…

Q: Do computers remember things?

A: Not in the way we do, that’s pretty certain. Or rather, we have a partial understanding of how our brains work and its nothing like any of the technologies that computers use.

Q: Obviously there are lots of different ways computers store information – CDs, memory sticks…

A: Yes, although those are just a few modern examples of removable media. Most computers have hard drives inside which store information, and they have solid state memory which they use for working storage.

Q: That’s the two numbers you hear quoted when you buy a machine?

A: That’s right. You’ll see a machine advertised with, say 2Gigs of memory and a 80Gig hard drive.

Q: And a gig is…?

A: Short for Gigabyte, which looks as though it ought to mean a thousand million bytes.

Q: “ought to mean”?

A: Computers and computer people love round numbers – but computers, as we know, work in binary, that’s base 2 numbers, not the base ten we use from day to day. So to a computer, 2 is a round number, so if 4, and 8, and so forth. Now if you keep going, after ten double-ups you get to 1,024. That’s a round number in computing terms. So a gigabyte is actually a bit bigger than a thousand million bytes, by about 7.5%.

Q: You get more for your money!

A: Not really, because there are other factors which conspire to waste space. On a computer hard drive, for instance, you use up some of the space just by what’s called formatting it – that uses bits of space to provide signposts to the rest of it. And most hard drives have an operating system, like Windows, installed and that uses many gigabytes.

Q: How many?

A: At least 5, often more like 10. There are a lot of other detailed factors which I won’t go into on air, but there’s a link to an article if anyone’s interested. The take home message is, that if you get a computer with, say, an 80Gig hard drive, you are going to be able to use a maximum of 60 give or take for your own use.

Q: So what exactly is a hard drive?

A: let’s just say what it’s not – a hard drive is not the main box which comprises a computer. Some people just refer to the entire unit as the hard drive, but in fact a hard drive is a fair bit smaller than that. I’ve got one here.

Q: And this is a slim silver metal box maybe half the size of a paperback and much thinner than a book. What’s inside?

A: Discs coated in magnetic material. They are free to turn on a spindle, and when its going there’s an electric motor which turns the disc very fast – anything up to 10,000 rpm depending on the particular unit. Faster is better. There are often several discs stacked up on the same spindle so you get more capacity – each disc is called a platter in the trade.

Q: How does it store information?

A: Think of the disc surface as being made of the same substance as the surface of a cassette tape, or a video tape. It’s a magnetic film which you can magnetise one way or the other – either North pole up and South pole down, or vice versa. It gets magnetised by a tiny electric coil called a read/write head that floats just above the disc surface. The same head is used to detect how the disc is magnetised, as well.

Q: “Floats”? How?

A: The head is on the end of a metal arm which moves in an out from the disk’s centre to its edge. If there are lots of platters there are lots of heads and instead of an arm you have an assembly which looks more like a comb, lots of arms joined together at their base and threaded carefully between the platters. The head is only about the width of a human hair from the platters. Now the head is moved in a straight line across the disk from the centre to the edge, all the while the disk is rotating, so you can get to any piece of information on the disk in a few milliseconds.

Q: That’s thousandths of a second, right?

A: Yes. It sounds fast, doesn’t it? In fact, to the computer processor, disk access is achingly, grindingly slow. The computer processor, its brain if you like, is completely solid state and it moves far faster. It doesn’t have to wait for chunks of metal to move around like the disc does. The processor does things in times measured in nanoseconds – there are a million nanoseconds in a millisecond. To put it on a human scale, imagine you have a thought that you want some information. That might take you a second, say, to think what you need. The equivalent of the computer waiting for disk access is that the information you need arrives two weeks later. That’s how slow it is to the computer processor.

Q: Because the processor is so much faster than us, you mean?

A: Yes, it thinks in nanoseconds we we think in seconds. So it’s a bit as though your computer had to send out the archives and wait two weeks every time it wants information from the disc.

Q: How does it get anything done?

A: Because it has other, faster, storage.

Q: That’s the memory, right?

A: Yes, its called RAM or random access memory in the trade. Random means that the computer can get to any bit of the memory without waiting for a disk to move round. It’s a lot faster, but it’s still not as fast as the processor. The way we get round that is that the processor has its own what’s called “cache” memory, which is fast again and it tries to make sure that whatever it needs is already in cache so it doesn’t have to slow down. So, if the processor needs a bit of information, it first check the cache, to us, that’s glancing down at the desktop and seeing if the paper we want is in front of us. If it’s not in the cache the processor looks to see if its in RAM – that’s like going to the filing cabinet in the corner – doesn’t take long, but you break your flow to do it. And if it’s not there the processor sends to the hard disc, which is like sending out to archives and waiting for two weeks.

Q: How on earth does all this stuff actually happen!

A: Through some very clever programming, partly by the chip manufacturers, and partly by the people who design operating systems like Windows or Linux. They have strategies like: we’ve just got a piece of information from slot number 2014, we’ve got a moment on our hands while we are waiting for something else to happen, let’s order up the information form slot number number 2015 and put it in cache because there’s a good chance we’ll want it next. The computer tries to predict what’s needed next and starts to get it ahead of time. This gets a lot more subtle and clever than I’ve suggested here, but that’s the basic idea.

And that is why you need a decent amount of memory in your computer. It needs to have enough space in its memory to grab everything you might need from the disc. If you don;t have enough memory your computer will usually still work but it will be a lot slower than it could be because it will be spending time waiting for disc access.

Q: How much memory should a computer have?

A: If you are buying a new one today, 2 gigabytes. Older ones might have less and still work OK, but really careful about loading new software on, especially something like Vista which is a real resource hog. Vista will bury a slow machine and you will regret it.

Q: And how much disk space do you need?

A: Now that’s a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question. The machine’s no fatser or slower according as to how much disc you have; it just determines how much stuff you can keep. It all depends on what you are going to store. Photos, music, and movies are the main space hogs. We seem to find enough things to store to use whatever space we have. I’ve never bought a disk drive I haven’t filled up eventually. If I were buying new now I’d probably buy at least 200 gigs.

Q: Can you increase it after you have bought a machine?

A: You can add disk to old machines – you can sometimes add memory to old machines as well, but it’s harder. Both are possible to do at home, but don’t attempt it if you’re not comfortable – there are some pitfalls to watch out for. Any computer shop can help.

Q: What about USB memory sticks?

A: They use a different technology, its a form of solid state memory called flash, and that’s the same as the cards we use in cameras. It’s slower than RAM but it’s a lot faster than disk. And it’s also not volatile – unlike RAM, flash keeps the information inside it when the power’s turned off. Flash is coming down in price very fast and some upmarket laptops are beginning to use it instead of a spinning hard drive. Having a flash drive makes a machine faster, makes it use less power, and makes it less delicate than a machine with a disc drive.

Q: Disc drives are delicate! How do they survive in laptops?

A: Well, yes, a disc drive has a rapidly-spinning disk and the head moving microns above it. If the two come into contact it tends to be goodnight nurse to everything on your disc. That’s something you really have to be aware of – you absolutely must have backups of everything you care about on your computer. It could just vanish overnight otherwise. I can’t stress this enough.

Q: How do you do a backup?

A: Simplest way is to buy a hard drive in a box which connects to your computer through its USB port. These things are a couple of hundred dollars in a computer shop. They often come with software for Windows, and Mac users have a great backup program called Time Machine built in to the latest Mac operating system. Check in the shop what you are getting, some are just boxes and you have to supply your own hard drive to go inside, some are complete –if you can’t tell, ask. Get one that’s bigger than the hard drive in your computer. If you don’t have a backup system in place – run, don’t walk, until you get one.

Links

As always, discuss this at it.gen.nz

The size of disc drives and why don’t always get what you think you will.

All you ever wanted to know about different kinds of RAM.

Wikipedia on Solid state drives

An example of an external backup drive.

For the third year running, Xtra has come bottom. And not just bottom, but 42% – a massive slump from their abysmal 55% last year. On just about every dimension of customer satisfaction Consumer measure, Xtra gets a black mark.

Xtra is a separate brand for Internet services, which is owned and run by Telecom. Xtra competes with a lot of other Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, like ihug, Iconz, Orcon, Inspire, and Maxnet – there are lots.

Incredibly, the 42% number – the customer satisfaction for this year – was measured before the email disaster Xtra perpetrated earlier this year., and the number is now 36%. That’s right, two thirds of Xtra’s customers hate them.

That email disaster by the way was an act of corporate hubris which they tried to spin as an upgrade. Xtra claimed it was upgrading everyone’s email but in fact it sold all its email facilities – all its customers email facilities – to Yahoo in Australia, who stuffed up the implementation horribly. Lots of people lost a lot of email, and including a lot of businesses. You really have to ask yourself if you run a business why you would use Xtra, and why you would use such a low-rent brand as Xtra in your email address. Just say no!

The real concern I have is that Xtra is the biggest ISP in terms of customer numbers, but it gets such hugely bad ratings. If people keep with them despite their lousy service, they will never improve. Why should they?

Let’s look at the best ISPs out there. The Consumer survey found the same ISP to be the top four times running, that’s Inspire. The next two in the survey are Actrix and Maxnet in Auckland. All three of these will give you service wherever you are in New Zealand, and judging by the surveys, you’ll get a lot more service from them than you will from Xtra.

To make the change, ring one of these up and ask. Do it now – 0800 4 THE NET, 0800 MAXNET, or 0800 ACTRIX.

Just one point before going ahead, though. As the law in New Zealand is currently, loading your CDs into your computer or iPod is illegal. That’s right, against the law. It’s perfectly legal in most other countries, of course. The government has shown us a draft law which is supposed to make it legal to use your iPod, but the last time anyone saw that, it still had big holes in. New Zealand badly needs the government to make iPods unconditionally legal as they are everywhere else.

Read on for the speaking notes, and some links at the end.

Now to iPods and other digital music players. Here’s a few…

Q: So what are all these players?

A: This is really old MP3 player that I bought about 5 years ago. It’s got 128 Megs of memory, which was the state of the art at the time. That memory is what they call flash memory – it’s solid state computer chip based memory. If you opened this up you’d find a couple of chips and a rechargeable battery. The whole thing is about the size of my thumb, maybe a little bigger, and it plugs straight into a computer’s USB port.

Next, here we have an iPod nano. This is about a year and a half old, it has a screen, it’s pretty small, maybe the size of a stack of 3 or 4 business cards. It has 2 Gigs of flash memory, and it’s got the usual clean Apple design.

Q: Is it in some kind of case?

A: Yes, it’s got a hard clear plastic shell that I’ve added – iPods can scratch really easily and some of these little ones the screen could crack if they weren’t handled well. And my iPod has to live in my pocket with keys, coins and who knows what.

Q: And this one has a case, too…

A: Yes, that’s a video iPod, about 6 months old. It’s a bit larger, maybe the size of a pack of cards but only half as thick. This one has a hard drive in it, and that means it can store a lot more music and video than the baby flash players. Having a hard drive also makes these a lot more fragile – they really hate being dropped. I always buy extended warranty on hard drive players, but not the others.

Q: And this one is tiny!

A: This is a Samsung bought a couple of weeks ago, it’s a lurid blue colour, it has 2Gigs of flash memory and its very small, smaller than my little finger. It’s got a really bright OLED display – OLED is the technology that will replace LCD screens in a few years. Anyway, I haven’t been able to make this one work on a Mac, it comes with its own software which is Windows-only.

Q: How do these players work?

A: Essentially these are gadgets for holding computer files that represent songs, and playing them back through an audio interface. So, your iPod might have an MP3 of, say, this programme and…

Q: What’s an MP3?

A: MP3 is a sound file format. It’s a way of describing a sound in a computer file.

Q: Like a CD track?

A: Very similar, but the CD track takes a lot more bits to describe the same sound as an MP3

Q: Why?

A: Mainly because when you convert a CD file to an MP3 you throw away a lot of the information on the CD so you can make the file smaller.

Q: Why doesn’t it sound terrible?

A: Some audiophiles would tell you it does…but to most of us, on portable equipment you won’t hear the difference, provided you have the quality set ‘high’ when you make the MP3. That’s because the MP3 format throws away the information that you are least likely to hear – quiet sounds at the same time as loud sounds and so forth. There’s a lot of science involved. I’ve linked an article describing the MP3 format in some depth if people want to go into it.

Incidentally there are alternatives to the MP3 format. Microsoft’s got its own format of course, it’s called WMA, and Apple has it’s own called AAC. And there’s an open source format called OGG that is getting some traction. And for the hard core audio heads out there, there are WAV files which are pretty much the same as what’s on the CD, with no information thrown away. WAV files are big. But my advice would be to use a high-quality MP3 as your format – it’s a bit bigger than some of the new formats but it plays on anything.

Q: So I have to convert my CDs to MP3s?

A: That’s the first step – it’s called ‘ripping’ by the way. You need some software for that. iTunes is very good for this, and it’s free. iTunes handles all the process of copying the music from your CD onto your computer and turning them into MP3s for you. Make sure you are connected to the Internet when you do this, and iTunes will look up the track list of the CD for you so you don’t have to type it all in. That will even work if you are still on dial-up, by the way.

Q: How do I get iTunes?

A: From the Apple web site – there’s a link – and it runs on Macs and on Windows boxes. For Linux people – there are equivalent programs. I used to use one called Grip, but that’s a few years ago and there is probably something better. If someone wants to leave a comment on my blog with their favourite open source ripper and music library tool, that would be neat.

Q: How exactly do I use iTunes?

A: Fire it up, then when you load a CD into Windows, iTunes should ask you if you want to import. Say yes, and it does. It takes five or ten minutes. That’s it in a nutshell.

Q: As easy as that?

A: Pretty much. I always have the quality turned up and I’d advise everyone to do that. It will soak up some more disc space that way, because the files it makes will be bigger, but you won’t have to rip your CDs again if you get a nice new stereo and the computer sounds too bad through it. So in the iTunes menus, you go Preferences, Advanced, Importing, then make sure you have the MP3 option selected, and under settings go custom, highest quality. It’s well worth doing this, because you will get very high quality sound files which should play back on most machines.

Q: So how do I get the music onto my digital music player?

A: iPods are just so easy, because Apple makes them integrate so beautifully with iTunes. You just plug your iPod into your computer, it’s a simple as that. If you have one of the bigger iPods with a hard disk in it, you can have your entire music collection on – just set it to automatically load the entire library and iTunes will do that. If you have a smaller iPod, set it to load manually, and it’s as simple as pointing at the songs you want in iTunes and dragging them into the little image of the iPod.

Q: What about other players that aren’t iPods?

A: Mostly you can load them from iTunes as well, but not quite as easily. Plug your player in, and it should appear in My Computer if you are on Windows, or in Finder on the Mac. Then you can drag things straight from iTunes to the player in My Computer or Finder. That should work – each player is different, and you would be well advised to check when you are buying a player that you can return it if you can’t get it to work on your computer, like my little Samsung here.

Some players come with their own software – I’d avoid using that if possible. It might not use MP3 format, it might be Windows only, it might not work on your version of Windows.

So to summarise – buy a player you are happy with, get iTunes or some other piece of software that looks similar, turn up the quality settings, feed one CD into the computer and rip it, then plug in the player and see if you can transfer the music to it. When you are happy that it’s playing properly, start feeding your CDs into the computer and ripping thew. Allow an evening or two for that, depending on how many you have – but at least can read a book or listen to the radio at the same time!

And once you’ve gone through the pain of loading all your CDs into your computer, make sure you are backing up regularly. Computer drives fail, after all. I think there’s a another programme in how to back up your computer, maybe in a few weeks…

Q: You mentioned playing your music back on your stereo from you computer – how do you do that?

A: The simplest way is just wire your computer straight to your stereo. Dick Smith’s can sell you a bit of wire for that. But it’s a rather ugly way to go about it – and it may not be practical if your computer is in a different room, and particularly if it’s a laptop.

There is a really neat gadget called a squeezebox that you can get. It sits on your stereo, and it can read the music in your music library. It needs you to have a home computer network, although it would probably work just straight off a wireless laptop. Anyway, these are great gadgets. I’ve had an older machine from the same stable for about 5 years. I’ll put it in the links.

Links

Get iTunes, Apple’s free music library software for Windows and Macs.

Understanding MP3 file compression.

The Squeezebox – a gadget which joins your com

Q: This is the Firefox web browser you’re talking about? We mentioned it before.

A: Yes – I’ll just recap. Firefox is an open source web browser, it’s an alternative to Internet Explorer if you are on Windows, Safari on the Mac, or Konqueror on Linux. It was originally written by a New Zealander called Ben Goodger, and it’s being developed at least partly in New Zealand. Two of the main Firefox developers are in Auckland.

Q: OK, so I Understand why it being open source makes it interesting, but is there more to it than that?

A: Oh yes. Open source almost isn’t the point here – Firefox is such a capable web browser, head and shoulders above the others. It’s really noticeable that Microsoft has restarted development of Internet Explorer now Firefox is taking off. Until recently Microsoft appeared to have stopped all innovation in this area – after all, it had an effective monopoly of the browser space – but then Firefox came out with lots of lovely features like tabbed browsing, an architecture for third party extensions, pop-up blocking out of the box and far better security. It had got a lot of these innovations from the open source world. And Microsoft just released a new version of its browser – the first for years, incorporating a lot of the same stuff as Firefox has always had, and Apple has done the same for Safari. Microsoft is definitely playing catch-up in browsers at the moment.

Q: Where did these programs originally come from?

A: If we go back to about 1993, the world wide web was just starting up, and the first web browser people could get their hands on was called Mosaic, and it came out of the University of Illinois where it had been written by a young man named Marc Andreesen.

Q: So how did we get to where we are today?

A: Andreesen left and formed a company with some rich backers to rewrite his browser and sell it. That was called Netscape, and it walked a fine line between giving away beta copies and trying to charge for non-beta copies. It also sold web servers software, and it did fairly well at first.

Q: What happened to it?

A: Microsoft decided it wanted that market. Bill Gates realized in 1996 that he’d misjudged the Internet and it was going to be serious big – and he took urgent corrective action. Part of that action was buying the Mosaic program – which had by now been spun off by the university and was called Spyglass – and he threw the might of Microsoft into improving it and turned it into Internet Explorer, and gave it away for free. The first couple of versions were rubbish compared to Netscape, but by version three it had come together as a serious contender. And Netscape wasn’t free. And Netscape’s server revenue was under threat from the open source Apache web server, which now runs more than half of the world’s web sites.

The Netscape people weren’t stupid. They could see the chasm yawning in front of them. So they made the browser open source – they just went and published it. They probably knew they were going to fall over whatever they did – and they did fall over soon after this – but they delivered their source code out onto the Internet before that. That was a brilliant move which stopped their source code from being acquired and monopolised. Their code got turned into Mozilla – the Godzilla of Mosaic as it were, and periodically the owners of the Godzilla copyrights threaten to sue for that. And Firefox grew out of that.

Q: Where did the name Firefox come from?

A: Yes, I got to ask Ben Goodger that. The program went through several names before they found one that wasn’t already taken. The last one was Firebird, but that’s the name of another open source project. They chose Firefox because it was like Firebird, and apparently it’s a name for the Red Panda. I told Ben Goodger that it makes me think of an atrocious Clint Eastwood movie of that name from the early eighties, but he hadn’t heard of that. But then, it might have been a little before his time!

Q: What about Apple’s browser – Safari, you said?

A: Yes, Apple’s browser is made from Konqueror – with a “K” – which is a Linux browser developed from the ground up in the late nineties as part of what is called the KDE desktop environment. Now KDE is open source like the rest of Linux, and presumably it’s licence allows Apple to make Safari out of it. The interesting thing about Safari is not that it exists for Macs – because Apple needs to have its own browser – but that Apple has just released a copy for Windows and is pushing it hard, too. It’s free, you can give it a whirl if you want to. There are other browsers as well – Opera is Scandinavian I think, it was built during the days when there was only Internet Explorer and it provides a good alternative to that. These days I think Opera is focusing on mobile phones.

Q: OK, so that’s where Firefox came from – why is it better?

A: It has so many really useful innovations. Tabbed browsing, for instance – that was invented back in the Mozilla days.

Q: What’s tabbed browsing?

A: It means having lots of web sites open at once, and you select which one to look at by clicking a tab along the top of the browser window. It’s massively useful.

Q: What else does Firefox do?

A: Blocks pop-ups straight out of the box. No more really irritating things popping in front of what you are looking at!

Q: And?

A: It has an open architecture for add-ons. Anyone can write a Firefox add-in. One of the most popular add-ins blocks adverts. Others do all kinds of things from downloading YouTube videos to your computer through to improving your privacy while browsing. There’s a wonderful add-in called Firebug for those of us with our own websites. There are add-ins doing most things you could imagine and a lot you can’t.

Another thing Firefox does beautifully is searching – it has a search box in the toolbar, just like the Google toolbar does if you’ve ever used that, but the really nice thing about Firefox’s way is that it lets you select what you want to search – mine does Google, Trademe, Amazon and YouTube. And the New Zealand government – bless it – has done a search plug-in of its own for Firefox so you can make that one of your options.

There’s another Kiwi connection here. A rather cool Firefox add-in called Interclue checks out links in a page before you click them and shows you what’s down the link as soon as you move your mouse over the link. Like most add-ins, it’s free to use – if you’re already a Firefox user I’d recommend you try it out. Interclue is being developed in Christchurch.

And possibly Firefox’s crowning glory is the way it deals with RSS feeds. Lots of websites have these – including Radio New Zealand’s site, and my own site it.gen.nz. It’s a way of distributing updated material. Typically a site that gets updated often will have a little icon and the abbreviation RSS or sometimes XML, or sometimes the word subscribe – these are all basically the same thing. If you click on them in Firefox it uses a thing it calls live bookmarks. It adds a subscription to that site to your bookmark bar, which sits just under the tool bar. (You might need go to the View menu and make it visible.) Then when you run your mouse over Firefox’s bookmark bar you can see a list of everything on the site. If, like me, you frequently check a few sites for information, this is just fantastic. All I need to do is run the mouse along that bar and I see a list of articles on each site.

Q: How popular is Firefox?

A: It’s beginning to give Microsoft a run for its money. 28% usage in Europe, 29% in Australasia – the real kicker is that its use goes up enormously at weekends. People are installing Firefox on their home computers even if they can’t use it at work.

Another reason Firefox is gaining so much ground is that it is developed in public. That means that the people who develop web sites, especially the fancy innovative new ones doing things like mapping and social networking, can talk with the developers as they are working on what is going into the next release of the browser. I saw that happening at a thing called Kiwi Foo Camp last February, a meeting of webby techy people with a few artists, journalists and politicians thrown in to leaven the mix. Anyway, the Firefox developers ran some sessions saying: this is what we are thinking about for FireFox three. What do you web people think of that? And there were some detailed and fascinating conversations that spun out of that session. You just can’t get that kind of transparency, that innovation, involving people from right across the Internet if you keep your source code as a trade secret. And the result is that the really good sites now tend to work better in Firefox than they do in anything else.

Links

Getting Firefox, the alternative web browser.

A survey showing that Firefox use is now around 28%.

Interclue – a New Zealand Firefox add-in that shows you what’s down links before you click on them.

New Zealand Government search tool add-on for Firefox or IE7.