What If There Were No CDs?

I was just retagging some of my music.  I ran across an interesting set of unexpected issues with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (by the Beatles, duh!).  The end was cut off of some of the song names, so I wanted to fix it up.  I looked up the album on the Internet and began fixing song names.  Immediately, I noticed that the number of tracks in my list didn't match the number of songs on the record.

After some headscratching I realized that the songs were listed by side of the record.  After smacking my forehead, I started thinking about how iTunes indexes songs.  It has metadata for multiple discs, but not different sides.  My immediate thought was, "What if there had never been CDs?  Would there be extra data for which side of the disk the song was on?"

After pondering this deeply philosophical alternate history, I noticed on the above Wikipedia article that the original release had some interesting quirks.  Specifically, after the last song was a 15 kilohertz tone designed by John Lennon to annoy people's dogs, followed by some jibberish studio noise put into the gutter track.  So, the original record would end by annoying your dog and then playing gibberish endlessly.

Apparently the CD re-release only repeats the noise eight or nine times and then fades out, since CDs can't really simulate an infinite loop like you get out of the gutter track.  Similarly, I'd imagine that the 15 kilohertz tone might not survive the MP3 encoding process.  Even though the tone and gutter track magic are really just tricks of the vinyl, it's interesting to think that these aspects of that album are effectively forever lost on future generations of Beatles fans.

Oh, well.  Endlessly repeating gibberish probably doesn't have much of a place in the world of iPod playlists.  Still, I can't help but feel that a little something is missing...

Erlang Error: {open_error, -12}

This error happens when you have old or missing .so libraries for your Erlang app.  It is rarely mentioned on the Internet and can consume hours of wasted debugging time.  Now you know.  :(

No to Bail-Out; Yes to Buy-Out

Leave it up to an opinion column in Bloomberg to perfectly articulate what I've had brewing in my head.

I kept thinking, "How does putting money into the banks fix the problem that these assets are overvalued?"  Unless we are buying these securities, and then writing them down to a corrected value, nothing is fixed.  It's quintessentially anti-market.  The properties aren't allowed to go down in value.

Ron Paul hit it on the head, it's price-fixing.  As with most of Ron Paul's theories, I don't completely agree with his solution (i.e. the Federal Reserve and paper currency is the root of all evil).  I think that there's a balance to be struck between letting banks set prudent interest rates and preventing a predatory banker's trust to form again.  Pure-free-market types often forget that freedom, liberty, and justice are rarely selected by the market.

At any rate, it appears that this has been solved before by buying an interest in the bad securities, rather than just extending the failing banks more credit (i.e. letting them dig the hole deeper).  Despite a deep understanding of all of the issues, this solution already is a favorite on Main Street.

The right solution seems to have worked for other people before, where the wrong solution didn't work so well.  Of course, they eventually figured it out and appear to have learned something in the process.

iCal and Automator

Recently discovered something kind of cool.  Apparently, you can save an automator workflow as a "iCal Alarm Plug-In".  Then you can select it as the "alarm" for a message.  Depending on your bent, this makes either a very elaborate alarm or a poor man's crond.

Rather skimpy details here.