It’s so relieving to have finished the last internal HSC assessment – the trial exam – for Information Processes and Technology. As I’ve said many times, it was like being squished by an elephant – just because that’s an amusing metaphor.

In case you’re an expert system with an artificial neural network that can rewire the links between its processing elements, this photograph from Wikipedia should give you an idea of what it feels like to be squished by an elephant:

Now, because I’ve included that image (provided by Wikipedia user Fir0002), this entire article is hereby licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License as stipulated by the photographer. Ahh, the social issues and ethical issues…

Anyway, I think it’s sufficient to justify the weird and mostly negative sentiment by saying that I finished the paper with only a few seconds to spare, after rushing through the last hour of the exam.

But you know what? It really weirdly brought people together. After finishing the exam, and watching the Year 12s leave, us Year 10s sat down on the concrete – yes, the concrete – and talked about how terrible it was, and how we were all thinking, “FML!”

A big happy shout to Andrew, Tony, and Jase for keeping me company during that deep and meaningful moment of post-exam surrealism.

And now, I’m in a state of “stoning”, as my friends would say. I’m not very aware of my surroundings or anything. The surrealism continues, so here are some random thoughts:

• Do you have Windows Vista Home Basic? If so, it appears that you can get Aero’s window decorator special effects by editing your msstyles file with a hex editor. How nice.
• The Master from the British television series, Doctor Who, looks like my French teacher. That is unusual for so many different reasons.

Okay, dot points suck on WordPress, so it’s back to good old paragraphs.

Between two worlds is a beautiful compilation of instrumental (piano) pieces by Maya Filipič. It is really relaxing and great as background music; best of all, it’s licensed under Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, No-Derivatives). Go and download it, or at least have a listen to it by streaming.

That brings me to a related point – in this day and age, people don’t want to buy music anymore. They’ve become accustomed to download it without permission; however, they know that this is frowned up. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they squeeze out of the valley of professional musicians and turn to the amateurs, who turn out to have a pretty damn good sound. Between two worlds is a great example, but there’s many, many more.

Now, as much as I hate advertising for big companies, I have to concede that I love Jamendo, the website that’s offering the aforementioned album. It’s a huge collection of free-to-download music, which I think is the way of the future. If the people don’t want to buy music and they don’t want to be accused of being pirates, then of course they’ll turn to truly free music.

At this point, I don’t think I can type anything that can be construed as meaningful, so here’s the English dub of Carameldansen, which seems to be the latest musical craze (or at least, what Bryan and Jase are dancing to). I warn you, though, it’s a little bit creepy.

I’m breaking the chain of Saturday blog entries because… well, guess what happened today at 34 minutes past noon? (Or in little under three hours, depending on your point of view – see below.)

Let’s all get ready to celebrate at 10:34 PM Sydney time, which is when it will be 12 hours, 34 minutes, and 56 seconds into 07/08/09 according to UTC.

Now, because it’s relevant to today’s post, let’s suss out what UTC actually is. UTC is the Earth’s “neutral” time zone by convention; everything other time zone simply described as an offset of UTC (including the one I work with right now, UTC+10). UTC was named because English speakers wanted coordinated universal time (CUT) and French speakers wanted temps universel coordonné (TUC) and so it was decided that a compromise – UTC – would work best.

Strictly speaking, though, the time should actually be written as 2009-08-07 12:34:56Z if we’re going to use international timing standards like UTC. But screw ISO 8601 (which I usually love) for just one day, because 12:34:56 07/08/09 looks so much more epic.

And as for the United States of America … well, they’re still using the Imperial system, and write the date as month/date/year, so as far as 123456789 day is concerned, I’m not even going to go there.

I spent like an hour making that graphic above; most of the time was taken to make sure that fonts looked more interesting than any old blob of text. The quote is from Barack Obama – State of the Nation Address (Hip-Hop interpretation) by YouTube member Alphacat. But the awesomeness of 12:34:56 07/08/09 doesn’t belong to me, or Alphacat, or Barack Obama, or even the lovely people who discovered this brilliant curiosity; no, that moment belongs to all of creation. So, when that second comes around, enjoy it while it lasts – because it won’t last very long.

On a less epic note, I’m letting this post substitute my entry for this weekend, so early birthday wishes to Celia (next Monday), Jaclyn (next Tuesday), and Amy (next Saturday)!

— blair25, 7:56 PM from Sydney

I love my music, and you probably love your music too. We live in a society that is obsessed with listening to recordings of the same people, performing the same song, in exactly the same way, over and over again. It’s as much a part of our culture as opera, theatre, and concerts were a few hundred years ago.

Music consumers have entered the digital world, where their sources for music vary greatly, from the virtual shopping trolleys of the iTunes music store, to the grey area of ripped audio tracks from borrowed CDs, to the dark and frowned-upon realms of Limewire and The Pirate Bay. At any rate, many people now have huge collections of music files, usually in MP3 format.

Tonight, I want to talk about metadata. Metadata is data that describes other data. In terms of MP3 files, the most common type of metadata is ID3 metadata. For most people, this is where information about the song’s title, artist, album, release year, and album artwork are stored.

Most music software for the desktop (Winamp, iTunes, and Banshee cover Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux)  tend to build and dynamically update a database about music files (usually called a “Library”), making a copy of ID3 metadata in addition to stuff like file location. After doing so, one can perform all sorts of brilliant queries on the database, using filters called smart playlists, or smart views, or autoplaylists. (There’s actually a lot of different names for the filters, but you get the idea.)

Now, this doesn’t seem very impressive, but it gets so much better if you add the right stuff to your ID3 metadata. Imagine being able to search for every song in your collection with female vocalists, or being able satisfy a sudden urge to appreciate French music, or  to see all the music that X recommended to you.

This level of sophistication is possible if you throw keywords in the “genre” ID3 field of all your MP3 files, and create matching smart playlists. In other words, you need to “tag” songs, like how I’m tagging this blog entry with “Software”. For example, the “genre” of my copy of Secondhand Serenade’s Fall For You looks something like this:

elena, vocal, male vocalists, love, piano

If I wanted a list of love songs, I would create a smart playlist that looks for all records (i.e. songs) containing “love” in the genre field. If I want a list of all the songs that Elena has recommended to me, I would create a smart playlist that looks for everything containing “elena” in the genre field, and so on.

Here is a screenshot of this technique in action. In this example, I am searching for all the music that I have labelled as being French:

This is a very quick and dirty trick and is not without its problems. For example, if you make a smart playlist that searches for songs that have “male vocalists” in the genre, it would include songs with female vocalists as well, because the word “female” contains “male”.

And hence, ladies and gentlemen, my quick and dirty solution to this quick and dirty problem is to force the filter to search for everything that contains “male vocalists” and then remove anything in the search results that contains “female vocalists”:

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “gosh, that’s tedious”. Well, not really. There’s plenty of ID3 metadata editors out there to automate the process. If you’re thinking of doing this as well, I suggest that you make a list of words that you’ll let yourself use, so you don’t find yourself creating too many overlaps.

The technique can be extended to portable devices, particularly those that can synchronise playlists with the computer (such as iPods). However, if you have a Zune, it is unfortunately impossible to replicate it; it appears that the Zune software can only search for exact matches.

In other words, you could search for “happy”, but a song that is labelled as “happy, german” would not appear in your search results. Bummer.

Until next week, mes amis! On a related note (pun), check out Toi plus moi by French musician Gregoire. The song is very catchy and made of awesome; thanks, Alley!

Users of a certain lovely student forum known as The Cardboard Box may or may not know that I was the one who gave it its name. I don’t mean to be stubborn; it’s relevant to today’s entry. And yes, I realise that revealing this information is a bit like opening Pandora’s Box and asking to be bombarded with a whole plethora of comments, ranging from heartwarmingly sweet to infuriatingly bitter.

But then, Pandora’s Box was opened for a reason. Anyway…

Back in my primary school days – many, many, many years ago – we had a school camp where we split off into groups. Being our last camp together, our grade was feeling rather … patriotic. To celebrate our odd happiness, we did many strange things. One of the more amusing things that we did included singing Yellow Submarine, but with slightly modified lyrics:

We all live in a yellow cardboard box,
A yellow cardboard box,
Yellow cardboard box…

Of course, you don’t forget a thing like that – not even many years later, when you need to come up with a name for an awesome new website that you and your friends are making. And thus, The Cardboard Box as a student forum was born. If you use the site, I can understand if you don’t like the name; however, I hope that you now understand why I like it.

Anyway, that kicked off a personal habit of mine to name things after boxes, like the blog you’re reading now – The Big Box. I’ve also named Aperture Box, my photography portfolio, after my favourite square-shaped object.

But anyway, I’ll skip the rest of the nostalgia and get to the point. My name is Blair, and I have a website. I called it Box Central, because, as you’ve probably figured, I quite like boxes.

On a completely different matter, I don’t really want to go back to school. But expounding on that would make me sound like an angsty teenager. I therefore introduce you to a new word today – omphaloskepsis.

Omphaloskepsis is a pseudo-scientific term for contemplation of the navel. If you think this is ridiculous, don’t worry; it’s meant to be. It is a tongue-in-cheek term used to describe someone whose ego is bigger than their stomach. If you have omphaloskepsis, then you need to think more about other people.

I learned this word about six minutes ago, courtesy of a certain flying cucumber with an amazing vocabulary. I hope you find it helpful for your future pursuits, and goodnight, world! (11:59PM)

… and Roman cavalry choirs can’t be bothered singing anymore. Mainly because they’re long gone, silent after the fall of the Roman Empire. But this wasn’t meant to be a history lesson; I just randomly left like quoting Viva la Vida lyrics; damn it, I love that thing.

End of school = holidays = great! Now I can rant about something other than IPT coursework…

Juggling with operating systems

I finally solved that osx86 HFS+ partition error problem! All you have to do is add chain0 to your boot.ini, and then start osx86 through the Windows bootloader. Do that, and everything works fine. The only problem for me is that I need the nforce kernel, which doesn’t like me very much. Oh well, mission failed – I’m back on Windows Vista after a downgrade from Windows 7, and I’m happy about it.

The Windows 7 RC (release candidate) was fun, but it was a ticking time bomb in that it was going to expire on June 1, 2010. So I figured, why not get rid of it earlier rather than later? To be honest, Vista was never that bad, and it’s sort of a relief to know that I’m back in an environment that will last (although admittedly I’ll probably do another fresh install some time soon, just for the heck of it).

Some random notes about the screenshot above:

• The wallpaper is Rain’s Firefly Night picture. It’s awesome and just happens to be the right resolution for my desktop.
• Winamp eats you and your iPod; it is seriously the most capable iTunes equivalent I have ever seen, and still as resource-conservative as it was when I first picked it up back in 2005. I am using Winamp with the Last.fm auto-scrobbler (more on that later)
• Pidgin rules, as it is portable, open-source, cross-platform, and supports various protocols extremely well; it even supports MSN/WLM “personal messages”, although it epic fails at web conferencing.
• IrfanView is a must-have if you’re on Vista, because the “Windows Photo Gallery” lags so much worse than the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer from good old XP.

Last.fm and music analytics

A bit of history: I used to use iTunes to stalk my music habits. There was a bit of dodginess involved; one strange day, for example, I decided to leave Rie Fu’s “Life is Like a Boat” on repeat, and then proceeded to switch off my speakers. That was 300 plays, and I didn’t hear a single one of them.

Still, I like having statistics about my listening habits; it’s as weird as the human desire for categorisation. (Look at how everything in this blog post is under a heading – we are obsessed with categorising stuff!)

I have therefore decided to follow wj32’s advice on using Last.fm. Wikipedia describes the service like so:

Using a music recommender system called “Audioscrobbler”, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations, the user’s computer or many portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (“scrobbled”) via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user’s profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favourites.

If you feel like stalking my music preferences, you may find my account here. I have actually had this account since December 2007, it’s just that I never really bothered to use it properly, because it seemed a bit weird having the whole world know about my strange liking for Fall Out Boy’s Thnks fr th Mmrs. It was a bit of a privacy concern… oh, the social and ethical issues! They might sell this information! They might use it for relevant advertising!

Social and ethical issues aside, though, I think the service is pretty useful for end users. Music recommendations are a fun benefit, but I really would be keen on building a profile on my taste in musical madness for future reference. And the internet is a lot more future-proof than local computer intrastructures can ever hope to be.

Random thoughts for the teenage souls

Unrequited love is what makes us human. If we always got what we wanted, we wouldn’t appreciate the good things. Now let’s all stop wasting time with being sad and drink plenty of coffee for our 99.95 ATARs so that we can all be doctors, lawyers, dentists, and scientists.

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Chain0

I’ll be walking randomly around a national park, and appreciating the beauty of the stars, sans air pollution. Camps are fun, even if they’re not officially known as camps.

This means, of course, that I won’t be able to update. Sorry about that. In the meantime, please go and look at some pictures of flowers on Flickr, because they are really quite impressive.

Rusians: check out the Maths intranet page next Friday; there might just be some awesome multimedia stuffs, hopefully including a tour guide of the C-block.

We went to pat cows. They were cool.

We didn’t get any free milk, but then, we didn’t have to milk any of the cows either.

In other news, I was shocked to find out that Michael Jackson died of a cardiac arrest. All these celebrity deaths (Steve Irwin, remember, guys?) are getting rather depressing.

I’ll post more meaningful stuff when/if I stop panicking over my major project for Information Procrastinations and Technology. By the way, depending on what version of the universe you live in, AAC stands for:

1. Advanced Audio Coding, or
2. Advanced Analogue Coding

… which is really rather strange.

I’m extremely stressed by upcoming assessments and projects. Yes, I know that I shouldn’t be complaining, considering that my lovely senior friends have about 10 to the power |x| things more to worry about, for x>2.

Steric numbers make my brain hurt. Thinking about the Friday Chem test makes me sad. Here is proof that Rickrolling can be incorporated into anything:

Information Processes and Technology. Multimedia. Multiple mediums. What makes audio awesome? High sampling rate >= max sound frequency; high bit resolution; stereo or better. What makes images awesome? High bit depth = large palette; high resolution. Compression and dithering = processing.

Please excuse the lack of clarity in today’s entry.

Power Shift stickers

If you walk around my school right now, you will see a lot of little square-shaped purple stickers. You will be able to find several staircases with a sticker on each step. You will be able to see these stickers plastered on a brick wall – in the dozens – to form a smiley. These stickers are everywhere.

I love what Power Shift stands for – the environment, youths taking action, and change for the better. Power Shift is a national climate change conference, but for young people. It is to be held at the Parramatta campus of the University of Western Australia on July 11-13 this year. There will be various discussions, workshops, and (I’m told) even concerts and ‘eco-fashion’ shows. The whole point of the exercise is to pressure the government into making environmentally-friendly decisions, particularly regarding ‘renewable energy, green jobs, and a safe climate future’.

But isn’t it just a little bit ironic that this ‘green’ event is being popularised by spamming the ecosphere with stickers that contain plastics which will take many decades to biodegrade, and paper that came from trees which, once upon a time, were collecting atmospheric carbon dioxide?

No more UAIs

A lot of studious teenagers in New South Wales just got their goal of “get 100UAI” crushed – well, depending on how you look at it.

The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) replaces the Universities Admissions Index (UAI) this year. It’s essentially the same thing but you can no longer get 100/100. Instead, the top mark is 99.95/99.95, which doesn’t look as good as 100. Last year, when we were studying Strictly Ballroom, our English teacher made quite a point of explaining the significance of the protagonist being “number 100″ instead of “number 69″. 100 represents perfection, and if get the top mark in the HSC, I reckon you deserve anything that associates you with perfection.

Apparently the ATAR will become a national standard next year, which means that if you live in a smarter state, you face more competition for the same reward. Needless to say, there have been various jokes flying around about moving interstate to get 99.95 ATAR. Anyone feel like moving to sunny Queensland?

Short unusual post for the heck of it, and because it’s 2:14 AM.

School: Funny things happen after spending ~15 hours at school. Evan & Ivan – your chemistry is very leet. Alvin – jailbreak your iPhone. Apparently I came around position 40 for maths. I LOL’ed at Mr. Wilson’s duck impersonations although they can be distracting (but curiously fascinating nonetheless). Mr. Pronger is a cool guy for his bike ride.

Musical: Hobo-singing completely random songs in the ‘change room’ science lab was lol-making. Kudos to whoever came up with the sign that says “be quiet you hyperactive bunnies” or something along those lines. Hope tomorrow’s performance is smashing. Our after party is going to be insane.

Birthday boy: Happy birthday coming up to Gerald! So I heard your internet explorer was eating system resources.  Please accept this imaginary birthday cake in advance. (gives cake)

cbbox: We need to have a meetup. (nods)
cgr’s: Sorry for being out of it these days; you’re still my best friends ever!
scr’s: I miss you people. Expect intermittent transmissions within the next 100 hours.

Service project: So, err, apparently the only ‘leadership’ involved is taking initiative (which seems to be difficult enough as it is), RuseZine might work but better to join an existing organisation according to Mrs. Pooviah.

Catpan: Comme d’habitude, tu as perdu le jeu sur l’étage parce que j’ai été ici. Désolé, mademoiselle. Bonne chance pour le soir prochaine.

Lee (Gu): Mr. Deigan wasn’t here today. I have your note in my special folder and will bring said special folder on Tuesday.