Linear Difficulty, Music as a Drug
I realized recently that my for-pay websites take the same amount of work now as they did three months ago. I also realized that's a horrible mistake on my part.
Computers are a powerful force multiplier (see Paul Graham), using them as only a black box to solve a certain problem is inefficient.
A much more profitable approach is to spend a part of your effort to write a tool to make your black boxes easier to build. I guess this generalizes into metaprogramming, ubiquitous automation, and many other ideas, but the moral of this story is, if the third time you solve the same problem with a computer it is just as hard as the first time, you are doing something wrong. Linear difficulty is a bad smell.
In other news, I owned a Sony Network Walkman digital music player with 1 gigabyte of RAM for slightly under twenty four hours.
But the Network Walkman requires windows in two different ways, first to install files onto the player that it requires to function, and second to use a closed source windows-only tool to obfuscate the MP3 files into a proprietary Sony-only format. The Sony Network Walkman does actually play MP3 files, but they must be scrambled in a very particular manner. Happily someone recently reverse engineered the process so he could use his Network Walkman in Linux. My problem was that I don't have a copy of windows. Most recently, I owned a copy of windows 95 some years back. So I couldn't use this cute MP3 obfuscator on my Network Walkman, because I couldn't install the files necessary to get the critter to run at all. After about ten hours of trying to find a solution I gave up, and it went back to the store. It just wasn't worth it.
Much of the reason it went back to the store was that my search for a solution to the Network Walkman problem was successful. The iRiver IFP-899 with 1 gigabyte of flash ram costs less than the Sony Network Walkman and has more features. The iRiver plays Ogg (with some limitations), mp3, aac(?), wmv(?), and possibly something else, I forget. It has an FM radio, a microphone, a line-in plug, and does mp3 compression of whatever you record via mic, FM radio, or line-in. It also mounts as a usb mass storage device just like the Sony Walkman, but unsurprisingly, does not require obfuscation of the files you want to play.
My iRiver IFP-899T arrived three days after I ordered it. The box included an AA battery and surprisingly, Sennheiser earbuds, so I was able to listen to the iRiver advertising mp3 thirty seconds after I opened the box. (thirty seconds to figure out how to play music, it didn't take that long for me to plug everything together.) The Sony Network Walkman included a warning that the music all disappears if you let the internal non-replaceable battery fully drain, so I was surprised to find music on the iRiver. After changing the AA battery today and finding that all my music was still there, I realized that the iRiver must use static ram, while the Sony uses dynamic ram, meaning the Sony memory is always draining the battery even when the player is off, and the memory is slower to access.
Boy, am I glad I took the Sony back and didn't try to work around its design flaws.
The moral of this story is, don't impulse buy the sexy looking Sony player, use Google to find the options and choose the one that's best for you.