New iPod and Musicbrainz

Sheila's xB has a direct connection for an iPod. It allows you to directly control an iPod from the head unit. So yesterday we went to Best Buy and picked up a new 60GB iPod. I had some old MP3s, but the tags were a total mess. I didn't feel like manually editing everything, so I started searching around for a good automatic tag editor.

A while back I fooled with a program called Replay Music, which allows you to record music played on the sound card. The best feature is that it has the ability to try to figure out what a song is by actually analyzing the audio and looking up information in Gracenote's CDDB. I tried it out and it worked rather well. Very cool technology.

I figured if the technology was available to acoustically fingerprint streaming music, certainly there had to be programs out there to do it with existing MP3s. After a lot of searching I finally found the answer: Musicbrainz. Musicbrainz uses TRM to create the acoustic fingerprint that their tagger program uses to help correctly identify the tags for an MP3. I downloaded it, tried it out, and it works like a charm! I highly recommend it to anyone who has a lot of MP3s and needs to do a lot of retagging.

Sheila's New Car

Last week we went to the auto show in Miami to find a new car for Sheila. Her old Sentra was dying on her and Gabriella is on the way, so it was definitely time for a new car. With gas prices being what they are and Sheila driving as much as she does, a large SUV was out of the question. We decided to take a look at hatchbacks and wagons for the most part.

The models that caught our attention were the Toyota Matrix, Pontiac Vibe, Toyota Corolla, Hyundai Tuscon, and the Scion xB. I had done some research on fueleconomy.gov and was a little surprised to see the Scion xB close to the top of the list for fuel economy. I previously thought the xB was somewhat unattractive, but after seeing it had a fuel economy of 30 in the city and 34 on the highway I began to reconsider my opinion.

The xB was one of the last vehicles we saw at the car show. We were all pleasantly surprised at how roomy it is inside, although very small on the outside. It really began to grow on me after sitting inside of it. We took it for a test drive the day after the auto show and fell in love with it. Although it is a 4-cylinder, it is not terribly loud on the highway. I've owned loud 4-bangers before and I think this one is the quietest.

It has very responsive handling for such a vertical vehicle. After the test drive I asked Sheila if she wanted to test drive the Tuscon, and she said she was sold on the xB. We went into the dealership, signed some papers, and anxiously began to await the arrival. It arrived 5 days later and we picked it up. I'm looking forward to taking it to Gainesville on Wednesday when we drive up for Thanksgiving.

Google Base is Live

Google Base has gone live! It appears to be a hodgepodge of posts for anything and everything. It certainly may give eBay a run for its money, as certainly items for sale are within the realm of items that will be posted. It should be interesting to see exactly what unfolds.

Google Analytics

In March, Google acquired Urchin Web Analytics, and cut the monthly service price from $400 per month to $199. It is a really nice web analysis tool, now called Google Analytics. They've now made it available for free! It's very easy to "install" and just involves pasting some simple code into your web pages.

Xen

I've been fooling around with a new open sourcevirtual machine program called Xen, and now that I've got some things working, I must say that I am quite impressed with the stability and performance. If you have a spare machine and you want to try it out completely from scratch, you can find an installation CD here:

http://www.option-c.com/xwiki/Xen_Debian_Quick_Start

It will install a minimal version of Debian 3.1 (sarge) along with Xen. This will allow you to have Debian 3.1 as your Dom0 (host operating system). There are similar quick start guides for other distributions as well. The only fundamental change I made after the installation was to set up Dom0 to have a static IP address. You can do this just by editing the /etc/network/interfaces file. Rather than using DHCP, i set up eth0 like this:

iface eth0 inet static
     address 192.168.x.y
     netmask 255.255.255.0
     gateway 192.168.x.x

Once you have the host Xen system up and running, you can download images of other operating systems. I went to jailtime.org and downloaded Fedora Core 4. I extracted the disk images (has a primary partition and swap file), move the config file into /etc/xen and rename it to something easier to remember. I had to correctly set the paths to the virtual disks in the configuration file, as well as put the correct path for the kernel, /boot/xen-linux-2.6.11-ocxenu. Then I was able to start up the virtual machine:

xm create -c <configfilename>

The virtual machine works like a charm! The yum package manager is already set up with some mirrors, so I was able to immediately install additional packages I wanted with ease. Again, the only basic change I made was to make eth0 static. To do this in Fedora Core 4, I edited the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file to contain:

TYPE=Ethernet
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
IPADDR=192.168.x.z
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=192.168.x.x
ONBOOT=yes

I'll probably fool with some of the other distributions jailtime.org has put together. As of right now, they have CentOS 4.2, Debian 3.1, Fedora Core 4, Gentoo 2005.0, and Slackware 10.2.

New Google Travel Search

I found an interesting article about a new travel feature that Google is testing. If you search for the route (for example, "Fort Lauderdale to New York"), in the search results it gives you the option to select two dates. You enter the dates (by default it selects the current day and one week after for the return date) and then click on one of the travel sites (currently Expedia, Hotwire, Orbitz, or Priceline).

Google Local for Mobile

Google has written a nifty little Java program for mobile phones that works with Google Local and Google Maps. If you have a web-enabled phone, visit http://www.google.com/glm. Although my phone wasn't listed, I selected Spring and used the lowest model # Sanyo phone, and the app works like a charm. Very cool! The only additional feature I wish it had was that it would take advantage of the GPS on the phone.

I've Got the Power

It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic
It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic
...
We finally got power back Saturday afternoon at about 4:30. We had just gotten back from doing laundary at Sheila's Parents' house. I walked in and Sheila told me we had power. I didn't believe it until I saw the clock on the stove flashing. Unfortunately, as of this morning we didn't have cable back yet. Hopefully it doesn't take too long.

Animated Hurricane Wilma Maps

I found a decent animated local radar map of hurricane Wilma hitting us. There's also a regional radar map that shows the storm intensity as it passed over as well. It's amazing to see how it remained a category 2-3 when it passed over us.