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For the most part, MacWorld Expo was family friendly; there were only a few booths where flesh was more present than product. The most egregious of these was run by ZeoBit, the makers of MacKeeper. ✝

MacKeeper has always struck me as seedy. It’s billed as a bundle of essential privacy and security tools; I’m skeptical of its merits. Much of the bundle seems to duplicate standard OS X features: why do you need Internet Security when Safari already has anti-phishing, or Backup when Lion already has Time Machine? ZeoBit would have you believe that, sold separately, their apps are worth over a thousand dollars. Thankfully, you can have it all at the low, low price of $38.95.

ZeoBit engages in scummy marketing tactics, many of which were pioneered by malware authors. They purchase dubious ad space on low-rent web property — the kind of property a naïve surfer might be unlucky enough to visit. They work hard to break pop-up blockers. They try to make their ads look like content or native security warnings. At expos, they apparently use a different kind of pop-up to draw attention.

I had the pleasure of meeting several above-board security and privacy companies at MacWorld. Guys like SecureMac are out there fighting the good fight. With Cloak, we’ve tried to raise the bar on several fronts. We’ve tried to make it easy and elegant to stay safe. Moreover, we’ve tried to be as open and transparent about what we do as possible. But MacKeeper? I don’t think I trust them. Not one bit.

✝ I feel dirty mentioning this product by name; I won’t honor it with a link. If there were a hypertext equivalent of “unasking the question,” I’d unlink the link in a hurry.

Sure, that’s the explanation — not that demand for Windows PCs is drying up. I’m surprised Nvidia couldn’t make up the difference with Tegra 2 chipsets that powering all those best sellers on the “non-iPad tablets” list.

Skepticism is understandable, but I actually suspect that Thailand’s flooding is the explanation. The PC hardware ecosystem is tightly coupled; is it so hard to believe that massive shortages in supply for any key component could lead to decreased demand across the ecosystem? It will probably take several more quarters before anyone can say for sure.

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the data we do have doesn’t remotely seem to justify the […] rhetoric that now appears to be obligatory on the Hill.

Sanchez makes several important points. To focus the discussion, Sanchez first notes that even if piracy were a huge economic problem, SOPA and PIPA would do nothing to fix it. He then moves on to the meat of the matter, which is threefold.

First, the MPAA and RIAA have claimed that piracy costs America 750,000 jobs and between $200 and $250 billion per year. This is simply wrong. As Sanchez examined in detail several years ago, these numbers appear to have originated in an ancient Forbes article about physical piracy and have since then cropped up in a number of discussions about internet piracy where they do not apply. The MPAA recently downsized their figures to $58 billion in annual damage; Sanchez investigated those claims and found them wanting, too.

Second, Sanchez targets an assumption that underlies most estimates of damage: namely, that piracy always leads to lost revenue. This is almost certainly false — many pirates will never pay for their ill-gotten gains — but for the sake of argument, Sanchez assumes that it’s true. Yet, revenue in the music and movie industries has actually outpaced the economy as a whole during the recession. In a world without piracy, would these industries truly have done $58 billion better still?

Finally, Sanchez reminds us that the constitution enshrines copyright as a means to promote the useful arts, not to increase corporate revenues. A better way to measure piracy’s impact is to look at whether it has reduced artistic output. At first blush, it seems the answer is no: accounting for the recession, there are more new movies and albums released today than ever before. (That said, more independent studies should be done on this point.)

Sanchez makes many other important and subtle points. I highly recommend reading all of his recent articles on the issue.

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It was my impression that PIPA was mostly written by well-funded lobbyists and that there aren’t that many Joe Six-Packs who truly support it. But surely they must be out there!

Amanda’s entire post is distressing and worth reading, but I’d like to address this one point.

They’re not “Joe Six-Packs,” but I do have a number of friends in the music industry. They feed their families with the music they write. I think it’s safe to say that they are all in favor of SOPA and PIPA.

My music friends believe (as I do) that there is a problem with piracy that needs to be solved. Where we appear to differ, however, is in believing that even an imperfect bill is preferable to no bill. Here I simply cannot agree. The SOPA and PIPA aren’t imperfect; they’re dangerous. Further, it’s unclear that any legislation will truly “fix” piracy; certainly the DMCA didn’t. Try as I might to convince them otherwise, I think my friends are fairly stuck in thinking that “something needs to be done.” From the congressional perspective, if you couple the mentality of “something needs to be done” with “lobbyists are lining my pockets,” it’s easy to see why these bills are likely to pass.

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Piracy is not a problem.

O'Reilly takes a bold position against SOPA. I wonder if “piracy is not a problem” only because O'Reilly sells tech books, not music or movies? To be fair, I’ve never seen compelling evidence that the music and motion picture industries are negatively impacted by piracy. Sure, I’ve certainly seen data counting the number of illegal downloads, or tallying their dollar value, but I’ve never seen an honest discussion of how this impacts the bottom line. The assumption that a pirated album or movie would otherwise have been purchased by the pirating customer is clearly false. O'Reilly is quick to point this out.

Do I agree with O'Reilly? His stance is probably too strong for me, but at least his argument is refreshing.

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You don’t need that much. Here are the pieces of my own puzzle:

 

• A digital library & server. Forget analog. For accurate reproduction, you want a digital source. You want it to be convenient, so rip your CDs (and records) and sell ‘em all. Most importantly, take the (potentially huge amount of) time needed and properly tag it all.
  
  I bought a Mac Mini and ripped my CDs with iTunes. I use Apple Lossless: no bits are harmed, hard drives easily handle the larger files, modern iDevices support the format, and (should it become necessary) I can always move to FLAC or another lossless format with open-source tools.
  
  The Mini is my media server and, with iTunes, everything just works. Well, mostly. To keep things organized, I turn “Keep my iTunes Media folder organized” and “copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library” on. With these settings enabled, iTunes is a pretty good MP3 tagger; disabled, large libraries quickly become unwieldy.
  
  I’ve discovered that iTunes Home Sharing plus large libraries is a recipe for disaster: the iOS5 music app often takes ten or more minutes just to “open” my home share. (!) I prefer using Apple’s Remote app to beam music to my two Airport Expresses instead.

• A digital-to-analog converter (DAC). You’ve got a digital library, so you want to keep your audio path digital as long as possible. At the end of the chain, you’ll need to convert to analog and amplify before your speakers.
  
  I’m not sure if this is commonly known, but all modern Apple gear supports digital optical audio output. The headphone jack on modern MacBook Pros, and on Airport Expresses, actually doubles as a TOSLINK digital mini connector. For other machines, the cheapest imaginable audio card that supports S/PDIF should suffice.
  
  The world of DACs is full of snake oil, so make a well-researched purchase. I opted for the $1,000 Lavry DA-10 because it was well reviewed, because it was built by a well-respected engineer in the audio world (Dan Lavry,) and because it supported a Seattle-local company.
  
  What features do you want in a DAC? On the input side, support for TOSLINK and S/PDIF is a must; everything else is a bonus. You’ll want balanced XLR output. The DAC will act as an amplifier or pre-amp; in my home setup, it’s the only amplifier I need. Finally, most DACs have a built-in headphone connection; the better DACs provide a separate high-quality headphone amp.
  
  What makes some DACs cost 1000x the price of others? At a certain point, the answer is snake oil. But the DAC integrated circuit, and the quality of the components on the analog side, can make a big difference in the quality of the output. Keep in mind, however, that even a $10 DAC IC is a marvel of modern engineering. I don’t care what any audiophile says: it doesn’t take much to reach the point where technology objectively eclipses the capability of the human ear.

 

• A great pair of speakers. My listening rig is optimized for accuracy. I want to mangle the bits as little as possible on their way to my ears. As a result, I tend to opt for studio monitors rather than audio loudspeakers. The markets overlap, but they’re not the same. Monitors are designed to help studio engineers figure out what’s going on in their mix. Loudspeakers are designed to make listening an enjoyable experience, at the (sometimes) cost of coloring sound. The downside to monitors is that they can expose terrible mixes; you may find yourself listening to your favorite recording a lot less.
  
  I opted for a pair of Genelec 8040As. I’ve always liked the Genelec “sound” for mixing work, although there are some who find the high-end on the 80X0 series too grating. The 8040s were about the right size for my living room; any larger and the sound would have been destroyed by the room.
  
  Before purchasing any speaker, be sure to audition it with music you know well. For studio monitors, visit your local pro audio shop, or Guitar Center in a pinch. For loudspeakers, find a reputable non-chain hi-fi shop. Make sure the speaker is something you want to listen to for a long time to come. Remember that with speakers, as with everything else audio, less is often more. For example, fewer woofers and tweeters means less crossover complexity and (often) better quality sound reproduction.

• Good speaker placement. It’s easy to get this right, but many people get it quite wrong. Make sure the speakers form an equilateral triangle with the listener, and (if possible) make sure the sides of the triangle are at least six feet long. Try to keep speakers at least half a foot away from the walls and corners. Mount the speakers on something relatively isolating, if possible. That’s all there is to it; if you get the basics right, your speakers will sound great and the rest (like buying bass traps or baffling) will be gravy.

 

• A great pair of headphones (or two). I can’t always listen to music out loud, so I bought a pair of Sennheiser HD650s. In general, “open” cans like the Sennheisers give better sound reproduction than their “closed” counterparts; the disadvantage is that people nearby can hear a bit of what you’re listening to.
  
  All headphones color sound, so when you pick a headphone it’s mostly about deciding what color you like. My Sennheisers tend to have a relaxed high-end and a punchy but not extreme low end. I find them perfect for jazz and classical, and pretty good for dubstep too! Grados (even the fantastic low-end SR-60i) are awesome for reproducing rock and metal. The high-end AKG K702s are also quite nice.
  
  When I’m working at coffee shops, I need something portable and closed. I haven’t found the perfect answer, but my recently acquired B&W P5s are fun to listen to, if overpriced.

  

• Just about any cables. I’m sure fools do buy $10,000 Stealth Cables. Don’t be a fool. You don’t need to spend much money on your TOSLINK and S/PDIF cables because the data is digital, and because error (and jitter) correction is awesome. Cheap cables will get your bits to the other side unmolested. And you don’t need to spend much money on your analog cables either: just make sure you’re using short length balanced XLR cables and all will be well.

All told, I’ve spent about $6,000 for a set of gear that I love and that will suit me for decades to come. It’s a big investment, but if you love music as much as I do, it’s one that can almost be rationally justified!

It’s worth tearing apart a little bit. To App Engine, an entity with a ListProperty of length N is equivalent to N separate entities. In this case, on average, each list has 8 items; that’s 112.8 million writes. In addition, the ListProperty is indexed; indexes need to be written, too. The math explodes to 6.5 billion write operations which indeed costs $6,500.

Is the cost reasonable, then? Absolutely not. The ListProperty in question contains geobox string prefixes; this is effectively a workaround for the fact that App Engine’s datastore isn’t terribly geo-friendly. The same 14.1 million entities in a PostGIS database might take a little time and a fair amount of I/O to update but even if you were (say) using Amazon EBS, you’d probably spend a couple dollars at most on fees.

Reading the Hacker News comments, you might think that this is operator error or even poor architecture decision-making on the part of the app’s developers. But that’s not the case.

The problem with App Engine’s recent price changes isn’t that things are more expensive (although they are); the problem is that the axes along which charges are made have substantially changed. A similar write operation might have cost tens of dollars under the old scheme.

App Engine’s original premise was that if you developed against its bespoke APIs and adhered to its quirky methodology, then your app would scale at low engineering and monetary cost. The pricing changes are a sign, perhaps, that App Engine couldn’t deliver on its promise.

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(NB: This is the first in my planned series of links to programmer music I’ve discovered and dig. I’ll always link to the Amazon MP3 using my affiliate code. I don’t really expect to make any money, but if I do, it is highly likely to be used to buy more music to recommend!)

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When installing Ivory II, an I/O or CRC error appears, and the installation cannot continue. What do I do?

This is the tip of the iceberg of insane failures you may encounter when installing Synthogy Ivory II for Mac OS X. I gave up on their installer and, I kid you not, wrote my own in Python. No wonder they treat me like a criminal.

All I wanted to do was play the piano. Never again.

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The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Perhaps I didn’t explain myself clearly. A differential equation describing piano physics, programmed into a computer, sounds like a real piano.

If that’s not beauty and wonderment, I don’t know what is.

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The iLok USB Hardware Key is a device that holds authorization licenses and connects via the USB port to your computer.

You’re a criminal.

It’s Portable: iLok enables you to easily move authorizations from one computer to another. Use your software at home, at the office, at a studio, or at a friend’s house. iLok makes it portable.

We’ll happily sell you another when you inevitably lose this one.

It’s Safe: Authorizations are stored in the secure iLok USB hardware key — not on the computer or hard drive. iLok is immune to problems caused by machine upgrades, disk maintenance, hardware failures, and software updates.

Your $2,500 laptop is crap. Trust our $40 USB dongle instead.

It’s Convenient: Store all of your iLok-enabled software authorizations on a single iLok USB hardware key, regardless of developer.

You only own one piece of software that requires iLok, but you’ll have to install it anyway. Setup takes just an hour and only requires us to install a kernel extension, a browser plug-in, and a user-space daemon, all of which probably compromise your machine’s security and stability in ways we could care less about because at least our software is safe.

Also: bend over. You’re a criminal.

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Ivory uses samples. Each key of the piano is painstakingly recorded hundreds of times at different dynamic levels and with different pedaling. When you “play” Ivory, you replay the samples.

Pianoteq is modeled from first principles. It is based on the mathematics of keys, dampers, hammers, strings, and soundboards. When you “play” Pianoteq, you solve a differential equation that describes the physics of an ideal piano.

Neither approach is perfect; both lie somewhere on the upslope of the uncanny valley. Ivory’s samples can’t capture the full quality of pedaling and sympathetic resonance. Pianoteq can’t yet capture the dirt and nuance of real hammers on real strings.

Despite my preference for Ivory, it seems to me that Pianoteq has the brighter future. There’s only so much one can do with samples. Someday soon, perhaps, physical modeling will overtake sampling for instruments as complex as the piano. When it does, we will never look back.

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My previous design was nearly three years old. It was starting to irk me: the font wasn’t ideal, the organization of content was a bit odd, and the text’s vertical rhythm was often rudely interrupted.

In the intervening years, I read a lot about typography. I also became enamored with the Miller Font Family, a truly gorgeous scotch serif with excellent hinting for both display and print.

Yesterday, I encountered Chris Pearson’s entertaining post on Golden Ratio Typography. No, the Golden Ratio is not the end-all of design, but the output of his typography calculator was often hard to argue with.

So: here we are. My new design is (I hope) clean but mildly textured, easy to navigate, and above all a pleasure to read. I even had the opportunity to sneak my technotronic initial (typeset in Thenofreak Black) into the sidebar. Yee-techno-haw!