Jan 01 2009
And so begins the fifth year of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks meme, where I challenge myself to read a minimum of 52 books in the coming calendar year, and then briefly review each book here on A Modest Construct. Keep a close watch as books are added to the list.
Other bloggers doing participating in this meme for 2009:
None yet.
Dec 31 2008
2008 came to an end more quickly than I thought, leaving me in the middle of three books and cementing my total for the year at 69 books.
For the full list of books, see here.
I’m afraid I lack the time for a full-featured wrap-up, but I’ve summarized the relevant information into a table of handy stats:
| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| Books Read | 69 |
| Total Pages | 25′609 |
| Shortest Book | 160 |
| Longest Book | 784 |
| Average Length | 371.14 |
| Worst Book | The Da Vinci Code |
| Best Book | The Raw Shark Texts |
| Nonfiction Books | 38 |
| Fiction Books | 31 |
| New Reads | 55 |
| Re-reads | 14 |
Dec 21 2008
FLAC is a cross-platform codec, but when it comes to Windows, one has a pretty wide range of compiles. Some are more optimized than others.
I first got the idea for this benchmark when I stumbled upon a native 64-bit FLAC executable for Windows. Curious, I did a quick and dirty test against the canonical build for Windows and found that while encoding times were similar, decoding times were considerably faster.
To figure out why this is so (the 64-bitness or something else), I quickly pulled some some additional compiles and benchmarked them against a few different samples.
Dec 19 2008
It’s been close to two years since I wrote GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a visual and textual comparison of some the best available audio players for the GNOME desktop.
As is usually the case in the world of free software, a lot has happened since then (and yet, in a strange way, things have stayed exactly the same). I decided to revisit some of those players and see how they’ve progressed. Some of them listed last time haven’t seen any appreciable development, and have been left off.
I realize that I am totally ignoring the daemon-based players (read: Music Player Daemon, XMMS2); this is by design, since those players open up a whole new can of worms. Suffice it to say that if you’ve decided on and XMMS2 or MPD-based player and successfully configured it, you probably don’t need any advice on choosing software.
The following programs will be covered in this review (development versions):
All of the testing was done on a fresh install (and update) of Ubuntu 8.10 in VirtualBox, using a small representative sample of my music collection (some modern, some classical, in Vorbis, MP3, and FLAC).
Dec 19 2008
The “semester’s over” edition.
Dec 18 2008
Today is my dad’s birthday—would be, if he hadn’t died this year.
I happen to be backing up some computer data and came across a large archive of documents that I took from his computer in the days after he died.
Going through a dead family member’s documents is always a strange experience, but it’s also a time for learning. There were no skeletons in my father’s proverbial closet, neo-Naziism or secret lives or anything like that. All we found was a shitload of credit cards, investment accounts, and backups of backups on his computer.
Dec 16 2008
Last revised 6 December 2008; get the PDF
Though its origins wend all the way back to 1971, it was not until the 1990s, after a successfully IPO, that Starbucks became the household name. One can trace both its precipitous proliferation as well as its near-singlehanded revival of the gourmet coffee market over nearly fifteen years, but as of 2008, Starbucks’ business model and its brand have taken blows. Despite all this, Starbucks seems to continually rank in the top tier of admired companies, even improving its ranking in Fortune’s “Top 100 Companies to Work For” poll (Levering, 2005; Levering & Moskowitz, 2008; “Top 20,” 2008). Its story is a textbook case of clever marketing, opportune timing, and the ultimate consequences of market saturation and dilution of brand.
Dec 15 2008
Like many of you, I’m a fan of Rob Miller’s Now Reading plugin. But Rob’s been busy lately, and the plugin, while functional, doesn’t look too great on Wordpress 2.7.
In an entirely selfish effort, I cleaned up some of the code (using the latest 4.4.4-beta code from SVN) to use some of Wordpress 2.7’s built in styles.
Now Reading has been downloaded 136 times.
Before you download it, let me make some things perfectly clear:
If you still want this, have a go at it.
