Brudvik.org » norwegian

Information and tools for MP3HD

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:38:37 +0000

Earlier today we heard about the coming of MP3HD, in my eyes a great announcement even though one can wonder why people don’t put more effort into FLAC. Afterall, MP3 is not free while FLAC is. Anyhow; for those of you whom don’t know what MP3HD is; it’s a lossless audio codec that has backward compatibility and have bitrates ranging from 500 to 900 kbps. It’s possible that you yourself can go test it out as the test-package is free for non-comercial and private usage. Tested it myself, and I must say I wouldn’t mind my music collection to be in this bitrate.

This package contains the following:

MP3HD command-line encoder
MP3HD command-line decoder
WinAmp plug-in

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Store Norske Leksikon

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:04:06 +0000

Finally it was decided that they would offer this service (Norwegian) for free. And surely there isn’t much you can complain about when it comes to content. Now that they even opened for user-contributed content I am sure we’ll see that this will quickly expand and in time it might even be able to compete with Wikipedia on Norwegian articles. That being said, I am amazed that they decide to offer this kind of service in such a shabby shape. The webpage looks like something thrown together in the last minute, the placement of the various elements are aweful and surely they haven’t put much effort into branding themself in a good way. If this were mine design project I would rather jump out a window before handing this of for public appearance. There are several links around the webpage that doesn’t even work. For instance, when you enter an article, they have this big sign in the upper-right corner of the content area, saying quality proofed. This sign has a link attached to it, clicking it just leads to a webpage saying no such publication.

Futhermore the usage of gradients and the colors they chose to go with it is far from the best combination I’ve seen. The placement of ADs looks like they just got a bunch of ADs they wanted to place, and placed them a bit here and there, caring little to nothing for the design. The usage of popular elements based on prototype like ballon tooltips and such is a good idea, but the design on the ballons are aweful. Taking a look at the source of the main page shows that this is a quick product when the developer(s) didn’t even care to remove bug comments. So to speak, the content here is absolutely thrilling, and I would love to see this wrapped in a good design, and not something a 14 year old kid came up with – 7 for usefulness, 1 for design – but I think I’ll keep to Wikipedia.

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Is your neighbour a pirate?

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:13:15 +0000

Thankfully, in terms of privacy – thats a question we don’t need to answer – but this new service that The Pirate Bay now offers at least gives us a glimpse into what countries do have a large group of pirates. Sure – the map only show some part of the truth, but still – it does give an idea on how the current situation is today. Due to the techincal fact that a client only connect to a tracker every 15-20 minutes, then it’s not possible to get it 100% accurate. This service however, is nothing compared to what Nexicon Inc. has developed and is currently implementing in the United States.

First of all, let me apologize for the bad quality of these screenshots, as you might understand it’s not that easy to find sources on the internet with screenshots taken from this system. The system is designed to monitor a big range of different p2p networks as well as webpages around the globe – and it then tracks the IP of the user that does the downloading/uploading, and creates rather impressive reports and pin-points the activity directly to a map. As you can see from the screenshots, they then are able to determine your address, your ISP, what you are downloading and when you did this. From a programmers perspective it’s quite a nifty and well-done system, and it would have been nice to see this in live action.

Links:

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Google to control your world

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:27:22 +0000

One can start to get worried when we think about how much control we let Google have. I mean – I am pro-google, and I love what the do, though when things like todays errors happens, one starts to wonder what would happen if Google turned into a monster? As it is today, we let Google control our mail, we have our websites there, they basically control what we find on the internet, they have great shares in the advertising business and even started to deliver us desktop applications. Now, todays error that is displayed in the screenshot above, was caused by a human-error – and the what actually went wrong is described here;

Now, this error today was rather small – in terms that it didn’t cause errors that caused major problems. But now that we allow Google to control so much of our day-to-day online activities, what happens the day the Google network really do end up doing something very bad. For instance, viruses spread amongst the attachments of emails on their server, someone hacking into their networks obtaining information about your company, your adsense configuration, your logins – the list can grow quite long. Though, even with this in mind, we would probably not stop using the Google services; they are simply too well made, and working without hussle – but the thought is always there.

A great article on this topic is; “Has Google created a monster?” by Jason Lee Miller.

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