James C. Liu's Weblog

Thursday November 16, 2006

What? Solaris Life Style?

Fishing Vacation Recap

Okay, so I haven't had time to blog in a while. Or fish for that matter. The exception was a short vacation back not too long ago to Vancouver to install a couple of new workstations in the vacation home up there, put in a second security camera and to figure out what was eating and extra 2kW-hrs/day in electricity besides the frige. I did manage to get some fishing in there, and a little scientific method of observing when the fish arrive relative to the tide, yielded big results. Here's a 10+kg salmon caught from shore just outside the house. Yeah, that's me in the picture. Took me 20 minutes to land the fish and two boats anchored just off shore to watch me bring it in. I wish I had a net with me, but I rarely bring one for fear of "Murphy's" Corollary - which states: If you bring a big net, you won't need it. But the fish looks like a Chinook on the outside. Black mouth, massive size, fiesty. And I got a kick cleaning it in the driveway. More than several of my neighbours (who own boats) drove by, hit the brakes, then backed up and lowered their passenger side power windows. "Ooooooh. N-I-C-E fish!" they all said, licking their chops. Amazingly, this salmon had no pink flesh. It's known as a "White Chinook" or "Ivory King." And up in B.C., there appear to be anywhere from 1% to several percent of the Chinook population that have the same genetic mutation where they lack the enzyme to breakdown and absorb beta-carotene. Hence, their flesh isn't pink. The flavour also is very sweet and mild, like a trout or char, and hardly like regular salmon. A delicacy in my book, for sure.

The two workstations I installed up there were systems for each bedroom. I found this killer store in Richmond, B.C., just off Bridgeport Rd., not to far west of the Home Depot/IKEA. It's called CanComputer and they have some good prices that compare well with the US. I may have mentioned some series of shops along the Bridgeport ICBC row (the section of Road where lots of auto-body repair shops are). Most are hole-in-the-wall shops with small store fronts, little retail display space, but large back rooms with inventory. CanComputer is like one of those shops, just a little fancier and cleaner. But they're all more mail order fulfillment businesses as opposed to Best Buy (which moved in last year, next door to the Future Shop at Landesdown Mall), which is over-priced anyway. Plus, the folks at CanComputer seem to know there specs a bit better on parts than the Future Shop or BestBuy folks. At least I was impressed that a sales person at CanComputer actually knew the difference in form factor for a x16 lane PCI-express slot versus AGP slot on an AMD socket 939 board and quiet power supplies with 20+4 versus 24+4 pins power rails. But neither BestBuy nor Future shop sell many computer parts - rather, they sell whole finished systems, so they aren't the kind of shops you'd expect true geeks/nerds to frequent.

I also had the privilege to bump into Nick Harrison at the Richmond, B.C. Costco. I was doing a run for DVD videos and on the lookout for Season 9 of Stargate SG-1, and met a semi-tall, medium build guy in the same video section looking at Sci-Fi serials. For folks who don't know, Nick Harrison is the guy who plays the Dark Knight in some of the Arthurian episode in last year's Stargate SG-1. He played roles as Jaffa in previous seasons as well. But it's just a kick to meet up with folks from popular Sci-Fi shows who are nice people and approachable. And with all the movies and TV shows they make up in Vancouver, that's another bonus for going up there. BTW, Season 9 of SG1 is out on DVD now. In the US, it's $32 at Costco.

Solaris Life Style?

So what's to do during those lazy late summer/early fall evenings in the great North? Well, for one thing, you can sit around and rip CD audio into mp3s to stuff them on a new, cheap, no-name MP3 player. I picked one up for fishing and roadtrips in California for around $50. It's a Truly MP310 in lime green with FM radio, colour display and 512MB of flash memory. I saw a recent sale at Fry's down in California on the same unit for about the same base price but $35 after rebate (curse short profanity to self...should've waited!) My sister always recommends waiting for these cheap electronic gizmos. "They'll get so cheap, you'll get 'em free with a Happy Meal in a year," she says.

Usually, I carry a trusty laptop with Linux on it, but as you all know, upgrading is a crap shoot, and sometimes, in the middle of an upgrade to a new kernel version, the Linux ABI story ain't the best and something go wrong. So my triple boot laptop has been booting Solaris x86-only in recent weeks/months. And it'll stay that way until I find some time to fix the install without hosing all my data on the existing slice. Well, I thought it was a bummer that I didn't have Linux with me, since, for things like CD-ripping and burning, it's been very handy and relatively easy to use. In fact, I believe the ability to rip and burn audio and mp3 CDs (as well as hook up digital cameras and other device support), has been critical to Linux's success. Without those utilities, there wouldn't have been the widespread adoption of Linux in the enterprise. In essence, Linux offered the Geeks something other Unices couldn't - LIFESTYLE.

Getting the powers-that-be who direct Solaris to view Multi-media support on Solaris, has been a long struggle for a lot of folks inside, and for many years. Senior/Upper management got the need for an Office Suite pretty quick. And Open Office/Star Office is just an awesome product. But office productivity doesn't equate to LIFESTYLE. A word processor isn't fun. You use it when a paper is due and you gotta get the darn thing out. You use a presentation package when customers are gonna show up the next day and you need to make something look pretty to sell them on some product or idea. And a spreadsheet... well, it's useful when creating PTA invoices to submit for reimbursement.

I thought Solaris was a long way from offering any Lifestyle, but I was wrong.

Stuck without operational Linux, I gave Solaris a try. And reading the man page on the cdrw(1) command, I quickly found out that it's possible to rip audio tracks and quite easily. For example, if you want to rip the 7th audio track off of any audio CD to a .wav file, then just do this:

    % /bin/cdrw -x -T wav 7 myaudiotrack.wav

So imagine what any shell scripter or Java programmer could do with a command line this simple... well, yes, it was easy enough to script this and rip and re-title every single song off of a CD and it's pretty fast too - probably less than 4 minutes to rip an hour of music into .wav format.

Once in .wav format, to convert it to .mp3, we can use any program. My preference is for Lame. And getting any version 3.9.x or later compiles cleanly and easily on Solaris x86 and runs fairly quickly, ripping at close to 6x playing speed for 128kbps bitrate. Usage is also straightforward. My ears aren't finicky so I don't need a higher bit rate. And if your cheap mp3 player is only 512 MB, the files are smaller than ripping using a higher bitrate.

  % /usr/local/bin/lame -h -b 128 --ta "Artist" --tt "Title" myaudiotrack.wav myaudiotrack.mp3

You may want to keep the .wav files around if you ever plan to burn a backup of your CD. But I usually delete them and just keep the .mp3 files. Some folks don't like the fact that .mp3s are lossy and noticeably lossy at 128kbps, so you can rip at a higher rate and store them which is still much smaller than the .wav files. I convert the .mp3 back to .wav files using mpg123 which is available freeware, and included on the Solaris 10 update 1 companion software distribution. If you've installed the companion software, then you'll find it in /opt/sfw/bin/mpg123. The command to convert songs back to .wav is:

    % /opt/sfw/bin/mpg123 --wav myaudiotrack.wav myaudiotrack.mp3

When you have all the tracks you want in .wav format, burning the audio CD is straightforward. Just use:

   % cdrw -a [track1.wav] track2.wav ....] trackN.wav]

So all this playing around with audio clips made me reconsider if Solaris can yield some semblance of LIFESTYLE. Yes. I think it can. The real question though is whether it could load songs onto the el cheapo MP3 player which is supposedly a usb-storage device. Funny thing is that the manufacturer claims that one can use Linux 2.2 and later with this player. But some users have had issues with kernel 2.6 and the usb port with this device. I had some issues with Fedora Core 3 at home, which has been upgraded a few times. There appeared to be an "Error USB Port 1" on Linux in the log files. I didn't expect much on Open Solaris Nevada build 48 if Linux couldn't even see this.

So on to Solaris. And as expected, nothing happened. Well there was some output in the /var/adm/message file on Solaris, but the usb-storage didn't mount. Yes, I was a little disappointed, until I got an idea to contact some of our Beijing driver folks working on USB. I got my hands on an early version of USB driver and after installing, I tried plugging the device in and, WOW! The device mounted and was found in /media. I found out that the MP3 player only supports USB 1.1, so it's a slow dog to upload songs. But after a couple of hours of chugging along, I managed to load up some oldies and goodies for my exceptional entertainment-on-the-go. I've checked recently with build 51 of Solaris Nevada, and yes, the new USB is in there, so soak up the Lifestyle folks. And if you have some cool scripts or Java GUI front end for the command line utils to rip and process audio clips, let me know. I would upload mine to Java.NET, except they're pretty embarrassing right now. Maybe later after code clean-up.

[disclaimer: Please use information here only to create -legal- archives of music you own. Don't be a spoil-sport and steal music. Support your favourite musicians and their labels]. November 16, 2006 05:08 PM PST Permalink