Random Developments

Second-to-last round, and some interesting results: three matches were decided by less than a goal, and three others by more than 10 goals. A few upsets, as well, which made for mediocre results for “ladder” and “money” (which, once again, tipped identically): only four hits, which caused the cumulative financial results for “ladder” to become negative for the first time in the season. “Home” did very well with seven, and random was, well, random, and got three. So far, not once has any strategy got all the results right in a round.

The numbers for this week:

Next week: the final results of the season and an analysis of the results of this experiment.

Links:

• Round 20 (previous)
• Round 22 (next)

Google Talk is available for download. GMail account required to use it, though.

Text and voice messaging, by the way.

If anyone wants to try it, I’m “wafonso”.

Rather than referring to “not safe for work” links, “hotlinking” is the practice of embedding, in one’s web pages, images (or other multimedia content) that comes from an unrelated site, without permission (or even notification). The effect is that the owners of the web site that hosts the images pay for the bandwidth used when someone views the pages that belong to the “hotlinker” (which gets a free ride) without getting anything in exchange; not even visibility. It may also be a copyright violation, depending on the terms of use of the site in question.

All this is to say that yesterday I looked at the stats for this site and noticed several hits with referrals coming from an auction site; they were all requests for one particular image. As you can guess, one of the auctioneers decided that one image from my site would make a cool avatar for him.

Now, if you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you will see a “Creative Commons” logo. That means that the content from this site can be freely copied and used for any purpose whatsoever, provided that the author (that would be me) is acknowledged.

However, I’m not a free hosting provider. Had that user copied the image somewhere else and used it, I’d be cool with that (and I probably wouldn’t ever find out about it, anyway). But using my bandwidth and not acknowledging authorship is a little too much.

So, after a quick fiddle with my .htaccess and thanks to mod_rewrite, that user’s avatar is now a red-on-white block of text saying “this user steals images”. I don’t think that’ll improve the chances of him selling whatever it is he’s selling.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?[auctionsite].com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?myspace.com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?[fotologsite].com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.netwhatever.com/hotlink.png [R,L]


At first I considered blocking all hotlinking, but that would break image search engines (such as Google Images), and I didn’t want that. So, I’m limiting it to known offenders (I also found one guy using the same image as an avatar in myspace.com, and another one had a different photo as his background image in a fotolog). If it gets out of hand, though, I’ll white-list Google, Yahoo etc. and block everything else.

We’re approaching the end of the season; only two more weeks to go. The results seem pretty much stable by now, and it’s clear that we’ll get a “hit rate” of approximately 60% for “ladder” and “home”, 65% for “money” and slightly over 50% for “random” (as predicted). That said, the results this week were pretty much average: 5 hits for “ladder” and “money”, only 3 for “home” (lower than usual) and 6 for “random”(higher than usual). This was also the third week in a row where “ladder” and “money” tipped exactly the same teams (and, of course, got exactly the same results).

The numbers for this week:

Links:

• Round 19 (previous)
• Round 21 (next)

Yes, the title of this entry answers the question of which player I chose. I got the NW-E407L: L for bLue (B is for black; why not B for blue and K for black?)

There are good things and bad things about this player. Most of the good things are in hardware, and most of the bad things are in software (including firmware).

The good points first: this thing is simply beautiful. The OLED display is very clear, the feel of the unit is very good (it is heavier than it seems, though) and the controls are well located, for the most part (although it’s hard to handle the unit when it’s in your pocket without accidentally pressing some buttons). Sound quality is very good, and it plays loud. One weak point is the earphone: it feels cheap, and it probably is; you can’t use the unit seriously without a new phone. And, of course, the feature that made me choose this player: it can play for up to 50 hours without recharges; an iPod won’t go over 12 hours.

The bad points: the software you have to install in your PC is very bad. Very, very bad. If you’ve read other reviews (as I had), many of them mention how bad this software is. Don’t believe them: it’s worse. I haven’t tried the bypass route yet, but it seems like it’s unavoidable.

One other problem is that the unit is not very good for playing podcasts: it will only play MP3 files if they are encoded with a 44khz sampling frequency, and that’s not very common for podcasts (22khz seems to be more frequent). The way to work around this is to convert the files to ATRAC3, Sony’s proprietary format, and their software (SonicStage) lets you do it with relative ease. But that’s just the beginning of your problems.

You see, you’d expect the desktop software to be aware of the limitations of your player and refuse to upload unplayable files; but that would be a good thing, and, as we’ve already covered, this software has no good features. Instead, it let’s the player tell you that it “CANNOT PLAY” the files, and you have to find out why. Well, after you do, you right click on the file and select “Convert format…”. After the conversion, the same library entry will refer to two files (as you can see if you right click on it and select “Properties -> File Info”). At this point, if you chose to transfer the file to the player, you’d expect SonicStage to do the right thing and send the ATRAC3 file. It doesn’t; it sends the MP3 file, and there’s no way (that I can see) to change this. You have to delete the MP3 file (not from the library, but from the file system) for it to work.

As Chandler would say, could they be more stupid? Hard to see how.

But they try. They make available a tool to bulk-convert files from MP3 to ATRAC3, which sounds good once you’ve resigned yourself to live with it. After downloading and installing the tool, though, it refuses to run because it needs “SonicStage 2.1 or later”. You’d think SonicStage 3.0 (included in the CD that comes with the player) would suffice, but their definition of “later” seems to be different from mine.

Other than that, there are a couple of minor annoyances. The desktop shortcut for the PDF manual doesn’t work if your default browser is not IE; it opens www.programfiles.com instead, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on. The manual comes only in electronic format, by the way. The online registration process (which is also IE-only) did not accept the serial number of my unit, besides making me feel old (the last option for “age” is “over 30″).

What would make this a very good unit: the desktop software needs to be smarter (and easier to use). For example, it should convert files on the fly to ATRAC3 if it knows the player can’t handle them (alternatively, and even better, the player should play any MP3 file; it can’t be that hard). And it should come with decent earphones.

For the moment, I still think I can live with the problems, but if I get annoyed enough by the next weekend, I will consider returning it and getting something else instead (probably an iPod Shuffle). I’ll keep you posted.

Excelent results this week. Once more, “ladder” and “money” had exactly the same selections, and both did very well with seven correct tips; that was the best result ever for “ladder”. “Home” got 5 hits and “random” got only 4 (the average tipper this week got six correct results).

The numbers for this week:

Links:

• Round 18 (previous)
• Round 20 (next)

So, I decided that I need want (and can afford) a portable MP3 player. Therefore, I’m looking for one. What I want is:

• very small and light
• long battery life
• at least 512MB

The first two requisites point to a Flash-based player, and the third one removes from the running all of the really cheap ones. After some (admittedly not very extensive) research, my two choices at the moment are the iPod Shuffle and the Sony Network Walkman NW-E405 (and its brothers 407/505/507).

The Sony models have in their favour that they are beautiful, the battery lasts for up to 50 hours (and a three-minute recharge gives you three hours of use), they have a display and there’s the option of an integrated FM tuner. Against them, I’m told that their music management software is terrible (but you can bypass it, apparently), they won’t talk to iTunes and they’re more expensive. The iPod has in its favour that, well, it’s an iPod. And it’s cheaper and slightly lighter, besides having those cool white earphones. But Apple is apparently not very nice if you want to use your iPod with two computers, and that’s a problem for me; the relatively short battery life (12 hours) is also a problem.

The iPod costs $149, and the cheapest Sony model costs $239. What I have to decide is whether the advantages of the Walkmans are worth 90 dollars (those are Australian dollars).

Would anyone have any comments on any of them? Advocacy is cool, and pointers to other candidates would be welcome as well.

The results were not so bad this week, but not so good either. An unusual event was that “ladder” and “money” had exactly the same selections, and “random” had almost exactly the reverse of those (except for the Bulldogs-Lions match, where it followed them in tipping the Lions; the Bulldogs won). In the end, “home” got 6 hits, “money” and “ladder” got 5 and “random” got only 2.

The numbers for this week:

Links:

• Round 17 (previous)
• Round 19 (next)