Josef “Jeff” Sipek

It’s been a couple of days already, but I should mention it just the same…

On Tuesday (August 26), I drove to Ann Arbor with the intention of living there for the next n years - however long it takes to do a PhD in Computer Science. The drive was mostly ok. Going through NYC was a bit slow, but still manageable. NJ was better, but there were still too many cars on the road. Once I hit PA, things were great…I-80 has just the right amount of curves, there are mountains, trees, and other things to look at. I stopped for gas near Allentown, PA because of the Billy Joel song. The couple of hours driving in OH were dreadful. It was the most boring part of the 10.5 hour trip. Do you know what you can see in OH? Fields! That’s it, nothing more. Just fields to your left, and fields to your right. The road has a slight turn every so often, but nowhere near enough to keep the mind busy. Also, since there are only fields, you actually get some pretty nasty gusts of wind that are really annoying. The drive in MI was much better…turns, etc. One thing that really amused me was a road sign saying "Prison area Do not pick up hitchhikers" or something to that effect. Unfortunately, I was busy driving to take a photo of sign.

647 miles total. 10.5 hours (30 mins spend on food and gas).

My apartment’s layout is something like this:

I actually have the left-right reverse…entrance is upper right, balcony is mid left. It’s quite big for my purposes. I still need to work on the furnishing and all. (I don’t like shopping for things, so I’ll just do a demand-purchases…when I need something, I’ll go and get it. I am thinking a recliner would be nice :) ).

As some of you may have noticed, my blahg has been down for about 2 days. The reason is, I upgraded my system, and php4 packages broke. I just installed the php5 packages, and things seem to work again.

Although I’m filing this under the “rants” category, don’t get fooled. The rant is about UIs in general, with Audacity being the exception.

Here’s what happened…I was going to save the recordings of my radio show to my computer, and I noticed that the first hour recording started about 4 minutes after I took over aether. That meant that I needed to get the previous hour, and cut whatever short portion into a small file and keep it along the 3 1-hour long mp3s.

For audio editing, I tend to use Audacity. It works well, it’s rather intuitive, etc., etc. I did the cut, and I was going to export it as an mp3 (to keep the file format consistent with the other 3 hours of audio, otherwise I’d make it an ogg/vorbis). Audacity let me chose the new file name, the new format, but then when it was about to start the actual encoding, this dialog popped up:

This is absolutely brilliant! And I mean it; I’m not being sarcastic as I usually am. Normally, one of these scenarios happens…

• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at start (if at all), and disables export to that file format
• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, forcing you to abort the encoding, potentially closing the application, to installed the codec, and redoing whatever you did and trying to re-export
• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, making you look through numerous preferences windows to find the one you care about - if it even exists
• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, making you trying to figure out which environment variable (LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LD_PRELOAD, etc., etc.) will make the linker do the right thing, and make the application find the .so

All are sub-optimal. Asking the user for the path to the .so, while not the newbie-friendliest of things, is really the best thing the application could do. This way, if the .so isn’t installed, the user can install it anywhere - system wide or in one’s $HOME - and then point Audacity to it. If the .so is installed but Audacity couldn’t find it, you can manually point it in the right place.

I use Debian, so installing libmp3lame was a matter of making sure I have the Debian Multimedia source in my sources.list, and then running a quick aptitude install to get it on my disk. If you are using a less privileged distro (or if you don’t have root access to install it system-wide), you’ll have to quite possibly go to the project’s website, and grab a copy there. Audacity’s UI designers haven’t failed you there. A convenient way to go to the website to download the .so is right there.

Overall, seeing this dialog didn’t make me agitated that Audacity wants something I don’t have installed, but instead it made me write this post about something that makes sense, but people fail at doing things like this.

This is a follow up post to Wordpress sucks from a week ago.

I decided to try to figure out some more category names, and then it hit me…my site is crawled from time to time by The Wayback Machine. So, I searched, and found a copy from November 2007. Not the latest, but quite new enough to have all the categories I had. A little while later, my blahg is back to its former glory. And there was much rejoicing.