Switching Gears

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.
...
Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Wall Street Journal

I definitely did not expect this so soon, as progress in the courts of stopping the RIAA's legal campaign is proceeding at a crawl, and the RIAA could probably have continued for a while longer before getting hit with serious legal penalties.

Graphics Programming Term Project

In case anybody is interested, here is the paper for my term project in graphics class. I was working on an implementation of it, but thanks to various brick wall problems, that didn't end up getting completed in time (which is why the results section does not discuss the results of the actual implementation), although it did result in me going 38 hours without sleep. It's an interesting method, and at least a couple small parts of it are novel (I'm not aware of them being proposed before), but probably isn't practically useful for the reasons explained in the paper.

Multi-Fragment Deferred Shading Using Index Rendering

& More Echoes

BahamutZero has informed me that Echoes of War is now available on iTunes+ (DRM-free 256 kbps AAC audio downloads) for $14.85 (the two CDs in Echoes of War are sold separately, totaling that price). I'm not aware of the actual CDs being available anywhere but Eminence, the creators. If you just want the audio files without the shipping (my Legendary Edition cost like $12 shipping), check out iTunes.

Intriguing

Well, just as school is almost over (finals are this week) and I don't have a job lined up yet, substantial amounts of amusement will be welcome in the near future (especially given how bleak the anime outlook is, this season...). Well, as it turns out, I'm in luck! While in the process of banging my head against a wall till I pass out while working on a term project, something amusing happened. I don't have time to explain the details now (despite the fact that this is much more interesting than my school project), but here's a short headline of what's up and coming: Q vs. Scam Debt Collection Agency.

Look forward to it!

& Other Things

I managed to forget something important in my last post, despite the fact that it's closely related to one of the things I did mention; that is, Echoes of War is out. At least, it got shipped to me last week; few others seem to have gotten it already, and as far as I know it hasn't even hit peer-to-peer networks yet.

Echoes of War is an orchestral remix/arrangement of music from all three of Blizzard's universes - Warcraft (III, World of Warcraft), Starcraft (I & II), and Diablo (I-III) - by Eminence. It's about one and a half hours of music, with several tracks from each game and each track being a medley of game pieces.

While some of them fairly closely follow the original sound, some of them are arranged in very novel and surprising ways. Two of the best examples of this are the big band jazz arrangement of the Starcraft I Terran music, and the crazy symphonic/operatic/Middle Eastern/The Rock arrangement of the Starcraft I Zerg music. (other samples can be played from the Echoes of War media section)

How much I like the tracks varies by the track. Several of them I really like, although I'm noticably less fond of the Diablo tracks than the Warcraft and Starcraft ones. But in any case, the album is awesome. If you like the music of Warcraft, Starcraft, and/or Diablo, buy it. I just wish the stupid thing was sold by stores that didn't charge you $14 for shipping...

Various Thingies

First of all, I should mention that my house is fine; the fire didn't get near it. The probability of it getting here was fairly low, but we did a bit of better-safe-than-sorry packing. Though last night while driving home from school I did drive past a (unrelated) fire that filled the entire intersection with smoke in about a 50 feet radius; I still don't know what was on fire (I couldn't see it), but the smoke was very obvious, and I heard fire trucks going by.

In other news, it's been relatively difficult to collect data on Firefox after reenabling the Feed Sidebar addon. Firefox crashed after three days of logging memory usage, and then a couple days later I needed to restart it because I needed the memory for WoW (Firefox was using about a gig). But the addon defintiely seems like the cause of the memory leak. From the days I gathered data, it looks like it leaks about 40 megs/hour (although that's only over a couple days; it might decrease over time).

Finally, I just noticed something that happened last year: the Starcraft soundtrack, not previously available (the compressed audio shipped with the games is 22 khz ADPCM, which is pretty poor quality), is on iTunes for $10; the other Blizzard OSTs that were included in the collectors' editions of Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and World of Warcraft are also available there (though unfortunately all of them are single CDs, which means they are incomplete). The music is DRM-free (although I hear they encode personally identifying information in the audio files), 256 kbps AAC (good quality), though you will have to install the Apple iTunes crapware to buy it. I'm told the M4A files should play on all PC audio players that support AAC (I know they work on WinAmp), though they are not MP3s, and will not work on MP3 audio players. That's your public service announcement for today.

Toasty

So, it's a blistering 4% humidity (91 degree temperature), and southern California is burning once again. As has happened several times, everything looks golden through the smoke filling the sky, and ash is accumulating on every outdoor surface. People working outside here are told to wear masks to cut down on the amount of smoke inhaled.

Currently several hundred homes have burned down and a few thousand have been evacuated. The fire isn't expected to get here (it's 10 miles away), but we're doing some preliminary packing in case things go badly and we have to evacuate. It's also possible that damage to the power lines at a distance might cause us to lose power here (in a bad case scenario), even if we don't have to evacuate.

& More Leakage

So, after writing that last post about the audio driver handle leak, I decided to log some data - specifically, the amount of memory Firefox allocates, and the number of handles in the Symantec Anti-Virus process smc.exe. It's now been about a week since I started gathering data (although unfortunately the power went out in the middle, so I ended up with two smaller replicates).

The data for smc.exe shows that it begins at approximately 450 handles on startup, and acquires an additional 3100 handles per day (although 'day' is about 14 hours, as I hibernate my computer at night; meaning about 220 handles/hour). This definitely doesn't seem normal, and I'm going to venture a guess that it's a handle leak. I also noted that the increase seems to be linear over the course of the day, so is unlikely to be related to something like automatic update.

I already knew that Firefox was hemmorhaging memory. If I recall correctly, the amount of memory allocated by Firefox increased by 200-300 MB per day. This time, I tried using Firefox for several days without two of the three addons I normally use (the third was NoScript, so I didn't want to try without that unless I had to). While this test didn't last as long as I'd hoped (thanks to that power outage), after four days, Firefox had only increased from 125 MB (when I first started it, with a lot of saved tabs) to 205 MB (now). In four days I would have predicted it would hit 600-900 megs.

This strongly suggests that one of the two plugins is responsible for the massive leakage, although I'll have to watch what happens after I reenable the one most likely the be causing the leak (as the other is newly installed, and this problem has been around for longer): Feed Sidebar (version 3.1.6). So, we'll see what happens with that. Might have an answer in another 4-7 days about that.

& the Audio Driver Incident

Several months ago, I (finally) upgraded my computer. My old one was a 1.8 GHz Athlon XP (single 32-bit core) with 1.25 gigs RAM and a GeForce 3; in other words, it was 2002 or 2003 hardware. My new computer is a 2.4 GHz Core 2 (quad 64-bit cores) with 4 gigs RAM and a Radeon 4850; depending on the benchmarks, my new CPU is 10-18x as fast as my old one, if you count all 4 cores. After trying various voodoo to try to get my old XP installation to run on my new computer (despite the fact that it wouldn't have been able to use about a gig of my RAM), I ultimately gave up and installed Windows Server 2008 64-bit. After dealing with a whole bunch of problems getting various stuff working with 64-bit 2008, things ultimately ended up being acceptable, and I've used that ever since.

However, a couple relatively minor problems have been pretty long-standing, and continued until a few days ago. One was easy to diagnose: Firefox was leaking memory like heck. For every day I left my computer on, Firefox would grow in RAM usage by a couple hundred megs, getting up to a good 2 gigs on occasion (I usually kill it before it gets to that point). While this was certainly an annoyance, it wasn't much of a problem, as I have 4 gigs memory, and I can simply restart it to reclaim all the leaked memory whenever it gets so large it becomes a problem.

One was much harder to diagnose, however. Something else was leaking memory in addition to Firefox, and it was not clear what was causing this. Total system memory usage would increase over days, and if you ignored Firefox, would end up using up all of my 4 gigs memory by about 2 weeks since the last reboot. Unlike with Firefox, there was no apparent problem - no single process was showing a significant accumulation of memory, nor were excess processes being created, leaving 1-2 gigs of memory I couldn't account for. So, I went several months without knowing what the problem was, usually handling it by restarting my computer every week or so.

Then, one day my dad called me from work to ask me why his computer at work was sometimes performing poorly. So I had him look through the process list and system statistics and look for memory leaks, excessive CPU usage, etc. As I don't have the exact terminology used on those pages memorized, I also opened up the listing on my computer to be sure I told him to look for the right things.

This brought something very curious to my attention: the total handle count for my computer was over 4 million. This is a VERY large number of handles; normally computers don't have more than 20-50k handles at a time - 2 orders of magnitude less than what my computer was experiencing. This was an almost certain indication that something was leaking handles on a massive scale. After adding the handles column to the process list, I found that audiodg.exe was the process with some 98% of those handles. Some looking online revealed that that process is a host for audio driver components and DRM. Some further looking for audiodg.exe and handle leaks found some reverse-engineering by one person that showed that this was due to the Sonic Focus audio driver for my Asus motherboard leaking registry handles.

Fortunately, there was an updated driver available by this time that addresses the issue. As my computer was currently at 96% RAM usage (the worst it's ever been - usually I reboot it before it gets to this point), I immediately installed the driver and restarted the audio services (of which audiodg.exe is one). This resulted in a shocking instant 1.3 gig drop in kernel memory usage to less than 400 megs total. It's been one and a half days since then, and audiodg.exe currently is using 226 handles, suggesting that the problem is either dead or drastically reduced (it has increased by like 70 handles in those 1.5 days); and even if it is still leaking handles, 50 handles a day is a tolorable leakage, as that's only like 10 k/day.

So, this whole thing revealed that Windows is quote robust. Given that most computers never go above 50k handles, I was very surprised that Windows was able to handle 6.6 million handles (the highest I've ever seen it get to) without falling over and dying (although this wouldn't have been possible with a 32-bit version of Windows, as that 1.7 gigs of kernel memory wouldn't have fit in the 2 gig kernel address space after memory-mapped devices have memory space allocated). Traditionally, Unix has had a limit of 1024 file handles per process, though I don't know what's typical these days (I know at least some Unix OS have that as a configurable option).

After pursuing that problem to its conclusion, I decided to do some more looking for handle leaks in other processes. While the average process used only 200-500 handles, a number a processes (which are not abnormally high) get as high as 2k handles. However, one process - smc.exe, a part of Symantec Antivirus - has almost 50 k handles allocated, making it a good candidate for a handle leak. Looking at the process in Process Explorer shows that a good 95% of these handles are of the same type - specifically, unnamed event handles - providing further evidence in support of handle leakage. That's as far as I've gotten so far; I haven't spent much time investigating the problem, or looking for an analysis online (though the brief searches I did didn't find anything related to this). So, that's work for the future.

Final Lap

Well, it's currently the second week of the fall university semester. This semester is extra special because it's the last semester before I graduate, and anything that results in less school is always a good thing. Between my two majors - biology and computer science - I've been in college for entirely too long, and I'm hoping to move on to more enjoyable things after Christmas.

This semester, I only need 9 units left for graduation, and two specific classes. First, I need a "modern high-level language" class. This comes in three flavors: Visual Basic (probably .NET), C#, and Java. As I don't see much of a use for VB, it's a toss-up between C# and Java. I already have a decent amount of experience in C#, which means that Java would be the course I could gain the most from (as it would add another entry to my resume). Unfortunately, the only Java class this semester is at 8 AM, which is a bit (*cough*) too early for me. Thus C# wins by default. While I probably won't learn a great deal, it has the advantage of requiring less effort, which is also always a good thing.

The other class required specifically is Programming Languages and Translation. This is a recent class which merges two previous classes, one on high-level languages (a survey of like a dozen languages, and the various ways high-level languages accomplish common tasks) and the other on compiler development. I had actually taken the former of the previous classes, but they merged the two before I could take the higher-level course, forcing me to take this new one instead. On the plus side, this also means I'll have to put in less effort at this course, as well, and I probably won't have to study (in my case this means 'read the textbook and come to class') much of the first half of the semester.

One of the things we'll be doing in the class over the semester is writing our own compiler. I've already got some ideas for a high-level programming language which closely resembles natural (i.e. spoken) English, intended for use by people who are not computer science or math people. I ought to discuss some of the ideas for this on this blog; we'll see what my infamous laziness permits.

Unfortunately, the class I really wanted to take this semester isn't being offered - the Game Programming Development Project. It would have been awesome to have to spend a semester working on E Terra (Gord knows I'm too lazy to work on it when I don't have to) and get three units credit for it.

So, that left me needing to find another class. This semester is actually pretty bleak, as far as which courses are being offered and when. While there are maybe five other classes I wouldn't have minded taking if nothing else was available, like none of them are offered this semester (or those that are have prerequisites I don't have, or are at extremely inconvenient times). So, I was forced to improvise - by looking into the list of graduate classes. As it turns out, my school allows undergraduate students to take graduate classes with permission from the department, although you can get kicked out if there are more graduate students than spots in the class.

One class was at a convenient time, covers something useful to me, and only required courses I'd already taken: Advanced Graphics Programming. Unlike BahamutZero, I can't really say I especially like or get excited by graphics and graphics programming, but clearly a thorough knowledge of graphics is a big plus for game programming; as well, I hadn't had any trouble in the undergraduate graphics class, so I can at least get the job done. Unfortunately, the syllabus doesn't look as applicable to game programming as the course description suggests, but hopefully it'll end up being worthwhile (and hopefully graduate-level homework and projects won't be too painful).

One thing that may turn out to be fun is the term project. The teacher hasn't actually given out the assignment (which would have a few dozen example topics), but as I understand it, we can do just about anything, as long as it's related to graphics and is sufficiently ambitous for a graduate-level class. When I mentioned all this to BZ (who loves graphics stuff, and would probably take a graduate-level graphics course, if he had the chance), he immediately asked if we could do a project together (although I'd thought the same thing even before he asked about it). As it turns out, we can (I talked to the teacher), provided the project is large enough for us both, and our work is sufficiently separated so that the teacher can grade my part of the work on its own. So, this could turn out to be fun. I'll probably write about at least the topic (when we come up with something), if not details along the way (and if BZ is working with me, he may post about it on his blog as well).

Also, just to briefly mention a topic I should (as in ought to) write about in the near future: the first programming assignment in graphics class - that is, a rudimentary ray-tracer. This actually isn't very difficult. Writing a simple ray-tracer that can render simple things (e.g. plastic-looking spheres) is pretty easy; it's making it fast and photo-realistic that's hard - but neither of those are requirements for this project. I estimate it'll take two or three days of coding, and we have two weeks to do it (though I have a bunch of relatively easy optional features I want to add, so it will probably take me longer than the others in the class), which isn't bad - not unlike what I'd expected from a graduate-level class.

& More MPQDraft

Well, looking at the SourceForge statistics, a few interesting things became apparent. First, there's still a remarkable amount of interest in MPQDraft, even after all these years. MPQDraft, released some 7 years ago, was originally targeted at Starcraft, which was released in 1997 - 11 years ago; while this has remained the primary target of MPQDraft and modders, MPQDraft has also been used to a lesser extent with Diablo II (8 or 9 years old, I think) and Warcraft III (7 years old, I believe). Given the fact that the most recent of those is still 7 years old, it's pretty surprising that MPQDraft is still heavily used today. As the graph indicates, over the last year, MPQDraft has been getting an average of 600 downloads/month, and trending upward, with 750 downloads last month.

I'm a bit curious what happened in November that produced such a huge rise in download count - about a 6x increase from September to November. The first thing I thought of was the announcement of Starcraft II, last year; however, this was quickly found to be incorrect, as SC2 was announced 6 months prior to that. So I'm really not sure what caused that increase. I can only imagine some very large site related to Blizzard games (Blizzard themselves or one of the major modding sites) linked to MPQDraft's recent home on SourceForge at that time.

The other surprise is the seeming lack of interest in the source code. According to the SourceForge statistics, there have been fewer than 50 source gets to date. I'm curious whether that's at all related to the fact that I'd only made the source available through Subversion (the source version control system I use for MPQDraft). To test that hypothesis, I've posted a package containing all the source on the SourceForge download page. You'll need to take a look at the notes (separate from the ZIP file) for what you need to get the code to build.

& MPQDraft

Well, it's been a while. After I registered the MPQDraft project on SourceForge last April 1, I procrastinated for so many months that many people suspected it was an April fools' prank; however, the only prank that was intended was the fact that it wasn't a prank. One year after then, I finally got around to posting the complete patching code, although I'm only just now getting the last of the GUI code uploaded. This is to say that the code on SourceForge is now complete, and MPQDraft is now fully open-source.

Relevant links:
The MPQDraft project
Binary download page
Web-based source code browser
Instructions on downloading the source code
The OSS license it's licensed under

Gah

Random fact of the day: Microsoft Developer Network library no longer gives information about what versions of Windows prior to 2000 support some functions. For example, MSDN does not list support for CreateFile in any versions of Windows prior to 2000, despite it being in every single 32-bit version of Windows (Windows 95 and NT 3.1 onward).

Comcast Revisited

A bit ago I wrote a Mac Chaos-inspired parody of the Comcast board room, explaining how they'd gotten into this P2P bandwidth crisis they're in, and proposing that the true cause of their crisis is that they'd signed up massively too many users for their old infrastructure while steadily increasing speeds offered to subscribers. A post on P2PNet today lends strong support for that conclusion.

There really is a problem on (at least some) cable upstreams today, based on what I hear from people I respect who have the data. My hope - which won’t be tested until 2009 - is that the DOCSIS 3.0 upstream will resolve most or all of the problems for the next few years. Full DOCSIS 3.0 has a minimum of 120 megabits upstream (shared) among typically 300 homes, something like 400K per subscriber. Current cable modems typically have 8 to 30K per subscriber. This is a huge difference.

While those 'K' don't indicate whether those are kilobits or kilobytes, a bit of quick math tells us that those are kilobit counts. In other words, currently Comcast is allocating a minimum of 1 to 4 KBps for each subscriber. As well, IIRC, Comcast sells 384 to 768 Kbps upstream connections. That puts the overselling ratio between 13 and 100.

Another section is also interesting, for comparison with DSL and FIOS:

Verizon, AT&T, and Free.fr are strongly on the record they do not have significant congestion problems. They do not have a shared local loop, and have allocated much more bandwidth per customer. I’ve sat at the network console of a large ISP and seen they had essentially no congestion amongst the millions of subscribers they served. They allocate 250K per subscriber, much more than current cable.

It's not clear who these figures are for. I believe AT&T DSL doesn't offer more than like 768 Kbps upstream, in which case this would be an overselling ratio of 3. If this is Verizon FIOS (let's say at 5 Mbps, which is their faster speed), that's an overselling ratio of 20. Suddenly it seems very unsurprising that Comcast is having problems and AT&T/Verizon are not. It also shows you who's been investing in their network over the last decade and who hasn't.

& Other Strange Ocurrences

As it turns out, the earthquake this morning was actually the second highly unusual thing to happen today. The first occurred late last night, as I was going into the bathroom one last time before going to sleep. A couple steps into the bathroom and I stepped into something wet. While having the floor of your bathroom wet for no apparent reason is unusual enough, I was more concerned with the smell: a faint smell of ammonia, and another smell I knew I had encountered before, though I couldn't think exactly what it was.

After I confirmed that the liquid was what was producing the smell, I hobbled back to my room (trying to avoid getting whatever it was on the floor as much as possible) to grab my glasses, and had another look. A fair amount of the floor was wet with several ounces or so of a liquid that was in some places clear, in other places milky white.

After tracing it under the sink, I found what seemed to be the cause: a can of insecticide. The entire can was wet, though not much that wasn't right near where it was, so it didn't look like an explosion (though there sure was a lot of the stuff on the floor). I didn't try removing the cap (for obvious reasons), but I'm thinking the spray nozzle might have exploded and the cap prevented the stuff from getting all over the cabinet under the sink. Ultimately, I wrapped it in a couple plastic bags and threw it in the trash, and wiped up all the stuff on the floor (probably wouldn't hurt to mop the floor with soap and water, either).

& Shaking

Just had an earthquake here, about an hour ago. The epicenter was 15 or 20 miles from here, and it was a 5.8, which is a pretty good size earthquake. Watching TV news for 20 mins or so, there have not been any reports of injuries, though cell phones and (less commonly) land lines are still out in some areas; I've heard some about damage to streets and one water line. Amusingly, lots of people e-mailed the news station to say that their phone lines or cell phones are out, so apparently it didn't do much for internet connectivity. I heard that there's a 5% chance of it being a foreshock to an even bigger earthquake.

More info on Yahoo and CNN.

Epic Fail

So, on Friday I got a new computer. The computer consists of a quad-core Core 2 CPU, 4 gigs of memory, and a Radeon HD 4850 based video card. Although there are some known techniques for getting an existing Windows installation to work in a new computer, this install simply refused to work with the USB ports on this computer (the computer freezes up several seconds after Windows has booted; disabling the USB ports in the BIOS allows it to work, but is not an acceptable solution). So, I ultimately ended up reinstalling Windows.

I had quite a few options when it came to choosing a version of Windows. Thanks to my obsessive downloading of everything on MSDN Academic Alliance, I have legal copies of Windows 2000, Windows XP x86, Windows XP x64, Vista x86 & x64, two copies of Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 x86 & x64. For those not familiar with the Servers, 2003 is an updated server version of XP, and 2008 is an updated server version of Vista.

As Server 2008 is an updated version of Vista with additional features (and the newest of any version), I figured I'd use that, and that's what I'm writing on right now. However, this install may be short-lived. As it turns out, just about nothing works on Server 2008. In the last three hours I've encountered the following:
- The Asus motherboard driver installer for Vista x64 will not run. When run, it says "Does not support this Operating System: WNT_6.0I_64". If I understand this correctly, it's saying it doesn't support Windows NT 6.0 x64. This is curious, as this is exactly what Vista x64 is, suggesting that the installer does not run on the system it was made for. Furthermore, several pieces of motherboard hardware do not have drivers included with Server 2008, and so appear as Unknown Devices and PCI Devices (there are still a couple unknown devices left if you manually install each driver). Epic Asus fail.
- The other major driver I needed was the 4850 driver. This was especially important because the 4850 has a known issue where the fan speed stays too low, resulting in hot temperatures. So, I downloaded the latest version of the drivers and ATI Catalyst programs from the video card manufacturer (as best I can tell the ATI web site doesn't list drivers for the 4850) and installed the driver and program. Installation had no problems; running the Catalyst Control Center, however, resulted in the message "The Catalyst Control Center is not supported by the driver version of your enabled graphics adapter.". Very curious, considering that driver and the Control Center came bundled in the same ZIP file. Epic ATI fail.
- One of the programs I use most of all (by far) is Windows Live Messenger. Naturally I soon needed to install it on this computer. The Windows installer even helpfully created a Windows Live Messenger Download link in my start menu. Unfortunately, following the link, downloading the program, and double-clicking it (I'm not even mentioning the UAC and IE annoyances) brought up the error message "Sorry, Windows Live programs cannot be installed on Windows Server, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, or Windows operating systems earlier than Windows XP Service Pack 2". By process of elimination, this appears to say that only supports XP x86 SP2+, Vista x86, and Vista x64; curious, given the fact that Microsoft advertises support for Server 2008. Epic Microsoft fail.
- The other program I use most often is FireFox. So, that was next on the list. Download, install, so far so good. Launching FireFox, however, is a completely different story: instant crash. Epic FireFox fail.
- And just for good measure, this install has blue-screened once so far (in about 3 hours), with the PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA bugcheck. I'm not sure exactly whose failure this is, but the Asus driver problems seem the most likely suspect. Epic fail.

& Fun with Turkish

Just saw this amusing segment in the Wikipedia page for Turkish grammar:

Avrupa (Europe)
Avrupalı (European)
Avrupalılaş (become European)
Avrupalılaştır (Europeanize)
Avrupalılaştırama (cannot Europeanize)
Avrupalılaştıramadık (whom [someone] could not Europeanize)
Avrupalılaştıramadıklar (those whom [someone] could not Europeanize)
Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımız (those whom we could not Europeanize)
Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdan (one of those whom we could not Europeanize)
Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdan mı? (one of those whom we could not Europeanize?)
Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdan mısınız? (Are you one of those whom we could not Europeanize?)

You now know the meaning of 'highly agglutinative language'.

Sansas & Bugs

Given how big I'm into music (particularly game, anime, and movie soundtracks), it'll probably come as a complete shock to most people to know that I've never had a portable CD or MP3 player (other than the CD player in my car). Probably the biggest reason for this is that I'm cheap - I save most of the money I make, and spend very little of it, even on things you'd expect me to buy (like a computer that's less than 6 years old). Well, yesterday I just bought a digital audio player: the SanDisk Sansa c250 2 gig, on sale at a price I couldn't refuse (cheaper than Amazon).

So, I spent some time playing with it yesterday, in preparation of today, when I drive my grandma to a doctor's appointment and various errands (she's had severe eye problems for the last couple months). Not a bad little sucker; though just as you might guess from the price, it didn't take long to run into problems. Naturally, as I'm too impatient to call tech support, and too inquisitive to give up on a technical challenge, this meant I had to debug the thing.

After loading almost 2 gigs of music onto it and disconnecting from the computer, it proceeded to promptly lock up on database refresh (after you modify the contents of the flash memory it scans all the files and indexes them). Wonderful. I could turn it off and on, but every time it turned on it immediately performed a database refresh, and promptly locked up. Worse, it would no longer connect to the computer, as the database refresh preempted other things, like USB port communication, meaning I couldn't delete anything that might be causing it to freeze (specifically, if you plugged it into the USB port while it was performing the database refresh, Windows would say "unrecognized USB device" after a couple seconds).

A substantial amount of experimentation revealed that it was possible to override this. Specifically, you had to have the computer send a USB signal to the device BEFORE it starts its database refresh. As the database refresh is the first thing it does when you turn it on, and plugging the USB cable in automatically turns the device on, this takes rather precise timing, and more or less requires pressing the button required to make it connect in mass storage mode*, insert the USB cable, and press "Scan for hardware changes" in Device Manager at essentially the same time (I'd say about 1/3 of a second). This will cause the USB signal from the computer to preempt the scheduled database refresh, and put it into USB storage mode.

Now that I was able to access the contents again, I spent some time fumbling around with trial and error, trying to figure out what was causing it to break; as it was 1 AM by this point, my brain wasn't in peak working condition, and this took some time. Searches on Google revealed that quite a few people had this problem and there are quite a few hypotheses as to what causes it and how to fix it, but no definitive explanation or solution (nor has Sandisk addressed this problem, despite people asking for help on their forums). As well, many of the "solutions" involved wiping the memory of the thing, and sometimes bricking it.

Through trial and error, I managed to burn through a number of hypotheses (which were either incorrect or simply not applicable to me). It appeared to be false that spaces in directory and file names caused lockups (or that bug only occurred in older versions of the firmware). I also did not observe any instances of odd characters in song titles or artists that caused this problem; to my surprise, the device even correctly handled and displayed the Japanese characters in some song and artist names (when I had first opened the package, I tried copying a single album onto it, which worked without incident; this album happened to have Japanese ID3 info). Lack of free space did not appear to cause it (I tried taking it down to 2 megs free space with good files, and it still worked fine). ID3v1 tags seemed to work fine. Even this one funky MP3 at "0 kbps" (what Explorer reports for it; I haven't looked at it with a hex editor to figure out why this is) did not cause the problem.

What ultimately ended up being the problem, at least in my instance, was that one of my game soundtrack MP3s was mislabeled as 'hard rock'. The significance of this, according to one person, is that it has a space in the genre name. Changing this to the proper genre corrected the freeze. I can't say for certain that the space in the genre is what causes the bug, but it's true that when none of my songs have a space, the player works fine, and it froze in that one case.

*The Sansa has two USB connection modes: MTP and MSC. MTP mode interfaces with media players such as Windows Media Player. This mode allows you to store media library files on the player, and make use of various features like tagging and playlists. MSC mode causes the player to act like a vanilla memory stick, allowing you to directly access the flash file system. I'd imagine it's only necessary to refresh the database in MSC mode; that's the only mode I've ever used.

Judging from Google, there are two different methods of switching between modes, which depend on what firmware you have. One method is that a USB mode option appears in the settings menu on the device. The other method (what mine has) is that the player is always in MTP mode, but connects in MSC mode if you hold the rewind button when you plug it into the USB port.

UPDATE:

Found another bug while playing around with putting DRMed WMAs on the critter (my dad also got one, and he has a bunch of DRMed WMAs to put on it, unlike my MP3s). It's only possible to load DRMed files onto the device in MTP mode, so I had to learn how to use that. It appears that my assumption was correct, that database refreshes are only necessary after adding files in MSC mode; after files are added in MTP mode, they appear in the player immediately after the player is disconnected from the computer.

While the player automatically turns on and goes into USB storage mode when you plug the USB cable in, it's possible to turn off the player by holding the power button (the same way you turn it off when it's not connected to the computer) while in USB storage mode. This is not a good idea. If you add some files to the device and then turn it off before unplugging it, it will lose track of those files, and they will not show up in the list of songs on the player (though they will still show up in the file list when it's connected to the computer in MTP mode). Adding additional files later will not cause this problem to be corrected; it is necessary to delete the files from the player and then transfer them from computer again

Random Thought of the Day

Did you ever notice that, in English, the simple past (e.g. "he wrote") and past progressive (e.g. "he was writing") are both very common, yet in the present tense, the present progressive (e.g. "he is writing") is overwhelmingly more common than the simple present (e.g. "he writes")? This fact actually leads into an important linguistic principle, which I'll probably write a post about in the future. I'll just leave it as food for thought, for now.