Posted By Quentin Carnicelli on March 12th, 2004

We’ve started work on *fanfare* Audio Hijack Pro 2. Initially we are working on the backend frameworks, but also at the same time, we are putting a lot of thinking into how user interface will function. Namely, how do we balance the power & feature set that everyone wants for the sequel, against keeping it reasonably simple to use. Which brings me to this gem of an idea (via comp.risks) regarding complex interfaces: Alan Kay and User Interfaces

Posted By Quentin Carnicelli on March 3rd, 2004

Neil Young: “I don’t have mainstream radio to count on anymore – they won’t play my stuff. The Internet is the new radio.”

Posted By Quentin Carnicelli on February 26th, 2004

Although Nicecast isn’t as CPU intensive as some applications, if you have it running all day, you don’t want it slowing your real work down. And while there are many aspects to Nicecast performance tuning, there are a couple simple changes that can prove effective.

1. Reduce Broadcast Quality
– In the Quality drawer, click on “Custom…”, pick your normal bitrate, but put the “CPU Usage/Audio Quality” slider all the way to the left.
– The Encoding Quality is the biggest factor when it comes to CPU usage in Nicecast. Although you can achieve some amazing feats of audio compression with it up high, down low things will still sound ok, and your CPU won’t melt.

2. Reduce Broadcast Bitrate
– Pick any bitrate lower then the one you are using now
– After Encoding Quality, Encoding Bitrate is the second biggest CPU factor. Lower bitrates are always easier, and thus faster, to encode.

3. Turn the Dock Icon preferences off
– Although it looks neat, updating the Dock icon once a second comes with a small performance penalty.

4. Don’t leave stray Effects on
– If you aren’t using an Effect, remove it from the patch, or atleast Bypass it. Any un-bypassed Effect in the patch will have audio piped through it, and even if the Effect doesn’t actually do anything (like an EQ set to flat), it still taking up cycles.

5. Perfomance Tune iTunes
– iTunes has never been known for being lightweight, but with a bit of chopping you can get running decently. First, if you haven’t already, turn the Sound “Enhancer” off. Same for the inline-visualizer at the top of the main window. If you have any 3rd party plugins, you can try turning them off too. Finally, switch iTunes to mini-mode, by clicking the Zoom button.

As with any performance tuning work, you should spend time to measure the effect of your changes. That is, using Activity Monitor or top to watch Nicecast’s performance both before and after changing a setting.

Posted By Paul Kafasis on February 18th, 2004

I was reading Eric Allman’s article on the economics of spam, and it expanded on something many of us have been muttering for a couple years – spam will never disappear entirely until it costs more money to send than can be made from it. And beyond that, until spam stops being almost free to send, the problem’s only going to get worse. If it got down to the level of junk mail I receive via USPS, I’d be satisfied – the reason the level of this is so low is because it costs money, real honest-to-god money, to send junk mail. But spam, that’s just a few electrons here and there. Oh, and a little piece of my sanity.

Anyway, at this point, I think a lot of people realize that the email spam situation is bad, and something more drastic needs to be done. We’ll see what happens there (variations on sender-pays, with refunds for valid mail, sound good to me). But this article reminded me that recently, I received a humorous piece of spam, which said in part:”My name is Kay and I’m an account rep for [Insert Pornographic Links Site here]. I saw your site……rogueamoeba.com listed on Google under the term “teen girl web cam” and I just wanted to take a moment to introduce our affiliate program to you. As you probably know, we are one of the largest and best adult affliate programs on the Net today, offering webmasters over 55+ hot converting sites to promote and paying $40 for every sale.”

Well, I really had no idea that [Insert Pornographic Links Site here] was one of the largest and best adult affiliate programs on the Net, or that they were paying such great rates (that’s as much as Nicecast costs), but this email was very fortuitous – we’re poised to unveil the new direction the company has taken, the distribution and sale of illicit materials. Or, ya know, not. We’re a software company, not a soft-core porn company, and we don’t have anything to do with pornography – the closest we come is a near-nude amoeba in our logo.

So how did this happen? Why did we receive this spam? And worse yet, why were they right? A Google search for “teen girl web cam” did indeed turn us up as the #9 result (it no longer does). The answer to the question of this spam is also spam. Comment spam on our company weblog led to email spam from smut peddlers. Fantastic. Spammers have been attacking blogs, particularly those using MovableType, in an effort to draw attention and increase their Google page rank, and we’d been hit pretty bad. We’ve installed MT-Blacklist, and cleaned out old spam, but my bet is it’ll crop up again.

So, what’s to be done? We can stop using MovableType, but that’s a weak solution – spam bots will be written for other blog packages, and I like MT. We can turn comments off – but this shouldn’t be necessary, and we’ve gotten great feedback on some articles right in the comments. Plenty of other sites use MT with no comment spam. I have to wonder what we’re doing wrong here, and contemplate solutions to the problem. Anyone have suggestions? I’m all ears.

Posted By Paul Kafasis on February 17th, 2004

You saw it at Macworld San Francisco, you’ve read about it in Macworld, and you’ve downloaded it to your home computer. Now, it’s time to update to Nicecast 1.5. And if you haven’t used it yet, now it’s even better than ever – read the full PR or download the Best-of-Show winning Nicecast now.