Looking Out To Sea

I spent last night trying to find a music player that would do what I wanted. I didn’t think I had extremely complex or demanding requirements.

1. A music library that can be loaded and queried quickly.
2. A music player that can cope with the standard Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files.
3. An organiser to sync the library (or a subset of it) with my portable MP3 player.

It seems number one is still beyond the abilities of most people who write these programs. Banshee reportedly has O(1) library loading in an experimental branch, but the remainder offer O(n). And n doesn’t have to get very large before you notice quite a slowdown. Exaile seems the best of the ones I tested, but really it’s just the least worst.

Everything I tested managed number two pretty well. But then, they’re music players, they should at least be able to play music files.

The third feature I want was a massive failure on all fronts. They all recognise my player as an external disk, but then they want to index the damn thing which takes forever. Rhythmbox actually hangs for some five minutes on startup (no UI response at all) until it’s finished loading all the tunes from my MP3 player — something I didn’t even ask it to do.

Exaile doesn’t actually hang while it’s indexing my player’s HD but it gives no indication that anything is happening. But five minutes later it pops back with a full list of everything on the disk. It won’t really let me sync though.

Banshee seems the best for syncing audio between different places. At least it seems to have the kind of options you’d need (manual updating, full automatic syncing). Shame it crashes stupendously when you hit the sync button, eh?

So I don’t have anything better than before. I use Exaile here because its library is pretty fast. I use Rhythmbox at work because it was the only one installed by default and it doesn’t demonstrate much slow-down with only two albums in the library. I have nothing to sync the contents of my on-computer library with my portable player. There are a bunch of separate applications that do this job for iPods but not for anything else, as far as I see. Pretty disappointing.

I was talking to someone the other day about infected Windows machines, and I mentioned the fact that it takes just minutes for an unprotected machine to succumb to something on the big wide web. Three separate studies produced different numbers, but in none of them was the average infection time more than 35 minutes. It was only four minutes in one trial.

It seems these numbers are not so well known as they should be, though they have been around long enough (and have been argued back and forth by enough people). Does this kind of information find itself into the hands of the computer-buying public? Obviously not.

I’ve tried convincing people to use something more usable (or at least, something less outright dangerous) than Windows. That’s not easy when people use some non-portable software. But Windows Vista has been such a break, for software compatibility and hardware, that a lot of people seem to be eyeing up alternatives.

In my optimistic moments I feel as if this might be the beginning of the end for Windows. Vista has been so thoroughly disparaged and ridiculed.

And in my more pessimistic moods, I think that Windows is like a software prolefeed. It keeps people happy now so they don’t think about how miserable they are at the same time: viruses, spyware, the need to even think about these things.

There’s a rich history of user-centric interface design in computing research; whole fields devoted to strengthening machines against attack; and several inter-operable but varied systems in use around the world. The road we’ve travelled is littered with the abandoned remains of glorious and terrible machines… and yet here we are, rumbling along in the slipstream of some hulking smoke-belching juggernaut.

Sometimes it feels like looking back at the history of an alien culture: a civilisation so advanced it sped off to stars, leaving behind its detritus for us to marvel at. And then we find out that all this was made by us. All these seemingly advanced machines were once in daily use by real people.