The Wax Drum

An acronym for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, CPAN maintains a huge library of perl modules and provides semi-automated access to them.

A couple of months ago as I was checking my web server access logs, I came across something odd. A single image file was being requested repeatedly and often from the same host IP. Although I wasn't aware of the term at the time, I had become a victim of Hot Linking. Since I wasn't aware of a technical means of blocking this heinous practice, I simply performed a reverse lookup on the IP, then emailed the owner of the domain with a "cease and desist" warning. Turns out it was a college dude, and he promptly removed the link.

So, we all know that a 'kilobyte' is not 1,000 bytes but 1,024 bytes (2^10), right? Wrong. A kilobyte is actually defined as 1,000 bytes, and therefore is a rather useless word to everyone except hard drive manufacturers. What we really mean to refer to is a kibibyte. Seriously. And scaling up there are mebibytes and gibibytes. Or so the International Electrotechnical Commission decreed in December 1998.

Charles gets bitten by the travel bug

Late in 2003, a good friend of mine suggested that I might be interested in a new outdoor activity that he and his family had recently been enjoying. It combines hi-tech resources with elements of a traditional treasure hunt, and it's known as "Geocaching". I later learned that this was basically Letterboxing with gadgets, but it was the gadgetry that piqued my interest.

If you've never heard about it, there's an entire web site devoted to Geocaching. I guaranty there's a geocache near you!

I have found the following tools to be valuable on a sliding scale between useful and indispensible. Here they are with a brief description, grouped by command-line and GUI.

Terminal/Shell Based Apps

You can find most of these on sourceforge.

• ffmpeg: The swiss army knife of audio/video tools
• flac: Free Lossless Audio Codec. Compress/Decompress without losing quality
• lame: The standard for compressing audio to MP3 format
• macape: Monkey's Audio (ape) compression/decompression

A common complaint I hear when one of my clients upgrades to a new system is how Apple abandons their old users. It's frustrating. Trust me, I understand. This was never more evident than in the transition from OS 9 to OS X. Without trying to justify Apple's reasoning, I'll offer a little support here.