Brent Kearney

Recently I found that certain songs in my iTunes library just stopped working. They appeared in the list, but double-clicking them, or selecting them and pressing the play button does nothing. I did a quick test today, and there were a lot of them that appeared to be broken. I tried locating the actual mp3 file in Finder, and double-clicking it — same thing: no music.

At first I was worried that there had been some update to iTunes that broke any song not purchased through the iTunes Music Store, but that would surely be the death-knoll for iTunes. So then I thought that somehow the files became corrupted. To fix them, I located a utility that, among other things, fixes the mp3 headers of a file: MP3Packer for Mac.

Just before I was about to run the utility on some broken files, however, I discovered the real reason that iTunes wasn’t playing them:

-rw-------   1 501  wheel   6663269 Jul 14 22:39 02 Don't Phunk With My Heart.mp3

It was a file permissions problem. The login that I use on my OSX box has a different uid number than 501, but these songs were owned by user 501 and set with read-write permissions for that user only. The songs were already indexed in iTunes, so they appeared in my Library (which is actually an XML database of your files, not the files themselves), but somehow the ownership of the files appears to have changed.

That they were set to user 501 is curious as well. The first user on a system is often 500 or 501, since the operating system begins numbering for ordinary users at that number. When I got my new laptop, I used the Mac OSX Migration Assistant to copy my home directory from my old laptop to my new one, but I kept my music files in a different location, and copied them over manually. My best guess is that these files, copied over manually, retained the old user id number and permissions.

Whatever the cause of the permissions problems, fixing it is easy, with a little bit of UNIX shell wizardry. From the Terminal, change to the root of the Music folder (for me, thats: /Users/Shared/Music. The default location is ~/Music.). Change all files to have global read permissions using the “find” utility:

$ cd /Users/Shared/Music
$ sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 644 '{}' \;

Then change the ownership of all mp3 files so that I own them:

$ sudo find . -name "*.mp3" -exec chown myusername '{}' \;

… where “myusername” is the username that I login with on the system (also the “short name” in macspeak).

The cause of the problem would have been obvious if iTunes produced an error message instead of just doing nothing when I attempted to play the “broken” file. “Permission denied” would have been helpful!

This is my summary of the third part of the L.A. Times special feature, Altered Oceans.

The embedded music is from Johnny Cash’s Ragged Old Flag album of 1974. Its amazing that, 32 years ago, he recognized that ‘we’re pouring every kind of evil in the sea’, yet the practice continues to this day. Cash was right: future generations would have to pay the penalty, and the bill, it seems, is due now.

(Click image to enlarge)

The highly toxic Red Tide normally blooms every decade in Florida’s Gulf Coast, but recently it has been coming back every year, and staying around for longer periods. With it comes piles of dead fish along the shores, brain-damaged and/or dead marine mammals, and an ocean breeze that causes severe respiratory problems and other illnesses in humans. Florida has seen a “19% increase in cases of pneumonia, a leading cause of death among the elderly.” Neurotoxins from the red algae have been detected in the air up to 3 miles inland.

The algae is fed by the billions of gallons of partially treated human sewage that we pump into the ocean, and by run-off of fertilizers from coastland farms.

Hundreds of visitors from the Midwest and New England have posted questions and complaints on websites, seeking to learn why, after a short beach vacation on the west coast of Florida, they suffered weeks of coughing, bronchial infections, dizziness, lethargy and other symptoms.

If you think breathing the toxic air sounds bad, try a mouthful of the algae-water directly, like this surfer did:

“I felt like I inhaled a garbage bag,” said Purdy, 33, a former high school swimming champion. “It locked up my lungs and throat like a paralysis.” The seconds ticked by. “I was thinking, ‘Is this the way it’s going to end?’ ”

Eventually, he managed to sneak in a little air. It was like sucking through a cocktail straw. He made his way to shore but didn’t feel much better until emergency medical technicians hooked him up to oxygen.

The dead fish that wash up on the shores are also a hazard to wildlife, and pets, that eat it. During one bloom of red tide, “local veterinarians treated 16 dogs — all twitching, vomiting and suffering from seizures. One died.” Pet owners in the area now know to keep them inside during a bloom. However, staying indoors isn’t enough: the toxin-rich air seeps in on the sea-side of the house, leaving “a metalic taste” in the back of the throat, and a dry cough that makes one sound “like a barking seal”.

Like the sea lions on the west coast, manatees, the “cows of the ocean”, are sucumbing to toxicity from algae around Florida. Greg Bossart, a veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, says the manatees are sentinels for human health: “[the manatee is] Florida’s 2,000-pound canary. We’ve opened a Pandora’s box of health issues.” Specifically, the manatees are dying because they inhale the air just above the algae, and the toxins in the air attack nerve tissue, causing their lungs to fill with blood.

Anyone want to go for a swim in the ocean?

Be sure to check out the videos and photography for Part 3 here.

This Digg story tracks the case of two security experts that exposed illegal phone tapping technologies hidden within cellular phone networks. One of them was found dead in Italy, the other, in Greece. The official line is that they both committed suicide, but the circumstances of their death are highly suspicious:

Just after noon on Friday, July 21, Adamo Bove — head of security at Telecom Italia, the country’s largest telecommunications firm — told his wife he had some errands to run as he left their Naples apartment. Hours later, police found his car parked atop a freeway overpass. Bove’s body lay on the pavement some 100 feet below.
…
[Software engineer for Vodafone, in Greece] Costas Tsalikidis, according to friends and family, was excited about his work and was looking forward to marrying his longtime girlfriend. But on March 9, 2005, his elderly mother found him hanging from a white rope tied to pipes outside of his apartment bathroom. His limp feet dangled a mere three inches above the floor. His death was ruled a suicide; he, like Adamo Bove, left no suicide note.

For the whole story, see:

Are the spooks now running amok?

A Vancouver music label, Nettwork Productions, seems to be the first big label to really understand how screwed up the music industry is, and to realize that there is more opportunity in music than there has ever been. They realize that file-sharing is a good thing for artists, and they encourage fans to download the raw data used in making recordings so that they can create their own remixes from it. Nettwork represents several big acts, including Avril Lavigne, Dido, Sarah McLachlan and Bare Naked Ladies.

Wired magazine reports that the creative genius behind the company is its CEO, Terry McBride.

“For decades, people in music have used the number of albums sold as a measuring stick for success,” McBride says. “We’re trying to get people to see beyond that. It’s about revenue from music, however you make it – selling concert tickets, licensing to TV, or selling packed USB drives.”

When Nettwerk manages a band, the band owns their own label and retains ownership of their intellectual property, which gets them $5 or $6 per CD sale, as opposed to the traditional $1 or $2. Nettwerk sets about the business of selling the music, not plastic discs, and takes 20% as its share of the profit. This stands in stark contrast to the vampires that make up today’s recording industry. The RIAA whines about declining CD sales, when they don’t realize that music is about more than plastic discs:

The market for music is thriving. With the rise of peer-to-peer networks, the iPod, and other digital technologies – plus a 100 percent jump in concert ticket sales since 1999 – the world is awash in music. The industry now has more sources of revenue – ringtones, concert tickets, license agreements with TV shows and videogames – than ever before.

Nettwerk has embraced technology and empowered fans to help market music for them. They setup software to track how many CDs fans have recommended and sold to their friends, and rewards them with prizes. This is only the beginning, according to McBride. They plan on becoming somewhat of a venture capitalist for bands:

“Once we have access to all the intellectual property, we’re going to offer shares in individual artists and take in equity investments,” McBride says. “Eventually, a major band could be its own public company.” The key, he adds, sounding like an overzealous investment banker, is that the value of a band would be measured like a stock and would receive capitalization in expectation of future earnings. “At that point, even a band selling 100,000 units a year becomes profitable,” McBride says.

A visionary like McBride is just what the music industry needed. Hopefully bands will hear about it and flock away from the big labels as fast as possible.

In a previous article, I introduced the L.A. Times special report, Altered Oceans. The second part of the special report explores a consequence of the extreme algae growth that seems to be taking over the oceans: marine mammals are succumbing to domoic acid poisoning. The new algae that has appeared on the west coast of the U.S. produces domoic acid, and it has made its way into the food chain.

Sea lions have been called the “sentinels of ocean and human health” — if there is something wrong with them, then there is something wrong with the ocean, and if there is something wrong with the ocean, we have a problem too. Sea lions have been found in odd places, disoriented and behaving strangely, some of them going into seizures. The Marine Mammal Care Center at Ft. MacAurthur in San Pedro has been overflowing with them.

The problem turns out to be that domoic acid causes neurological damage: it kills cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for short-term and spacial memory. Damage to this area impairs the ability to navigate. Thus, the reason they are turning up disoriented in strange places. More extensive damage apparently induces seizures and other serious health problems, as many of the sea lions must be euthanized, failing a response to treatment procedures.

Studies of clams along the same shores show high levels of domoic acid as well. Unfortunately the clams are a main part of the diet of a local Native American tribe, and harvested by thousands of others. Sea lions are fairly high level mammals, like us, and if they are getting poisioned from eating the fish in the ocean, then we probably are as well.