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.

Microsoft has sponsored a study on employee attitudes on restricted Internet access. They found that it was important enough that people will migrate away from companies with restrictive policies on ‘net access, and those who have to live with it find ways to work-around the controls anyways. As I have always suspected, using the heavy hand and trying to control people will only generate resentment. Modern businesses need to realize that a happy employee is a productive one, and restricting access to communications technologies is a sure way to create frustration and job dissatisfaction.

This article in Gizmag claims that an Irish company named Steorn has invented a device which apparently breaks the law of conservation of energy, something considered impossible by pretty much everyone in science. They are publicly issuing a challenge, calling for a dozen scientists to verify that their perpetual energy machine does three things:

1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%. 2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts. 3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).

It sounds like something that David Copperfield might do. It will surely revolutionize the world as we know it, if it turns out to be fact instead of fiction though! You can see what their CEO and marketing manager have to say in this interview.

As of 09:08 this morning, over 1000 scientists have signed up on Steorn’s website to participate in the debunking or confirmation of their technology. Steorn says that they will choose the twelve most qualified and most skeptical scientists to participate.

Some bloggers are speculating that it is an over-the-top marketing campaign of some sort. Thats an interesting idea. It reminds me of the ingenious campaign for the iRobot movie with Will Smith. The ads mentioned nothing of a movie, and indeed appeared to be a product launch for futuristic robots. It may have been the biggest viral marketing campaign to date, at the time. The only problem with the Hollywood theory is that Steorn has a history in the technology sector… or do they?

Other Blogs on this Subject:

• Steorn’s Free Energy Technology Challenge
• Steorn: inventors of infinite energy, destroyers of laws of thermodynamics?
• Free, clean energy or a marketing ploy?
• Irish Perpetual Motion Machine
• Steorn and free energy: the plot thickens
• Steorn, I’m all out of faith

It has been quite awhile since my last post on the 5-Peaks series of trail running races that I’ve been doing this summer. Today I ran the 4th race in the series, which took place in Calgary again, but this time at Fish Creek Provincial Park. The 2nd and 3rd races took place in Kananaskis Country, a massive national park.

In my first race, my calves cramped in the final few kilometers, forcing me to slow down, continuing uncomfortably. A couple of people suggested that I was probably not well hydrated enough, prior to the race. So for the second race, I drank plenty of water in the days before, and in the morning before the race. I drank over a litre before the race started. I knew in the first 30 seconds of running that it was a mistake.

The course was 12km through a beautiful trail system at a place called Sibbald Flats. The weather was perfect for running: cool and moist, rain threatening at any moment. The sound of water sloshing around in my belly was mildly entertaining, but terribly uncomfortable. I felt like throwing up after about 10 minutes, and that feeling never left me. I managed to finish OK though, placing 8th in my category (out of 20), and 20th overall, out of 150.

For the 3rd race, I decided to get a jump on everyone and go out to the course for a practice run a few weeks before the race. The map provided by 5 Peaks sucked ass, but together with the map at Delta Lodge in K-country, I was able to discern the course. Although, I thought the website had said the course was 12-15km, but my GPS told me that it was only 11. It was easy running on wide road-like trails, nothing too steep, but the hills were super long. One section was about 2km of downhill, which just pounded my knees. So I thought the best preparation would be to work on power, so I trained on steep mountain trails, doing plenty of interval training.

The morning of the race, I didn’t over-hydrate, and arrived ready to run, with a strategy. A friend of mine who used to run a lot of cross-country races advised that its best to push hard at the beginning of the race, hold a good pace in the middle, then burn whatever you have left in the final bit. I knew that the beginning had about 1km of uphill followed by about 2km of down, and after that it was more or less flat for the rest of the race. So my strategy was to conserve energy up the big hill at the beginning, although keep a decent pace, and then burn really fast on the downhill, passing any ground that I lost.

That part worked like a charm, I was sprinting down the hill with huge bounding steps, and passed dozens of runners at twice their speed or more. At the bottom of the hill, the trail wound back to a fork in the trail, where I had taken a left during my practice run. To my surprise, the race course went right, instead. This worried me — suddenly I had no idea what was ahead, and I had just burned a substantial amount of energy. As it turned out, the course was indeed 15km, and there were plenty more big hills in the course. It was a major psychological struggle as I turned corner after corner to discover more and more climbs, and more and more distance. The sun was beating down, and it was around 30 °C. Normally for a 10-15k run, I would wear a hydration pack, but I thought it would be a quick 11k run at race pace. Ouch. In the end, I placed 8th in my category again, and 20th overall out of 150. Weird! I felt like death afterwards though, and it took days to recover.

My training between the 3rd and 4th race was sporadic and random. I did a few runs here and there, some short and fast, others long and easy, or long and grueling, and plenty of mountain biking. I did a few duathlon style runs, which I really enjoy. One of them was the most extreme run I’ve done, with about 10k of mountain biking, followed by around 20k of mountain trail running with around 1000m of elevation gain, followed again by another 10km of trail riding home. That was a week before the race, and I was worried that I wouldn’t have time to recover (my knees were aching from all the downhill). I did though, and even managed to do some speed work a couple of days before the race.

This morning I woke up a bit late — I stayed overnight at a friend’s place in Calgary — and rushed off to a late breakfast. I *hate* running before breakfast; it feels like I’m running in slow motion, on empty. So I ate a typical breakfast, hoping that two hours would be sufficient time to digest it before the race. It was and it wasn’t; when I was really pushing it, my guts were not happy at all. I could have used another hour to digest breakfast, but aside from some gross coffee-flavored burps and a pressing desire to visit a toilet, it wasn’t a huge problem.

My strategy this race, after some experimentation during training, was to pace myself for the first half so that I could really rip for the second half. In previous races, I found that the second half was always much, much slower, and I’d get passed by a dozen people. So I wore my heart-rate monitor, and tried to keep a pace that was as fast as possible while sustainable. There is a magic heart-rate, for me somewhere between 178 and 181 beats per minute, that is sustainable for a long time, probably hours. Above that, I’m running significantly faster, but I can only sustain it for 25 minutes or so before hitting a wall.

It was tough holding back for the first half of the race, watching people ahead of me that I knew I could pass if I just pushed it a bit harder. But then, after 5km or so, it was rewarding passing some of those people who had hit their wall, after passing me a few minutes earlier. It worked out well, but afterwards I felt that I could have pushed myself a lot harder than I did in the second half. I felt really good after the race, in contrast to the morbid pangs following the 3rd race. I even considered going mountain biking when I got home today, but opted for a hot bath and a movie instead. Strangely, I placed 8th in my category again, and 20th overall! This time there were 300 racers instead of 150, however, so I guess that it was relatively a better placing.

Hopefully I can break the mystical 8th-place barrier in the next race; placing in the top-5 would be great. The next one is in Canmore in September, and I’ve heard that its a gruesome course. I’m looking forward to it!

This blog entry brought my attention to the L.A. Times special report, Altered Oceans. The first part describes how our many years of polluting the oceans has lined the ocean beds with “a virulent pox” in which ancient bacteria and all sorts of nasties are thriving. Now,

… some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

One example is the miles of “hairy growth” that appeared on ocean beds around Australia. Local fisherman have dubbed it, “fireweed”. It is so toxic that to come in contact with it causes skin inflammation and boils, searing welts that won’t stop burning, and leave scars. Residue from it is not a good thing to breathe:

When fishermen tried to shake it off the webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air.

After one man bit a fishing line in two, his mouth and tongue swelled so badly that he couldn’t eat solid food for a week.
…
“It’s like acid,” Tanner said. “I couldn’t believe it. It kept pulling the skin off.”

University of Queensland’s marine botany lab identified the toxic weed as “a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago.”

Plankton and algae were once consumed by swarming clouds of small fish such as sardines and anchovies. These small fish have been harvested to feed our fish farms, reducing their numbers dramatically, allowing algae to flourish.

…every day about a billion gallons of sewage in South Florida are pumped offshore or into underground aquifers that seep into the ocean. The wastewater feeds a green tide of algae and bacteria that is helping to wipe out the remnants of Florida’s 220 miles of coral, the world’s third largest barrier reef.

97% of elkhorn and staghorn corals, previously the most populous kind, are gone, and threatened with extinction. Marine life in general is dying off, as the algae suck the oxygen out of the water, leaving little for more complex organisms. As fish die and sink to the bottom, even more food for bacteria is created in rot, and a self-perpetuating downward spiral has been gaining momentum. As if our overfishing wasn’t a big enough problem for marine life.

You can (and should!) watch videos and see photographs here. Click the menu bar on the left side after you’re done watching one, and you can select the next video or photo.

I was really disappointed to see that the text editor that Apple included with OSX reads, but refuses to write, text files. They should have named it, “RichtextEdit”, because it only saves files in Rich Text format. That makes it useless for system administration, editing HTML or PHP files, and most other things that one would want a text editor for. Fortunately there are a plethora of text editors available for OSX, but most of the better ones are not free.

My favorite, not including vim, since I switched to OSX from Linux, has been SubEthaEdit. It used to be free, but after version 2.2, it turned into shareware, and they re-licensed the old version to be free for non-commercial use. You can still download the old version, and its still free. What I like about it is its simple interface, and that it does syntax highlighting. It has a ton of other features, the most unique being that it is network-aware and allows multiple people to edit the same document simultaneously, but who uses that? I just need to edit text files occasionally, and the other alternatives that I’ve seen are either ugly, overly complicated or not free.

This is really old news, but I just came across it yesterday, and thought it was pretty funny. The BBC reported on the phenomenon of Google Bombing in 2003, and to this day, a search for miserable failure still places George Bush’s home page first in line, despite the mountain of matches on the practice of Google bombing itself. Michael Moore is catching up, with a 6th place ranking. Friends tell me that the same search used to bring up the Whitehouse’s page on the war in Iraq.