Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

Just caught this item in my Google Reader feed from Joystiq:

Although GHIII is fine and you could probably survive being in Hot Topic, playing Guitar Hero III within the walls of a Hot Topic actual [sic] conscripts you into an emo band. It’s true: A spectral version of Morrissey appears and eats all but .5 percent of your body fat, tears pre-caked in eyeliner spurt from your eyes and members of Jimmy Eat World chloroform you and force you to play bass. It’s a nightmare.

If it’s worth the risk to you you can see all the details here. But we think we’ll stay at home and put our eyeliner on by ourselves, thank you very much.

I recently had a request from Phil to rip a particular track to MP3 from a band’s MySpace page. While most music on MySpace is shoddily encoded at 96Kbps, sometimes it’s the only place available online to listen to a particular song. To save yourself from the agony of calling up a Web browser, going to the domain, and having ads foisted upon yourself, some technical work will get you set to have a fully unrestricted MP3 copy of the music.

Other solutions exist for this process, including connecting a 3.5mm cable from your sound card line out to sound card line in, and then recording the result, but this introduces even more quality loss to the process.

There are some technical restrictions on this process, and I advise anyone coming here to ask about them to seriously consider their questions before commenting. With a post title involving music and MySpace, I don’t expect the cream of the crop to start posting their wireless packet sniffing instructions or automated Flash extractor Linux tools (although that would be a pleasant change.)

You need a wired connection to the Internet to perform the packet capture. Most wireless card drivers don’t have the ability to capture packets, or they don’t work in this configuration.

1. Download and install Wireshark, which is the newest version of the classic Ethereal network utility. The Windows installer also comes with a driver, WinPCap, that allows the packet capture to take place. Follow all default instructions in the installer.
2. Close any programs that use your Internet or network connection. This includes other Web browsers, instant messaging programs, file sharing utilities and feed readers. While you don’t have to close everything, it’ll help make sure that there’s enough memory to load the MySpace page and capture the MP3 at the same time.
3. Open Wireshark, then resize it to a standard window.
   
4. Start a new Web browser window, resize it to a standard window, and click the Stop button to cancel the page load. You should have Wireshark and your web browser running side by side:
5. Enter the address of the MySpace page in the web browser address bar, but don’t press Enter or Go yet.
6. Switch to Wireshark, and click the Interfaces button - it’s the first one on the left:
7. In the Interfaces window, look for the active wired Ethernet controller in your computer. The numbers for the controller should be slowly increasing:
8. Click the Start button to the right of the controller. Immediately, switch back to your browser and let the MySpace page load. If the song isn’t the one you want, switch to it as quickly as possible. If you resize the Wireshark window, you’ll see packets scrolling past:
9. Wait until the song is done or is almost done playing. (You really only need to wait until the song data is downloaded, though.) Once finished, click the Stop Capture button in Wireshark:
10. Resize the Wireshark window. Copy and paste the following text into the Filter box, then click the Apply button.http.content_type == "audio/mpeg"

    

11. When you click the Apply button, you should only see one entry in the packet list. You may also see two dialog box with progress bars - one filters the captured packets, and the other decodes the MP3 file sequence.
12. Resize the Wireshark window so that you can see the packet overview, as in the dialog below. Click on the Media Type header and cancel the progress windows.
13. Right-click on the Media Type header and click Export Selected Packet Bytes. Enter a filename for the data, ending with the extension .mp3.
14. Open the MP3 or import it into your library. You’ll likely have to provide artist and title information for the track, since it’s not included with the packet stream.

As a special bonus, I’ve also recorded a Wink tutorial on the process. The video takes the shortcut of applying the audio/mpeg filter before stopping the packet capture, so that you can save your song file immediately after it’s downloaded from MySpace.

Other possibilities to reduce processing time would be to set a filter, only capturing HTTP packets on port 80 following the audio/mpeg chain, and changing various configuration settings in Wireshark.

The band that I demoed the capture from is Stalling Dawn, who also have much higher quality tracks available to download directly from their PodShow page if you create an account. Unfortunately they don’t seem to have an official album released yet, but I’d definitely buy it if one ever comes out.

My music selection lately has turned around from illScarlett’s latest album to the Warped Tour 2007 compilation. Usually there’s a few choice artists on the list, and this year there are a few decent tracks if you can get into the whole emo/punk genre. Here’s the ones I’ve found to jump out at me immediately. Admittedly, I can’t say a whole lot of them have insightful or inspiring lyrics.

• Killswitch Engage - The Arms of Sorrow. Very listenable with a decent chorus. I’m not a huge Killswitch fan, and the punk/screamo verses aren’t entirely my thing, but it’s a very anthemic in the chorus and bridge sections.
• Amber Pacific - Summer (In B). Punk-ish, almost power pop. Could go very well as a “surfer dude”, high energy summer movie track.
• Escape the Fate - Reverse This Curse. Escape the Fate has a style that I’d consider screamo. The vocals have a very distinct, recognizable sound, but the lyrics sound like typical RIAA-produced teenage rebellion material. Nothing’s really outstanding about this song - I’d personally recommend listening to “Ransom”, which isn’t on this album, for a better idea of the band’s sound.
• My American Heart - The Shake (Awful Feeling). I actually heard about this band in the UW Imprint a few years ago, and had no idea they had a new album out. This song in particular has radio single material and is much less whiny than their previous work. Another track with this style is “Hiding Inside the Horrible Weather”, which happens to also be the name of their 2007 album. The album itself has been on my playlist for a few days in the illustrious “crap emo that I can’t stop listening to” position.
  

  Don’t you get it?
  I made an attempt / to piece it all together
  And I’ve found your love lost in the sky
  Hiding inside / the horrible weather
  We’ll watch it all come down

  Hiding Inside The Horrible Weather - My American Heart (lyrics)

• Mayday Parade - Black Cat. I only mention this one because the intro sounds incredibly similar to some Panic! at the Disco tracks, and I couldn’t place it at first. I might still have some musical taste remaining.
• The Used - The Ripper. If you’ve heard The Used, this won’t really be anything new. They have several better (and several much, much worse) tracks on Lies for the Liars.
• Aiden - We Sleep Forever. A significant departure from what other work I’ve heard, and again, it’s a pop-style anthem executed fairly well. Listening to the lyrics, though, it’s really just another emo kid song, although the instrumental arrangement wouldn’t suggest it. Similar to the Gin Blossoms’ “Follow You Down”, which fancies up the act of stalking, Aiden puts a bright spin on wrist-slitting:
  

  She cuts a vein although it’s much too dull
  I say she’s all alone
  Fighting for redemption
  I know little pain, a little lust
  I lose myself at night to feel the rush
  Of tearing my skin apart
  Now take this sadness and close your eyes love

  Hey, call the angels. This razor blade was meant for me
  Hey, call the angels. We’ll mutilate insanity

  Go deeper, I feel it
  I see your ghost appear
  Go deeper, I see it
  I feel your ghost appear
  I will say goodbye tonight (We’ll sleep forever)
  Hold on, hold on tonight love
  We’ll sleep forever
  Hold on, hold on tonight love
  We’ll sleep forever
  Hold on, hold on tonight love
  Close your eyes

  (lyrics)

There are still a few other reasonably interesting tracks on the album that I didn’t mention, so I’d suggest checking it out if you’re not totally offput by the occasional power pop song.

Just got this snippet as part of an Amazon recommendations email for Anberlin’s Cities:

Unlike most emo bands that merely offer a laundry list of personal hardships over the sound of loud guitars, the members of Anberlin know that they can seek salvation in a higher power, so the songs on Cities aren’t so much about self-pity as self-preservation. It’s a refreshing twist on the formula, especially when paired with the industrial-strength hooks the spiritual Florida band knocks out on tracks like “Dismantle. Repair.” and “Godspeed.” On the latter, the group’s frontman Stephen Christian lashes out against the bad habits of his secular counterparts: “Tell them who you were, who you really were/Kill yourself slowly over time, fashion statement suicide.” –Aidin Vaziri

My good friend Phil has joined the ranks of the whiny bloggers union and installed WordPress. He will likely complain about things even more vocally than I, perhaps in a more emo-tastic way. Go visit him and convince him to keep things online, since he gives things up quickly if not encouraged.

I’ve decided to take a look at my Webalizer statistics for the months of April and May to figure out what people are searching for. It also helps me tailor the content on this ugly green and beige page to what people might be interested in.

If you’ve got a question about something I’ve written, or want to know more details about a particular subject, leave a comment! I’ll get back to you as soon as I check my email, which, now that I have a Blackberry, is more frequent than ever.

ml-2010 errors: Sorry, can’t help you there. My Samsung ML-2010 has been working really well, even from a Windows box networked to OS X. You also may want to specify the error message that you’re receiving.

svchost cpu usage 99%: Sadly, there haven’t been many updates to this situation since I last updated the post on the matter. My solution is still to disable Microsoft Update from the Windows Update / Change settings / Disable Microsoft Update software page, since I haven’t seen much of a tangible benefit from systems using MU versus standard WU.

It’s more likely to cause problems than it solves, especially with respect to drivers. I wonder if they’ve fixed that issue with Dell boxes and GeForce2 cards that causes WU to deliver a 640×480-limited resolution… (the solution is to tell Windows Update to never install the faulty driver, and get the official nVidia one.)

because nothing can fly with this broken wing music lyrics: This one’s easy to recall - the post was about OMGLOLEMO music, and the specific artist is Story of the Year. The relevant song was Burning Years off the Page Avenue album - which I actually own a legal copy of (but somehow have misplaced it!)

Speaking of emo bands, here are just some of the top artists on my playlist of angst, which is also coincidentally called “4+ Stars”:

• A Day to Remember (pretty much screamo, but the non-screaming parts have fairly good vocals, or at least pretty good Pro Tools work)
• The Academy Is
• Anberlin
• Boys Like Girls (more mellowed sound)
• Chiodos
• Linkin Park (the new album is super power pop angst IMO)
• Saosin
• The Used (specifically the new promo track The Bird And The Worm)

I do indeed listen to other music, by the way. My latest artist of hilarity is Mims, whose concert posters a few friends and myself spotted in Toronto the other week. He’s clearly an absolute genius with “This Is Why I’m Hot” and continues his vocal prowess with “Like This.”

bus error: Yes, that’s the title of this weblog. It stems from several cryptic OS X error messages. What else do you want from me?

As an aside, “bus error php” and MySQL bus errors mean that you’ve seriously ruined something with your configuration, or your hardware is toasted. I’ve never seen these apps throw the standard POSIX error messages, and frankly, you should rethink your purpose if you’re getting that kind of nonsense out of those tools.

custom resolutions nvidia not available vista: Run XP. Vista is indeed pretty, but XP has not exhibited one of the many symptoms I experienced with Vista’s installation. Like I’ve said, it’s fairly standard hardware for a new system: Asus P5B Deluxe board, eVGA GeForce 7800GT, Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB of OCZ RAM… you’d think there’d be few issues with this sort of thing.

download convection font: Sure, you can find the Convection font right here.

driver for samsung ml2010 printer for windows: Oh, honestly. Learn to search and type in addresses: Samsung Product Downloads, type in the model number, and you’re golden.

driver vista viewsonic vx2025wm: Again! No Vista! Ruins lives!

is it safe to update a modified xbox 360: Safe? Depends how modified it is. Check Xbox-Scene for all your 360 modding needs, you filthy pirates.

kf42e200a: Good TV, I got it for $999 at Future Shop. Don’t pay any more if you can help it.

msdnaa vista number of installs: 2, then activation hell.

phpmyadmin futurepoint: Ooh, an interesting one! Look up the IP address of your server by running an “nslookup” command to your domain. Then, go to http:///MyAdmin/ and sign in with your MySQL credentials. You can also use the “nsxx-y.futurepoint.com” URL instead of the IP address, depending which nameserver you’re connected on.

All for now. Going to crash and think about proper normalized form database design, since it’s actually practical in my job.

From Slashdot - (disclaimer: I hate MySpace)

An anonymous reader passed us a link to PC World’s coverage of the upcoming Month of MySpace bugs. Organized by a pair of wiseacre hackers tired of the ‘Month of X Bugs’, they are set up to ‘highlight the monoculture-style danger of extremely popular websites.’ Though it’s supposed to be funny, outside security analysts have apparently been consulted on the project.

“Though the project, which launches on April 1, has all the appearance of a practical joke one well-known hacker said he’d been contacted by the Month of MySpace team with legitimate security questions. ‘Those guys and I have been keeping in touch,’ said Robert Hansen, chief executive of Sectheory.com. ‘It’s funny but it’s not a joke.’”

The article follows with a pretty good anonymous comment summing up my reasons against the site:

Status: OLD

Severity: Major

Reproducible: Always

Description: MySpace is filled to the brim with whiny, middle-class, suburbanite, emo kids whining about how emo their life is and how they like to listen to emo music while cutting themselves.

Solution: Delete Myspace.

The problem with MySpace is twofold, in my opinion:

1. Its demographic consists of susceptible people. Susceptible, in this case, means “people likely to click the flashing banners.” It also means that anything with a vaguely social networking appeal will have a profound impact on these users, and as such, a modified login screen wouldn’t look too out of place.
2. Its technical issues are vast, already. How many times has the site been exploited so far? Allowing raw HTML is a recipe for disaster, and combined with its userbase (who largely wouldn’t understand the concept behind closing tags) you have potential for thirty actual, bona fide bugs. Cross site scripting? Stealing cookies? Falsifying login fields? Installing spyware? Local denial of service exploits? They’re all there.

Unlike the Month of Apple Bugs, where the orchestrators had to reach for third-party applications to achieve a month’s work of exploits, this exposé has the potential to affect over a hundred million spambot accounts, and maybe 20 million “legitimate” ones.

Start up your firewalls and HOSTS file blocking, people…

Since I have quite the collection of music, I figure that a productive use of my time would be to review some of the albums in my playlist. While it’s not at all cool to admit, I’m a bit of a sucker for the occasional “emo” track. (For all the purists, not “emotional hardcore” by any means. Think “angst emo.”) There’s more information in my Facebook profile about particular groups I listen to. I find most genre classifications to be fluid and subjective, depending on the listener and their associated company.

Why the emo angst stuff, though? Sometimes I listen to these songs with an ironic sense of the actual lyrics. A well-adjusted person would find it hard not to laugh when confronted with a masterpiece from Hawthorne Heights:

Ohio Is For Lovers - Hawthorne Heights
So cut my wrists and black my eyes.
(Cut my wrists and black my eyes)
So I can fall asleep tonight, or die.
Because you kill me.

Honestly, you can’t take that sort of thing seriously. It has the syndrome of “did your dad yell at you because you didn’t mow the lawn?” as its primary element.

I can’t blame all of my particular musical tastes on irony (although a good percentage of rap or hip-hop in my collection is clearly for this purpose alone.) Sometimes you can’t listen to the lyrics at all, because if you do it ruins the particular melody of a decent-sounding song. So what if power chords in a 3 beat pattern are trite, cliche and overused? It all just blends together in the background if I’m working on something particular. For example, if I were to write out several lyrics of my current track:

But I can’t take this anymore
I think that nothing can fly
With this broken wing
There’s so much to hold on to now

At first glance, it’s a horribly depressing song. Nobody wants to hear about being prevented from flying. Pretty little birds fly, and we don’t want to lose those! A majestic eagle flies, representing all that is true and valiant and good! Many of our culture’s upbeat, positive songs involve flying! (Note: the particular track, “I Believe I Can Fly,” is positive only when you don’t consider R. Kelly’s criminal record and its associated connotations.) The song above is actually Story of the Year’s “Burning Years.” It’s got a fairly decent melody, but you cannot just concentrate on the lyrics or it’s really horribly depressing.

Speaking of Story of the Year, they have two significant albums on the market. Their 2003 release, “Page Avenue”, has the title track Until The Day I Die that’s possibly the best representation of their vocal and tonal style on the album. In 2005, “In The Wake Of Determination” continued in a similar vein with We Don’t Care Anymore. If you want to fanboy it up, the Wikipedia article is suitably biased towards them and their fans, whereas the talk page contains mostly genre debates.

(The particular fallacy of “In my opinion, as i think i have the right to decide - being a loyal fan and a supporter” is quite predominant.)