Monthly Archive for February, 2005

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Popular Belgian Blogs: version 4

Published on February 14, 2005 in Belgium. 14 Comments

#1: coolios.net
Valentine or not, here are the numbers of the Belgian Jury.

The changes to the process are:

  • added some 20 more blogs, including the now #3 Dog Of Flanders. Hey, I can’t be expected to know all blogs, I discover new ones every day.
  • added some ‘normal’ sites to see how they compare to the blogs. Today I will show results for the Flemish newspapers.
  • added the 3 Dutch shockblogs: Flabber, VolkomenKut en GeenStijl, to see how far ‘behind’ Belgium is.
  • #2: zattevrienden.bechanged the weighting system for search engine hits. Altavista claims to have over 50.000 pages for coolios.net, whereas Google has only 2040. So I scaled all numbers to percentages of the site with the most hits. This makes Google results weigh heavier. (Flabber has most hits in most search engines: 9220 in Google, 192000 in Yahoo, 47000 in MSN and 199000 in Altavista)
  • Alexa and Google PageRank coefficient calculation remains +- the same: they can at best give a multiplier of 200%, and at worst 100%.
  • the end result is no longer in ‘equivalent hits’, but in percentages. To keep things easy, I scale everything back to 100% for the #1 site: coolios.net.

#3: dof.skynetblogs.be
Here is the top #30:

  1. 100,0% www.coolios.net
  2. 87,0% www.zattevrienden.be
  3. 75,4% dof.skynetblogs.be
  4. 73,6% demuynck.org
  5. 56,0% fuckhedz.com
  6. 48,5% veerle.duoh.com
  7. 41,6% lvb.net
  8. 37,5% www.kapingamarangi.be
  9. 30,5% mathibus.com
  10. 28,0% www.scene24.net
  11. 27,9% blog.zog.org
  12. 27,9% www.sepi.be
  13. 27,2% www.polskaya.be
  14. 27,0% pdw.blogspot.com
  15. 26,5% www.jahsonic.com
  16. 26,4% www.internetjournalistiek.be #4: demuynck.org
  17. 21,8% www.domilog.be
  18. 20,7% www.druppels.be
  19. 19,1% www.ruudsdesign.com
  20. 18,2% www.smintjes.be
  21. 16,4% percept.be
  22. 16,2% zonderzever.blogspot.com
  23. 16,0% www.dominiek.be
  24. 16,0% www.eug.be
  25. 15,1% www.eskimokaka.be
  26. 13,5% www.7seconden.be
  27. 13,4% huugendruug.blogspot.com
  28. 13,2% www.kwaadbloed.be
  29. 13,1% lonestar.skynetblogs.be
  30. 12,5% bruxelles-ma-ville.skynetblogs.be

#5: fuckhedz.com
When we compare this to the top 3 Dutch blogs:

  1. 481,1% www.flabber.nl
  2. 191,5% www.geenstijl.nl
  3. 154,3% www.volkomenkut.com

And because I promised: the Belgian ‘traditional media’: De Vlaamse Gazetten

  1. 92,1% www.destandaard.be
  2. 63,1% www.gva.be
  3. 57,1% www.nieuwsblad.be
  4. 43,3% www.hbvl.be
  5. 43,0% www.hln.be
  6. 31,0% www.hetvolk.be
  7. 26,8% www.demorgen.be

(Previous top Belgian blogs: version 1, version 2 and version 3.)

UPDATE Oct 2005: check out the top 60 based on virtual blog value

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LovePangs – Pain-Rage-Resent-Over

Published on February 13, 2005 in mypast and Society. Closed


Anyone knows what a “Love Pain Congress” is? Neither did I, so I yesterday I went to LovePangs in Ghent.

When you get in, you are screened by the “Pain Commission” to see in what stage of the process you are: Pain, Rage, Resent or Over. I got the black ‘OVER’ badge, because actually, yes, I’m over it. You also get 20 Pain Euro that you can use later in the event. The most important part of the Congress are the one-on-one conversations you can have with ‘pain experts’. These are an mix of 25 well-known (Jos Geysels, Pascale Platel) and lesser known people that you can have a 30-minutes conversation with on some aspect of love, pain, regret, guilt, … you name it. These experts also belong to one of the 4 groups mentioned above, and you can only book a time slot with a person of your colour. If you want to, you can however use your pain euros to sell your badge and buy one of another colour at the “Pain Stockmarket” (in some cases, you get paid for this, in other cases you need to pay: supply and demand and all that jazz). There was also some karaoke theatre going on, but I never got to that.

Mieke DebruyneSo how did it go for me: I got in and booked a ‘black’ date with Mieke Debruyne, journalist (on “missed opportunities” – how prophetic this would be) and another ‘black’ one with Mieke Deley – dancer (on “guilt” – no picture, sorry). At 21h30 I got asked to fill in a vacant spot, but that turned out to be double booked. At 22h00 I was supposed to have my conversation with Mieke Deley, but since our table was double booked, we waited for 15 minutes and then just started talking while sitting on the ground in a corner. The conversation was great fun, we lost track of time and since no one told us our time slot was over, I only got to Mieke Debruyne 20 minutes late, at which point she was already talking to some one else. The organisation was rather clueless (yes, using Excel sheets can be something of a black art). When I asked to maybe book Ms Debruyne at a later time, the lady in question seemed to have disappeared. But since talking to Mieke-the-dancer was so much fun anyway, we told every one of the Love Pain hostesses who interrupted us – and there were quite some – that we just started our session, which gave us a load of free drinks, half a dozen of different locations and about 2 hours of off-and-on sparkling and very open conversation.

End conclusion: there’s still some work in the details, but the idea is brilliant. The general mood amongst visitors is something between openheartedness, amusement and genuine interest in what’s going on in the minds and hearts of the other person. That goes for most of the conversations I had that night, not only the 1 ‘pain expertise’ that I managed to arrange.

If there is a new edition in 2006, I’ll be there! Oh, and if Mieke Debruyne would be so kind to drop me a line so we can finally have that session, I’d be so grateful.

CD-to-MP3 ripping speed estimation

Published on February 12, 2005 in bandwidth, copyright, music and tool. Closed

As every sensible car-owner in Brussels, I rip my CDs to MP3 so I can put copies of them in my car. As every self-respecting geek, I have multiple PCs at home. Which brings me to following observation: not all PCs rip alike. On one PC the CPU maxes out at 100% for the whole ripping procedure, and on the other, I never get above 75%. So I started wondering: what are the elements to define the maximum ripping speed you can get on a PC?
My hunch:

the CD-ROM drive speed:

the original CD audio specification required a constant data rate. This was implemented by running the CD at 500 rpm for the first/inner tracks on the CD (ø 48mm) and at 200 rpm for the outer tracks (ø 118mm). If the CD would have been played at a constant 500 rpm, the data rate at the end would have been 500/200 = 2,5X. (cf Devnulled: Ripping speed)
With CD-ROM the data should be delivered as fast as possible. So the rotation speed is turned up as much as possible. The physical boundaries are the vibrations and the centrifugal forces that occur at high speeds. Maxwell claims the maximum safe speed is 48X. Since the “48X” is marketing speak, this speed is only obtained at the outer border of the CD: this means that the rotation speed would be 48 x 200 = 9200 rpm. Some CDs seem to explode above 10.000 rpm.
To convert this speed into a data rate: at 9200 rpm, the outer tracks would deliver 48x the data rate of an audio CD: 67,74 Mbps or 8.47 MB/s. The first tracks, at ø 48mm, deliver data 2,5 times slower: 27,52 Mbps or 3,44 MB/s.
Real-life tests of a whole bunch of drives on DAE speed results.
For the exact sizes: CD-R/CD-RW technical specifications

the bus speeds:

the CD-ROM drive is connected to the PC by a ATAPI, SCSI, FireWire or USB connection. In theory there could also be a network in between (e.g. when using a Ethernet connected CD Jukebox).
The slowest ATA-33 has a theoretical max throughput of 33MB/s. Most modern SCSIs go above 20MB/s and FireWire gives 50 MB/s. So they would not be the bottleneck in the ripping process.
USB1.1 is limited to 1,5 MB/s (in practice even lower). Most common networks would be a bottleneck too (even Fast Ethernet at a theoretical 12,5 MB/s since 7MB/s would be more of a realistic top rate in practice, certainly if the network is used for other stuff too. Same thing with WiFi standards: 802.11g’s advertised “54Mbps” will in real life never translate in an actual 6,75MB/s throughput.

the CPU speed:

encoding raw audio data to MP3 is CPU intensive. Main parameter will be the clock speed – which I would expect to scale linearly: a 2GHz processor does it twice as fast as a 1GHz. Extra influences: brand of processor (Intel/AMD), model (Celeron/Pentium4/Athlon/Athlon64), number of processors (or HyperThreading). Also, the software you use to encode (LAME/GOGO/RealPlayer/Windows Media Player/…) will have an impact.
Some data can be found on GamePC.com: an Intel P4 3.06 GHz encodes 200MB of raw data info 160 kbps MP3 in 57 seconds: 3,5 MB/s or 20X. The AMD AthlonXP 2700+: 3,28 MB/s or 18.6. More info on GamePC.com confirms our hunch that performance scales linearly with clock speed. For the Pentium4: (1,15 MB/s) per GHz or 6,5X per GHz.

the MP3 bitrate:

the above numbers are for 160 kbps, but what with 192 kbps and 64 kbps? Is encoding faster or slower? I found no data on the net, and I haven’t tested it myself. So no hunch here. Also, the output of the encoding process, even at a very high quality 320kbps is largely within the capacity of any output, even Bluetooth, god forbid. So I don’t take that parameter into account.


So in the following situation:

  • a 24X CD-ROM drive
  • a Pentium 4 2,8GHz processor
  • ripping with the LAME encoder to 160 kbps

Your ripping will start at about 9,8X and speed up until your CPU is saturated at 18,2X. Which gives the graphic at the right. Now there’s a rule of fist.

Remark: looking at the benchmarks, adding a second processor (or HyperThreading) does not enhance the ripping speed (probably since the MP3 encoding code does not do parallelisation). But if you have 2 CPU’s, only one CPU will go to 100% and you keep some breathing room while your PC is creating the MP3s.

Sue your customers

Published on February 11, 2005 in Belgium, copyright, music and NL. Closed

(Post in Dutch)

Het Franse equivalent van anti-piraterijstichting Brein (“Sacem“) stond onlangs in zijn hemd. Muzikanten als Yann Tiersen, Ez3kiel, Le Peuple de l’Herbe en Manu Chao ondertekenden in opinietijdschrift Le Nouvel Observateur een manifest waarin ze strijden voor een eind aan de hetze tegen de downloader. ‘Net als minstens acht miljoen andere Fransen hebben wij ooit online muziek gedownload en zijn we dus potentiele misdadigers.’
(from 3voor12.vpro.nl)

Marcel, ge gaat het nooit geloven: nu vinden de artiesten ook al dat we moeten stoppen met iedereen een proces aan te doen die MP3s downloadt.

Geen paniek, Suzanne! Ik had dit voorzien in mijn businessplan.

Hoe bedoelt ge?

Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved. Machiavelli, Suzanneke!

En dat betekent concreet …

We doen een paar artiesten een proces aan wegens contractbreuk, we zetten er een tiental andere op straat, en het gaat rap gedaan zijn.

Amai, Marcel, gij zijt ne straffe tiep… Zeg, het is vrijdag vandaag, he? Wie sturen we vandaag een sies en die sist?

‘Cease and desist’, Suzanne. Even in mijn agenda kijken … Dominiek of Fuckhedz? Inne miene mutte …

Ik nodig u uit om te beleven op welk gesofisticeerd niveau dit gevecht beslecht wordt. Hyperlinks voor dummies:

Although it is possible to make links without the ISP (who hosts the site on which these links appear) knowing it and although those links constitute a technical means enabling users to go directly or indirectly from one site to another, they can be considered as information which is to be found on a web site. Therefore, the fact that such links are to be found on a web site hosted by Belgacom Skynet has to be viewed as a storage of information on its server. What is more, these links automatically refer to another site, they are a kind of key which, when you click on it, makes it possible to download, copy and spread reproductions of music records without the authorisation of the right owners. Linking to such illegal files while knowing (or being supposed to know) that these links are illegal constitutes an unlawful act.
(via IFPI vs Belgacom Skynet – PDF)

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