Chaucery Blog

In my ongoing quest to replace all of my software with free alternatives I recently turned my attention to the venerable WinZip. I was looking for a utility with the following features:

• shell extension to add and extract (denoted shell)
• pleasant streamlined graphical user interface (GUI)
• full command-line interface (CLI)
• 7-Zip support (the reigning champion in compression)

I gathered the most promising candidates from NoNags and the more discerning Pricelessware list and took them for a test drive.

QuickZip 4.5b11

• [GUI] non-standard UI - icons in weird places
• [GUI] after testing an archive, doesn't show the result
• [GUI] options dialog hideously complicated and over-tabbed
• [GUI] many poorly-explained extra features
• [CLI] no command-line operation
• website is obscure about software functionality

7-Zip 4.12b

• Open Source (feel-good factor)
• [GUI] Nice simple interface.
• [Shell] No right-click explorer menu after dragging (third-party fix available)
• [Shell] No icon in right-click explorer menu
• [CLI] Virtually complete command-line interface (similar to WinZip)
• [CLI] Some command-line options buggy or counterintutive, eg. exclude
  (Aside 2-Dec-2004: the usage may be obtuse, but the author is willing and prompt to respond to queries on the 7-Zip forum)
• Small.

IZArc 3.4.1.6

• [GUI] Modern configurable GUI.
• [GUI] Slight lack of GUI polish.
• [GUI] Excellent tree view of archives.
• [CLI] Only basic command-line interface.

TugZip 3.1

• [GUI] Modern configurable GUI.
• [GUI] Excellent tree view of archives.
• Comprehensive scripting language (dissimilar to WinZip, so not useful to people who don't want to learn another language)

ZipGenius 5.11

• [GUI] Modern GUI, but too fussy and unconfigurable.

As there were no products that completely satisfied my needs, I decided to stick with a combination of two, 7-Zip for its command-line interface, to use in scripts, and either IZArc or TugZip for the GUI and shell extensions. Of those two, IZArc's GUI was less polished, but made more sense to me, so that's my winner.

I was considering switching to using 7-Zip (.7z) archives as my default for backups, but have decided to stick with the old zip format for the moment, because few programs can test .7z archives, and their creation takes much longer than for similarly sized zips.

Finally, I must note my surprise at how much better the interfaces of IZArc (and perhaps these other archivers) is than WinZip 8 (and presumably 9). It's certainly well worth trialling free alternatives before you decide to purchase any software.

Posted by James at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fridge is a nice, easy-to-spell word. It's unfortunately the cause of the frequent misspelling of its full-length relation, refrigerator. As you can see, a d has crept into the short form. From this, people mistakenly back-form the original word to refridgerator. To prompt yourself just remember that the short version is spelt differently from its big brother.

Posted by James at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The misuse of reign for rein is quite common, perhaps because of the decreasing uses of rein in everyday life. Even CNN are guilty, erring in the title of a piece about oil: OPEC keeps tight reign on taps. There are over 8000 hits found for "tight reign" on Google, all of which are wrong.

The easy way to remember which to use in a particular situation is to know that reign, meaning the period during which a monarch rules, is derived from reg, or rex, meaning king. So, seeing the 'g' in reign should remind you of regal. Hence, the other rein must be the horse one.

Posted by James at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The news that the main developers of Winamp have now left AOL has prompted me to give up hope that my major problem with Winamp would be resolved. Most of the music I listen to is via internet streaming audio, and usually it's from Icecast relays. However, when I use Winamp to listen it always gets stuck after a random time (4 seconds to an hour), with the display permanently at buffer 0%, until I press play, at which point the music plays on.

Despite much lurking on the Winamp.com forums I could never find a reasonable explanation, so I thought I might as well try other media players to see if any acted better. I knew that it was possible, because XMMS in Linux always worked perfectly on these same streams.

In summary, I was looking for a player that, in order of importance (most first):

• could play m3u and/or pls icecast streams without stopping
• was as small and functional as Winamp's classic winshade mode
• would scroll the song title in the task bar
• allowed volume adjustment by scroll-wheel with program active

I got the most advanced-looking and highest rated media players from Tucows.com and Nonags.com and had a play. I separated the results into those that could play streams continously for extended periods of time, and those that couldn't, or could only briefly.

Stream-friendly

• Quintessential Player (v4.51): Copes with most network errors, though not all. Lots of skins to choose from - found Minibar was about Winamp's size.
• Sonique (v1.96): perfect audio quality. Could not get pls or m3u to work. Not being developed any more, so no good new skins. No winshade mode. Didn't like the interface - much too cluttered.
• Windows Media Player (v9) (v10 unavailable for Windows 2000): no tiny usable skin found. Absolutely no problems playing streamed audio. Perfect recovery from breaks in the stream.

Stream problematic

• Coolplayer (v2.15). Could not play pls or m3u.
• Foobar2000 (v0.8.3). No built-in fancy UI. Stopped on network error.
• Media Player Classic (v6.4.8.2). Could not play pls or m3u streams.
• Real Player (v10.0). Stopped on network error.
• XMPlayer (v3.1). Promising, but couldn't cope with network errors.
• VLC (v0.8.1). Despite the network problems it was never brought to a complete halt. However, it did produce rather a lot of breaks in sound, which were enough to make it unlistenable. It did, however, provide a very useful message window, which told me exactly what was going on at all times, so I could see why the sound was breaking up. For this reason, I shall keep VLC installed - not as a media player, but as a media player debugger.

By the way, according to VLC, the errors are:

main warning: buffer is 48083 in advance, triggering downsampling
main warning: resampling stopped after 2656273 usec (drift: -85163)
main warning: buffer is 87911 late, triggering upsampling
main warning: audio drift is too big (122221), dropping buffer
main warning: audio drift is too big (120485), dropping buffer
main warning: audio drift is too big (-121331), clearing out
main warning: timing screwed, stopping resampling
main warning: mixer start isn't output start (-10120)
main warning: audio drift is too big (-122427), clearing out
main debug: audio output is starving (199650), playing silence

If any can give me a guess as to a possible cause then I'd be delighted to see your comment.

Posted by James at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Which formerly great power used a recent national tragedy to put more power in the hands of the president? Yes, it's Russia, a country with many pressing issues: .

Long life is one of the central characteristics of an advanced society; in Russia, men often die too young to collect a pension. In the United States, even during the Great Depression mortality rates continued to drop, and the same has been true for all other developed countries. Except Russia. In the past decade, life expectancy has fallen so drastically that a boy born in Russia today can expect to live just to the age of fifty-eight, younger than if he were born in Bangladesh. No other educated, industrialized nation ever has suffered such a prolonged, catastrophic growth in death rates.

Posted by James at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For a brief period of my youth I was a voracious reader of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Although I recall some wondering about how books by different authors could be so similar, I was too young too take it any further. But now I know...

I don’t remember wondering much about Carolyn Keene, the book’s putative author, although I must have eventually asked how she could write so many books; I recall my father gently suggesting that Keene had been replaced by a ghostwriter. This concerned me for one reason: what if the books changed? I needn’t have worried. The truth is that Nancy Drew, like her comrades-in-sleuthing the Hardy Boys, was never the creation of a single mind. From the start, she was the product of a corporation—a literary syndicate. The man who created the syndicate was not a feminist or a brilliant writer. But in his own unassuming way he was, like Nancy Drew, a phenomenon.

Posted by James at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seeing the number of countries that still execute people dwindling gives a glimmer of hope that in my lifetime this practice will have ceased worldwide. In addition to the humanist arguments, CSICOP has the statistical reasons.

There are some questions that social scientists should be able to answer. Either executing people cuts the homicide rate or it does not. Or perhaps it does under certain conditions and not others. In any case, the data are readily available and researchers should be able to answer the question. Of course, this would not resolve the ethical issues surrounding the question, but that is another matter.
...
Models that find deterrence effects of capital punishment often rely on rather bizarre specifications. In a rigorous and comprehensive review Cameron (1994, 214) observed that, “What emerges most strongly from this review is that obtaining a significant deterrent effect of executions seems to depend on adding a set of data with no executions to the time series and including an executing/non-executing dummy in the cross-section analysis . . . there is no clear justification for the latter practice.”

In less technical language, the researchers included a set of years when there were no executions, then introduced a control variable to eliminate the nonexistent variance. The other day upon the stair, they saw some variance that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there again today, thank goodness their model scared it away. Not all the studies rely on this particular maneuver, but they all depend on techniques that demand too much from the available data.

Posted by James at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)