iPod encounters

I never thought of buying an iPod, and had been very much satisfied with Nomad Muvo 512, which i still believe gives good bang for buck. Until company gave all an iPod Video 30G. It was a more than a surprise when it got shipped in less than 48 hours from Shangai, CN to Knoxville, TN; hmm FedEx! Anyway here I’m trying to abuse this piece of electronic.

Anyone will fall for the slick user interface and cool click wheel, but when you start using it from a WinX OS, you are hit with a quite a bit of annoyances. iTunes interface for iPod is one crazy software, it doesn’t tell you if a selected/drag-n-dropped media file is not supported or anything, it just acts dumb. I can understand if Apple decided not to support many WinX media formats in iTunes, but I expect them to provide atleast an encoder in it to support those? I'v got ephPod downloaded; breathing fire over iTunes shoulder, waiting to make that kill.

Media are internally stored with cryptic file names, once I get them in, I don’t know how to backup them with original file names. A useless info I gained while googling for converters, AAC (internal media format) doesn’t (surprisingly) stand for Apple Audio Codec.

MediaCoder did most of the work converting all my audio collections in myriad formats to AAC (pointe de note: Only Nero AAC Encoder was able to convert my rm’s and gave better conversion quality over iTunesEncoder). Sadly I was not able to convert mpeg/dvd-rips using MediaCoder video conversion, even converting strictly to Apple iPOD supported video formats (tried both MPEG-4 & H.264 video in 768 Kbps); not able to get any support in web for this software, should be satified to have a free converter for most used feature of iPOD. Finally ended up using Xilisoft iPOD video converter, there is lot on the market.

And finally a note on v.rarely talked about feature, eBooks, check out yourself thousands of free ebooks for iPOD @ http://manybooks.net.

Keeping issues aside, iPod gets whatz supposed to: look&feel, good battery (audio only, video drains out battery v.v.quickly, drains 75% in 10-15 mins video playback), simple and easy interface and more than anything raising eyebrows in next seat ;-)

Bye and Happy iPoding.

Reverse Engineering Taboo

Many (esp in IT world) think this a taboo, well here i'm trying to break. I don’t understand why such negativity associated with this; if this is not so in other industries. Take an automobile manufacturing industry, isn't a common practice to buy competitor product and disassemble it to examine and understand for the purpose of enhancing their vehicles/components. If you can consider that legal (of course if it doesn’t violate any patent/copy-right), then it should be okay to disassemble software for the purpose of understanding and enhancing existing system.

For people who confuse this with Security Hack, question yourself why you have that secured data/logic in the binaries which can be reversed in a matter of seconds (Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector), esp with the these high-order languages. No, not even NGEN isn't protected from reversing, hmmm, are you still in Fool's Paradise!

Wake-up Buddy. The silent guy in that last desk could be a black hat! Hahahaha.