grack.com

Looks like Vorbis walloped WMA on the Multiformat listening test.

If you’re interested in how the test was run, Roberto Amorim has a page with all the details.

Personally I’m still using MP3s as my primary ripping format as it’s the format supported by pretty much every piece of software and hardware out there.  After this, I’m considering switching to Vorbis.  Unfortunately, I’ll have to give up my coveted iTunes at work unless I can find either a plug-in for Vorbis music or an iTunes clone (for Windows) that supports it.  Any hints?

The second-place winner,Musepack, is something I haven’t heard of until I saw the test results.

I’ve been playing around with Fedora Core 2’s Cyrus IMAP a bit and discovered the cyrus-imapd-nntp package.  This lets you export a shared IMAP folder via NNTP.  The cool part about this is that it’s a standard IMAP folder, like every user’s INBOX and custom folders.

This means that to set up a newsgroup, you only need to run cyradm and enter the following commands:

cm netnews.some.newsgroup  
setacl netnews.some.newsgroup group:users post

Assuming you’ve added newsprefix: netnews to your imapd.conf, this will add a new newsgroup “some.newsgroup” and give everyone post permissions.

Cool, eh?

The tricky part for me was figuring out how to actually connect to the Cyrus administration tools.  The secret was the reset the password for the “cyrus” account and connect with cyradm -u cyrus --admin=login localhost.

Not only was 1&1’s server hosting my site down for a few days, but they’ve managed to bring it up with incorrect permissions so that I can’t modify anything within it! 

At least it’s still accessible to the outside world.  Sigh.

I’m performing the task of apt-get dist-upgradeing to Fedora Core 2 as we speak.  The biggest reason is that I can’t get the latest development 2.6.5/2.6.6 kernels to boot on my system.  It’s freezing right after the “freeing kernel memory” line (trying to find /sbin/init, I assume).

I’ve found a thread on Google Groups potentially related to this issue, but I haven’t tried out the patch mentioned.

Looks like 1&1 hosting is having some trouble with my site.  I’m in the process of temporarily shifting the site elsewhere so things might be a bit broken for a bit while the DNS changes propagate.

UPDATE (6/26/2004): Since Google has been directing a few people to this site, I thought I’d at least describe the situation a bit more.  It looks like one of the 1&1 servers with my host on it crashed, leaving my site inaccessible for more than a week.  When they finally brought it back up (from backups, I assume) it had incorrect permissions and I couldn’t update anything.  After a number of support requests (email and form-based), I finally managed to convince them that it was their problem.  The first engineer even gave me a templated response, without reading my support mail!

It took a total of two weeks for the whole thing to be resolved, but it’s been pretty good so far since then.  I know of another person hosted by 1&1 that hasn’t had any issues, so I might just have been unlucky.  Since I’m using their three-years-free-no-strings-attached plan, I’m not going to complain too much.

My biggest peeve with 1&1 is that DNS has to be hosted by 1&1.  You’ll get a nasty mail if your domain’s nameservers aren’t 1&1’s and they check once a week.  This means that you can’t host www.yoursite.com on 1&1 with your NNTP or FTP server somewhere else.

Other than that, their management console is pretty sharp.  It’s easy to set up permissions, passwords and the like for all your directories.  SSH access is provided too, for extra tweakage.