The un-lame LAME

LAME originally stood for LAME Ain’t an Mp3 Encoder. LAME development started around mid 1998 by Mike Cheng. It started life as a GPL’d patch against the dist10 ISO demonstration source, and thus was incapable of producing an mp3 stream or even being compiled by itself. Therefore, Mike Cheng decided to start from scratch based on the dist10 sources. His goal was only to speed up the dist10 sources, and leave its quality untouched. That branch (a patch against the reference sources) became Lame 2.0, and only on Lame 3.81 did we replaced of all dist10 code, making LAME no more only a patch. Now LAME is the source code for a fully LGPL’d MP3 encoder, with speed and quality to rival and often surpass all commercial competitors.

Mike Cheng eventually left leadership and started working on tooLame, an MP2 encoder. Mark Taylor became leader and started pursuing increased quality in addition to better speed. He can be considered the initiator of the LAME project in its current form. He released version 3.0 featuring gpsycho, a new psychoacoustic model he developed. In early 2003 Mark left project leadership, and since then the project has been lead through the cooperation of the active developers (currently 4 individuals).

• Gabriel Bouvigne
• Robert Hegemann
• Alexander Leidinger
• Takehiro Tominaga

Today, LAME is considered the best MP3 encoder at mid-high bitrates and at VBR, mostly thanks to the dedicated work of its developers and the open source licensing model that allowed the project to tap into engineering resources from all around the world. Both quality and speed improvements are still happening, probably making LAME the only MP3 encoder still being actively developed.

LAME features:

• Many improvements in quality in speed over ISO reference software. See history.
• MPEG1,2 and 2.5 layer III encoding.
• CBR (constant bitrate) and two types of variable bitrate, VBR and ABR.
• Encoding engine can be compiled as a shared library (Linux/UNIX), DLL , Directshow filter or ACM codec (Windows).
• Free format encoding and decoding.
• GPSYCHO: a GPL’d psycho acoustic and noise shaping model.
• Powerful and easy to use presets.
• Quality better than all other encoders at most bitrates.
• Fast! Encodes faster than real time on a PII 266 at highest quality mode.
• MP3x: a GTK/X-Window MP3 frame analyzer for both .mp3 and unencoded audio files.

Q: What the hack is this? I did involve in MP3 encoding, but why I never heard about this before?
A: Because you are lame. 😛

Among the commercial tools that are using LAME are :

• WinAmp
• UltraISO
• SWiSH Max
• Blaze Media Pro
• … and many more…

Those names that I mentioned above (in bold) are the true hero in open source world especially in MP3 encoding. They are the truly un-lame LAMErs. For the lamers out there who have big dreams but totally have no effort like Mike Cheng, you are the king of lame!:)

Dell EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN Arrays – Storage Area Network

This is not the first time I deal with SAN device but I never use it with Ubuntu Linux before. Anyway, there is first time for everything.

After 15 minutes playing around with Open-iSCSI (it can be done in just a few seconds in Windows by using GUI based iSCSI Initiator), here is the howto (and at the same time as a note for myself)

1) Install Open-iSCSI Initiator

sudo apt-get install open-iscsi

2) If you want your computer manually connect to the SAN volume, proceed with step 3. But if you want your computer automatically connect to the volume, edit the iscsid configurtation file

sudo nano /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf

And change the following parameters

• isns.address = SAN-IP-ADDRESS-HERE
• isns.port = 3260

3) If the restriction is based on IP (without password) procees with step 4. But if password is required, edit the iscsid configurtation file

sudo nano /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf

And change/set the following parameters

• node.session.auth.username = USER
• node.session.auth.password = PASSWORD
• discovery.sendtargets.auth.username = USER
• discovery.sendtargets.auth.password = PASSWORD

4) Restart the open-iscsi service

sudo /etc/init.d/open-iscsi restart

5) Run open-iscsi administration utility with root privilege to discover available volume

sudo iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p 192.168.10.1

where 192.168.10.1 is the IP of your SAN. If your configuration is working, you will get something similar to this :-

192.168.10.1:3260,1 iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:0-8a0906-f260b4603-e8b0000001249f55-vss-control
192.168.10.1:3260,1 iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:0-8a0906-6980b4603-a990000001f49f56-csmvol3
192.168.10.1:3260,1 iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:0-8a0906-58c0b4603-1730000001c49f56-csmvol2
192.168.10.1:3260,1 iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:0-8a0906-4280b4603-a410000001949f56-csmvol1

6) In this case, I want to connect to volume 1 (iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:0-8a0906-4280b4603-a410000001949f56-csmvol1), so here is what I should do

sudo iscsiadm --mode node --targetname iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:0-8a0906-4280b4603-a410000001949f56-csmvol1 --portal 192.168.10.1:3260 --login

And if you are successfully connected, you’ll get the following message

Logging in to [iface: default, target: iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:0-8a0906-4280b4603-a410000001949f56-csmvol1, portal: 192.168.10.1,3260]
Login to [iface: default, target: iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:0-8a0906-4280b4603-a410000001949f56-csmvol1, portal: 192.168.10.1,3260]: successful

7) Now, verify the device name that has been connected to your machine

tail -f /var/log/messages

And in my case, this is my output

Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.014658] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     EQLOGIC  100E-00          4.0  PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.016499] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 209725440 512-byte hardware sectors: (107 GB/100 GiB)
Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.017832] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.018256] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.019240] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 209725440 512-byte hardware sectors: (107 GB/100 GiB)
Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.019434] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.019836] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.019842]  sdb: sdb1
Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.024882] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
Apr 28 09:42:48 xps kernel: [ 2514.026039] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

The connected volume appear to be as SDB in my machine

8 ) If the volume already contain partition and already formated, you can straight away mount them, but if they dont have partition and filesystem yet, you can either use fdisk or gparted to create the partition and format them 😉

Enjoy..!~

Demo for fdisk -l output

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x12961295
 
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          12       96358+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2   *          13        7661    61440592+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            7662       11396    30001387+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda4           11397       19457    64749982+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           11397       11520      995998+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6           11521       19457    63753921   83  Linux
 
Disk /dev/sdb: 107.3 GB, 107379425280 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 13054 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00093e08
 
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       13054   104856223+  83  Linux

[Reference: Cyberciti & Ubuntu Forum]

Sexy Part of Malaysia

Hello guys… Welcome to Malaysia..

Oracle to Buy Sun

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 20, 2009 — Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

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1st April 2009 – Selamat Menyambut Conficker.C Al-Mubarak

has been observing increasing trend of IT security related discussion and information sharing about a worm variant called Conficker.C on the internet. It is expected that the enhanced version of previous worm variant Conficker.A and Conficker.B will trigger on the coming 1st of April. Security researchers believe, the latest outbreak of Conficker variant C began first spreading at roughly 6 p.m. PST, 4 March 2009 (5 March UTC). would like to highlight that this is not a new outbreak nor a new piece of malware. Removal and mitigation strategies were highlighted in our previous advisory.

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