Fucema

On my last trip to Vegas, I noticed that most casinos had the H17 rule for 6+ deck Blackjack games. It seems like a very minor rule but it does give a slight edge to the house. I found a website that gives you the lowdown on what the H17 rule means to you and how you should play your cards to maximize your odds.

Modifications to Basic Playing Strategy for Soft 17 Rule

Single Deck

Hit soft 18 against ace

If double after pair splitting is allowed, split a pair of 9’s against an ace

If surrender is allowed, surrender hard 15 against an ace and hard 17 against an ace.

Double Deck

Double down on soft 14 against 4

Double down on soft 18 against 2

Double down on soft 19 against 6

If surrender is allowed, surrender hard 15 against dealer ace.

4, 6 or 8 Decks

Double down on 11 against an ace

Double down on soft 17 against 2

If surrender is allowed, surrender hard 15 against ace, hard 17 against ace, and a pair of 8’s against dealer ace.

Check out The Soft 17 Rule in Blackjack for the inside scoop and tips for your next (read: September 2008!) trip to Vegas.

For the poker fans among us, I like to read the AllVegasPoker blog and review site for the inside news on the poker rooms in Las Vegas.

Until recently I’ve been ripping my CD collection to MP3 files. But I recently discovered that Nero opened their reference quality implementation MPEG-4 (or AAC) audio codec to the public (last year!). This is great because the AAC format actually compresses quite nicely and sounds great too. In my opinion Nero’s AAC audio codec produces music files that rival or exceed most (all?) open-source AAC codecs.

I couldn’t find any guides for configuring CDex to rip and tag into the AAC format so I’ve copied down the steps I used. Hope this helps others looking to get started with AACs and the CDex audio ripper.

These instructions assume your environment is similar to mine:
• Windows XP SP2
• CDex 1.70 (Beta 2)
• Nero AAC Codec 1.1.34.2
• Picard 0.9.0
• encode.bat

CDex + AAC + MusicBrainz = .w4a Goodness
1. 

   Download the AAC codec and extract all the files. Copy all the files inside win32 into the new folder C:nero_aac.
   
   

2. 

   Download encode.bat movie it to C:nero_aacencode.bat. CDex will invoke encode.bat which in turn will execute the AAC encoder and the AAC tagger.
   
   

   Here are the two commands inside encode.bat:

   1 2	c:nero_aacneroAacEnc_SSE.exe -q 0.8 -if %1 -of %2 c:nero_aacneroAacTag.exe %2 -meta:artist=%3 -meta:album=%4 -meta:track=%5 -meta:totaltracks=%6 -meta:title=%7 -meta:genre=%8 -meta:year=%9

   The first line executes an SSE optimized(?) encoder. This should be safe for most of us, but you can substitute it with neroAacEnc.exe. The parameter -q sets the VBR quality. I’ve set it to 0.8 but it can be a floating number from 0.0 up to 1.0 (max. bit rate and larger file size) I could not tell the difference between 0.5 and 1.0 during some informal testing. The second line performs the metadata tagging.

   To get a list of the various metadata tags that are available, execute the tagger with the option -list-standard-meta.

   1 2 3 4 5 6

   c:nero_aacneroAacTag.exe -list-standard-meta List of standard Nero Digital metadata field names: title artist year album genre track totaltracks disc totaldiscs url copyright comment lyrics credits rating label composer isrc mood tempo End of metadata field name list.

3. Start CDex and press F4 for options.
   
   Click on the Encoder tab and set the following options.
   • Encoder -> External Encoder
   • Encoder Path -> C:nero_aacencode.bat
   • Parameter string -> %1 %2 "%a" "%b" "%tn" "%tt" "%t" "%g" "%y"
   • File Extension -> m4a
   • On-the-fly Encoding -> unchecked
   • Send WAV header to stdin -> unchecked
   
   Click on the Generic tab and disable ID3 tagging.
   • ID3 Tag Version -> None

   
   

4. Rip your MP3s as usual and you should find fresh hot m4a files waiting in your target folder. Winamp can play these without a problem. Coincidentally, I use the m4a extension versus the mp4 extension in order to allow iTunes and iPods to read the same files with minimal hassle.
5. 

   (optional) Save these new settings to a profile named aac. I also keep separate profiles for mp3s and flacs.
   
   

6. (optional) Post process each set of m4a’s using MusicBrainz PicardTagger to scrub the metadata. I prefer to lookup CD information using MusicBrainz, and fall back to using freedb2.org as a backup. PicardTagger makes it a cinch to remove and cleanup weird capitalizations and characters in the song filename and attributes.

   MusicBrainz creates and assigns a unique PUID to every song. A PUID is a digital fingerprint created through analyzing the audio properties of the song itself; every song has it’s own unique fingerprint. PUIDs can be used to identify a song correctly, even if the filename and ID3 information is missing or incorrect.

Cheers!

Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons—to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.

News flash! Kid’s are lying to their parents! This is a great article that goes into depth about possibly how children learn to lie. Yea nothing new when the article tells me all kids lie to their parents – even the honor students. However the ability to tell a convincing lie is an advanced skill and an early tell-tale sign of intelligence in your 2 year old. Forget about classical music in the womb, you should just pipe tapes of Nixon to the little future Harvard graduate in the womb. That’ll teach him a thing or two.

The Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) recently released Goolag which in simplest terms is a mass exploit scanner. Their Goolag specifications page has more information and makes for a pretty entertaining read. Though they are humorous, this tool is pretty serious stuff for identifying exploits on a remote host. I could easily find a use for this in my workplace; this could be one of many tools used to audit a website before it is placed into production. It’s better to scan and catch the security holes on your own, before an unknown attacker does it for you.

On a completely unrelated note, I had run across a means of using Google to locate and display live images from video cameras all around the world. This was several months ago and I had said to myself and friends that this would make for a great screensaver – a mosaic of live images from random web cameras from around the world. Well, looks like someone went and implemented it. Check out surveillancesaver which has versions for both Windows and OSX.