Internet radio is interesting. I used to want to try this out, but the bandwidth was always something that I was worried about. But considering the fact that these days I'm not really using much of my bandwidth anyways, I decided to relook into this other media form. So, I managed to find some cool classical stations on SHOUTcast, and since I'm using the venerable foobar2000, that meant that it was ridiculously easy for me to actually make use of the SHOUTcast.
Here's a simple computation on the amount of bandwidth required. Suppose we are using 96 kbps quality. This gives us 96000 bits per second, or roughly 12,000 bytes per second. Suppose that we let the player run for about 24 hours, that's roughly 86,400 seconds, which gives us a total yield of 1,036,800,000 bytes or about 989 MiB. So, if the Internet radio is on for 24 hours, then the expected bandwidth consumption is around 1 GiB, which is roughly half of the daily bandwidth that we are limited to. Not too bad, but considering the fact that a more realistic number of hours of play time is roughly 9 hours, the actual number is really around 370 MiB, which I think is completely reasonable.
Besides, I don't really want to buy/leech so many CDs of classical music; only a connoisseur (or scholar or some other classical music buff) will know the difference between one piece and another. To me, the music seems kind of generic in nature, and serves as a useful background music to stimulate pseudo-intellectual thought during the process of revising for my finals.
That all aside, the preparations for finals are really causing a strain in me. I'm feeling so lackadaisical and am actually slowing down in terms of getting the revision underway—could it be that I don't have enough caffeine in my blood to keep myself awake? Or could it be that the adrenaline hasn't quite kicked in yet?
On another note, I have successfully written a working proxy for my lab, which is interesting in its own right, I think. There were several weird bugs with regards to race conditions on the concurrency of read/write locks, but after utilising a semi-novel debugging technique, I was able to quash that bug once and for all, and a live test of flooding it with about 400+ HTTP requests didn't kill my proxy off with weird segfaults or infinite loops. I love concurrency programming—I discovered that I have this weird insight to how and why concurrency works/fails for the code that I'm writing. It's an amazing feeling, I think, to be able to look at concurrent code and to reason about its correctness and think about ways on how to defeat the carefully constructed locking mechanisms to test the robustness of the code.
On yet another note, I think I know what I want for Christmas. A nice girl to hang out with and chit-chat, and maybe to cuddle with and share warmth as the snow drifts all over the place. But of course, we all know that this is only another of those phantasies of mine, which has an extremely low chance of coming true. I'll probably end up wandering about the city of Pittsburgh during that time. Maybe then there will be more interesting updates about the sights (and possibly) the sounds of the city that I've been spending my last year-and-a-half in. Pittsburgh is a really pretty place, and it's quite a pity that I don't really have the chance to explore it well enough, because of all the insane amounts of work that I need to do each day just to keep my neck above the waterline. A period of peace and solitude; it might turn me into a complete nervous wreck, or it could help me really think about things through, and to determine for myself what is it that I want exactly. I guess that it is probably the best time to start getting reaquainted with the side of me that I've been neglecting all these years.
Alright, as usual, I end up with a rather long-ish post/rant here. It is late, and I'd want to catch up on sleep, and so I think that i'll stop here for now. More updates should be coming soon, I think, as and when I find something interesting to talk about and when I'm sufficiently tired from all the studying and need some manner of a distraction.
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