User talk:James

Audio Skips
Need to make this into an article, but no time yet. Anyone else is welcome to.


 * Gale:17 Feb 11 This looks like a Feature Request to me so I integrated the vote with other similar ones received and added them to Feature Requests, while integrating the trivial content from IdlePriority back into FR's then deleting IdlePriority. I also added the tip about PSExec to point 17 in Managing Computer Resources and Drivers. I don't know what you had in mind for an article but if it's substantial and related to task priority perhaps you may want to resurrect Idle Priority. Not sure where the complainant's message came from but if he gets skips on that system something is very wrong. I think he could look at Managing Computer Resources and Drivers and DPC Latency Checker.


 * James:17 Feb 11 It sounds like an interaction issue to me, and to do with software that streams audio taking more resources, or possibly audio running 'on different cores'. Anyway, the bit that alerts me is that Audacity does not detect skips, i.e. when it fails to service portaudio frequently enough, and at some point I need to do something about that - at least understand what our status is.  These are scrappy notes for myself.  If you are making head or tail of them that's a bonus.


 * Gale:19 Feb 11 Skips have always been a problem, but generally far less than they used to be as computers and even external storage gets faster. If Audacity detects skips, what should it do - increase the buffer, increase the blocksize? In the old days, most skips occurred at the point where Audacity wrote the blockfile. That I assume isn't relevant to John if he still gets skips with Audio Cache on, but it would be interesting to know if other recording software like Windows Sound Recorder behaved any better. Generally Win7 and Vista are very "busy" OS'es that seem to do a lot of housekeeping in the background by default like making backup copies of files.


 * James:21 Feb 11 Skips on recording are serious, and by default should be signalled to the user. Not an 'abandon recording' but a note on the status bar and a log message on ending or pausing recording.  Could always have a "don't show this again" tick box.

From John Smit:

Without an internal facility for changing priority, I use PsExec, one of the Windows Sysinternals Suite (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553) to set the priority of Audacity. The shortcut below works for me:

C:\Windows\System32\PsExec.exe -d -high "D:\Program Files (x86)\Audacity 1.3 Beta (Unicode)\audacity.exe" This has reduced (but not eliminated) my audio skips. Funny thing is, some internet sites never skip, like LastFM; others occasionally, like WQXR.org; some very often, like http://classicalsouthflorida.publicradio.org/radio/playlist/. I have two 3Ghz quad core Windows 7 machines with 4GB ram and 7200rpm 64MB cache hard disks, and also use the "audio cache to Ram" setting (that helped some), and 7 Mbps DSL service - so I don't think the skip problem is hardware related. Thanks for a great (and free) program.

Pre-emptive Blocks
Users who create an account and then don't edit anything - I am now regarding as suspicious. I also regard it as suspicious having a number on a user name when no number is needed. Statistically these users overwhelmingly never create anything of use.

My pre-emptive blocks might piss off a few real users. If so, and if they really are serious, perhaps they will complain by other channels. We will see. It's an experiment.

Gale: 09Feb11 -1. I am certainly not going to pre-emptively block users, even if we had the time to do it, though I understand you've just had to clean a lot of spam (thanks). I assume the "number" on the username is to match an e-mail address. Punishing legitimate users (however unlikely they may post) is just telling spammers they won. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the "problem" of users registering and not posting just appears to be worse than it was because user creations did not used to show by default in Recent Changes. I think if we want to restrict new users (which I don't) or address spam (of course) we want to do it properly with a mod, not like this. Please respond.


 * I was dubious about doing it myself. Consider the experiment over. James 20:50, 9 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Gale: Thanks. Sorry if I was forceful. I think we need to consider the possibility of a major attack happening though. Clearly some bots can read CAPTCHAS - we know that from the Forum. And sadly for the amount of really useful edits we get here, we could almost have the "apply for an account" system that we have on the Manual.


 * James: Not too forceful - comment was fine. I would like to have had a big lock down button that bureaucrats can press that disables new account creation for a while - and says please apply for an account.  Anyway, let's see how the spam goes.  My take on it is if the volume of spam is greater than the volume of useful new content, we should at least consider switching to "apply for an account".


 * Peter 10Feb11:I too note the large numbers of users who register and never post. Could we automate a process whereby somebody who registers for an account and then doesn't post within a specific period of time (a week, a month say)then their account gets deleted/de-activated?  The only real reason for creating an a/c is to be able to contribute to the Wiki.  I agree with James that it could be good to move to an account application process like we do with the manual - though that could put off the folk who register just to add a few quick votes to the FR pages.
 * Gale: 17Feb11: I discussed this with Buanzo a while ago on Wiki Development Checklist i.e. there is a shell script to prune unused accounts but the time period it works on wasn't clear. As on the Forum, I wouldn't be happy with deleting users unless they've been inactive for a couple of years, so it would be a tidying exercise rather than spam protection. There may be other solutions out there now - I haven't looked. As for FRs, James and I have come to the view it takes less time to clear up mess if we don't encourage people who e-mail a suggestion to come to the Wiki and vote. That's partly an indictment of not having a better voting system I think, but that's how it is now.

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Sortable feature request
I've just made a try to help improving the sorting of the feature requests and I'd like to have your opinion. If it's ok for you, I'll be able to adapt the actual feature request page. There will be no need for the highest rated section. --Djiboun 08:48, 2 October 2010 (UTC)