Comment On Techno by Accident

Winamp - the latest proof that IE really IS part of the OS

At least he's got taste - I love Berlin! The 80's will never die.

verisimilidude:

Winamp - the latest proof that IE really IS part of the OS

Yes, I can see why a program getting HTML by accident, panicking, and just dumping it out somewhere could be seen as a sign of M$'s evil...

OMG>>>

captcha: ewww - how appropriate

Ahhhh.. HTML. As if we needed more evidence that Microsoft has an evil, illegal monopoly.

somebody's actually heard of breakcore? I thought I was the only one... my favorite track is the one that goes skkkkrreeeeeartch pooka pooka grounch.

Boy, looks like someone's made a delightful choice of streams to use. Perhaps he should try http://www.di.fm/ instead! (I <3 the breaks channel)

I like all the advertising servers in Russia, land of spam and malware.
(Let's see how long this post lasts, or if I get thrown out of a fifth-floor window.)

I just listened to the track.
I think it's great for <break> dancing

nobody:

I just listened to the track.
I think it's great for <break> dancing

Shouldn't that be <br> dancing?

or <br/> dancing if you do XHTML.

Bill:

At least he's got taste - I love Berlin! The 80's will never die.

The 80's are so last century.

I actually have Berlin's "Sex(Im a...)" on my MP3 player.

Someone must be outputting HTML code in their M3U generator on their website.

This is like opening an .exe file in notepad and complaining that it shows garbage.

The WTF would be calling that music??? bah dump dump ching

winamp user:

Someone must be outputting HTML code in their M3U generator on their website.

This is like opening an .exe file in notepad and complaining that it shows garbage.

I'm sure there's a 404 message or similar in there. I think the complaint is that their server doesn't handle errors gracefully.

more likely is that the genius right-clicked and tried to save a link that went to a webpage instead of an mp3 file.

winamp user:

Someone must be outputting HTML code in their M3U generator on their website.

This is like opening an .exe file in notepad and complaining that it shows garbage.

And then blaming Microsoft in the comments.

Bill:

winamp user:

Someone must be outputting HTML code in their M3U generator on their website.

This is like opening an .exe file in notepad and complaining that it shows garbage.

And then blaming Microsoft in the comments.

You forgot to place it on a table and take a photograph.

PS:

Bill:

At least he's got taste - I love Berlin! The 80's will never die.

The 80's are so last century.

True, but personally being a product of the 80's, I have to admit that the 80's produced some spectacular stuff.

My guess is that he was connecting to some site that automatically generated an M3U file. The location started to generate the M3U file and then bombed, causing it to spit out the default error page, which was styled for the site.

Why M3U? M3U files are, at their simplest, a dump of the locations of MP3 files. So the following is a perfectly valid M3U file:

Track 1.mp3

Track 2.mp3

http://worsethanfailure.com/

Captcha: ninjas

It specifies four items in the playlist, which are generally taken as paths relative to the M3U file. The first two are valid, the URL will be interpreted by some MP3 files as the URL to an MP3 file, and the last line is almost certainly invalid on any system you try it on.

So it's not so much a WTF in WinAmp, as it is a WTF in the, um, "flexibility" of the M3U format in making any line fair game. You could also cite the site for dumping an HTML error message into an M3U file.

"TCHHH SKREEE TCHHHHHHHHHHHH RRRCHHHHHHH RRRRRRRRRRRR TCHHHHHHHHH."

Ah, another person who likes Aphex twin

Pedant:

"TCHHH SKREEE TCHHHHHHHHHHHH RRRCHHHHHHH RRRRRRRRRRRR TCHHHHHHHHH."

Ah, another person who likes Aphex twin

Actually, that's the first artist I thought of when I read that. And yes, I do like Aphex Twin. Windowlicker is great!

Anon:

So it's not so much a WTF in WinAmp, as it is a WTF in the, um, "flexibility" of the M3U format in making any line fair game. You could also cite the site for dumping an HTML error message into an M3U file.

Except that with that flexibility, you'd think that winamp would at least do a simple check to see if appears to be a valid local, network or whatever URI, rather than just loading it by default. It can't take that long to figure that out, even if the actual location turns out to be invalid, at least it could be encapsulated in an error message rather than just having random text in the playlist.

So it's not so much a WTF in WinAmp, as it is a WTF in the, um, "flexibility" of the M3U format in making any line fair game. You could also cite the site for dumping an HTML error message into an M3U file.

And that's why you should check for the correct MIME-types. But I guess IE already made people so used to just ignoring that header that it won't be very useful anymore. Not to mention if that's really an error page (maybe the link was actually pointing to an HTML page, who knows), it should return an error code, and Winamp should catch that anyway in case it doesn't.

For an added bonus, the page doesn't even produce any vaguely valid HTML, skipping straight to the <body> tag. Also, we can see the first 48 lines are pretty much pure advertising.

How about checking the !@#$%ing MIME type when you load the URL? Is that really too much to ask?

Why is everyone defending a program willing to treat random ASCII garbage as audio data?

KattMan:

I actually have Berlin's "Sex(Im a...)" on my MP3 player.

I just have it in the middle of Weird Al's "Polkas on 45"

N/k:

And that's why you should check for the correct MIME-types.

I'd bet you that it had the correct MIME type. My guess is that it's a script that failed after writing headers and a single line of the intended M3U.

So the scripting environment simply dumped the error page into the output, which happens to be HTML, after the correct Content-Type header (and a very little bit of M3U) had been sent. (Also, if the headers had already been sent, then 200 OK will have already been sent too.)

I'd bet you that it had the correct MIME type. My guess is that it's a script that failed after writing headers and a single line of the intended M3U.

We are just making assumptions here, but my personal guess is that it did not return the correct headers, and that Berlin.mp3 is not part of that playlist.

I know no single (commonly used) environment that normally behaves as you described. Most of them perform output buffering by default, and as such should return the correct headers (and no partial output). PHP does not perform output buffering by default (or used not to), but had you tried (is this gramatically correct? Sorry, my English is quite a bit of an WTF in itself) to send them, a couple warnings should appear in the beginning of the output. Not to mention an error message that starts with <body> when the content body has probably already started is quite weird.

Personally, I love the subgenre dumpcore. But that may just be me.

Anon:

Track 1.mp3

Track 2.mp3

http://worsethanfailure.com/

Captcha: ninjas

... and the last line is almost certainly invalid on any system you try it on.

i would pay good money for a system that can play music based on that line. i'm pretty sure it would be the most awesomest music that man has ever heard.

I think some people hinted at it, but at the risk of sounding cliche (and too lazy to hunt down the accented "e" in Character Map...): the Real WTF here is that Winamp doesn't do any sanity checking before adding lines in an M3U to the playlist. On no system I know of could a file name, URI, or other valid resource locator begin with

document.write("http://...

E.g., on systems where a colon is allowed in a locator, it's either the second character (X:\foo\bar) up to the sixth ("https://..."). I guess I'm all for future-proofing for allowing the addition of longer protocol specifiers, but a) they're not likely to have a double-quote in them, and b) they're not likely to be more than, say, 10 characters long.


That said, there was obviously also some failure either of the page author, or the web server, or the user, or possibly (but probably not) Winamp, in getting the hosed playlist in the first place. But Winamp should probably sanity check the result as well.

è == Alt + 130

Well, writing a validity check based on "protocol specifiers probably aren't more than 10 characters long" would be heading towards a WTF in itself, but you're right about the invalid characters - although surprisingly, RFC 2396 does allow

plus ("+"), period ("."), or hyphen ("-")

Besides, strictly speaking they don't specify protocols, they specify "URI schemes" - consider "file:", or "mailto:", but that's a bit of a pedant's point, really.


What I do want to say, though, is that WinAmp's IE integration is kinda crazy, whether or not it caused this WTF. My copy generates a JavaScript error every time it tries to pop up the "Update Available" dialogue. I mean, c'mon, WTF does that need JavaScript for!?

WMP taking over all...



WinAmp 2 trying to play an MP3 from an FTP server using the minibrowser on a Win2k machine.

The fact that it added the lines without a sanity check is probably a minor part of the WTF. Judging from the article it not only added the lines but then attempted to play them producing a god awful noise.

I've certainly experienced winamp playing something that obviously wasn't an audio file with the same result. Something that an audio player should try really hard not to do.

bobday:

Ahhhh.. HTML. As if we needed more evidence that Microsoft has an evil, illegal monopoly.

What am I missing here? Last time I ran across Winamp, it rode in with Netscape. I have not seen the silly little app since I stopped abandoned Netscape in favor of Firefox.

So has M$ now taken over Winamp?

Anon:

N/k:

And that's why you should check for the correct MIME-types.

I'd bet you that it had the correct MIME type. My guess is that it's a script that failed after writing headers and a single line of the intended M3U.

So the scripting environment simply dumped the error page into the output, which happens to be HTML, after the correct Content-Type header (and a very little bit of M3U) had been sent. (Also, if the headers had already been sent, then 200 OK will have already been sent too.)

So it's really the fault of the server.

And validating this file format isn't easy when it's just a list of URLs. But still, one could check if they were proper URLs that followed the URL standard (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html)...

strictnein:

Pedant:

"TCHHH SKREEE TCHHHHHHHHHHHH RRRCHHHHHHH RRRRRRRRRRRR TCHHHHHHHHH."

Ah, another person who likes Aphex twin

Actually, that's the first artist I thought of when I read that. And yes, I do like Aphex Twin. Windowlicker is great!

I prefer windex, much easier on the tongue.

bob the dingo:

Anon:

Track 1.mp3

Track 2.mp3

http://worsethanfailure.com/

Captcha: ninjas

... and the last line is almost certainly invalid on any system you try it on.

i would pay good money for a system that can play music based on that line. i'm pretty sure it would be the most awesomest music that man has ever heard.

me@linux-box:~/Desktop/Ninjas$ cp /media/files/Music/Code\ Monkey.mp3 .

me@linux-box:~/Desktop/Ninjas$ mv Code\ Monkey.mp3 Captcha\:\ ninjas

me@linux-box:~/Desktop/Ninjas$ ls

Captcha: ninjas

me@linux-box:~/Desktop/Ninjas$ mpg123 Captcha\:\ ninjas

High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layers 1, 2 and 3

        version 0.60; written and copyright by Michael Hipp and others

        free software (LGPL/GPL) without any warranty but with best wishes



Playing MPEG stream 1 of 1: Captcha: ninjas ...



        Title:   

        Artist:  

        Album:   

        Year:    

        Genre:   

        Comment: 



MPEG 1.0 layer III, 160 kbits/s, 44100 Hz joint-stereo

  

[0:08] Decoding of Captcha: ninjas finished.

me@linux-box:~/Desktop/Ninjas$

Luckily, Linux is free.

Anon:

N/k:

And that's why you should check for the correct MIME-types.

I'd bet you that it had the correct MIME type. My guess is that it's a script that failed after writing headers and a single line of the intended M3U.

So the scripting environment simply dumped the error page into the output, which happens to be HTML, after the correct Content-Type header (and a very little bit of M3U) had been sent. (Also, if the headers had already been sent, then 200 OK will have already been sent too.)

It may have had the right MIME type in Content-Type, but I've found that WinAMP ignores that header, at least for audio streams. I downsample .flac files to mp3 for streaming with gnump3d, but WinAMP will always try to decode them as FLAC even if gnump3d gives audio/mpeg. I had to uninstall the FLAC plugin so that WinAMP would fall back on the MP3 decoder when it couldn't identify the file. Moral of the story: If the file extention was .m3u, I bet WinAMP treats it as M3U unquestioningly.

i'm very disappointed. I've read all of these comments without seeing a single "In Soviet Russia..." joke.

Shouldn't that be noizecore/noisegrind?

As a weird coincidence, Venetian Snares + Speedranch - pay me for sex is what was in my winamp when I read this

Stavron:

What I do want to say, though, is that WinAmp's IE integration is kinda crazy, whether or not it caused this WTF. My copy generates a JavaScript error every time it tries to pop up the "Update Available" dialogue. I mean, c'mon, WTF does that need JavaScript for!?

It loads the description of the new version from their site in the form of *gasp*... a webpage. If there's an error on that page then *any* browser should give you warnings if you have that feature turned on. The only difference here is that the browser is embedded in a widget they used as part of their GUI. Even if they did use an IE based widget it proves nothing really as MS routinely distribute IE based widgets with their dev environments (as do Borland or whatever they're called these days). Why do they do this? Because they own the thing, why would they distribute widgets based on someone else's browser? That's up to the other companies.

There surely was an innocent mp3 on the other end of that link - before the advertisers moved in.

nickf:

i'm very disappointed. I've read all of these comments without seeing a single "In Soviet Russia..." joke.

OK, OK... (russian accent)In Soviet Russia, MP3's play YOU!

Nobody here posted anything, beginning with ,,the REAL WTF is...", so it´s up to me I guess.
The real WTF is, that I personally know several people, whose reaction to this article would be 10minutes tirade of how great and divine breakcore is, and how ignorant must Alex be to even think of making jokes about it.
In fact, I am relative to several of those people.
I am not proud of it, mind you.

Jon:

è == Alt + 130

But how does that help spell cliché? (Compose + e + ' on real operating systems :-þ)
[/pedantry]

Addendum (2007-03-13 06:33):
(Or Alt + 0233 in Windows)

rbowes:

PS:

Bill:

At least he's got taste - I love Berlin! The 80's will never die.

The 80's are so last century.

True, but personally being a product of the 80's, I have to admit that the 80's produced some spectacular stuff.

In fact, the eighties are totally last millenium...dude. However this just means the eighties are retro or vintage.

Bill:

At least he's got taste - I love Berlin! The 80's will never die.

Or maybe it's Lou Reed's Berlin, in which case he's got better taste. Though I love the 80's too.

captcha: bling