Monthly Archives: June 2012

Winamp and the March of GUI

Ars Technica recently published a 15-year retrospective on the venerable Winamp multimedia player, prompting bouts of nostalgia and revelations of “Huh? That program is still around?” from many readers. I was among them.



I remember first using Winamp in 1997. I remember finding a few of these new files called MP3s online and being able to play the first 20 seconds using the official Fraunhofer Windows player– full playback required the fully licensed version. Then I searched for another player and came up with Winamp. The first version I ever used was v1.05 in the summer of 1997. I remember checking the website often for updates and trying out every single one. I can’t imagine doing that nowadays– programs need to auto-update themselves (which Winamp probably does now; I can’t recall the last time I used the program).

Video Underdog
The last time Winamp came up on my radar was early in 2003 when a new version came with support for a custom, proprietary multimedia audio/video format called Nullsoft Video (NSV). I remember the timeframe because the date is indicated in the earliest revision of my NSV spec document (back when I was maintaining such docs in a series of plaintext files). This was cobbled together from details I and others in the open source multimedia community sorted out from sample files. It was missing quite a few details, though.

Then, Winamp founder Justin Frankel — introduced through a colleague on the xine team — emailed me his official NSV format and told me I was free to incorporate details into my document just as long as it wasn’t obvious that I had the official spec. This put me in an obnoxious position of trying to incorporate details which would have been very difficult to reverse engineer without the official doc. I think I coped with the situation by never really getting around to updating my doc in any meaningful way. Then, one day, the official spec was released to the world anyway, and it is now mirrored here at multimedia.cx.

I don’t think the format ever really caught on in any meaningful way, so not a big deal. (Anytime I say that about a format, I always learn it saw huge adoption is some small but vocal community.)

What’s Wrong With This Picture?
What I really wanted to discuss in this post was the matter of graphical user interfaces and how they have changed in the last 15 years.
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Size Discrepany in the ‘du’ Command

I had a problem today while using the common Unix command ‘du’. As a refresher, ‘du’ stands for disk usage and is a handy tool for understanding how much disk space is being occupied.

I think ‘du’ is probably doing the right thing. The problem might be that I’m getting strange (read: 1/2 the expected number) when running the tool against directories on vmhgfs, the VMware filesystem.

Science Project
On an Ubuntu Linux VMware session, my home directory is on the main file system, which is ext4. The directory /mnt/hgfs is reported by ‘mount’ to be of type vmhgfs and is shared with the host machine.

Create a directory in the home directory and generate a 10 MiB file:

mkdir /home/melanson/dir
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/home/melanson/dir/random-file bs=1048576 count=10

Create a directory on the shared drive and copy the same file:

mkdir /mnt/hgfs/vmshare/dir
cp /home/melanson/dir/random-file /mnt/hgfs/vmshare/dir

Run ‘du’ on each directory using the -k and -h options:

du -k /home/melanson/dir /mnt/hgfs/vmshare/dir
10244   /home/melanson/dir
5120    /mnt/hgfs/vmshare/dir

du -h /home/melanson/dir /mnt/hgfs/vmshare/dir
11M    /home/melanson/directory
5.0M   /mnt/hgfs/vmshare/directory

I noticed this discrepancy when I was trying to pack a set of files (akin to ‘tar’-ing) living in a directory in the shared location. I was going mad trying to understand why the original directory was only 2 MB as reported by ‘du’ but the final packed file was 4 MB.

To be fair, the man page for ‘du’ succinctly states that the tool’s purpose is merely to estimate file space usage”.