Beaneball

Windows users aren't going to care too much about this post. Since I got my Xclef, I've needed to rip my CDs to Oggs so that I might actually have something to put on the player. Unfortunately, the ripping was not cooperating until, I believe, last night. What was happening is Oggs were being created that seemed to be an appropriate file size but had no apparent data in them: they sounded like a bunch of hisses and clicks. I quickly realized that the problem was not in the Ogg creation, but in the ripping of the audio CD to Wav format, because the Wav files were even emptier: they produced no sound whatsoever. A look at a Wav file in most was enlightening: it contained 0 upon 0 upon 0. Sixty megabytes of zeros! No wonder there was no meaningful sound created. (This did make me wonder, though, about the sound integrity of compressing audio files: how did a bunch of zeros get turned into hisses and clicks?) I tried restarting the computer (to get the process table into something of a virgin state), but that didn't really work. I tried a different ripper (cdd2wav instead of cdparanoia). I looked at different versions of the rippers (though I never actually tested a new version). Finally, on cdparanoia's website, I found a hint. Maybe I should try enabling ide-scsi emulation. Last night, I recompiled my kernel (again - it's like my ninth recompile of the last two days, for a variety of reasons) with ide-scsi and without ATAPI CDROM support, added the appropriate boot parameter (EDIT: That appropriate boot parameter is append="hdd=ide-scsi" in the menu.lst file for grub, at least in my case; for you, it might be hda, hdb, or hdc.), and restarted. Lo and behold, my computer is currently ripping its third consecutive CD successfully. Full Xclef, here I come! Details:

• Compiled ide-scsi as a module in a 2.6.7 kernel (Device Drivers -> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support -> SCSI emulation support)
• Compiled sr-mod as a module (Device Drivers -> SCSI device support -> SCSI CDROM support)
• Compiled sg as a module (Device Drivers -> SCSI device support -> SCSI generic support)
• Deselected ATAPI CDROM support (Device Drivers -> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support -> Include IDE/ATAPI CDROM support)
• Pointed the /dev/cdrom symlink to /dev/scd0
• In Grip (my ripper of choice), put Generic SCSI device as /dev/sg0 (Config tab -> Rip tab -> Ripper tab -> Generic SCSI device) (EDIT: Putting /dev/cdrom here, after creating the link, also seems to work. For some strange reason, I don't recall having /dev/scd0 there working, and I'm loathe to play too much - it's so delicate!)

Posted by jason in Computer at 11:17 | |

Athletics Nation claims to have info that Erubiel Durazo has been signed to a one-year deal. Obviously, we can't really say more about this until we know the terms, but the immediate good and bad are pretty clear. EDIT: Durazo appears to have actually signed for $4.7 million for this year, according to ... well, just about everyone. I'm leaving the above link in for archival purposes. This means that if he does this year what he did last, the A's will be getting about one win per million bucks for him, which isn't terrible. It's not likely to approach the value they'll get from Dan Haren or anything, but that's not a fair comparison. Look at the guys on either side of him on the VORP list from last year: Hideki Matsui and Javy Lopez, both of whom are making far more than four and a half million bucks next year. Anyway, on both a rate and overall value basis, Durazo was the best hitter on the team last year. When defense is taken into account, Mark Kotsay and Eric Chavez were both more valuable, but in terms of who the A's want at the plate in a critical situation and who the A's most want in the batting order every day, Durazo is the guy. A second point is that Durazo's mainstream stats were not that impressive: he hit just 22 homers, drove in 88 runs, scored 80, and struck out over 100 times. The only thing he'd have going for him if we were still living with the analysis of the '50's is his .321 batting average. The hidden part of his value comes from his 74 times on base that didn't require a hit and his .202 Isolated Power, a result of 35 doubles. The point of all this is that he might be making less money than he actually deserves because the demands he could make in arbitration may not be as great as comparable players with better counting numbers. On the downside, this means Dan Johnson is stuck again. Durazo and Scott Hatteberg both play most of the team's games, despite Durazo's prior injury history, so there's not a lot of room for someone else to horn in on their playing time when they need to nurse some owies. Graham Koonce has already left for greener pastures, probably because he realized that he was never going to get any significant playing time in Oakland. It also means the A's don't really have a backup first baseman. When Hatteberg does need to rest, the A's options at first appear to be Durazo and, based on his college position, Nick Swisher. He did make some appearances at first last year, so the A's aren't locked into the idea of him as an outfielder, which is nice, but, seeing as how he's supposed to be the everyday right fielder, you don't necessarily want to be jerking him around when you need to rest Hatteberg. This leaves Durazo to play first, which is a really ugly and costly site. His rate stats at first last year suggest that he'd cost the team 47 runs below the average first baseman over 100 games. Small sample size warnings apply, of course, because this was only four games. His previous four years, though, in which he played 60, 38, 56, and 33 games, yielded rates of 89, 97, 91, and 81. Those are ugly. You don't want those numbers in the field for your team, but if Hatteberg goes down and you want to do something other than shift Keith Ginter around, Durazo's going to be out there, butchering ground balls and throws from the infield alike. First-base-side fans, take heed. Of course, the A's could just count on Hatteberg playing every day and, in the case of injury, calling up Johnson to play every day, leaving Durazo safely at the DH. I guess this isn't a bad option, because Hatteberg has been durable, appearing in 152 games last year. That plus the fact that the A's are already going younger and, temporarily, worse, means they probably don't want to swap out Durazo for Johnson just yet. Wait 'til 2006.

Posted by jason in Baseball, Oakland A's at 10:48 | |