freeform goodness

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Slashdot’s CmdrTaco, upon the introduction of the iPod, October 23, 2001

Apple’s iPod platform is a monster in the portable music space. Tens of millions have been sold, and the application that interfaces with the device,iTunes, runs on tens of millions of computers.

I have a love/hate relationship with the iTunes application. I use it to manage my digital collection, which it does handily, but I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that it has limitations and inconsistencies that I bump into every day.

Continued @ moodmat.

:: Dave Walker 01:52 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (0)

My little LazyWeb mewl from a few weeks ago didn’t really generate much in the way of attention, though one poster, Matan Ninio, was apparently able to get things working with a manually specified proxy:

The problem seem to be that iCal does not know how to work with a proxy.pac file, but does know how to work via a proxy. Just enter the proxy address and port directly, and suddenly all is well again. (at least thats the case with our 10.5.2 machines)

My employer now supports Juniper’s SSL proxy, though, which means “free” split routing, which means my iCal traffic doesn’t need to negotiate a proxy at all.

:: Dave Walker 15:23 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags: osx

:: Comments (0)

I’d heard about Tumblr before, but I’d never quite figured out what it would give me that I couldn’t already achieve via this blog, or Twitter, or del.icio.us, or moodmat, or any of the other places I sporadically attempt to bore people. I’ve finally figured it out — it works best for things that are a little too substantial to be tweets, are more than just random linkdrops, but don’t quite justify a full blog entry (general purpose nor music specialty). So I have fractional horsepower freeform goodness.

The stalker feed covers it all, anyway, and then some.

:: Dave Walker 09:52 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

iCal sure isn’t perfect (far from it, actually), though its current incarnation is far more useful than it was at 1.0. I use it because it integrates well with the rest of the OS (e.g. Mail, Address Book, i$ShinyDevices, etc.) and since, unlike a certain other calendaring product from a large corporation that I Won’t Name, it acknowledges that the rest of the world exists and that integrating with things Not Invented Here is OK…

There is one thing about it, though, that drives me batty. Unlike just about every other tool Apple ships, it doesn’t work through an HTTP proxy. They managed to fix the icon so it displays the correct date when the application isn’t running (which has to be hacky as hell behind the scenes), but they couldn’t do something as basic as reusing the same URL retrieval logic as almost everything else on the platform.

In practice, this means that if I log into my employer’s VPN, my calendar subscriptions are broken (i.e. non-refreshing) until I disconnect, rendering them useless during the most important part of the work day.

If anyone has managed to hack around this problem, I’d appreciate hearing about it in the comments.

:: Dave Walker 11:37 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags: osx

:: Comments (4)

I was always under the impression that ports and madeiras were best served at room temperature, but we picked up a port that claimed to be “superb when served deeply chilled”, so now I’m confused. For the record, and maybe it’s just because it’s what I’m used to, when served chilled the port in question seemed way too sweet to me, whereas, at room temperature, it made me long for a smoking jacket and a fireplace, which is generally the state of mind I’m trying to reach when drinking dessert wines.

:: Dave Walker 17:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/foodanddrink]
:: tags: foodanddrink

:: Comments (0)

Like most people who waste a bit too much time online, I’ve reached the point where I have far too many feeds and accounts on “social” websites to keep track of. I tried creating a “life feed” using Yahoo Pipes, but it’s a bit of a PITA because of the varying quality of the feeds produced by these applications (i.e. broken or at least suspect date handling, bad use of GUIDs, etc., and don’t get me started on how the various deficiencies in RSS contribute to this mess) and the fun and games involved in trying to use a graphical scripting environment in a browser.

I understand that Facebook will do something like this, but I’ve vowed to be the last person on earth to get a Facebook account — my (perhaps unfair) opinion is that FaceBook is like MySpace, only without musicians — so I started looking elsewhere. I tried out Mugshot, but something about the “feel” of the service seemed off to me — it seemed like way too much work to get my various feeds and memberships integrated.

Today I tried FriendFeed, which seems to do pretty much what I was hoping with a minimum of setup drama. Hand it a few URLs and it does it’s thing. I’m ffg on the service (of course).

:: Dave Walker 15:38 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet

:: Comments (0)

I’m working from home today, which means I’m connected into work via the corporate PPTP VPN. To drastically oversimplify things, when you’re connected via a VPN, your local network basically “goes away”, for all intents and purposes, unless you manually set up split routing, which is, to be frank, a complete and utter pain in the ass.

What I noticed today, though, is that Bonjour apparently takes care of split-routing .local addresses automagically. Connecting via ssh and afp worked fine to my local, non-VPN machines, and they even showed up in the Finder’s sidebar and iTunes.

I know this isn’t a huge thing, but it’s nice that “the right thing” happens by default.

:: Dave Walker 11:23 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/apple]
:: tags: apple

:: Comments (0)

• Congratulations to the new Mr. and Mrs. Leija, Raymundo and Jennifer. We love you and wish you all the best in your new life together.
• There are far worse things to be doing during one of the coldest, wettest Februarys I can remember than traveling to Phoenix, AZ, even if it is a working trip. It went very well, and the highs were in the mid 70’s (F) the whole time, which, considering there was an ice storm the morning I flew out of DTW, is the sort of thing I can appreciate.
• Little things I’m enjoying the heck out of, even if they’re just “a little cool” rather than “Wow, I need to write 500 words about each of these!” Please allow me to go all TechCrunch on that ass.
  • The release of all 9 Basic Channel (wikipedia) EP’s digitally, via Beatport, the first time these have ever been officially available for download. I think we’ll actually be posting a big retrospective about these over on Moodmat, maybe.
  • Skitch, the über screenshot utility for OS X from the clever folks who brought us Comic Life.
  • Tripit lets you consolidate all those maps, reservations, and confirmation numbers into a single, self-contained printout, and if you booked through one of the services they support, will do so with nothing more than an email forward to plans@tripit.com.
  • Sandy, the automated reminder/digital assistant, i.e. you email reminders to “her” and she can extract contact info, meeting invites, etc.
  • Prologue, a Wordpress theme that allows you to do something that approximates a “behind-the-firewall-Twitter” within your own workgroup.

:: Dave Walker 20:55 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc]
:: tags: misc

:: Comments (0)

I don’t really have a post here. I just wanted an excuse to use Panic’s fancy image zoomer. If you’re reading this in the feed it won’t work, of course.

:: Dave Walker 17:35 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

:: Comments (0)

I’ve been seeing a ton of probes on UDP port 26185. Google has been unhelpful. Anyone else seeing these or know what they mean?

addendum: It looks like the UDP probes are sometimes paired with a TCP probe, like so:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

:: Dave Walker 19:37 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet/security]
:: tags: security

:: Comments (0)

So “Fairplay Version 3” apparently has the ability to handle expiring content. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that Apple could, if they wanted, apply the same expiration logic to music. Steve Jobs has repeatedly stated that customers don’t like to rent their music, and the relative success of online music sellers (e.g. iTunes, Amazon, eMusic) as opposed to renters (Rhapsody, etc.) would seem to bear that out.

Still, it’s an interesting new wrinkle.

:: Dave Walker 08:10 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (1)

When I woke up, the rental I started last night had stalled at the 75% point. Clicking the little revolvo-reloado iconlet in the iTunes downloads list revived it, and it finished up in about 15 minutes. Considering that I lost my IP connection a dozen times earlier Tuesday evening (the hotel wifi went through a really crappy phase), I’m really not going to harp on the download performance too much.

The Biz

I disagree a small bit with Sven on the rentals being overpriced —

edit: I misread Sven a bit there (see comments)
A new DVD release from Blockbuster or Hollywood Video is going to be priced @ about $3 for a rental, and I have to travel to the store both to pick it up and to return it. I’m perfectly willing to kick in an extra buck to avoid that trip, especially during a Michigan winter. I imagine that price constitutes a decent margin both for Apple and the studios, but I don’t really have a problem with that. One could argue that library titles could be a little cheaper, but whatever.

Some of the suckiest things about the rentals seem to be things the studios would have insisted on to keep cable, satellite, and physical rental outlets happy, namely:

1. The 24-hours-once-you’ve-started-viewing matches the broken model used by cable and satellite pay-per-view outlets.
2. No rentals until after the DVD’s been out 30 days sounds like a bone being thrown to Blockbuster or maybe Walmart/Target/etc.

It seems as though the content cartels are negotiating from a stronger postition than they were back when the iTunes store debuted — it seems like with every new media product added to the store, they get a few more concessions: TV shows were more restricted than songs (no burning of physical copies), movies for sale were more restricted than TV shows (much less desirable pricing), movie rentals expire aggressively on a 30-day/24 hour schedule.

As others have mentioned, a Netflix-like model where you’re able to keep a certain number of films rented for a fixed monthly fee would have been great, but it’s not to be, at least not for this go-around.

The Viewing Experience

On my MacBook, the video and sound quality were completely acceptable. The horizontal resolution is 640 pixels, slightly less than a physical DVD, so zoomed up to 1280 pixels the picture quality was slightly “soft” but nothing too dramatic. I didn’t see any artifacts like macroblocking. Framerate was rock steady (I was running full-screen and not doing anything else, however.) Sound quality was fine through noise cancelling headphones. One thing worth noting is that my fans spun up from time to time — h.264 is a fairly demanding playback codec. I’m not sure how often the fans came up (yay for noise cancellation), but that might be an issue running from battery or in quiet surroundings.

Amusingly enough, the other bit visible in iTunes’ info window:

As for the movie itself, er, I’ve seen better…

:: Dave Walker 07:26 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/movies]
:: tags: movies

:: Comments (1)

After watching the Macworld 2008 keynote, the first thing I wanted to try out were the new movie rentals from the iTunes store. After updating to iTunes 7.6 and visiting the movies section of the store, I saw, confusingly, that there was a pane for “Top Rentals”, but no movie I selected was actually available for rental. Hmm…

I visited the store a few more times over the course of the evening, but I didn’t actually see rental buttons start to appear on movies until after midnight EST.

Seeing as I’m on the road this week stuck in a hotel room, it seemed like a great opportunity to try a rental. I went ahead and clicked the RENT MOVIE button, which popped open a dialog asking me if I really wanted to rent the movie, and then added it to my cart. After switching to my cart and clicking the purchase button, I got a screenful of legal gibberish to agree to before I could actually complete the transaction. Dumb — why couldn’t this screenful of garbage have been tacked onto the other screenful of garbage I had to blow past when I ran iTunes 7.6 for the first time? To add insult, after agreeing to the clickwrap, iTunes informed me that I’d have to attempt my purchase again. Yes, I had to go back to the movie’s screen, as assenting to the license helpfully emptied my cart. Asstastic usability there, guys.

During the keynote, Jobs was able to start viewing his rental a few seconds after beginning the download. In the real world (i.e. on sketchy hotel wifi) it looks like the download is going to take about 2 hours (for a 1.14GB movie). I guess I won’t start my 24-hour viewing window until tomorrow sometime — it’s time for sleep.

addendum: Download stalled at about the 75% point (did I mention how flaky the hotel wifi was?) Resumed when I woke up…

:: Dave Walker 01:27 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/movies]
:: tags: movies

:: Comments (0)

The newly free NetNewsWire has this way of letting you know that your weblog isn’t updated enough — it turns its display of the feed title a lovely Zune-y brown:

I’m in Philadelphia for the week, if anything fun happens I’ll let ya know.

:: Dave Walker 20:54 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

No detailed upgrade journal, you really ought to read John Siracusa’s latest novel for that. The only thing that was immediately broken was the URL for this blog, because Leopard switched things over to Apache HTTP Server 2.x and doesn’t move your old configs over.

sudo cp /etc/httpd/users/* /etc/apache2/users

If I have anything to say that you haven’t already read 167 other places, I’ll post it.

:: Dave Walker 16:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/apple]
:: tags: apple

:: Comments (0)

OK, not really. I’m about to move to Leopard on the machine that hosts this blog, so, if it doesn’t come back and you can’t read this, you know why. :).

:: Dave Walker 14:30 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

It’s hard to believe that Bill Waterston stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, considering how dead-on his characterization of the most common form of online “discourse” happens to be:

via Russ Beattie

:: Dave Walker 20:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor]
:: tags: humor

:: Comments (0)

Considering this was one of the original use cases for the Atom Syndication format and api, this should be really, really easy, right? I have a valid Atom 1.0 feed that I want to pour into a new Wordpress installation. In theory, I should be able to basically just pipe the Atom feed into the Atompub endpoint, right? Has anyone actually done this on Wordpress 2.3.x? I’ll add anything I find to this entry for the sake of others wanting to do the same thing.

:: Dave Walker 13:09 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet wordpress atom blogging

:: Comments (0)

Um, yeah, long time no see.

:: Dave Walker 18:21 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/general]
:: tags: general

:: Comments (0)

For whatever reason (I smell lawyers), DRM-free purchases (“iTunes Plus”, cheesy har-har) are not enabled by default in iTunes 7.2. In fact, they’re positively buried:

1. Choose the iTunes Store in the source list (under “STORE”) in iTunes 7.2
2. Choose “Account” under the “QUICK LINKS” pane towards the upper-right corner of the store interface.
3. Click “Manage iTunes Plus” on the account page.
4. Agree to the screen full of lawyer scat.

hat tip: SteveX Compiled

addendum: Looks like they placed iTunes Plus links more prominently in the store interface, so you no longer have to dig for them. Thanks, Apple.

:: Dave Walker 10:19 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all/applications]
:: tags: applications iTunes drm lawyers

:: Comments (0)