freeform goodness

Enable DRM-Free Purchases in iTunes 7.2

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

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Markdown, Two Months Later

I never consciously planned to do it, but two months after trying Markdown for the first time, I find I’m using it for substanially all of my web-based writing. I’d played around with other human-centered web markup formats before (WikiText, Textile, etc.), but with every one I always found myself having to unlearn too much HTML markup to feel efficient. Markdown succeeds, for me, in a few crucial ways where the others always failed.

1. Simple passthrough of HTML markup - the parser doesn’t strip HTML it doesn’t know how to handle itself. This is crucial.
2. Fits into my workflow. I do 90% of my writing in 3 programs: SubEthaEdit, Apple Mail, and in Safari textfields. Markdown works as a service, so I can invoke it with a keystroke in each of these places.
3. “Feels” familiar. Since Markdown uses email-style conventions for things like bulleted lists, text emphasis, and footnoted links, and I’ve been writing emails for 20 years, I never feel like I’m trying to shoehorn my writing into something new or unfamiliar.

I’m not storing my blog text in Markdown’s syntax. I’m writing in Markdown, then running the finished text through the parser, rendering it to HTML and filtering it through Tidy. Still, I find I’m producing substantially stupid-free (i.e. no open or improperly nested tags) text faster than I ever did writing my posts in raw HTML.

:: Dave Walker 14:24 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

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Yow, Web Services In Action

Rather than using a physical TV listings guide or viewing TV listings on a website, I prefer to use a specialized application to see what’s on. For quite a while, I’ve been using Tom Talbott’s MyTelly, which was always pretty nice. It’s written in Java, but it’s acceptably responsive even on my G3. The only drawback was that it retrieved its listings by screen scraping the listings at the Zap2it site. It did a good job of it, but of course it was handicapped by the inherent limitations of that technique — it had to grab entire web pages and labouriously filter and extract the programming from them.

Well, Zap2it has deployed a SOAP interface, and the newest MyTelly release talks directly to it. Wow. Fetching 8 days worth of programming data with the old screen-scraping MyTelly engine took 10-15 minutes over a cable modem connection. The new release fetches the same data in about 45-60 seconds. I suspect the amount of bandwidth consumed is a couple of orders of magnitude less than with the old version. Sweet.

:: Dave Walker 21:09 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

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jEdit and Stuff

My copy of Panther is in the hands of UPS, and there’s no shortage of reviews for it anyway, so I’ll talk about some other software.

It’s well known that my current favorite text editor is Hydra SubEthaEdit. I can’t use it on my office PC, but I have found something to use there that I like nearly as much. It’s called jEdit, and it runs as a Java desktop application. I know that sets off alarm bells in some people’s heads, but it’s really quite nice. It’s very responsive (even as a non-native application), and the interface isn’t particularly jarring (I’m notoriously not picky about interface consistency when I’m in Windows, I’ll admit.) Since it’s Java, it runs in most every modern OS. I’ve run it in OSX, Windows, and I’m going to try it on FreeBSD later. It does everything you’d expect from a modern programmer’s editor, and benefits from one of the coolest plugin architectures I’ve seen in any application. The plugin manager is fully web-integrated: it connects to a server and presents a fully up-to-date list of modules, complete with descriptions, that you can download and install with a single click. It handles dependencies automatically, too. The only negative is that plugins require a restart before they become active, which is subobptimal, but hardly a deal-breaker.

Unconnected observation — the Delgados are really, really good. They’ve been around a while, too — I wonder how I missed them.

:: Dave Walker 11:07 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

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Killing a Mosquito With a 12-Gauge

After playing around with VoodooPad, which I quite like, I decided I’d register it and start using it as my personal organizer, so to speak. Then I thought a bit more and realized that, no matter how much I liked the app, that wasn’t going to work out very well. I don’t have a PowerBook (sob), and I’m primarily limited to Windows machines at work, and if I end up going mobile with a Hiptop or some other PDA then it’s inaccessible there, too. Then I realized — I have a webserver!

I looked at Alex King’s Tasks, which looks really good. But really, it’s not really the sort of thing I’d really use. I need something more freeform — I don’t really need all the alarms and “project 50% done” indicators and all that. What I really need is a virtual scratchpad where I can record semi-random stuff:

• things to pick up at the grocery store
• which libraries I need to download and install so app-xyz will compile
• what website had the walkthrough for level 16 of Aliens Eating Cheeseburgers III
• what the secretary on the fourth floor said her printer did when she plugged it into the Ethernet jack
• the notes for my review of the new Shaggs record

and a million other of the trivial details that fill my life. I’d been using VoodooPad for these sort of things, but, as mentioned above, it doesn’t travel with me so I needed something web based. I’ve grown fairly comfortable with Wiki -style editing, and I definitely love being able to create new pages basically “at the flick of the wrist” (by joining wiki-words), so I started to think: Why not just configure some proper WikiWikiWeb software? I already have AwkiAwki installed to serve my FAQ pages, but it’s not exactly feature-ful. I tried PurpleWiki as well, but had some problems setting it up (adding Perl modules on OS X usually involves invoking dark forces.) MoinMoin is powerful enough to have served the Atom project, and it was dead simple to set up at work (praise Jebus for the FreeBSD ports system), where I’m evaluating it as a possible internal tech-support mechanism, so I decided to try it here. Frankly, the installation was a pain in the ass (mostly my fault), but I got it working.

Anyway, I get full text searching and an index and stuff “for free.” I can see myself using it as an idea scratchpad for long blog entries, for the book about absolutely nothing I may write someday, and whatever else.

I’ve restricted it by IP address for now (Google, world, and dog don’t need my grocery list), so I can reach it from home, the office, and I figure any other place I might need to have access from in the future is just a SSH session away.

You don’t have to tell me that normal people don’t do this. Well, duh… Proudly without a life since at least 1985…

:: Dave Walker 21:58 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

:: Comments (1)

More Fun Than A Barrel of Monkeys

Yay, a new toy.
Geekier than normal content follows. Mom, you should skip to the next entry.

See more …

:: Dave Walker 22:20 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

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Mozilla’s Continued Existence Assured

Looks like a number of corporations have chipped in to ensure a secure base of funding for projects under the Mozilla banner, under the leadership of Mitch Kapor. This is great news, since there has been plenty of doubt about AOL’s commitment to Mozilla ever since they crawled under the desk.

edit: I wrote the above paragraph before I read that “AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape”. Ugh. My heart goes out to those folks, who worked their butts off for the usual corporate reward.

Mike Pinkerton: “Tonight I pour one for myself, and one for my homies.”

:: Dave Walker 13:58 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

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Smart feed fetching

Chuq Von Rospach has an excellent suggestion for aggregator developers here. A couple of aggregator developers applaud the suggestion in his comments, so maybe we’ll start to see these sorts of smarts in a software generation or so.

:: Dave Walker 11:58 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

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Tools for the sake of tools

I collect RSS aggregators like some folks collect stamps. I (obviously) don’t do this for practical reasons. Realistically, no one really needs an aggregator (though if you’re an avid reader of weblogs they’re pretty much essential for keeping things manageable.) Anyway, I’ve got a ton of them.

An extended ramble on tools, aggregation, and people who you should probably be tired of by now.

See more …

:: Dave Walker 12:46 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

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New Mozilla Roadmap

The Mozilla Project has unveiled their latest development roadmap, and there are two really big bits of news to be found there:

1. The large, integrated Navigator browser project, which integrates a web browsing front-end with a mail/news client, HTML composer, etc., is being replaced with smaller, more focused subprojects, based on Phoenix and Thunderbird (neé Minotaur.)
2. They’re tightening up module ownership, which should (theoretically) result in higher quality code and more strongly focused project management.

There are other significant changes (e.g. moving to Mozilla 1.4 as the recommended stable baseline branchm etc.), but the two changes above are the ones that are probably the biggest deals. Best of luck to them.

:: Dave Walker 18:11 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

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