Author: shacker

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Apple As Innovator

Tim O’Reilly has some interesting comments on the common notion that Apple is an innovator, Microsoft a copier. His position is that Apple doesn’t really innovate that much more than other companies — what they do is to package and market difficult technologies in such a way that people realize they need them the minute they see them in action — AirPort, Rendezvous… all technologies that were sort of inchoate in the industry — Apple polishes things like this to a high gloss and makes them into fetish objects. By the time MS gets around to similar, it’s clip art.

Example: Tim is especially enamored of Rendezvous, which is impressing me more all the time. The zeroconf spec has been floating out there for a while, but Apple implemented it at the OS level and started building it into apps. Now my browser has automatic, real-time bookmarks to every user’s homepage on every Apache-running Mac on my subnet, iTunes can see the collections of every iTunes user on the home network, and so on.

Aside: Customer Reports on customer satisfaction with Macs.

Update: In the comments, Allistair McMillan points out that Rendezvous actually is an Apple technology – I stand corrected (this takes a bit of the wind out of Tim’s sails as well). FireWire removed from the above list – not sure why that was there to begin with, der.

Music: The Pretenders :: Jealous Dogs
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Stream Sharing Pulled

All my curiosity about whether iTunes 4’s streaming capabilities amounted to webcasting or not turns out to have been on target — version 4.01 is out, and Apple has yanked the feature. Turns out that merely marking the feature “for personal use only” was insufficient — people found ways to list streams for public consumption within weeks. Apple says they’re “disappointed” that a few bad eggs ruined it for everyone else, which strikes me as funny — as if Mac users were a bunch of kids that Apple thought had all grown up, only to discover that, nope, we’re not ready to own a Daisy B-B Gun after all since we still leave our bicycle in the driveway*.

One has to wonder whether Apple’s new relationship with the big labels forced their hand here — I had assumed that the five-listener limit was one of the “reasonable compromises” Apple had reached with the labels, and that they fully knew what they were getting into with this limited form of webcasting. In retrospect, it looks as if either Apple or the labels got cold feet after releasing the feature, and backpedaled. Anyway you slice it, this is disappointing step backwards. I was getting a lot of perfectly legal mileage out of it, too.

Great discussion at MacSlash.

*Sorry for the obscure reference — when I was a kid there was often an ad on the back of comics that showed a kid leaving his bike in the driveway in the path of dad’s car, thus demonstrating he wasn’t yet mature enough to own his first gun.

Music: Afro Cult Foundation :: The Quest
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Cremaster 3

Went to see Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 with Mike, Josh, Minette. Not sure it’s worth trying to describe this experience of astounding unreality (watch the 35MB QuickTime trailer for a shadow of its gorgeous impenetrability). Amy and I had seen bits and pieces of other films in the Cremaster series at museums and had found them tedious, but I realize now the key is to be in the theater, immersed, rather than watching excerpts on video with tired feet in the middle of a museum day. Barney’s stuff has an addictive internal logic, even if it doesn’t connect to the world at large in any meaningful way. I’m still wondering what he and Bjork named their baby.

Music: John Renbourn :: Buffalo Skinners
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Vinyl Again

Between the years 12 and 24, more or less, I lived with a Pioneer PL-A35 turntable. All of my formative musical experiences ran through its tonearm. It was part of the landscape of every bedroom I inhabited. Not sure when or why, but it ended up in my mother’s garage, gathering dust for 15 years. When I rescued it a few months ago, the main bearing was frozen solid. The Sound Well in Berkeley said they had a cut-off point beyond which they refused to work on vintage turntables (parts too scarce), and I didn’t make the cut. They suggested a hole in the wall called Handy Electronics. Finally got there today — one of those places with torn apart toasters and VCRs everywhere. Broken English. But 24 hrs later it’s in perfect working order and I’m reunited with the turntable of my teens. Such a physical feeling to slide an LP from the sleeve. Such a short period of time before you have to turn the damn thing over :)

Music: Vinyl!
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Uninterruptible

90-minute power outage in North Oakland this afternoon. Of course I’ve been swearing I’d get a UPS installed soon, and of course we had an outage before I got to it. Just the kick in the pants I needed — I’ll be ready for the next one. Sorry about the downtime.

Music: Moby :: Straight to Hell
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Peter, Paul, and Mary

Is it just the SF Bay Area, or this happening everywhere? In the eight months since Miles was born, I haven’t met a single baby named John, Michael, Amy, Cathy, etc. “Normal” names are just plain old out the window. The babies in Amy’s mommies group are named:

Asa
Eliana
Miles
Simone
Ariel
Amelia
Shiva
Liam
Ruby

Is it the same deal in Durham, Fort Lauderdale, Madison, Akron… ?

Music: Air :: Electronic Performers
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Mirror Writing

Unplug the mouse from the right side of your keyboard and into the left (or vice versa). Use it. Not just for 30 seconds but all day long. Shocking how difficult this, like mirror writing. Start by feeling like you’re stumbling across the surface of the moon. Then move on to more subtle annoyances, like wishing scrollbars were on the other side of windows. Overall, it’s a realization of just how lopsided your brain/body patterns have become with time (I’ll wager this experiment is harder the longer you’ve been using computers).

Creeping pain in forearms/elbows has me looking for ways to minimize onset of RSI difficulties.

Music: The 5th Dimension :: One Less Bell To Answer
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Chicken Transformation Set

The finest in cat costumery, these Japanese feline threads are guaranteed to impress the most discriminating haberdashers. Nice Engrish, too!

It is made from the two-tone felt cloth of yellow and orange, and even if it takes, it is finished to the pop impression. Please observe the feather of the chicken currently attached to the both sides of a hat.

—

For the first time since the image went up in 1994, I have been asked how to obtain permission to republish the big boot. Answer: It’s clip-art. Go to town.

Music: Sydney Bechet :: Indiana
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Mass Encoding

Beginning to plan for the move, and decided it was time to do something about all the CDs in this house. If we listened to one CD a day, we wouldn’t repeat a song for about four years. I like having lots of music at my fingertips, but the space sacrifice for all these CDs is silly. Now that Amy is comfortable with the SliMP3, and now that I have the Wiebetech for large-scale backup, and now that iTunes has lifted the 32,000 track limit, decided to get serious about digitizing and selling off discs. The initial goal is to get rid of 1/3 the CDs in the house, which means a miniature emotional battle fought over each one – I’m very good at justifying why any particular disc I haven’t heard for five years is still important. Nevertheless, making good progress. This will get harder after cherry-picking the low-hanging fruit (nicely mangled metaphor). Sticking with 192kbps for almost everything, dipping to 160 for pre-1960s low-fi stuff.

Music: The Three Suns :: Smoke
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EMFs

Some initial concern about high-voltage power lines near our new house and associated possible cancer risks from electromagnetic fields. This was a hot topic in the mid 90s, then died down by the late 90s. People probably got tired of results being so inconclusive.

The National Cancer Institute produced its own epidemiological study in 1997 which found no association between childhood leukemia and measured magnetic fields. As a follow-up to this report, The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of this study along with an editorial calling for an end to wasting money on EMF research.

Today our home inspector went back and took some readings:

Magnetic Field readings in milligauss on my TriField Meter – 5/25/03

1 at my desk, 2 feet from computer screen, 4 feet away from 3 florescent bulbs.

10 touching my computer screen.

100 about 6 inches from the center of a florescent bulb.

100 about 3 feet away from the high-voltage power lines on the outside of the power pole.

100 where you turn off from Moeser into the Safeway parking lot.

10-20 on the sidewalk along the side of the house on Richmond

20 driving up Moeser under the high voltage power lines.

Music: Ron Carter And M.C. Solaar :: Un Ange En Danger