Category: Geek

Far out — the author of Kung-Tunes has released Kung-Log, an OS X client very similar to iJournal for posting to MT from the desktop rather than via web forms. This fills in a big missing hole for me in the LJ-MT transition. Hotkeys and music detection would make my life complete.

Interesting… more than 500 emails on the BeOS Refugee articles, and for the first time someone has pointed out an embedded puzzle in my thinking:

On one hand I talk about how I believe in the open source philosophy, benefit hugely from the fruits of open source efforts in my daily work, and always support collaborative development as a general concept.

On the other hand, I know from experience that closed source development models under a single control structure, with a single unified vision, are capable of producing a better user experience, more cohesive design, etc. more quickly. Despite best intentions, open source efforts are inevitably tripped up by fragmentation or bad communication resulting in a “cobbled together” atmosphere in the user experience.

The email I received subtly implied that there was a hypocrisy in my thinking here, but I see it more as an irony. And on further thought, this probably has something to do with my attraction to OS X – it’s the perfect blend of open and closed source development models – closed at the desktop level, where the user experience matters, and open at the command line level, where collaborative efforts work best. Hmm….

Archaeologists have discovered what appears to be one of the first 404s created by humans:

View image

(OK, I admit I’m a bit enthralled by MT’s image upload feature – it even creates all the HTML embed or javascript pop-up code for you – no more passing through BBEdit, no more FTP… most excellent).

Amanita.net offers a LiveJournal to MovableType import/export script. I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to make the jump with all my old content intact. Unfortunately it required a bunch of perl modules I didn’t have. Started compiling those, only to find that one required the expat lib, which refused to compile. Realized I hadn’t upgraded to Jaguar’s devtools – that brought the compiler back, and I did get expat compiled, but the perl module dance took another hour. Anyway, finally got it all happening, and the script worked perfectly.

Amazingly, Amanita offers to do the conversion for you if you can’t make it happen. Send them a batch of zipped LJ XML files and you get back a zipped pack of MT backup files to import. People who rock are so cool.

Fairly impressed with the first release of iCal, but disappointed that you can’t publish to a single calendar from more than one location. I would have expected a calendar to be attached to a single .mac account – instead it’s attached to the computer you’re on. That means you have to, say, publish your work calendar from work and subscribe to it from home, and vice versa. Amy and I are both publishing our own calendars and subscribing to each other’s even though we’d rather just have a shared calendar (you can’t edit a subscribed calendar). This is a possible disappointment for landwater, who I want to move off phpWebCal and onto iCal. I would expect Apple to figure out that this is badly designed for groups soon.

Now setting up for the next big J-School webcast, this time a week long panel on Food and the Environment. Will take place while I’m probably out for paternity leave, so teaching students to run the whole thing. This time will be using Apple’s free broadcast software under OS X, rather than the pricier stuff we used under OS 9 last time around.

I’m becoming addicted to AmphetaDesk, but am open to suggestions on better RSS aggregators (besides Radio).

Why does Sherlock include a button called “Yellow Pages” when this component actually functions like a white pages? If you type in “diaper,” it will find all diaper services in your area with “diaper” in their names, but none that don’t. In other words, it searches by business name, not by business category.

Pill earrings for that special laaaa-deeeee….

Oh lord, those kittens (turn it up!)

No weekend. Spent almost every waking hour at landwater doing the Mac conversion. No matter what, you can never plan for all the unforseen details that come up in a job like this. Estimated 12 hours, put in almost 30, plus six more this afternoon. Machines that attach themselves mysteriously to the wrong DHCP server and drop off the network. Misplaced router password. PCL printer without Mac compatibility, which had to be replaced (gimp-print got us almost, but not quite there). What do about the fact that Office X doesn’t ship with a WordPerfect converter while they still have a lot of old WP docs around? Envelope printing is misaligned, why? Why won’t this AirPort base station let me configure it? Why isn’t this shell script (backup) running via crontab? (Mac vs. Unix line endings).

And so on, and so on, and so on. It’s always that way, always a million unforseen details. And then there’s training. And documentation. And figuring out a replacement for myself in case Amy goes into labor during the conversion. And etc. We’re mostly squared away now, just a few more bits and pieces. iChat is turning out to be a really great remote support tool, who woulda thunk.

So everything has arrived from Apple for the big landwater changeover – 2 iMacs, AirPort cards, Office X boxes, external FireWire Orb drive, Quicken, AppleCare packets, StudioDisplay. The dual G4 is in shipment now.

That means the only piece that hasn’t shipped is the AirPort base station. I just found a box under the chair in the living room that looked like it might be the right size.

Me to wife: “What’s in this box under the chair?”

Wife to me: “That antique human skull we were going to give to Mike.”

Me to wife: “I wonder if I could substitute it for an AirPort base station.”

Caught this at /. yesterday : Fraunhoffer and co. have always charged for MP3 encoders, but have now changed their licensing terms so that MP3 decoders will now cost implementers .75 each. Red Hat has already pulled all MP3 decoders from their distro. This is going to be a big boost to Ogg-Vorbis. But does iTunes support OGG? Nooo… I suggest that people who care about this drop a note to Apple letting them know you want OGG support in iTunes.

Emmett Plant of the Ogg-Vorbis team has written a letter to Fraunhoffer thanking them for boosting the Ogg technology’s chances of wider adoption.

And what can we learn from this? Nets made by spiders fed on drug-dosed flies