Category: Geek

When you bring MP3s from one iTunes 3 machine to another, the Play Count attributes are preserved. This means the Play Count is stored as ID3 data, not in the iTunes database, as I had thought. And this in turn means that iTunes is using ID3v2 rather than ID3v1, even though there’s no preference for ID3v1 vs ID3v2.

I’m actually not very interested in the Play Count data, though it’s kind of cool to have a Smart Playlist consisting only of tracks I’ve never played before. What I actually am using that I didn’t expect to is the star-rating system. When tracks come through that I really dig, I give them 4 or 5 stars. A Smart Playlist aggregates these, and I can use this playlist as a source for quick compilation CD gifts, etc. Likewise, poorer tracks get 1 or 2 stars, and a “worst tracks” playlist lets me quickly cull deadwood for archiving or deletion. You can set ratings quickly by Ctrl+clicking iTunes in the dock.

baald says: “Google supports many languages, such as english, french, croation, etc. It also supports Elmer Fudd.”

Clean out your nose!

Finished building an online Journalism Job Bank including a complete editing and publishing back-end, 30-day auto-expire with overrides, 3-part submission/edit/expire process, generation of a weekly email feed that gets sent to other jschools… all in PHP/MySQL. Very fun project. My boss has been doing all of this by hand for ages. I just automated this task away from him.

The ORA community came through with the golden answer – the reason for the slow lookups from some machines was that HostnameLookups was set to On in httpd.conf. Turning it off made the site as fast to visit from Macs as from PCs. The question now is, why are Macs so different in this respect?

“Humble Pie” may quite possibly be the best band name ever. Either that or “Foghat.”

Attended Macromedia seminars in SF today. Kind of large – like 700 people in a room, not hands-on like I had hoped. Sort of a feature by feature intro to all the goodies in the MX suite. I am constantly tempted to do more work in Dreamweaver. And every time I try, I find myself running back to the comfort of BBEdit. To watch the pros, you’d think you could do everything in Dreamweaver. But every time I sit down to work, I find that there’s still no replacement for a really powerful text editor (please, no comments about Dreamweaver’s code mode). Of course Macromedia claims that 80% of professional web developers use Dreamweaver. I believe that 80% may have it installed. But how many actually use it as their primary development tool? Would be curious to hear feedback from other web devs out there on this topic.

In the city, encountered this fellow on Market St., who seems to have excellent sign-making skills!

Lots of excellent cult movies wallpaper.

How do you know when you’re within range of an 802.1x network? You can’t look it up online since you’re not online yet, dummy. The latest is warchalking – chalk-tagging the city with somewhat cryptic but easy to understand glyphs for the benefit of geeky passers by.

Nice metaphor: Perl is Internet Yiddish.

Ultimately, Yiddish and Perl share the potentially detractive qualities of complexity and inconsistency, but turn them in their favour due to the huge amount of character they provide. This is because they have History. This has resulted in Culture and Community, and a great degree of affection.

ORA blog: Internet’s founders offer warnings.

I’ve registered OmniWeb so I don’t see this, but apparently if you use OmniWeb 4.1 in shareware mode, you see this:

“A man in Chicago licensed OmniWeb and the next day he got free fries with his burger. A woman in Des Moines didn’t license it and a week later she stubbed her toe really badly. Coincidence?”

A BeOS die-hard just pointed out that all my old BeHive columns have gone missing from ZDNet. Reading them over now, I consider most of them embarrassing and somewhat naive, but they’re a record of the time, and of one journalist’s involvement in the platform. They’re historically interesting. So I put up a complete archive of BeHive articles 1996-1998 for the completists.

Update: Thanks to for providing a couple of the missing images from article 6.

This was floating around the other day – Plugging the Analog Hole – a fairly chilling piece on attempts of the entertainment industry to convince lawmakers to clamp down on ALL analog-digital converters. Sound innocuous?

If ADCs are constrained from performing analog-to-digital conversion of all watermarked copyrighted works, you might end up with a cellphone that switches itself off when you get within range of the copyrighted music on your stereo; a camcorder that refuses to store your child’s first steps because he is taking them within eyeshot of a television playing a copyrighted cartoon; a camera that won’t snap your holiday moments if they take place against the copyrighted backdrop of a chain store such as Starbucks, which forbids on-premises photography because its fixtures are proprietary works.

Stay tuned.

OK, a puzzler for you webmaster types (spoiler below).

So I get a call from my a client that two of their people were having trouble logging into the alumni database. I tested these people’s logins in every browser I had handy and they worked fine. No one else was having problems logging in. I went to the job site and sure enough, I couldn’t log in as anyone from two machines, both running IE6. Javascript was enabled. Cookies were enabled. What the heck was going on?

The site uses HTML hosted on a virtual domain at earthlink and database data coming from phpwebhosting.com, all married together in a frameset. Login authentication is handled via PHP sessions.

So why weren’t any logins working from IE6? Give up? This one took quite a while to figure out.

[ … spoiler … ]

First of all, PHP sessions are really just a simplified wrapper for a specialized form of cookie. So start with the realization that cookies aren’t getting planted even though cookies are enabled in the browser.

IE6 has a cookie tolerance slider that defaults to Medium. On the Medium setting,

“Internet Explorer prevents Web sites from storing third-party cookies that do not have a compact privacy policy or that use personally identifiable information without your explicit consent. The browser also prevents Web sites from storing first-party cookies that use personally identifiable information without your implicit consent.”

Compact Privacy Policy:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/howto/privacy/config.asp

Ah. So now I have to find out how to implement a compact privacy policy. Jeezis christ. See also:

http://www.w3.org/P3P/

and

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-268478.html?legacy=cnet

And finally, I find the deployment answer in a PHP forum. This affects me because the site is pulling HTML and PHP/data from two different sources:

“MSIE 6 has an inaccurate definition of third party cookies. If your domain is hosted on one server and your PHP stuff is on another, the IE6 P3P implementation considers any cookies sent from the second machine “third party”. Third party cookies will be blocked automatically in most privacy settings if not accompanied by what MS considers “an appropriate Compact Policy”. In order to make this new piece of tweakable garbage happy I’d suggest you’d par exemple send

header(‘P3P: CP=”NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM”‘);

before sending your cookie from your second machine. This header enables your cookie to survive any privacy setting.

So in the end I went to privacycouncil.com, filled in the wizard, which generated a CPC similar to the one above, and started sending it in the header of auth.php.

What a huge hassle. And I shudder to think how many sites this going to affect. There’s a good intention behind it, but it’s virtually useless, since you can virtually make up the privacy policy (it doesn’t have any necessary bearing on ACTUAL privacy) and meanwhile, it’s going to make a hell of a lot of sites inaccessible.

There’s so much conflicting data out there on whether or not MP3s and digital music distribution affect CD sales, but this is a first : Eminem’s as-yet-unreleased CD is currently the 2nd most popular CD being stuck into CD players, according to Gracenote. Also interesting that Gracenote can track popularity of CDs being played regionally (presumably by mapping IP addresses to geography). Not that I feel sorry for Eminem, mind you, but anyone who insists that digital music means more record sales has to take this picture into account.