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iTunes Collection Plate

The problem isn’t downloading, it’s making sure the artists get paid. The EFF has produced a swell silent short to illustrate the point (and to solicitate your support).

Speaking of making sure the artist gets paid… iTunes for Windows is out (Apple’s homepage read “Hell Froze Over” and introduced “The best Windows app ever”).

At work I use an OS X (primary) and Win2K machines side by side. Installed the Win version of iTunes and was impressed at how the two mirrored each other pretty much feature-for-feature. The Rendezvous sharing is awesome – enable music sharing on the Mac and the Win machine sees and plays the entire library and all playlists.

Of course the only reason Apple does this is the runaway financial success of the iTunes Music Store, which is now available to a vastly larger audience. For a while, the sexy integration of iPod and iTunes was the draw so compelling people would supposedly quit Windows for the Mac. Then it was the draw of the amazing music store. Suddenly the strategy changes – people aren’t going to come to church, so why not bring the collection plate to their doorsteps?

Music: Cocteau Twins :: Little Spacey
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Flourescent Green Mutant Pets

Start with a zebra fish. Extract the magical glowing gene from a jellyfish. Insert glowing gene into fish DNA. “Wallah,” beautiful glowing zebra fish. Now these Night Pearls have become a hit as pets in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia. Meanwhile, Europe and the U.S. fear contamination of the gene pool and have disallowed them, despite promises that all exported samples would be fully sterilized.

Music: Led Zeppelin :: Hots On For Nowhere
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Double Your Yuan

Just went to register domains for the China and the Internet class, who wanted both .org and .cn domains. To my amazement, the totals showed dotster charging 2.5x more for .cn domains than for “standard” TLDs. Well blow me down. Bopped over to the well-loathed Verisign, and found they won’t even sell you a .cn. Checked several other registrars and found the same — either they won’t do it or they charge a wad. Wonder what the hang is. It’s a line in a database, how can one take more effort than another?

Music: David Thomas & the Pedestrians :: Sound of the Sand
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Chinese Language Pack

chinablog.jpgWe’re finally getting The Great Firewall of China off the ground – set to launch later this month. It was up to me to install the Chinese Language Pack for Movable Type on our server. Installation itself was fairly easy. Somewhat more tricky for a non-Chinese speaker is using the back-end in Chinese mode. Only via intimacy with the UI was I able to negotiate my way around. Let’s see… the Rebuild button is second from the bottom, and the Rebuild Category Indexes option is the third item in the picklist. If you switch languages without either knowing the language or having the muscle memory, you won’t be able to get back to the language selector to return to English mode – you’d have to wander around the labyrinth pecking half-random ’til you got it right.

chinablog2.jpg

The key is not just to get menu items to display in Chinese, but to have proper encodings on both the back-end and on your public site. Learned something interesting: If you’re in charset=iso-8859-1 and paste Chinese characters into a form, then save the record and look back at what you just entered, the characters will all be HTML entities (i.e. they’ll render okay for readers, but will be virtually uneditable). The browser does this, not MT. On the other hand, if you’re in charset=UTF-8, the characters are retained properly.

If you set the default encoding to UTF-8 in the MT config file, you’ll affect all blogs under the installation, which is probably not what you want to do. If you just want to affect one blog, leave the config file alone and hard-wire the encoding into the templates for that blog. That covers the public pages. The back-end language is selected per-user, and form encodings are switched automagically.

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Hyperdrive

I have presta valves on my bicycle tires. This morning went to put some air in the rear. When I removed the adapter, it took the core of the valve stem out with it. The little brass stem went rocketing across the garage and hit the back wall, scary projectile. Heard it, couldn’t see it. Tire deflated in two seconds flat, no pun intended. Walked to work. Over lunch discovered that the one bike shop within walking distance of UC Berkeley has closed down.

I never thought there were corners in time
‘Till I was told to stand in one.
— Grace Slick

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Curious George at the Apple Store

The repair permissions trick ultimately didn’t work (I knew it wouldn’t), so back to the Apple Store to drop off the box for repair. Irks me no end that Apple will not give you a SuperDrive to install yourself. Ten minutes and problem could be solved, but no, they want the whole machine, want to ship it to Infinite Loop or wherever their repair monkeys live, and ship it back. I can appreciate that they want to “control the experience,” top to bottom, reduce injection of foreign objects into the hardware, but shoot, I’d be willing to sign a waiver. It’s both insulting and a waste of time.

Anyway. Took Miles with me. When he was there a week ago, we showed him the Curious George game on one of the eMacs, and he seemed to enjoy, even though he’s too young even for the preschool levels. This time he started pointing and grunting as soon as we got in the store. Persisted until I put him down. He ran across the store and plopped himself down in front of Curious George. Started whacking at the keyboard, smiling ear to ear, squealing. Uh-oh.

And I’m computerless for a week, stealing time on Amy’s machine after hours.

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MT-Blacklist

I’ve complained about comment spam before, but the problem has really swollen out of all proportion over the past two weeks. Because the phenomenon is relatively new, Movable Type has no simple mechanism for handling it, other than to ban IPs (or entire triplets). Deleting comments and rebuilding posts is cumbersome.

This weekend, one of the J-School’s blogs, bIPlog, got hit hard, and a student spent hours deleting Lolita comments. In the nick of time, Jay Allen released MT-Blacklist, which totally supersedes his previous MTMacro solution. Comes with a database of 450 known evil URLs and ability to post your updated blacklist to a known location for automated sharing. Also modifies the comment emails that MT generates to include an additional “de-spam” link – clicking it lets you delete the comment, rebuild the page, and add the spammer to your blacklist all at once. If you’re running multiple blogs from one installation, you can turn MT-Blacklist on or off for any arbitrary subset of them.

Installing MT-Blacklist on birdhouse and on the J-School today felt triumphant — as if the whole episode had been a battle between good and evil, and evil was winning… until the Megatron DDT Squirtation Assembly arrived to vaporize all the cock-a-roaches.

xian says:

I would like to have Jay Allen’s baby. He is a god.

On the normal spam front, I like this idea: Filter That Fight Back. Short version: create client-side spam filters that purposely follow/spider every link in a spam. Spammer sends out a million emails an hour, they get in return with a million hits an hour. “The branch snaps back in their face.” Punish them with the traffic they’re looking for. Crush them with it. Very Tae Kwon Do.

Music: Can :: Pnoom
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Sod

Sod rollingLast weekend started crunching away at the back yard, which has looked like a lunar landscape, preparing to lay sod. Saturday a.m. spent a couple more hours tweaking, then broke the cycle of infinite revision and added topsoil, fertilizer, rolled, and layed down 96 chunks of sod (images). By 3:30 we had a whole new back yard, amazing. In two weeks it’ll be usable, won’t be a mud factory, erosion center, eyesore.

Rarely does a project at home or work take less effort or time than expected. I thought this one would go all weekend, but the work went like buttah.

Let the “sod” jokes begin.

Music: Mercury Rev :: Pick Up If You’re There
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Miles One-Year Images, Cat Door

Hard to believe Miles is one year old already. Actually his birthday was back in September, but he was sick on the big day. We had a small party a week later. Now he’s on the brink of talking, is eating solid food and feeding himself (with hands, and working on spoons) and is into everything (everything). In this set, Miles goes hiking, takes a trip to Minnesota and meets all his cousins, sweeps like crazy, learns sign language, plays with hoses, wears Chinese silk, and toilet papers the house.

Also: Miles loves to push toys through the cat door. One day he decided he could follow his things right on through, but misjudged his hip girth by a couple of sizes and… No child labor laws were violated in the making of this short. Miles Stuck in the Cat Door.