Coals [2] Newcastle

Apple and EMI To Release Limited Edition Stereo USB - The Beatles

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:40:00 +0000

This has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever seen. Instead of selling digital media DIGITALLY, we're going to pack it into a strange plastic thing, which will be a pain to keep in your house and sell it to you that way. Come on, Beatles people! Just sell your stuff on iTunes and Amazon like the rest of the world and stop being so, so OLD.

Posted via web from Nate's Random Walk

The First Server I Actually Like

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:36:00 +0000

via apple.com

Oh man I want one of these! If I only had an extra $1000...I would spend it on something else, like food or mortgage, obviously. But if I needed a server and had $1000 to buy it this would be it.

OSX Server is an excellent platform, once you get used to its eccentricities. I would almost start a small business just to get to use this as my office server. :)

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A picture is worth a thousand words. A movie is often priceless.

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:25:00 +0000

A few days ago my colleague and I were having problems getting warranty service on a machine we support. The problem was that we would see the problem, document the problem, send the machine in, they would sit on it for a few days, declare it fine and send it back. This was getting stupid our client was starting to think that we didn't know what we were doing. Finally, we struck upon a great way to visibly demonstrate the problem without going down to the repair center and hitting them until they gave us access to their workbench: we faced one of the iMacs in our office towards the problem child PC, opened Quicktime, and told it to record from the iSight camera. Then we demonstrated the problem, with commentary, and emailed the movie to the support team. And their bosses.

Yes, there are more convenient ways to do it. Yes, there are more elegant iSight recording programs out there than Quicktime. If you have any of those, feel free to use them. The point is that it's no longer all that hard to demonstrate exactly what's wrong with a system instead of trying to explain those "funny box things on the screen" that the techs can't ever seem to see.

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3 Kids under the age of five. Grad School. 50 hours/week job. I'm still gonna do it.

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:04:00 +0000

via nanowrimo.org

50,000 words in November. I'm gonna do it, even with all the possible excuses I just listed.

What's your excuse?

The point is to do it. Even if your novel isn't good. Even if you never publish it, you are starting to think for yourself and use the gray stuff between your ears for something more than storing TV shows.

I did this last year, and it was hard, terrible, frustrating, stressful, and I'm so glad I did it that I can't wait for November 1st to roll around so I can do it again. There is great joy in thinking, and creation. And there's amazing joy when that accursed word count bar you've been staring at every day finally turns a beautiful shade of purple (purple is the official color of winning NaNoWriMo).

Do it. You'll be glad you did.

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Kindle? Kindle who?

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:21:00 +0000

via barnesandnoble.com

So, the nook has the touchscreen thing, read EPUB and eReader formats (both open), expandable via microSD cards, has more available titles than Kindle...and at the same price. Yeah, sorry Kindle, I found a new love.

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This, ladies and gentlemen, is the CEO of Microsoft.

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:38:00 +0000

via fakesteve.net

I love this picture. The article is okay, and the article to which it's referring is...enlightening, but this picture is amazing. It's like Smeagol one third of the way into changing into Gollum.

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Nerd Merit Badges - Family Tech Support

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:12:00 +0000

05: Family Tech Support

Requirements: Provide hardware, software, and telephone support for extended family computers and electronics. Voluntarily or...

Oh man, have I earned this one!

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With botnets everywhere, DDoS attacks get cheaper | Security | Macworld

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:26:00 +0000

While $100 per day might cover a garden-variety 100MB/second to 400MB/second attack, it might also procure something much weaker, depending on the seller. “There’s a lot of crap out there where you don’t really know what you’re getting,”

Remember, when shopping for a botnet to supply your next DDoS attack, insist on high quality attacks. Sure, it might cost a little more, but isn't the extra money worth the look on your enemy's face when his website goes down?

WHY DID ANYONE RUN THIS ARTICLE?

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Can Apple Spoil Microsoft's Day? - BusinessWeek

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:02:00 +0000

In the coming weeks, Apple is expected to hit those computer buyers with advertising aimed at luring them to its Macs. It will likely make the case that Macs are less susceptible to viruses and are best suited to its popular iPods and iPhones. And look for it to poke fun at Microsoft for making XP owners go through an arduous process to upgrade to Windows 7—one that includes backing up all their files to an external drive, reformatting their PC, and then reinstalling all of their old programs, assuming they still have the CDs. "Any user that reads all those steps is probably going to freak out. If you have to go through all that, why not just buy a Mac?" says Schiller.

via businessweek.com

Seriously, who is going to do that?

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Stop Alien Abductions

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:43:00 +0000

Check out this website I found at stopabductions.com

I really, really don't know what to say about this site. It's...It's just too much.

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Some guy gets left hanging after Nasa bombed the moon

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:18:00 +0000

via youtube.com

The guy in black is all "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds...put your hand down, Jenkins!"

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Pagehand: a new word processor for the Mac

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:58:00 +0000

via pagehand.com

I like the idea: Simple, clean, concerned with layout, and uses PDF as it's native file format. I just don't know when I would use this rather than Word, Pages, Scrivener, TextEdit, TextMate, Bean...

Well, okay, I guess if I cared that the PDF I send someone is beautifully kearned, ligatures were handled right, and... wait a minute, I do care about those things. I'm a total type geek.

Shoot.

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Scrivener NaNoWriMo 2009 Trial

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:27:00 +0000

via literatureandlatte.com

I love Scrivener. I use it for National Novel Writing Month, writing tabletop adventures, essays, homework...anywhere that I want to have all my writing intelligently split up and also have all my research available for me without switching programs (and therefore contexts). Getting a long trial PLUS a 50% discount if you win NaNoWriMo this year is a sweet deal. If you are a writer at all (and have a Mac) than you should jump on this.

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Oh man, the Kindle is down to $260.

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:49:00 +0000

via amazon.com

Just in case I didn't totally already want one...
*Sigh*

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{Filename?} Apple is Moving up in the world!

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:59:00 +0000

MacUser

10/7/09 8:28 AM Dan Moren

Eolas, which famously sued Microsoft over its Internet Explorer browser, has now set its sights on Apple and a host of other prominent countries.

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AppleInsider | Not quite Flash, Adobe announces iPhone native app porting

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:54:00 +0000

via appleinsider.com

Yes, this will make it easier to write apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch. But, on the downside, it will mostly make it easier to write really crappy apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

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Irony

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:20:00 +0000

My iPod touch's battery is about to die. Right before I go to an iPhone/iPod touch developer conference .

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What I stare at all day.

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:23:00 +0000

Now you know!

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Great bit of transcription from Google Voice

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:16:00 +0000

I have Google Voice, and it's pretty awesome. But every once in a while, when people have odd accents it gets some... interesting transcriptions. Here's my favorite from recent days:

...Our i just singing trees down it's coming up wallace do that so when you get a pop in and see what could be fixed...

What it actually said was really pretty mundane, and it's much more fun to think of the accounting department singing trees down than doing what they were actually doing: i.e. calling me in to work on my day off.

Comments

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:26:00 +0000

What is it about a some sites that attract idiot comments? On this blog I've been pretty fortunate; most comment posters either ask intelligent questions or give intelligent opinions on the things I've posted. I've noticed that most programming/web design blogs are similarly blessed. But then you get the borderline ones. These are usually the blogs that cover technology as the press understands it. Instead of covering the latest Flex API they cover the latest release of the iPhone and what effect the new software will have on your favorite games. User-tech instead of developer tech.

So one could say that target audience is the determining factor: write for intelligent people and you'll get intelligent comments. But that seems to be a huge slam on the readership of "user-tech" blogs. And I'm willing to bet that just about everyone who reads this blog on a regular basis also reads some of those blogs from time to time. After all, every developer or designer is also a user. Well, maybe not Richard Stallman, but most of us.

So one could modify the previous statement and say that having a wider target audience means that you get a larger sample of the entire spectrum, from taciturn-intelligent to verbose-stupid. And I think I can deal with that.

But there's still the underlying problem: What do you do with idiot comments. I like the bbPress answer: mark the person who consistently leaves idiot comments as a "bozo". They will still be able to leave comments, but nobody else will ever see them. When the bozo logs in, they will see all their awesome comebacks in all their illiterate glory, but the rest of the world will be free to converse intelligently. It's a beautiful thing. But it's not quite the answer.

At the risk of sounding ten years older than I am, the real answer is to start raising our expectations of one another. Slashdot has made a stab at this by allowing the community to rate comments and giving preference to ones that show some spark of intelligence. But it's time for the Web as a whole to start being a little less accepting of the ranting 13-year-old-in-a-35-year-old's-body and start quietly dropping those comments from our websites. Yes, you may lose a reader or two (or two hundred) who love to see their own name above a great mot juste, but you'll save the sanity of the rest of your readers. The time has come.

Bad, Bad News

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:10:00 +0000

Am I the only one who is worried about Oracle, with their fortress of death mindset, buying Sun, which coincidentally owns MySQL? I can't see Larry Ellison being all fatherly to the little Open Source Database that could, considering that MySQL's continued existence is a major barrier to Oracle being a more major player on the web front.

Now, let's look at the possible outcomes of this little merger from MySQL's perspective:

MySQL as a corporate focus is de-emphasised to the point that they are to Oracle what Netscape was to AOL. The corporate version eventually dies, as Netscape did. The silver lining is that the source code is already open, so it won't require the hail-mary pass that Netscape threw to the Mozilla foundation to give us a new and free OurSQL or whatever the fork ends up being called. However, consider the interregnum between the death of Netscape and the rise of Firefox, and the ground that the beloved 'fox still has to make up against IE. We can expect the same sort of thing; an era of Oracle dominance (or at least ascension) until the new Open Source RDBMS gains traction.
Another MySQL death scenario: a battle of FOSS databases. PostGRESQL vs. SQLite vs. who the heck knows all else. the Open Source community is balkanized and again, we get a period of Oracle (and SQL Server) ascension while the free systems sort themselves out.
Alternately, Oracle lets MySQL live. Corporate pricing for service goes up to be in line with what they charge for their Oracle database product. Upside: Free MySQL doesn't die; downside: paid MySQL suddenly gets a lot of proprietary addons that the free version doesn't see. This is already happening just with Sun. How much worse is Oracle going to be?

I could be completely wrong. Oracle could just see the value in Sun's line of products, and might be intelligent enough to leave them alone and just make money off of them. But somehow I doubt it.

My only MacHeist3 Post, I promise!

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:54:00 +0000

Just as a little note, everything I did to this graphic, from capturing it (Little Snapper) to rounding the edges and creating a reflection (Picturesque), was done in software I got from MacHeist 3. It's a great deal this year (as it is every year), and this year 25% goes to charity, instead of just 10%. I can't recommend it enough.

By the by, if you do check it out, and decide to buy a bundle, I would appreciate it if you used my referral code:

http://www.macheist.com/bundle/u/33343/

Thanks!

Suddenly Loving AppleScript

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:05:00 +0000

Some things are instantly useful, and you love them from the moment you set eyes on them. Others take more time to become useful.

For me, AppleScript has definitely fallen into the second category. When I first got my iMac in 2006 I was excited to see what I could do with AppleScript and Automator. These, I felt, were what the world of Windows was wanting (alliteration free with every blog post! (not really! That would be really hard!))

So I dove in to attempting to script every aspect of my life. I wanted to automatically move things from my desktop to my FTP server, send batch emails to people about things, and basically just stop wasting time. And it never worked. Nothing I tried worked. Finally, after much struggle, I made a nice little "app" that controls iTunes and DVD Player, so that you can sync a Rifftrax with a DVD, provided you are pretty lenient with the usage of the word "sync". Basically, it would pause one or the other, so that you could get them closer together. In the end it was almost harder to use than the native interfaces for those two programs, and I pretty much stopped playing with AppleScript altogether.

Well, not quite. I kept going back, trying to see what I was missing, why so many people thought that AppleScript was awesome, why there were long-running web communities that pass scripts back and forth, why programs went out of their way to be scriptable, and eventually decided that there must be something there.

So I scaled back my expectations of my first scripts. And a few weeks ago I found the perfect use for Apple's little english language parser: file cruching. You see, there's this system at work made by a company I'll call "Big Red" (not it's real name. At all), and when you export files from their server they are in Unicode 16. The problem is that languages like Ruby, PHP, et al, don't like Unicode 16. They like Unicode 8, or else you have to fiddle around under the hood. So instead of fiddling around under the hood, I wrote a script to start BBEdit, have it open all text files in a directory, and save them as UTF-8 files instead of UTF-16. See? No big deal.

But it was finally a successful and useful "program". I use it a few times a week, and it's quite handy. With one success under my belt, I wondered what else I could do. I wrote a script that runs on startup, maximizes Safari, and points it to a specific website. Bam! instant display system.

Today I wrote the script I've been looking for for years. All I wanted to do was loop a movie indefinitely. Frustratingly enough, it used to be included with DVD Player, but not with the Leopard version. So I kept seeing people say "just look in this folder (that existed in OSX 10.3) and run the 'loop' script." Since it was included with every copy back then no one thought to copy it on to their blog post, so I was stuck loopless. Still, I knew how to use the Dictionary, and I knew how to write scripts. So I did. What I have is functional, not pretty. But for all of you who are also frustrated trying to make DVD Player keep playing your movie all day long, here's a good start:


--plays a movie through 5 times.
-- To Loop forever change maxLoops on each pass through 
--as well as changing loops.

tell application "DVD Player"
   	activate
   	if has media is true then
      		set maxLoops to 5
      		set loops to 0
      		repeat while loops is less than maxLoops
         			delay 3
         			--Wait for the DVD to load, then
         			--press enter. Usually this will be on the 
         			--"play all" option.
         			if dvd menu active is true then
              				press enter key
              				delay 2
              				if elapsed time is greater than 10 then
                 					set elapsed time to 1
                 					play dvd
              				end if
          end if
         			--let the DVD start playing before getting all weird in the head.
         			delay 4
          repeat while dvd state is playing
               if remaining time is less than 5 then
                   					set elapsed time to 1
                   					play dvd
               end if
         			end repeat
        			set loops to loops + 1
     		end repeat
  	else
     		display dialog "No disc!"
  	end if
end tell

I hope this helps someone else fix a common problem, and hopefully helps them also decide that AppleScript isn't a complete waste. Also, if you see easy ways to improve this script, please put them in the comments.

thanks!

Jinks!

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:35:00 +0000

I love XKCD, even when they steal my ideas. Compare this comic with this blog post from 2007. Of course, I embedded an XKCD comic in my last post, so I guess we're even.

Analyze, Acclaim, Break, Repeat

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:01:00 +0000

There seems to be a pattern that we follow when we are faced with a new technology. First we (meaning people who are interested in technology as technology) first want to know more about the thing. What is it? How does it work? What OS? What's driving it? and so forth.

Once we've established some basics, if the idea is any good, we are usually pretty quick to declare that something is a breakthrough. We like breakthroughs! This is especially true in the world of Apple and its products.

Once we've decided something is good, then it's time to see how far we can push it before it breaks. At this point we start mocking it for not being perfect, but if it's good enough we continue using it.

Two recent real life examples are iPhoto '09 and the latest Android update.

iPhoto has the much-talked about "Faces" feature, which goes throgh your photos, locates faces and does as much as it can to help you sort them by who they are. My photo library is about 10 GB, mostly people, so I figured it was a pretty good test site. I went in and started tagging people that would be repeated over and over. Me, my wife, my two kids, various siblings, and so forth. It picked up on who I am pretty quickly; boxes around my face went from "Unknown face" to "is this Nate?" after about 30 pictures. My kids are both under the age of five, so it's understandable that iPhoto can't quite tell them apart yet, but it actually does a pretty good job. My wife, however, seems to be a complete mystery to the iPhoto daemons. It confuses her with her sisters, my sisters, and occasionally asks if someone's hand or shoulder is my wife.

And thus we hit the "Break" stage. I decided to see how off it is compared to human recognition. Because a human would never do that. If you showed me 40 pictures of my two sisters-in-law, just their faces, I could probably tell you with 100% accuracy which was which unless you pulled out the traditional "one-day-old" pictures, because those all look the same, man. iPhoto gets about a 40% on telling them apart. And while we may tell ourselves that we see faces in trees, shadows, the clouds, etc., we don't for a moment think that those faces are our brothers. So we get to feel superior to technology for a while longer, and completely miss the point that Apple taught the computer to recognize and categorize faces at all.

The other one I just got my hands on is Google's voice search. My G1 auto-updated yesterday, and when it was finished my Google search bar had a cute little microphone on it. I spent a happy 45 minutes asking it for truly strange things like "football sushi" or "directions to the Los Angeles lockers" and it understood my voice (if not my questions) every time. So I tried to show it off to my brother-in-law on the commuter train home and it failed every time. Well, let's be fair, I was having a hard time "parsing" the things my brother-in-law was saying on that amazingly noisy train, so we have to cut it a little slack. But it still gave me a momentary "I'm still better than the machine" feeling.

I don't really have a point, by the way. This is mostly by way of obervation. But I do think it's healthy, and the "break" step is the one that keeps technology moving forward and interesting. So let's go see what shiny new breakthrough we can break today!