Tritone Substitution

Pull Quoting

2009-08-07T22:05:00.000-07:00

“Conservative activists don’t want to have a conversation,” said Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “They want to disrupt.”

Hm... that sounds familiar. Maybe a bit like the liberal activists while Republicans were in power?

Can somebody actually have a conversation sometime, please?

Health Plan Opponents Make Voices Heard - NYTimes.com

iPhone 3.0 (3GS) Voice Control problems

2009-07-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

OK, so I really like the new iPhone. However, its Voice Control feature is really not up to snuff.

Firstly, if I want to dial the phone by voice, I have to take the phone out of my pocket and speak into it—even if I've got a Bluetooth headset connected. My old RAZR let me voice dial into the headset by pressing the button; why won't the iPhone? The headset button just makes the iPhone redial your last outgoing number, and only if you hold it down for a couple of seconds.

Secondly, if I have a playlist containing only podcast episodes, Voice Control won't play it. Apparently Voice Control will only play songs for some reason. I've got multiple podcast playlists (one for the short daily ones that I want to listen to first, and another for the other longer ones that come out less frequently), so when I want to switch between them I have to glance down at the screen.

Thirdly, and probably most important to me, there's no way to use Voice Control to start a playlist in shuffle mode—which, once my podcasts are finished, is exactly what I want to do. I have to start a playlist, then separately issue a "shuffle" voice command or shake the phone (if 'shake to shuffle' is enabled). While this could a serviceable enough option, it adds one to the Skip Count of the first item in the playlist! I haven't skipped the song; I just wanted to start the playlist in shuffle mode. This throws off my smart playlists, some of which use Skip Count and Last Skipped Time to determine which songs should be included.

The worst part of this two-steps-to-shuffle bit, however, is how long it takes—especially while I'm driving the car. I should be able to issue a single voice command, not go through the whole rigmarole twice just to end up how I want it. Not to mention that it takes nearly 3 seconds of holding the button down just to start Voice Control each time, and then it may or may not understand my command properly the first time anyway.

Actually, in the process of writing this post, I discovered way to get a playlist going in shuffle mode without incrementing any songs' Skip Counts, but it takes three steps! First, issue the Voice command "shuffle", then it says "no music is playing; do you want to play music now?" So then you have to wait for the beep and say "yes," which starts playing your whole library in shuffle mode. Then you can start Voice Control again and tell it to play a particular playlist, which will then start in shuffle mode.

Apple, please think of the people who are using your products in the car! Make it simple to place calls and initiate shuffled playlists without looking at the device! There's a "shuffle" button at the top of every playlist in the visual interface; shouldn't that be an option in the spoken interface as well?

I realize that, at iPhone OS 3.0's introduction, they said that Voice Control wasn't totally complete. However, its inclusion at all was one of the big things that convinced me to finally get one, so I'm a bit disappointed that it was added on without the usual polish of most Apple products.

Hudzee - Hard Drive storage

2009-05-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

I just found out about a new hard drive storage case which is actually pretty neat. Most technology enthusiasts and computer professionals have at least a few hard drives just sitting around, full of old data which we're not quite willing to discard just yet. Or maybe it's a new drive you just picked up cheap at a swap meet or rummage sale.

Sure, you can put these bare drives into anti-static bags, but that can get clumsy. It's hard to store a bunch of bagged drives, and it's even harder to figure out what's on each one.

The Hudzee helps you safely store and organize your drives. It's a plastic case with a bit of padding on the inside to keep the drive's delicate components from getting scuffed or scratched. For anyone who regularly deals with hard drives—whether it's storing spares in case of failure, archiving old data, or for transporting large amounts of data via "sneakernet"—these cases are very cool.

I recently ordered a few, and I'm really impressed with how well the drive mechanisms are protected. They're cushioned, but still given plenty of room inside the case to breathe. There's also a window on the outside of the case for labeling, so you can remind yourself of the drive's contents or purpose when it's sitting on the shelf.

I definitely recommend the Hudzee drive case. It's an easy way to keep your data protected, secure, and easy to organize.

$8 each ($65 for 10).

HUDZEE - Keep Your Internal Drives Under Control
(via The Adventures of Systems Boy!)

Today's FoxTrot

2009-04-19T14:57:00.001-07:00

Bill Amend quit doing FoxTrot comics on weekdays, but he still draws them for Sundays. Once again, it's a puzzle, and today's was pretty fun. I figured out all of the letters in my head, though two of them I solved by inference and not mathematically (I seriously can't remember how to do differentials, and I didn't bother with the three-digit divisor).

Fox Trot — Gocomics.com

My (brief) adventures with AppleTV

2009-04-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

So I bought an AppleTV yesterday. I had been advised against it by two different people, especially since my primary intended use was going to be for playing videos from Hulu through the Boxee plugin. I'd been told that the Flash video playback on the device was no good, and both of the people to whom I spoke had either uninstalled Boxee or gotten rid of the device altogether.

However, I'm stubborn, and I figured my standards couldn't be too demanding. Hulu on my iMac looks awesome, even through Boxee, so how much worse could the AppleTV be? I still watch cable and DVDs through the coaxial input on my TV, after all! Also, my TV is a 4:3 CRT, and I haven't even been exposed to the fancy-schmancy High Definition stuff that's all the rave these days. I just wanted to see it for myself, so I went to the Apple Store after work yesterday and picked up a 40GB ATV.

I thought that my set, with its HD component video inputs, was capable of displaying 720p HD— but apparently it isn't. I had to settle for standard-def 480i output from the device, which was the first disappointment of the evening. I set the machine to sync with my iMac's iTunes library, then I sat down to eat dinner with my wife (who was finally discharged from the hospital yesterday! hopefully she stays well for a while this time).

After I finished cleaning up from dinner and loading the dishwasher, all of the lights in the house suddenly turned off. They flickered back on briefly, but soon the house was dark. Thankfully, it wasn't yet 7pm, and Daylight Saving Time meant that there was still enough light coming through the windows that we weren't entirely enshrouded. My AppleTV adventure was cut short, though. I turned on my (battery-powered) EeePC in order to look online for the power company's phone number, only to realize that the outage had also turned off my modem and router. I ended up using Google's 800-GOOG-411 service to get ahold of them anyway, and was told that it was a known outage that should be resolved by 7:46pm.

Around 7:30, the lights came back on. I turned the AppleTV back on and resumed the iTunes sync. I let the AppleTV play the latest episode of the FLOSS Weekly podcast while it finished syncing and I surfed the Web on my netbook. This was the best use of the device I'd had yet... the ability to listen to podcasts & surf the Web while downstairs in the living room and not holed up in front of the iMac in my home office.

After the sync was finished, the AppleTV wanted to update itself to the latest Apple firmware, which I allowed it to do. Then I created the USB patchstick with my SanDisk thumb drive so I could hack the box and install Boxee. It installed and ran just fine, so I fired up Hulu. The video there was incredibly choppy. It got better when I turned off the 480p high-resolution stream in my Hulu account and restarted the stream of Monday's episode of Chuck, but it still wasn't smooth. This was very frustrating, and the Boxee CBS player had the same problem. Oddly, the Comedy Central player was better, but still not great.

Boxee was awesome when I set it up to play video files over the network from my Mac. I had a House episode I'd downloaded recently since my cable box's DVR cut off the end of the show, and the XviD file played great streaming through Boxee.

However, my main attempted use for the AppleTV was going to be a replacement for cable, watching all the shows I like with Hulu and through Apple's iTunes Store. I wanted to make sure I got all my video legitimately, through paid or ad-supported Internet means, and not have to resort to downloading all my shows from the shadier corners of the Internet. Since Hulu wasn't satisfactory as a cable replacement (and Big Bang Theory doesn't have any legal Internet distribution, anyway), I restored the device to its factory settings and put it back in the box to return it to the Apple Store.

It made for an enjoyable evening of hacking around (I even enabled ssh access to the AppleTV, which was pretty fun just for the hack value), but it's just not viable as a replacement for cable. I'll probably need a full-scale Mac mini for that, but if I'm going to run full-on OS X I don't want to be using a CRT with overscan, anyway. I'll wait until I can afford both a mini and a new flat-panel TV with HDMI input, which probably won't be for a while.

Apple's new anouncement

2009-03-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

First off... this is probably the very first Apple announcement in at least four years that I didn't know about in advance. Seriously, the first time I heard about Tuesday's press event was in the NYT article linked below. I feel this is my first step toward becoming a "cranky geek."

In any case, I've finally been thinking more about getting an iPhone, and this new wave of features (and the speculated cheaper new hardware in the summer) is making it ever more attractive.

The oddest thing to me about this report, though, is the description of their new "pay for program enhancements" feature in the App Store. When I read this, my first reaction was to think, "Cool! People can now offer free trial apps and then charge for an upgrade to the full version, like Mac apps have done for years!" However, they've explicitly stated that any app offered originally for free can't have any paid add-ons, so this model won't be available. If developers want to offer trial software, they'll still have to put separate free and paid apps into the Store.

I also hear that they're upgrading the synchronization of personal information from the Internet to the device in the form of direct CalDAV support. Sounds cool; I'm officially considering this seriously now.

Apple Shows Off Next Version of iPhone Software - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Geek Code update

2009-02-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

Well, I haven't updated my Geek Code in about 18 months, so I was due for a refresh. Of course, everything is horribly dated since the code itself was last updated in 1996, but here's where I am today:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT/MU d+() s:+>: a->+++ C++> ULXB++++$ L++ M++ w--() !O !V P++ E--- W++ N o++ K? PS PE+ Y+ PGP- t !5 X- R tv+ b++ DI++ D--- G++ e*++ h--- r+++ y+++? ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

(my geek code decoded)

That "25 Random Things" meme

2009-02-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've been "tagged" yet to do a "25 Random Things About Me" list on Facebook, but I've seen a number of them. While I think it's an interesting idea, I dread getting into it since it would probably become a big multi-day project that I'd spend endless hours tinkering with and refining, and then agonizing over the finality of hitting the "Post" button.

The following article from the New York Times takes a sardonic look at the whole phenomenon, and until I get around to writing such a list (if I ever do), please consider Amy Harmon's "generic" contribution to be my own.

25 Random Tips for the Busy Facebook User - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com

Val Kilmer to be... blah, blah, blah

2009-01-30T11:43:00.000-08:00

I don't care so much about this article itself; I focused more on the accompanying photograph. Is that seriously the guy who played The Saint? I know that was 12 years ago, but he seems to have aged nearly twice that.

Kilmer to be king of Bacchus in New Orleans parade - Yahoo! News

Today's xkcd

2009-01-12T13:05:00.000-08:00

With a reference to Calvin & Hobbes... fantastic!

Windows is officially irrelevant

2009-01-08T10:36:00.001-08:00

In a NYT piece this morning, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer argues that the upcoming "Windows 7" will be important. However, this paragraph from the article just made me laugh:

He added, however, that Windows 7 should not have the same sort of problems with compatibility with devices and programs that Vista did. While some of underlying architecture of Vista changed from earlier versions of Windows, Windows 7 is built on Vista’s underlying structure.

That means that users upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 won't experience any problems. However, anyone that didn't upgrade to Vista because of the compatibility problems will still face the exact same roadblocks if they try to use Windows 7.

He's assuming that all his customers are using the latest version and just might just have had some problems getting it to work. But in my lab, I still have all the workstations running Windows XP. I was hoping the next version of Windows would respond to criticism from the cautious and provide a cleaner upgrade path from XP, but based on this report of Ballmer's CES keynote I'm no longer optimistic.

Thankfully, our use of XP is just a fallback measure for a few pieces of software that aren't cross-platform; Linux is our main operating system and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Ballmer: Windows Is Still Relevant - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

That book thing

2008-12-11T15:40:00.000-08:00

So, I've seen this a bunch of places now, and I decided to finally do it.

Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

So, the closest book to my chair at work is the Unix System Administration Handbook. Unfortunately, page 56 has no sentences as it's a bunch of charts and tables. However, from A Practical Guide to the Unix System (the next closest volume):

Refer to grep in Part II and to Appendix A, "Regular Expressions," for more information.

Purchasing Gift Cards?

2008-12-11T10:08:00.000-08:00

If you're intending to buy gift cards this Christmas (or anytime, really), go to this site to purchase them. Not only is there a huge selection, they ship quickly and up to 8% of the proceeds go to support my friends who are missionaries in Germany with Greater Europe Mission.

With the holiday rush, you need to order them by the 17th if you want to get them by Christmas.

Thadd and Laura Davis Gift Card Center

Dr. Fun

2008-11-29T17:59:00.000-08:00

I was poking around some of my old bookmarks today and ran across the following comic. It's over 14 years old now, but it's still great (and probably my favorite from the entire run of Doctor Fun).

Dr. Fun - The shocking truth behind zucchini nut bread

Today's Wondermark

2008-11-21T07:42:00.000-08:00

Good stuff.

Wondermark #463; In which the Future is Saved

Today's Dilbert

2008-11-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

Heuristics!

In the wake of recent events

2008-11-07T17:45:00.000-08:00

As is often the case, Dave Barry's humor column makes an important point.

You know what I miss? I miss 1960. Not the part about my face turning overnight into the world's most productive zit farm. What I miss is the way the grown-ups acted about the Kennedy-Nixon race. Like the McCain-Obama race, that was a big historic deal that aroused strong feelings in the voters. This included my parents and their friends, who were fairly evenly divided, and very passionate. They'd have these major honking arguments at their cocktail parties. But unlike today, when people wear out their upper lips sneering at those who disagree with them, the 1960s grown-ups of my memory, whoever they voted for, continued to respect each other and remain good friends.

What was their secret? Gin. On any given Saturday night they consumed enough martinis to fuel an assault helicopter. But also they were capable of understanding a concept that we seem to have lost, which is that people who disagree with you politically are not necessarily evil or stupid. My parents and their friends took it for granted that most people were fundamentally decent and wanted the best for the country. So they argued by sincerely (if loudly) trying to persuade each other. They did not argue by calling each other names, which is pointless and childish, and which constitutes I would estimate 97 percent of what passes for political debate today.

The rest of the column is good and funny, but this bit struck me as immensely poignant.

(hat tip to Doc Searls)

Dave Barry: And the winner is . . . the man with the martini | MiamiHerald.com

Have you heard the new piece by W. A. Mozart?

2008-09-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't either, but a fragment at a library in Nantes, France, was recently confirmed as being written in Mozart's hand.

Unknown Mozart fragment found in French library - Yahoo! News

Highway "zippers" helping traffic

2008-09-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

Interesting... Tom Limoncelli mentions on his blog about a machine he's seen that moves the barrier between the eastbound and westbound sides of the Tappan Zee bridge depending on prevailing traffic. This lets there be more lanes for westbound traffic in the morning and then allows more eastbound traffic in the evening as needed.

Pretty cool, and interesting to watch in action (Tom put a picture up on his blog, linked below).

Everything Sysadmin: The Zipper Machine

A little '80s movie nostalgia...

2008-09-12T20:27:00.001-07:00

So, this guy (apparently his name is James) went to the mall they used when shooting the first time travel scene in Back to the Future. He shot some pictures and put them up next to screen grabs from the movie so you can see him in some of the exact same places as the actors were.

Great Scott!

Twin Pines Mall | Cinemassacre.com

Sudden realization

2008-09-11T12:48:00.001-07:00

Oh yeah, I have a blog, huh?

So…

2008-06-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

First of all, I realize that this will be the third time I’ve had a blog post with this title, which might make this one a bit more ironic.

In any case, last night I was thinking about the American tendency to end sentences by trailing off into the conversational ether. For example, when people start a story or thought and then finish with “so…” without really coming to a full stop. I know I'm guilty of this myself at times, and I can’t really point fingers, so…

I’ve decided that the reason for this is mostly laziness. It’s basically saying, “I’ll lay down the tracks for this train of thought, but hopefully you can see where it leads and I won't actually have to articulate the whole thing.” Of course this is mostly done between people who know each other well enough to finish each others’ sentences anyway, but that still doesn’t excuse the ennui that leads to deliberately unfinished thoughts.

After all, when I used to be an editor (the links at the beginning of this post are quite old; that’s no longer my job) I would never let an author end a phrase with an ellipsis. Granted, I mostly dealt with sheet music, but I also edited the accompanying text and I'm passionate about the written word as well.

The “…” punctuation literally stands for an undefined, and possibly unuttered, group of words. For instance, if you wish to quote someone and leave out a portion, you'd use it in the place of what you blanked out: “Mary had a […] lamb.” When it's used deliberately (by that, I mean “not editorially”) at the end of a phrase or sentence, it leaves the intention of the writer completely up to the interpretation of the reader. And since my number-one priority as an editor and a writer is clarity, using an ellipsis in such a way is completely anathema to my preferred style.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its uses. In casual conversation (i.e. the spoken word, personal email), I suppose it can be tolerated quite a bit. And, in the hands of a skilled writer, it can be an interesting rhetorical device. However, when the intent is to convey information clearly, three dots in succession just don't belong anywhere.

My thoughts on this matter were perfectly punctuated this morning by the new Wondermark (link below). I don’t know whether to laugh at the absurdity or cry over the reference to modern lack of expression. I’ll probably do both.

Wondermark by David Malki ! - 420: In which One Thing sparks Another, and So On

Shiny New Toy

2008-06-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

Recently the Netflix DVD-rentals-by-mail service introduced a new product, a set-top box that lets you stream movies from the Internet directly to your television.

They've had the "Instant View" capability for quite a while now, but you needed to watch the movies on a Windows PC. Now, though, they've teamed up with media-device company Roku to produce the Netflix Player to put those movies from the Internet onto your TV screen.

When I first heard about the Player, it seemed interesting, but I doubted that it would be worth it in my home. First of all, my wife and I cancelled our Netflix subscription back in 2005 after only about three months with the service. While it's a great service, we found ourselves feeling that we had to watch the DVDs as soon as possible and send them back for new ones so that we were getting our money's worth. Those red envelopes consumed nearly all of the free time we had (especially since we were on the plan that let us have three movies at a time).

However, I read a blog post by a fellow member of the local Linux Users' Group that changed my mind. He wrote about opening and setting up the machine, and I was really intrigued; especially by the mention of the television shows that were available for viewing with this method.

I looked around on the Netflix site to see how the pricing works, and it turns out that even the $9/month plan allows for unlimited Instant Viewing on the device (the plan includes one DVD in your home at a time). Well, that's barely more than the price of two Blockbuster rentals. Regardless of whether we went through the physical DVDs quickly, we could definitely get a good bang for our subscription buck with the Netflix Player. Granted, the device itslef costs $100, but we hadn't put any of our tax rebate into the US economy yet...

So I restarted our Netflix subscription a couple of weeks ago and ordered the Player. It was delivered by FedEx last Friday, and I've been really impressed by it. The only difficult part was entering the 64-character randomly-generated strong password for our wireless network on the little 9-button remote control. However, the onscreen keyboard was versatile enough to provide all the characters I needed, and the box downloaded my Instant Queue list immediately and was ready to start playing movies.

You have to choose the movies for your Instant Queue list by visiting the Netflix website on a computer, and then your only options on the Player itself are to change a few settings or play one of the movies you've pre-selected online. Most of the titles available are fairly old, though there are some newer movies. In a really cool twist, some recently-aired NBC shows (Heroes, 30 Rock, The Office) are already available for Instant Viewing. If more television gets added to the list in such a timely manner, we might even be able to cancel cable.

All in all, this is a great device that I recommend to anyone with a decently-fast Internet connection. Check it out!

xkcd in NYT

2008-05-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

Randall Munroe, creator of the oft-linked-here online comic xkcd, was interviewed by Noam Cohen of the New York Times. The resulting article appeared online today (link below).

Link By Link - This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix - NYTimes.com

The rise and (please, come quicky) fall of Microsoft

2008-05-17T19:29:00.000-07:00

It's obvious that Microsoft won't be a big technology market force forever, and here's a great piece from the New York Times detailing their inevitable (and, in some senses, current) state of decline.

The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits - New York Times