Planet Tao of Mac

Michael Tsai: Modernizing the Responder Chain

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:38:23 +0000

Tim Wood has some interesting suggestions for resolving some longstanding problems with Cocoa’s responder chain.

Pedro Custódio: Google Goggles

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:40:53 +0000

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Colin Charles: How do you convince an entrepreneur to go opensource?

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:58:52 +0000

So, a while back, I became a council member at the Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM). My focus is on open source and open standards.

I would like to get more entrepreneurs building their products on opensource. I want them to harness open standards, and expose APIs so others can build cool stuff around it. I want to see TeAM help create more Malaysian tech success stories.

As an aside, I found FOSS FAQ, and decided to post a question there: How do you convince an entrepreneur to go opensource?.

Seems like a silly question. I mean, VC’s like Guy Kawasaki like you to use cheap, and highly available tools, and opensource fits that bill. But nowadays, proprietary vendors have also upped the game – they also provide cheap (free for a time period) tools. So how do you get entrepreneurs going OSS for their products? What’s your pitch to them?

Daniel Jalkut: We Aim To Please

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:16:42 +0000

Yesterday Favrd, a site that monitored the number of favorite stars a particular Twitter update has received, was suddenly shut down.

Twitter erupted with reaction, much of which was more earnest and emotional than I expected. I had learned about Favrd and used it myself from time to time, but I assumed it was one of those sites that you should feel slightly embarrassed about loading. Or at the very least, you should be ashamed if you were caught trying to get your own tweets to be featured.

But Dean Allen, who created the site, is apparently some massively famous, well-loved internet superstar. I had never heard of him, even though many bloggers whose opinions I respect obviously had. Disorder is good for a system, so I guess it was my healthy function to be ignorant of this man so that I could experience the curious emotion of respecting him not for what he built, but for why he dismantled it.

Mr. Allen’s goodbye message, which now occupies the entire content of the site, was matter-of-fact and sincere, but its declaratory tone gave it a tinge of self-aggrandizement. To learn some of the really interesting rationale behind this fascinating end, you need to visit the comments section of Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog (thanks, Gruber), where Mr. Allen responds to Jeffrey’s criticism of the abrupt shutdown:

“I’ve spent the past year or so reading and writing and doing my level best to chip away at 40 years of belief in the logical fallacy that one’s identity meaning – self-worth, self-image, whatever you want to call it – can accurately be measured in the thoughts of others.”

Many folks use the internet as a valuable tool for research and connectedness, but also as a dubious source for ego-validation. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. How many of the following questions do you care to know the answer to?

How many people are following me on Twitter
How many hits on my home page?
Has any high-profile blogger linked to me recently?
How many people are @responding to my tweets?
How many comments on my latest blog post?
How early does my name show up in a Google search?
How many people are buying my app/t-shirt/CD/craft?
Who left positive feedback on eBay/Amazon/iTunes?

If you’re interested in the answers to these questions, it’s probably because you are concerned on some level about whether you matter or not. But more specifically, when it comes to the internet and other people you may reach by way of it, all these questions boil down to whether you have pleased anybody lately.

I relate strongly to this urge, because I find most of my time at the computer ultimately boils down to striving to get another “fix” of pleasure acknowledgment. When I’m working on my apps, I’m hoping the features I add will move somebody to send positive feedback, or to buy the software. When I’m writing on Twitter, it feels great to have people declare their enthusiasm for something I’ve said. And yes, when I’m writing on this blog, it’s ultimately because I hope what I’ve shared will resonate with other people, and some percentage of those readers will share their satisfaction with me.

What can I say? I aim to please. And I think this is a pretty common “problem.” It’s not exactly humanity’s worst defect. The expectation that our help and amusement be acknowledged has probably fueled a lot of important help and amusement. While a few saints work tirelessly and without need of emotional coddling, the rest of us always benefit from a pat on the head and an “atta boy”.

Sites like Favrd, and even Twitter itself, demonstrate how the internet has facilitated an ever-increasing diversity of positive feedback. A witty remark to an appreciative cluster of people at a party was once chalked up as a major win, but nowadays you might find yourself recognizing the wasted potential of that line, and quickly cc’ing it to Twitter. Then what? If 10 people favorite it, you’re a rock star. Until 10 people favoriting you is an everyday occurrence, then it takes 100 to move the meter. When does it end?

While the desire for praise and acknowledgement that we do matter is a healthy instinct that motivates us to do life-affirming things, I believe it can be fed inappropriately. Compare this need with hunger, which can be sated easily at first, but which tends to become harder to satisfy as your meals become larger, richer, and less complex.

It’s become relatively easy to find praise on the internet. A quip on Twitter yields a simple reply of “Hilarious!” from somebody you’ve never met. Not the most illustrious validation you’ve ever received, but it will get you through the hour. If you don’t pay attention to what you’re feeding your ego, it might develop health problems. Adulation by way of Twitter replies, favorite counts, blog comments, etc., are all fast food gratification. They are invaluable when you’re stuck in a lonely place and are desperate for a boost, but if it’s all you consume day in and day out, you’re heading for an epic fall.

Michael Tsai: Optimizing WiFi Reconnect Time

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:51:23 +0000

Joel Levin:

If you move the networks you actually use to be the top items, you will see a drastic decrease in the connection time as airport no longer has to spend a bunch of time connecting to networks that aren’t currently around.

Rui Carmo: On Bits of Various Descriptions and Music

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:33:06 +0000

This is an update to an item originally published on Sunday, 6 December 2009.

I’ve been talking advantage of local holidays to take 2 4-day weekends in a row, and it’s been simply great for unwinding, even if some of the notable stuff ended up happening during work days.For instance, last Thursday afternoon I attended codebits, and besides the event itself¹, most of the fun consisted of sitting in with @ppinheiro76 and @nosuchuser (obviously, after a while everyone had their Twitter handles written on their nametags) to watch the early stages of their robotics project.

For those of you who don’t know the venue, the Cordoaria Nacional was built back in 1771 for rope and sail rigging work, and besides stone walls thick enough to cool it like a meat locker, it also opens into a couple of courtyards, so despite the massed heat of 600-odd geeks and their kit (loads of which were sporting Apple gear, by the way), I thought it best to leave my overcoat on at all times.

So I left after @pedrocs and @shrike_pt had a nice mixed narrative/technical session² on Pond – by popular demand, @chbm and I did have a go at making fun of the current color scheme, but the boys had an interesting surprise towards the end of the talk (sadly, I can’t find the video here, so I can’t share it with you).

Anyway, I left just as the “coldbits” jokes were getting a bit too real – I suppose I missed out on a lot of fun, but an afternoon’s work was as much as I could spare, and 3 day’s worth of geeking out is something best left to the folk who can fit that kind of thing into their long-term schedules.

As to other goings-on, I’ve been mostly trying to get my music library together. After two months’ worth (i.e., what would be ordinarily only a couple of days if I had enough free time) of getting all of my photos into a single, consistent backup set and handing out copies to family for safe off-site storage, I’ve been spending the past couple of weekends trying to sort out my music library (books are next, in case you’re wondering) and have reached two main conclusions:

iTunes is brilliant for listening to music (i.e., the Genius stuff, the Remote app for the iPhone, etc.). I actually miss the fat, blisteringly hot Apple TV I borrowed from our TV folk for testing, since it got so much of that right³.
iTunes is utter crap for actually managing it as far as backups are concerned, since getting stuff out of your Library in a coherent fashion is a mess, mostly due to the way there is a weird split between the original metadata on the files and the extra (but ultimately extraneous) stuff iTunes stores in its own database.

So I ended up writing an AppleScript to export the whole thing – with metadata built into the files themselves – into easily manageable folders (that will find its way online eventually, once I get rid of the ugly way I’m handling copying).

This last bit (cleaning up and exporting) is taking a good while, mostly because I’m doing spot checks to see whether I want to re-rip some of the original CDs and there’s a whole lot of music I haven’t heard in a long time, so I’m piping it out to my Airport Express during the weekends and bringing along huge chunks of it with me every workday.

Which is brilliant, since I am having a lot of fun that I probably wouldn’t be having if a friend of mine hadn’t given me an actual CD for my birthday – I’ve been meaning to clean up my music library for years now, and now it’s happening with a vengeance – I’m now listening to music (and paying attention to it) practically every day.

But one thing that annoys me tremendously (and has done so at least once a week for a couple of years now) is the inability to manually manage music in the iPhone on any Mac I happen to be using⁴.

After all, if I’ve let Apple have access to my entire music library to get Genius to work, they might as well let me manage music manually on any Mac I login with my iTunes account – I can resort to hacks like cloning library IDs, but my biggest issue is that this restriction was built in by design, which I find a completely asinine approach that has, on the whole, rendered my iPhone useless for music.

Which is only one of the reasons why I’ve been using my 360 phone as my primary device for a while now – I plug it in, it shows up as roughly 16GB worth of USB storage, I drag in whatever I want to listen to from any machine, and it just works, like the MuVo of yore. No extra software. No monkeying around. No artificial restrictions.

But never mind – I promised I wouldn’t go on about work, and it seems that I’m going to have to take some photos of actual CD covers (mostly Portuguese ones that you can’t find anywhere), so I’d better make the best of what little time I have left this weekend and get on to doing those…

—

¹ It being organized by Sapo and their (technically) being the competition doesn’t mean we can’t get along, and they deserve credit for the fact that it’s pretty much de rigueur for anyone doing Internet-related stuff in Portugal to drop in on at least a couple of sessions – the geekier bits, quizzes and competitions are, of course, targeted to a different audience, but there’s something in it for everybody. ↩

² Besides, it’s a lot more interesting to know your competition face to face… ↩

³ The PS3, sadly, is not only a mediocre music player but also lacks a credible way to control remotely (no, Remote Play via the PSP isn’t it), so all I can really do with it is watch movies and store photos there. ↩

⁴ I know all about the iTunes restrictions, rights management and whatnot – but I see no reason for them to apply to stuff I own in physical format and rip to different machines as time goes by – and no, Home Sharing doesn’t cut it for me, since I don’t want to share stuff across machines – I just want to pick a few tracks from wherever they are and drop them in my iPhone, without any hacks. ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

"On Bits of Various Descriptions and Music" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Sunday, 6 December 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Michael Tsai: AT&T Mark the Spot

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:46:41 +0000

Mark the Spot is an iPhone app for reporting problems with AT&T’s coverage (via Rich Siegel). It remains to be see how much effect apps like this and Citizens Connect (for reporting potholes in Boston) will have, but if the process is frictionless enough it seems worth a try.

Pedro Custódio: When Is It Inappropriate to Use Your iPhone?

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:30:06 +0000

Via Igor Schwarzmann

Michael Tsai: Personalized Search for Everyone

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:17:23 +0000

Google:

What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.

I suppose this makes sense, and even without cookies Google could figure out the history, but it still creeps me out. You can turn it off by clicking on “Web History.” SEO just became a lot more unpredictable.

Michael Tsai: Kindle Book Sales

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:07:14 +0000

Jeff Bezos (via Marco Arment):

For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition.

That’s incredible, but I’m not sure that I believe it. Are the numbers skewed by averaging in the free Kindle books or something?

Pedro Figueiredo: Not the Large Hadron Collider

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 22:42:17 +0000

Yesterday I did something I hadn’t done in a long time (this 100 days project is turning out to be a lot like that): I fired up SuperCollider and went through the motions of one of the tutorials.

SuperCollider really fascinates me, because it makes it very easy to write the sort of music I like in a very precise way (after all, it’s got a Turing-complete programming language to do it in), that can be saved, transported, and re-played somewhere else easily. Better yet, you can play it on the other side of the world without even getting up from your living room, just by sending your code to the SuperCollider server running there (it uses OSC to achieve this, and OSC is good, mmmkay?). It also makes it easy to rely on things like timers and events, and it’s a doozy to write generative music with (and I’m a big fan of generative music and just writing some code to come up with a 43-minute piece).

The other reason why I think using a programming language to express music is A Good Thing(tm) is that it’s easy to understand. You might say “Oh, sure, for you, who are a programmer anyway”; but I posit it goes far beyond that. If you don’t have any programming experience, but you also don’t have any formal musical training, which is easier to understand (hint: which one is more similar to English)?

s = Server.internal;
(
// define a noise pulse
SynthDef( "tish", { arg freq = 1200, rate = 2;
  var osc, trg;
  trg = Decay2.ar( Impulse.ar( rate, 0, 0.3 ), 0.01, 0.3 );
  osc = {WhiteNoise.ar( trg )}.dup;
  Out.ar( 0, osc );
}).send( s );
)

At the end of the day, they’re both just code anyway. But you can’t google for a piece of music yet (dear Google, feel free to send me the cheque for that idea). Here’s what that SC snippet sounds like, btw: tish.

Out of this came the first definite goal for my hundred days: make SuperCollider and Logic do awesome stuff together. Stay tuned.

Pedro Figueiredo: Things wot I learned today

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:43:57 +0000

The London Perl Workshop 2009 was today, and as always it was excellent. A big thank you to Mark Keating and all the other people who made it happen, and to the speakers.

Here’s a brief account of what I found most interesting:

Tomas Doran’s talk about Catalyst and Moose. These two are probably the most exciting things happening in Perl-land these days (well, for quite a while now, not just since last week) and I truly pity the poor sods who use other languages, because they simply don’t have Catalyst and Moose (on a tangent, go and buy The Definitive Guide to Catalyst, which is not only a great reference for Catalyst programmers, but a run-down of the state of the art of modern Perl programming and best practices). Catalyst’s rewrite in Moose really paid off, and Tomas showed us some of the good that has come of it, and what we can expect in the future. Which is shiny. Best slide of the day, too.
Miyagawa’s talk on PSGI and Plack was a very good introduction to the whys and hows of PSGI (think WSGI or Rack, if you’re too lazy to click on that link). It was about time we had this in Perl, and he did a hell of a job not only specifying PSGI but also writing Plack and implementing a lot of adapters for existing machinery (and even writing some new machinery). For me this was easily the best talk of the day, so look for it when it shows up on the site, or Slideshare.
One of the reasons I’ve been quiet since August is that I’ve been mostly living in Java land, and don’t have much to write about concerning Perl. And quite frankly, deploying Java applications is a piece of cake, whereas every time you need to ship a Perl app that will run in a non-standard server (which has all the support modules installed, etc) it’s a royal pain in the ass. For months I’ve been pining for something like jars and wars in the Perl world. Dave Hodgkinson told me about PAR and Shipwright the other day in the pub, but I never really had time to look into them - or rather didn’t need to, because I’ve been stuck writing Java. In a discussion today around CPANising your code to make it easier to ship, Piers Cawley mentioned Shipwright again, and afterwards I went and had a chat with him. If you’re shipping Perl code, it’s now pretty clear to me that Shipwright is the way to do it.
Speaking of Piers Cawley, if you’ve never seen him and Susan Boyle together in the same room, you’d know why if you’d attended LPW 2009. Also, Matt S. Trout in a robe and wizard hat and actually making sense in a talk about marketing? All for free?

CPAN and the community: two good reasons no other programming language comes even close to Perl.

Technorati Tags: catalyst, conference, moose, perl, programming, software development, lpw2009

Pedro Figueiredo: And on the 3rd day, he rested

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:07:06 +0000

Well, mostly. Ok, I’ll cheat a little and say that yesterday what I did for my 100 days project was documenting the first two days (well, just the second, really). Other than that I faffed around a bit in Logic but was too tired to accomplish anything audible or even make some real progress on the learning side of it.

Better days will come.

Daniel Jalkut: Guest Post On TUAW

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:00:38 +0000

The folks at The Unofficial Apple Weblog were kind enough to invite me to write a guest post about my experience at the recent Apple iPhone Tech Talks in New York City:

Inside view of the iPhone Tech Talks from Daniel Jalkut

Thanks to Mike Rose for approaching me about writing this up!

Daniel Jalkut: You Should Be Blogging

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:11:25 +0000

Starting a blog changed my life. Before Red Sweater Blog, nobody knew who I was, nobody cared what I was working on, and nobody (relatively speaking) bought any of my products.

I’m not saying the blog changed everything overnight, but my first post, on June 24, 2005, set the stage for what has been an exciting 4 year adventure. At the time, I was fresh from graduating with my second BA degree (in Music!), and was scraping by doing freelance development for an assortment of clients. Today, I spend every day working on my own software, which sustains me and my small family.

So what changed? The moment I started blogging, I became part of a community. Sure, the community was just myself and a few readers at first, but as my readership grew, it merged with other readerships, and connected me to other bloggers and readers, many of whom have become good friends. Every opportunity I’ve had the privilege to take advantage of over these years can be traced back to the reputation I earned and the friends I made by blogging.

Dan Wood wrote about the value of blogging on his excellent marketing blog. The Importance of Blogging discusses the benefits of writing a blog in more concrete terms than I have here. Check it out!

Some of you consider yourself more adept at reading than at writing. I know you’re with me, because you’re the type of person who had no problem digesting the content of this post, and you’re still reading five paragraphs later. You might be tempted to think you can’t start a blog because you’re not the world’s best writer. Think again. I covered this a couple years ago in another post: No More Excuses. I stand by those thoughts today.

If starting a blog is so great for your reputation, and will make you lots of friends, and bring you fame and fortune, why should I share the secret with you? Why not keep it to myself? Because I write blog editing software? Well, sure, more blogging is good for me. But much more importantly, it’s good for you. Helping others has always been a mission of this blog. It’s one of the things that led to its success, and it is one of the aspects of my work that gives me the biggest charge.

So start a blog intent on helping others. You’ll reap personal benefits and feel good all at the same time. Furthermore, everybody who ever helped me over the years holds a special place in my heart and they’ll always have my deep respect. If this post gets you to start blogging and achieve the level of success you deserve, maybe I’ll earn a similar spot in your heart. Bonus!

Pedro Figueiredo: Day 2 of 100: make some noise

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:32:04 +0000

Yesterday I moved forward some more on the Logic tutorial, I dug up a couple of MIDI controllers and my iO|2 and connected the electric guitar to it. Recorded and mixed a few tracks in Logic and was really happy with the process, if not with the end result (probably the most boring 8:36 you’d ever sit through).

As some people asked about my setup, here’s a brief description. I have Logic 8 running on a MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz with 4GB of RAM), to which I connect 2 self-powered USB hubs. To these I connect some Korg toys (a nanoKEY and a nanoPad), plus the iO|2.

The iO|2 then takes the electric guitar and another analog source (usually the Nintendo DS - running Korg’s DS-10 or the amazing freeware from glitchDS; glitchDS, cellsDS, and repeaterDS - or the Noise Toy). The iO|2 also has a couple of entries for microphones, complete with phantom power, so you can get a nice bullet mic and a harmonica to play Ennio Morricone. The iO|2 is the heart of the system, as far as connections are concerned, and it also doubles as output for monitoring.

Also feeding Logic are a couple of software instruments, the fantastic noatikl and Reaktor 5 (plus a host of auxiliary stuff, MidiPipe, MIDI Patchbay, etc, and some random toys). All put together, this setup allows for some great freedom and even some interesting results, in a good day :)

Pedro Figueiredo: 100 days, this being the first

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:31:28 +0000

So, Anna talked me into joining this 100 days thing… Well, she tweeted about it, I’m that easy. I’m usually not very good at these things, but let’s see what comes out of it anyway, it’ll be a nice change from coding.

For the first day (which, by the way, was 2 days ago), I restarted my Logic education. I have a lot of stuff recorded that needs to be finished (read: cut, mixed, and mastered) and I’ve been procrastinating for ages, so THIS IS IT. Or whatever.

Anyway, I had completely forgotten how much I like Logic. Why can’t all software be like it?

Michael Tsai: Disable and Recover from Mac OS X’s Quarantine

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:40:09 +0000

Jonathan Rentzsch shows how to disable the quarantine and how to remove the quarantine xattrs from existing files.

Pedro Custódio: Beat Torrent

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:19:53 +0000

Michael Tsai: ATPM 15.12

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:28:14 +0000

The December issue of ATPM is out: