Month: 2003/04
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2003 April 30
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Getting a Strange "Component Manager" Message Under OS X?
Posting this just in case anyone needs it. I've been getting the following strange message lately in logs and consoles under OS X: ## Component Manager: attempting to find symbols in a component alias of type (regR/carP/x!bt) As it turns out, I had just installed Toast. A quick Google search leads me to blame Toast and remove a QuickTime component supporting Video CD. That's pretty obscure. Hmph. So much for never again worrying about strange drivers and cryptic error messages under OS X. :) [ ... 122 words ... ]
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2003 April 29
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iTunes Does Indeed Do DRM
How unobservant am I? It took an article from The Register to make me realize that this new Apple music store does indeed use DRM to lock up purchased music. The files aren't mine. (Though, whoopie, I'm allowed to use them on up to 3 computers.) Crap. No thanks. I guess that 10% of the catalog doesn't look quite so attractive at a buck-a-song now. I mean, I've already destroyed one computer with a tumbler of water, why would I want to lose all my music with the next one I douse? And what happens in 10 years or so, when I want to listen to all those hypothetical Talking Heads tunes I bought? Of course, I'm still listening to CDs and tapes I acquired back in junior high, and I don't need to query anyone's permission to do so. I hereby bestow this award to the Apple Music Store: [ ... 243 words ... ]
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What is my iSync doing?
Umm... what is iSync doing? I didn't know that it had anything to do with my bookmarks. Lately I've been using bookmarks more since I started using BookmarkBlogger. Nearly every time I try dragging a bookmark into a toolbar folder, though, I'm rebuffed by this dialog. What gives? The bookmarks don't show up on my PDA, or my calendar. With what are they being synched? I see that Scot Hacker has discovered the same thing happening to him. Lots of comments, but still no answer as to what's up with this. Hmm. [ ... 230 words ... ]
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Indie Music Service (ala Apple)?
Okay, so in between all the other hecticity currently ongoing in my life, I managed to check out Apple's new music service. Although I'm not interested in approximately 90% of the music offered so far, that still leaves me with 2000 songs whose "buy" buttons call my name. The process is simple, the files are mine and not locked up with DRM, and although I hope and expect the price structure to change (ie. maybe price based on popularity?), a dollar a song isn't horrendous considering that I get what I want on demand and without hopping in the car and going anywhere. So far, so good. So... This got me to thinking in the last 10 minutes: What about an indie clone of the Apple Music Service? One using RDF or some other XML format to offer up the catalogues of record labels? Include all artists, albums, songs, and any various and sundry bits of trivia about all the above. Establish a modular mechanism for specifying payment process (ie. paypal, credit card, free, upload a song), and make the whole interface as slick and easy as iTunes'. The real trick I see in this, though, is to make the file format for music vendors fairly easy yet flexible. It should be as easy or easier than an RSS feed for a blog. Let a hundred of these mushrooms bloom, aggregate, search, and buy. Make it distributed and not dependant on any particular music company or technology company. Not a terribly original idea, but that's what I just thought of. Sounds like a good semantic web app that could have some umph going for it in the immediate future. [ ... 366 words ... ]
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2003 April 22
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rsync: It's a damn brilliant thing.
I take rsync for granted. It's just the best way to keep stuff out there up to date with stuff over here, and vice versa. And lately, I've been using it to supplant my usage of scp. And it works. Brilliantly. And until recently, I hadn't stopped to realize: Hey, you know, this thing somehow works out differences between files out there and over here long before what's here gets there. I know, duh, but I just hadn't considered it. Well, Paul Holbrook reminded me of this tonight, with links to Andrew Tridgell's paper on the algorithm, among other things. Damn, things like this remind me that I'm supposed to be getting my butt back into school... [ ... 179 words ... ]
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Learning How to Do Magic with Flash and XML
Was thinking about learning new tech, and well, I haven't gotten much farther into .NET as I'd wanted to, given moving and a sudden appearance of work. Instead, I've had a project hurled at me that combines Flash MX and XML, something I've just barely touched before. Wow, is this stuff fun. And I write that without a trace of sarcasm-- this app I've inherited for maintenance and extension, though it's a bit grungy and shows some signs of late-night expediency, does some neat things with actions and buttons dynamically wired up in response to XML config files loaded via URL, which are in turn generated from a database managed by a simple end-user admin interface. Not sure how much more I should write about it, but I'm dying to post a link. Of course, this isn't revolutionary stuff in general. It's just a revelation to me. The last time I had an opportunity to really, really dig around in Flash was just about when Flash 5 came out. I was immersed daily in Flash in the years between the initial acquisition by Macromedia, up through version 4, and just started drifting away, sadly, when things started getting really interesting with v5. That was when my daily job swung entirely into the backend, and client-side concerns were no longer my task. But now I'm back in this old neighborhood, and I can see why some people would love nothing better but to build entire websites in Flash. Yeah, that's evil, but it's sexy. Despite some clunkiness, there are some very nice possibilities I see now. I love Java, and loved cobbling together funky applets 5 years or so ago, but Flash makes me want to toy with rich client-side apps again. And then, there's this Sony Clie PEG-TG50 handheld I've recently started pining for, and it appears to run a Flash 5 player. It's probably underwhelming, but who knows? Anyway, back to work, but just had to spill some enthusiasm for Flash. [ ... 543 words ... ]
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Do NOT Taunt the Happy Fun Dave
Mark Pilgrim asks: What's your Winer number? I duck & cover under our new futon. The one that I broke already, but it's better than nothing. [ ... 27 words ... ]
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Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Bloggers
Wow. Missed this from Mark over the weekend, and then further missed Sam's link to it and the subsequent whirling mass of shitstorm that rolled past in its wake. Well, at least everyone just ends up being an asshole in the end, and no nazis or ethnicities or monsters were invoked in the process. And no one co-opted any acronyms, though I think someone got ketchup on their tie. Hope it wasn't silk. And does anyone know if all us assholes are actually alive or dead in Schroedinger's Trunk? [ ... 127 words ... ]
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2003 April 21
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Further Bitchun Reading...
Finally got around to reading Cory Doctorow's Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom, and though I loved it, I wish it were longer. Or, at least, I'd love to see more stories from the same setting or playing with the same themes of the Bitchun Society. I have seen some of these things in stories before, though. So, hey, I haven't posted anything here in a few days - have some babble and book links (feel free to comment and leave some more links): Of course I love the notion of ubiquitous computing and personal HUD's. I've babbled about that at length for sure. If you want more of that, go check out Vernor Vinge's Fast Times at Fairmont High. Mediated reality with P2P computing woven into clothing and projected across contact lens displays. A little less obtrusive than seisure-inducing in-brain electronics, but just as post-human. And then there's backup-and-restore and the cure for death. Although in David Brin's Kiln People, things start with disposable doppelgangers, survival of personality after bodily death is promised in the ending. What could change human nature more than transcending mortality? As for deadheading, check out Vinge's Across Realtime series. In particular, read up on bobbling in Marooned in Realtime. There's also Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga. A one-way trip into the far future through geological periods of time seems particularly external to known human experience, especially when combined with immortality. One thing I've yet to see much in stories or speculations is how society could function in a post-mortality and post-scarcity conditions. I've never been satisfied with the way Star Trek dodges the day-to-day realities of a post-capitalistic Federation of plenty. Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi explores an interesting track with a meritocratic society whose top members have godlike powers matched to godlike creativity and self-possession (not to mention possession by multiple selves). But so far, Whuffie and its currency in reputation is the best game I've seen yet. Since, even if the problems of mortality and material scarcity are solved, human attention and cooperation will never be gratis. So, how else do you herd the cats when you can neither threaten nor reward them via any physical means? Seems like the blogosphere, gift culture, and open source noosphere brought to reality. Kinda makes me want to get back to fiction writing meself and finally get out the dozen or so stories I've had bouncing around in my head these past years. Doesn't necessarily mean I'd churn out anything good, but who knows? Maybe after some work and some stumbling I could produce something passable. All those creative writing classes in college and short stories in spiral-bound notebooks from high school have to count for something. I'd even love to squat in the Bitchun Society for a few stories, but that might be a bit presumptuous, even though Mr. Doctorow himself has let on that he's not likely to write more tales from the same Bitchun universe. Better to get some practice in before jamming in someone else's club. [ ... 703 words ... ]
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2003 April 16
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OPML vs OML - Fork but don't fight!
In my intermittent online presence, I've been happily watching Dave Winer's ramp-up with OPML toward OSCON with things like "How to implement an OPML directory browser". I love outliners, and though it's been a little while since I played with Radio, I loved Instant Outlining and the transclusion of outside outlines into the one at hand via URL. And when Dave first introduced the idea of an OPML-based distributed web directory, I figured it was the start of another nifty twist in the web fabric. (You know, the kind that makes wrinkles? The kind of wrinkles that make brains smarter?) Anyway, even given all this, OPML has always bugged me, and I'm not alone. In fact, today I found a link to OML, the Outline Markup Language project on ?SourceForge, which seems to seek to address many of the same things that have bugged me. That is, things like UserLand application-specific tags, and extension via arbitrary attributes. Though I'm no master of deep XML magic, these things struck me as grungy. But you know, we're designing for recombinant growth with the lazyweb here (or at least, Dave Winer was and is), and OPML looks like one of those dirty things that got thrown together quickly in order to enable a laundry list of further projects. It works, isn't all that hard to grasp, and has gotten adopted quickly. There's momentum there. As Dave says, there is no wait for tools. So, now there's also OML starting. Hopefully this won't become another rehash of the RSS fight.Because, I sense many similar issues between the two. Maybe it would have been better still if OML had been named something completely avoiding the letters O, P, M, or L. I already see mailing list charters being called out in order to quiet unwanted discussion of fundamentals, but, hopefully we can avoid anyone claiming that they have the One True Format, all fighting for the same name and slapping each other around with version numbers. Gah. Anyway. I like OML but see some grunge in it as well. At the moment, I'm using an OPML-supporting tool. I can't imagine that conversion would be more than an XSLT file away. Well, maybe more than that. Beyond that, let's agree to disagree and viva le fork. Let the best, most demonstratably capable format win. Meanwhile, I'm still considering that Tinderbox license to see if I might like multi-dimensional outlining... [ ... 741 words ... ]
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2003 April 15
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Safari has tabs now, but I've changed my mind.
So yeah, I wanted tabs in Safari. Or something like tabs. But since discovering that the "Window" menu in OS X is not painful to use, and that CMD-Backquote rotates between open windows, I've not missed tabs an incredible amount. I think my tab usage was a response to my experience with Windows and Linux window managers, though even those have changed since I started using tabs in my browser. However, I still love using pwm as my window manager under X11, with its tab collections and windowshading. Go figure. [ ... 91 words ... ]
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Still Alive Out Here
Been out of touch with my usual online haunts as of late, and have barely had time to think straight, let alone write. My girlfriend and I have moved just from one end of town to the other, and we have an overlapping month of leases between the new place and old. In theory, this is plenty of time to accomplish moving and cleaning and decorating. But, some things are hard to move gradually, especially when both she and I have compact cars and trucks rent by the hour. And then there's the fact that our new residence is found on the third floor, providing much exercise to the both of us. So, it's been a hectic couple of weeks so far, though well worth it for us to start settling down in new and improved digs. And then, right in the middle of things, I was offered an opportunity for a few months' work as a contractor for a startup located almost (but not quite) within walking distance of the new apartment. So, I decided to snatch that up, and since then things have been doubly busy. Whew. This'll give me some breathing room to figure out what's next, hopefully. So anyway, here's hoping things settle down a bit and stop feeling like I've jumped the tracks. After getting life in general into some semblance of happy chaos, I hope to get a chance to catch up on happenings and maybe even take a stab at some of my projects around here again. [ ... 340 words ... ]