eclecticism

Along with the Mac OS X 10.4.4 update that was released today, Software Update notified me of two other updates to install: QuickTime 7.0.4 and iTunes 6.0.2 (which doesn’t seem to have a support document listing the updates made to the program).

Apparently, one of the changes made to iTunes was more advertising! Yay! I was just lamenting the fact that I didn’t see enough ads while deciding which song to play next, and here Apple’s gone and taken care of that for me.

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Thankfully, there’s a new little button added to the group at the lower-right that allows you to toggle the MiniStore on and off, so I can kill this little monstrosity. Still doesn’t make its inclusion any less obnoxious, though.

“Jerry Springer” by Yankovic, “Weird Al” from the album Running With Scissors (1999, 2:46).

Big news of the day, of course, is Steve Jobs’ keynote address at Macworld 2006. I just got home from school and watched the video stream of the keynote. Here’s the key points (plus occasional commentary from me here and there):

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m honestly not entirely sure if I should be grumbling at Mozilla’s authors or Windows’ authors, but this drives me up the wall:

Those last two options are way too close together. If the only places for them to go are the last two items on the contextual menu, could there at least be a seperating line between them? I’m just glad Control-Z works after delete operations, or I’d be in a world of hurt, far more often than I’d like to admit.

(Admittedly, this is somewhat compounded with my having to use a mouse on the work computer instead of the tablet that I use at home, which is far easier, more comfortable, and accurate…but I still think this is a bad thing.)

One of the perpetual “how am I going to do this?” questions that will pop up from time to time when working with websites is how to get a screenshot of an entire webpage. Most of the time it’s not at all easy to do, and unless you’ve stumbled across some specialized software, involves taking a screenshot of however much fits on your screen, scrolling down, taking another, repeating until you’ve captured it all, and then stitching the images together in Photoshop.

Enter Paparazzi for OS X: give it a URL and dimensions, and get a single image of the entire page. Quick, simple, and occasionally very handy.

A sample image follows behind the cut… Read the rest of this entry »

Does anyone out there have any need for an official Windows 2000 Professional install CD, complete with serial number? Update: Eight minutes later, it’s spoken for. You people scare me.

As part of an initial stab at starting to weed out the junk from my apartment in preparation for my upcoming move, I’ve finally given up on any hope of resurrecting the PC that’s been doing nothing more than holding my desk down for the last year and junked it. This leaves me with the OS install disc, which is useless to me.

Admittedly, in these days of XP and the upcoming Longhorn Vista (in, what, another three years or something?), a Win2kPro install probably isn’t that valuable even to Windows users. Even so, I thought I’d toss this out there just on the off chance someone could use it. First come, first serve, just let me know where to mail it and I’ll send it your way.

If I don’t get a taker in, oh, a week or so, I’ll just toss it.

“Love Your Enemies” by Burroughs, William S. from the album Dead City Radio (1990, 1:13).

This month’s Wired has what is likely not just the best article I’ve seen come out of Wired in a long time, but the best piece I’ve seen in ages on the Web, where it’s been, and where it may be headed in the future.

> Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don’t see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Ganked this one straight from Daily Kos, via Boing Boing:

> WARNING: Severe Cognitive Dissonance Ahead! > > > Hollywood wins Internet piracy battle
> > The U.S. Supreme Court rules against file-sharing service Grokster in a closely watched piracy case. > > > > NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled [last month] that software companies can be held liable for copyright infringement when individuals use their technology to download songs and movies illegally. > > > > [Hollywood’s] victory [last month]…dealt a big blow to technology companies, which claim that holding them accountable for the illegal downloading of songs, movies, video games and other proprietary products would stifle their ability to develop new products. > > > > “We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties,” Justice Souter wrote. > > Wait for it… wait for it… > > > Senate Moves to Shield Gun Industry > > > > WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans on Tuesday moved the National Rifle Association’s top priority ahead of a $491 billion defense bill, setting up a vote on legislation to shield firearms manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits over gun crimes. > > > > “The president believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. “We look at it from a standpoint of stopping lawsuit abuse.” > > > > The bill would prohibit lawsuits against the firearms industry for damages resulting form the unlawful use of a firearm or ammunition. > > > > [Senator Larry] Craig said such lawsuits are “predatory and aimed at bankrupting the firearms industry,” unfairly blaming dealers and manufacturers for the crimes of gun users. > > Got that? If a company makes a product that is inappropriately used to illegally copy a movie, that company is liable. If a company makes a product that is inappropriately used to illegally kill a human, that company is not liable. What’s the common logic holding these disparate concepts together? Massive corporate special interest money. Welcome to your government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, where a pirated copy of “Hollywood Homicide” is bigger threat than an actual Hollywood homicide.

This is such a crock. How soon until I can afford to bail from this bass-ackwards country?

“

“No One is Fax Exempt” by Rollins, Henry from the album Think Tank (1998, 19:28).

This amused me greatly.

Compare and contrast:

1. Photos of the internals of an Apple Intel Development Box.

2. The infamous G5-to-PC mod hoax that had lots of people up in arms in January of 2004.

He wasn’t hoaxing — he was predicting! He’s a genius!

Some brief initial thoughts on today’s news…

• There’s a rousing snowball fight going on in hell right now.

• IBM just got spanked. Hard.

• From a user-standpoint, this may not be as big of a deal as some might fear. Apple has plenty of past experience dealing with potentially difficult and disastrous transitions. Most recently, of course, the OS transition from OS 9 to the UNIX-based OS X; more applicable to this situation, however, is their earlier switch from the Motorola 680x0 processors to the IBM/whoever-else-was-involved (I’m on lunch and trying to post this quickly, so I’m not looking up all the little details) PowerPC processors.

  From my standpoint, both prior switches were handled quite well. With the number of ways that things could break, it’s amazing how much didn’t. Case in point, just this weekend I downloaded the game Crystal Crazy from the Macintosh Garden, a repository for “abandonware”. This is a game that was written for 680x0 systems, so it’s outdated by many years, one software transition, and one hardware transition…and it still works. Granted, the sound doesn’t work, and it has to be run from the disk image instead of being copied directly to the hard drive, but the fact that it works at all (680x0 code running through the PowerPC emulation inside the Classic environment on an OS X system) is a rather resounding testament to the work Apple did in ensuring backwards compatibility — and I have no doubt that they will do everything they can to continue this trend.

• This certainly doesn’t mean that the Mac is suddenly going to turn into Windows. No matter what kind of processor is providing the underlying power, it’s OS X that is the heart and soul of the Mac “experience”, and that’s not going to change (well, not beyond future OS upgrades that is).

• I think it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll start seeing “install anywhere” OS X boxes that will allow OS X to be installed on any random x86-based system. Much of what makes a Mac a Mac is the tight integration between the OS and known, Apple-approved system components, and I don’t see them giving that up and attempting to support the nearly-infinite possible hardware configurations of homebrew PCs. The processor may be going to Intel, but that doesn’t preclude Apple from keeping tight control of their motherboards and keeping OS X on their proprietary hardware.

  That said, I expect plenty of hackers will be doing everything possible to circumvent that. It’ll be interesting to see how successful they are, and how soon they pull it off.

• I expect that Virtual PC will be undergoing a major shift in a couple years, possibly moving to something closer to the fabled ‘Red Box’ of the Rhapsody years. No more emulation layer to worry about — Windows will be able to run native code on the Intel processors that it’s written for, at full speed. In theory (and this is definitely theory, as I’m no programmer), all VPC would really have to do is create an isolated virtual machine for Windows to run inside, much like the Classic layer already does for pre-OS X applications. Perhaps we could even see Windows apps running outside of the VPC window, side-by-side with OS X and Classic applications? It’d be a UI nightmare, sure, but it might not be outside the realm of possibility anymore.

• I can’t wait until I get off work and can really dive into all the various analysis and speculation after this. I’m going to have a lot of reading to do tonight!

Any other thoughts?

Here’s an amusing little something that I’d never seen before. I tried to take a look at a Slashdot story about the Apple/Intel switch, when…

Apparently everybody was trying to get to that story, and for once, Slashdot couldn’t keep up! Pretty impressive, and an indicator of just how big this news is.

“My Dark Life” by Costello, Elvis/Eno, Brian from the album X-Files, The: Songs In the Key of X (1996, 6:20).

Wow. It’s true.

Short on details at the moment, as the keynote is still going on, and I’m just watching the MacRumors updates, but…Apple is moving to Intel for their processors.

Wow.

There’s a lot of rumbling in the Mac world today thanks to a Wall Street Journal article reporting rumors of Apple talking to Intel about using their chips.

> Apple Computer Inc. has been in talks that could lead to a decision soon to use Intel Corp. chips in its Macintosh computer line, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. > > The report, citing two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies, said Apple will agree to use Intel chips. > > Neither company would confirm the report and an Apple spokeswoman told the Journal she would characterize it as “rumor and speculation.”

This, of course, has led to the usual fooferal about whether Apple may be looking at either moving away from the Power PC chip and onto X86 chips, or possibly simply releasing a version of Mac OS X for Intel processors.

Personally, I think a few of the Slashdot crowd have a better grasp of what’s probably going on here.

> > > /ASCII: My guess is they really are planning on using Intel chips - just not processors. Remember, Intel produces wireless chips, Flash memory, Ethernet chips, and Salt and Vinegar chips. > > > > Halo1: The gigabit ethernet chip in my old G4/400 in fact is an Intel chip. > > arloguthrie: Most notably, the XServe Raid runs on an Intel processor. There are tons of reasons Apple would be meeting with Intel. One day, perhaps “the news” will actually be news and not gossip based on “a friend-of-a-friend told me…”

(via /. and many other sites this morning…)

My copy of Tiger was supposed to show up today, and I was going to have the whole weekend to Nuke and Pave and play with my new toy.

UPS, in their infinite wisdom, tried to deliver my package at 2:30 in the afternoon, while I’m at work.

I don’t get Tiger until Monday (when it’s being delivered to me at work so this doesn’t happen again)!

Anybody in Seattle feel like letting me borrow their Tiger install disc until Monday when mine gets here?

“Here I Am (Come and Take Me)” by Green, Al from the album The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005, 4:13).

The Safari browser now subscribes to R.S.S. news feeds,
And its “private browsing” mode conceals the tracks of online deeds.
There are archives now, and log files, when you send or get a fax;
You can make the pointer bigger on those Jumbotron-screened Macs.
You can start a full-screen slide show from some photos on demand;
And the voice that reads the screen aloud can lend the blind a hand.
There’s a password-phrase suggestor meant to make yours more secure,
And the Grapher module draws equations simple and obscure.
Then the Automator program is a geeky software clerk -
You just choose the steps you want performed, and it does all the work.
There’s a lot of miscellany, lots of spit-and-polish stuff,
But it works and doesn’t slow you down - and these days, that’s enough.

— David Pogue, in the New York Times

(via adavies42, on /. — I originally didn’t notice the poem in the NYT article thanks to their horrid online formatting)

It appears that Gnomedex, one of the big blog/tech/geek/pick-a-descriptor conferences is coming to Seattle this summer, and Julie’s going to be speaking. Congrats, Julie!

I’ve got to admit, I’d love to be able to go to this thing. While I’m hardly one of the “big players” in the blogosphere — heck, most of the people who are going to be there probably would only know me because of my adventures at Microsoft — I think it’d be fascinating to be able to meet some of these people, get an idea at what it’s like to be part of one of these conferences I read about from time to time, sit in on the sessions, and generally absorb the atmosphere and see what all goes on. Besides, while I may not be one of the movers-and-shakers in the tech world, I’ve been tracking and using many of the technologies that these people have come up with and influenced over the past few years, and it would be neat to see a little bit of the “insider’s view” of everything.

The downside, of course, is that the registration fee for the conference is a bit out of my reach at the moment ($399). Technically, I could probably afford to sign up (though it would be tight), but that’s a big enough chunk of money with my current operating budget that I just can’t justify spending it on the event — that’s money that would be put to far better use for food, paying off bills (which I’m finally starting to get a handle on…it’s slow going, but progress is being made), and other such day-to-day sundries.

Note: This isn’t a complaint at all about the cost — I’m under no illusions about how much it might take (both financially and in the actual work itself) to put one of these conferences on — merely a reflection of my own current state.

Maybe I’ll just grab my camera and head down there every so often during the conference weekend and play the role of the blog world’s geeky-fan-boy-cum-slightly-freaky-stalker.

> “Hey…guys…don’t look now, but that weird guy in the skirt is following us again.”

“Bridge is Over” by Boogie Down Productions from the album Hits From The Vault Vol. 1: The Pioneers (1981, 3:26).

I’m a bit late to the party on this one, unfortunately, but the Macintosh turned 21 years old today.

Even better, there’s one heck of a birthday present to the Mac community out on the ‘net now: the long-lost video of the original introduction of the Mac by Steve Jobs.

> 21 years ago today, on January 24th 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh. And we’ve seen that 1984 wasn’t like 1984. > > What we’ve never seen indeed, was the big day itself. Lots of historic stuff has been preserved - images, texts, even sounds, and the saga has been told on and on. However only very few people have actually seen how Steve Jobs pulls the first Mac out of this bag, how the Mac introduces itself to the public, Steves biggest grin ever, and how he is obviously overwhelmed by this moment in the Cupertino Flint Center. > > Fear not, faithful Mac believers. We have found it. We have found what seems to be the only copy of a public TV broadcast on that very day. It was recorded and preserved by Scott Knaster, the “legendary Mac hacker”, as Amazon puts it. Scott kept the tape (a NTSC Betamax III longplay) for 21 years since he keeps everything. Andy Hertzfeld saw it when he wrote the story ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ on folklore.org. From there we followed the hints, and that’s how we found it. > > We worked with Scott to convert it from NTSC to PAL, we’ve polished it, cleaned it, huged it and digitzed it. Here it is. It goes back to the people who’ve made the Macintosh, and to the world. The complete material of about 2 hours is returned to Scott, Andy and the folklore.org people, and this weblog will report the story of the “missing 1984 video” in detail. We’ll release other clips in the coming days, so bookmark and check back. > > But now, Ladies and Gentlemen: please welcome - the 1984 Macintosh introduction video. A travel back in time…

(via MeFi)

“Gimme Shelter” by Sisters of Mercy, The from the album Some Girls Wander By Mistake (1983, 5:58).

Change of plans as far as my keywords/tags project goes.

This past week, Technorati introduced a tag search to their weblog-centric search engine. Searching for a particular tag on Technorati returns a result page that aggregates recent weblog posts, Flickr photos, and del.icio.us links from across the web that use the same tag. Very nice.

This works well for me. One of the potential downsides I’d been running into with my prior plan — integrating ishbadiddle’s local keyword search — was simply that I’d gotten very used to the Flickr/del.icio.us method of separating tags with spaces, while the local keyword search required that the tags be separated with commas. As I was starting to work my way through cleaning up the keywords for my entries here, then, I’d been using spaces within keywords on the weblog (for instance, a tag of my name would be “michaelhanscom” or “michael.hanscom” on Flickr or del.icio.us, but be “Michael Hanscom” here on my weblog). I’m anal enough, though, that this bugged me — I’d rather have one consistent tagging methodology across all the systems.

As Technorati also uses the space separated tag format, and expects multiple words to be ‘smooshed’ together (just as Flickr and del.icio.us do), I’ve decided to use that system for all my tagging, foregoing ishbadiddle’s system (sorry, M E-L! — but if your system can be tweaked to read space-delimited lists rather than comma-delimited, I can look back into it again…).

Thanks to George’s TechoratiTags plugin for MovableType, I’m now listing tags in the metadata for each post, just underneath the title. The tags are drawn from the (space-separated) keywords for each entry, and clicking on any one of them will take you to that tag’s Technorati search page.

Just another way the web is getting more and more classified. Pretty cool, in my world.

“James Brown Is Dead (Wide Awake)” by L.A. Style from the album James Brown Is Dead (1991, 5:25).

As I’ve been more and more interested in using tag-based taxonomies to categorize and track things, I’ve been looking more and more often at using del.icio.us as a bookmark manager and potential replacement for my linklog.

Admittedly, when I first looked at del.icio.us a while back, I didn’t really understand what the deal was, or why it was so special. After spending time bouncing around Flickr and finding all sorts of interesting photographic work by exploring the tags people had used to categorize their photos, though, it finally clicked — del.icio.us was using the same concept to classify virtually the entire web. Oh! Now I get it!

So the old linklog has been removed from my sidebar (though the archives still exist), and has been replaced with a list of the most recent fifteen items added to my del.icio.us page. There’s an RSS feed available too, though as I’ll be using FeedBurner’s link splicing ability to add my del.icio.us links to my main RSS feeds (just as I do for my Flickr photos), subscribing to that is definitely optional.

It may be a day or so before the links get spliced in, though — for some reason, FeedBurner keeps telling me that ‘djwudi’ isn’t a valid del.icio.us ID. Funny, del.icio.us thinks it is…I’m going to have to work on that.

Update: FeedBurner tracked down the issue they were having with connecting to del.icio.us, and I’ve updated my feeds. Both the ‘full posts’ and ‘full posts with comments’ feeds have the links spliced in, and the The ‘eclinkticism’ feed has been switched over to my del.icio.us links (if you were subscribed to either of my full post feeds and the linklog feed, you’ll be able to delete the linklog feed now). The ‘excerpts only’ feed has been left as-is (it doesn’t include my flickr photos, either).

Update 2: Well, it seemed like a good idea. However, that was a bit too much all in one feed. Links have been taken back out of the full-post and full-post-with-comments feeds, in favor of leaving them in their own separate feed. I’m also wondering if I should pull my Flickr photos out of the main streams, in favor of making everything mix-and-match. Seems better to let people pick and choose what they want to pay attention to rather than forcing everything on them all at once….

The part I’m happiest about was figuring out a very easy way to integrate my del.icio.us links into my site without having to deal with extra Movable Type plugins, installing extra software, or the like. del.icio.us provides an HTML feed of recent links, so I just set up a simple shell script, then use cron to run it every hour on the hour. Here’s the script in question:

#!/bin/sh

echo “del.icio.us linklog sucessfully updated!”

The curl command retrieves the HTML feed of my links and saves it to a file, which mv then renames (this ensures that there won’t be an issue if the file is being updated at the same time that my webserver is expecting to be able to read from it), and echo returns a short message letting me know that the operation concluded successfully (cron e-mails me the confirmation message each time it runs…and I may turn that off soon now that I know everything’s working). Then, anytime someone loads my site, a simple PHP include loads the delicious.inc file into the page. Quick and simple.

Oh, and the name of the shell script?

deli.sh

“867-5309 Jenny (Hot Tracks)” by Tutone, Tommy from the album Edge, The Level 2 (1995, 5:31).

Jacqueline pointed out the Face Analyzer, an automated online tool where you upload a photograph and it process the photo to determine everything from your nationality to your personality. This struck me as worth killing a few minutes playing with, so I grabbed a recent headshot of me from when I got my new glasses, and sent it in. The results were something of a surprise:

100% South East Asian — and female.

I never knew. You’d think that my folks would have clued me in about this at some point in my life.

Undaunted, I cropped the photo down a bit so that there was less background, wondering if giving the system less background junk would help it concentrate on my face.

Well, it at least got the sex right that time. I’m really curious as to how it’s coming up with the nationality, though — to most people (who, admittedly, aren’t automated software systems [or if they are, I haven’t figured it out yet]), the red hair and pale-to-the-point-of-translucence skin tends to indicate northern European ancestry, typically either Irish, Scottish, or possibly the general Scandinavian areas.

I guess they’re all wrong. South East Asian it is. After all, if you can’t believe what you read on the ‘net, what can you believe?

The personality profile section was just as silly, and just as accurate.

Sure, I knew Microsoft was evil, but I never expected them to actually brag about it. Today brings the release of their Malicious Software Removal Tool, though, so I guess I was wrong.

I’m curious just who they expect to be excited about this announcement. Malicious software removal? It’s bad enough that so much of their software is fairly malicious in standard day to day operations, but now they’re actively promoting a product that, judging by its name, will gleefully and with great gusto go rampaging through your computer, removing the most useful pieces of software it can find?

What hubris! What unmitigated gall!

What?

It’s a tool to remove malicious software?

Oh. Well, that’s different.

(via /.) Read the rest of this entry »