June 2005 Archives

I just went to burn some mp3 tunes onto a CD to move to my computer at home. It seems to me that at some time in the past when I tried to burn a CD with iTunes and I had more songs than could fit onto an audio CD iTunes would come up with a box that told me that the songs wouldn't fit on a single audio CD and asked if I wanted to burn an mp3 CD.

It's been quite a while since I did this, but this time the dialog asked if I wanted to create multiple audio CDs.

Of course I went and set the preferences setting to burn an mp3 CD and it worked fine, but it seems like an interesting change in default settings.

I'm currently reviewing a contract which states:

“Premium Service” means the basic version of the [service name] service...

Guess they couldn't sell it if they just named it the Basic Service.

Ted points out that OSAF now has a group blog where they're keeping track of what's happening on Chandler and Cosmo development. This should make it easier to keep an eye on the progress as it happens. I don't know about anybody else, but I find the clutter of Wikis to be too depressingly similar to the piles of unlooked-at paper in my office.

Dan Gilmor has a short post today in ressponse to a piece from the Mercury News about Trumba, a new web-based social calendaring service. Trumba is the brainchild of Jeremy Jaech, a UW Computer Science MS grad and one of the co-founders of Visio.

Dan's take is that online calendaring is not yet ready for prime time, and he notes that he's hoping that Chandler will be the product usable for real people in this space.

I commented on Dan's post as follows:

Dan -

I've been getting increasing number of trackback spams lately. Some of them I don't understand, as the web sites that are mentioned in the trackback don't appear to actually be accessible - so what's the point?

I'd been meaning to install Jay Allen's wonderful MT-Blacklist since I re-installed Movable Type, and finally got around to it this morning.

Since around 7 am this morning, MT-Blacklist as blocked 63 85 spams.

What's up with the dramatic increase in animated ads on web pages? I find it almost impossible to read any content while there are things blinking at me in my peripheral vision.

Note to self - stop reading web sites that flank content with animations.

Bye-bye - Trusted Reviews.

So long Eweek.

What? no more news.com?

hoo boy.

Cory points out that the Radio3 is putting up the BBC performances of Beethoven's symphonies as mp3 files for download.

Is it the height of post-modernist copyright irony that you can freely download Beethoven's 19th century masterpieces, but not the latest from Sleater-Kinney? (though you can stream it in QuickTime).

And, speaking of Sleater-Kinney - KEXP has a performance from them live in the studio on May 20 up for streaming too.

UPDATE -- I have not yet been able to get the link to stream the Sleater-Kinney's The Woods to work for me - anybody have better luck?

Terry Gray points out that Microsoft has announced that Exchange will be able to "push" email to mobile devices. While I'm sure they've invented some clever and entirely proprietary way of accomplishing this, Terry sez:

I sure must be missing something... all this hubbub about "push" mail, which sure sounds like what we've been calling "online" access mode in the IMAP context for over a dozen years.

Why use a real standard when you can invent one of your own?

So the big news is that Apple is switching to use Intel processors (from IBM) in their computers. There's lots of speculation as to what the motivating factors are, but as Tim Bray notes: there are a few Really Big Secrets that very few people and no journalists know: one of them is how much box-builders like Apple, HP, Dell, and Sun pay chip-builders like Intel, IBM, and AMD. I bet that when whoever at Apple sat down across the table from whoever at Intel the negotiation was complicated and involved lots more than the per-chip cost.

I don't think this switch really makes much difference for users of desktop computers, and it shouldn't be seen as a big deal. Those of us who choose to use OS X on the desktop find that it's a compelling user experience for a variety of reasons (I wrote about my reasons last year). As long as Apple can continue to build on that user experience and people all over the world can provide good applications for the platform, I believe that Apple will continue to be successful.

There will of course be the inevitable transition pains for application developers, particularly those who write compiled applications in languages like C++ (another reason to like scripting languages).

And, as I wrote to our local Apple rep yesterday, if switching to Intel means I can get a faster and/or lighter and/or cooler OS X notebook, I'm all for it!

Last week I got a new desktop machine for the office - a 20-inch G5 iMac, complete with Tiger installed. The 20-inch screen is gorgeous and actually feels far larger than the 17-inch I've been using. The response of the 2Ghz G5 does indeed feel somewhat snappier and quicker than the 1 Ghz G4, but not hugely dramatic for everyday use - though I'm not rendering video or doing lots of audio processing that would really test processor speed.

It's always interesting going through the process of setting up a new machine to work with all my quirky ways.

Lately I've been primarily using the Mac mail client as my primary desktop mail software - the main reason I shifted away from Thunderbird is the difference in handling forwarding of multiple messages to a single destination - In Thunderbird, when you select multiple messages in a folder and click on Forward, it opens up a separate window with one message in each window, and you have to address each message individually.

The Mac mail app, on the other hand, puts all of the forwarded messages sequentially together inside a single message which you can then send off. That feels far more logical to my way of thinking (though I do think Pine's handling is probably even better - it asks you if you want to forward the messages as a MIME digest and then bundles them up as attachments to a message).

I configured the mail client and then sent it off to get my mail. Because the Mac mail app wants to grab a lot of your mail to manage locally on the desktop, even with a 100MB connection to the mail server it took overnight to import all of my mail into the app - I hate to think of what it would've been like if I had tried that at home through my so-called "broadband" Comcast connection, where I typically am lucky to get 500kb/sec transfer speeds.

The mail app seems to be working just fine, though in the Tiger version I notice that occasionally it opens new messages with the window positioned in the middle of the message instead of at the start.

I installed the latest Firefox and made it the default browser (there are still too many pages that don't work right with Safari, including some UW NetID authentication pages) - it seems like there's something a little counter-intuitive about having to use Safari's preferences to set the default browser to not be Safari. I used Torisugari's excellent Bookmarks Synchronizer Firefox extension to get my bookmarks synced via .Mac (I'll have to try it with a local WebDAV server too). There's a good page on how to install and configure Bookmark Synchronizer on Jonathan Hudson's studio2f blog.

I've got Ecto installed for blog authoring, and BBEdit for text editing. I need to move OmniGraffle over and then my most-used applications will all be on the new machine.

When I upgraded the 17-incher to Tiger, the apps for handling Microsoft Office documents got reset from Office 2004 to Appleworks (!). On the new machine those documents are opened with the test-drive version of Office 2004. I went to the trouble of installing the full Office 2004 so I wouldn't get the annoying message from the test drive about how many days are remaining on the test license. It's interesting - I use Excel occasionally, but I almost never use Word any more - it's just gotten way too big and cumbersome for my needs these days. I find almost all of my text editing needs can be handled in an email editor, in BBEdit, or in Ecto. If I need to do any formatting, it's almost always for a web page rather than printed paper.

I'll report more on further adventures with the new machine as I go.