Archive for October, 2003

iTunes for ‘doze rocks

iTunes on the mac was pretty cool. iTunes on windows is even cooler. Why? Because I use a PC way more than I get to use Val’s mac :-)

I guess I didn’t think the sharing would work, right off the bat, but it sure does, to Mac iTunes users, no matter. This is good news–at home, my PC is the one with all the CDs ripped to it–my wife’s PowerBook only has a few CDs; now she can stream them off my harddrive if I leave iTunes on, and she can use my PC to play stuff if she wants it loud (it’s connected to the big Logitech Z680’s in the livingroom).

Second point–I installed it at work on my T30 notebook, and realized that the mac users upstairs in the graphics department have weird taste in music, but cool. Interesting to check it all out.

Of course, this is standard out-of-the box stuff. Nothing mind-blowing. What we really need is to be able to stream stuff off the linux box sitting next to me. Someone must have done that. Yes, they have. A little compiling and tweaking later, I’ve got it working for me. Shweet. Thanks to this story at macoshints.com for the juicy bits). Basically, follow that article… I was doing this on RH9, no big deal, only thing that wasn’t clear from the article is that you do the build (make os=linux) in the mDNSPosix dir of the Rendezvous download from apple, and then the binaries are in build/. (I did sudo cp build/* /usr/local/bin/). Also, you’ll need to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf if not already there (and then run ldconfig as root.) Make sure you get daapd going (requires building a couple smaller libraries first, and make install’ing them.). Copy the daapd-example.conf to /etc/daapd.conf, and configure. Then, here’s the (cheesy, and not perfect, I know) init script I made (/etc/init.d/itunes): This will obviously require some editing before it’ll work for you!

#!/bin/sh
#
# Startup script for mDNSProxyResponderPosix and daap, ie. iTunes server
#
# chkconfig: 2345 95 05
# description: set up this machine for Rendezvous and DAAP protocol (iTunes sharing)
#

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
. /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0

PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

prog=”mDNSProxyResponderPosix”
prog2=”daapd”

[ -f /usr/local/bin/$prog ] || exit 0
[ -f /usr/local/bin/$prog2 ] || exit 0

start() {
echo $”Starting $prog: ”
CMD=”mDNSProxyResponderPosix 172.20.31.170 dotnet ‘Ben RedHat9′ _daap._tcp. 3689″
#echo “Running: $CMD”
$CMD &
RETVAL=$?
touch /var/lock/subsys/$prog

echo $”Starting $prog2: ”
CMD=$prog2
$CMD &
RETVAL=$?
touch /var/lock/subsys/$prog2
return $RETVAL
}

stop() {
echo -n $”Stopping $prog: ”
killproc $prog
echo
rm -f /var/lock/subsys/$prog
echo -n $”Stopping $prog: ”
killproc $prog2
echo
rm -f /var/lock/subsys/$prog2
return $RETVAL
}

case “$1″ in
start)
start
;;

stop)
stop
;;

status)
status $prog
status $prog2
;;
restart)
stop
start
;;
condrestart)
if test “x`pidof $prog`” != x; then
stop
start
fi
;;

*)
echo $”Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|condrestart|status}”
exit 1

esac

exit 0

By the way, Eclipse rocks too. I’ve kinda given up on Komodo, and am just using Emacs again for PHP. Sigh.

Wanting to bust a cap in Urban Outfitters’ azz

OK, you want to be mad at someone? How about David T Chang and Urban Outfitters. He created a “game” called Ghettopoly. It’s being sold at the Urban Outfitters chain stores. I don’t honestly think I’ve ever bought anything there, but I certainly won’t in the future.

I don’t even want to potentially bump this motherfucker’s pagerank by linking to him, but… you have to see this, before someone burns his site down: http://www.ghettopoly.com/. It’s hosted by Yahoo!, so I’m off to write a complaint e-mail.

Here’s some of what MSNBC passes off as ‘coverage’ on it: ‘Ghettopoly’ game called ‘racist’ (why is racist quoted? Single quoted at that? WTF?!?)

It’s one thing to joke about our differences, encourage discussion, and have fun with friends. It’s another to mass market stereotypes, especially trivializing serious issues and painting with such a wide, offensive, brush. And yes this goes for Hollywood, too! Insensitivity is one thing, but this is truly tasteless and offensive. Is gangsta rap? Yeah, some of it is too, and some of that needs to be kicked to the curb, as well. But let’s start with this first. I can appreciate offensive humor, in a big way, but this isn’t really humorous–it’s simply exploitative. Once you get all the “jokes”, this game wouldn’t be funny, or fun. And it offers no commentary on the ghetto, no insight to make it humorous, only presents the ghetto and stereotypes of the ghetto as something to point and laugh at, not find a commonality with the subject that is the basis for true humor. It is the kind of “funny” 7 year olds laugh at when the bully breaks someone’s toy out of hate, not the kind when a comedian exposes and show the humor in stereotypes (think Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin.)

And now that I’ve visited the urban outfitter’s site, I see how this could happen. What a load of trash–beer-branded t-shirts, “jesus is my homeboy” logo’d stuff, and camo pants. I suggest they change their name to ‘Suburban Loutfitters’; apparently their target demographic is farm-dwelling militia members. I clicked around a lot, and was surprised to eventually find a nonwhite model. One. But then again, I don’t blame minority models for refusing to wear any of that shit :-)

Art Futura does Blogging

Well, I really tried to get to the ArtFutura show at CCCB on time today, so I could see the panel discussion on weblogging. I ended up missing almost all of it (thanks Transports Metro Barcelona! Thanks RENFE! I appreciate all your confusing-ass signage and refusal to speak in Spanish, only Catalan!) Anyhow, mostly my fault. Instead of walking 1 mile downhill to the FGC train station and taking a 25 minute ride downtown, it was a 30 minute bus ride, walking uphill 1/2 mile, and then waiting for a big ol’ train, long ride into Barcelona, and then a metro 2 stops to downtown.

SO I finally arrive, and the Q&A session is underway. Anil from TypePad/SixApart is there, as is Meg from Blogger, and a Spanish guy, and someone from BoingBoing. From best I could tell, this is definitely not the author of the stuff I enjoy reading on BoingBoing… but she seemed competent for the few minutes of moderation I saw. Meg was given to rambling, and tried to make some point about linking to sites in different languages that was vaguely incoherent. Anil was well spoken as always (disclaimer: he’s a personal friend so I’m likely biased), but the whole panel looked like they could use a good night’s sleep (and I understand this is the case.) I won’t judge the whole thing on the 10-15 minutes I saw, and much of the audience seemed pretty into it, so I’m guessing the overall S/N ratio was high. Next time I’ll learn to navigate the bus system better, and actually see the whole talk, or something.

Watched the presentation from some guys from the UK who did Bjork’s last video, pretty nifty CG animation. Three young guys, it was depressing a bit. But they seemed geniunely creative, so props to them.

Finished off the night with a good Pakistani meal with Ubaldo and Lisette, yum. That makes the mistaken commute hell almost worth it :-)

Badass Boom Box and Free Music

First, the geek link: Old school Lasonic boombox, retrofitted with wi-fi, mp3 decoding, and web browser interface (shweet)

A few posts ago I wrote a bit about downloadable music and bus models, etc. I got a couple comments from Ani at LaMundial.net, and now their new album is available for download for free. Yep, free (as in beer). And, the stuff’s even good! These guys can play, you should definitely check it out. Maybe even rename the files with titles like “50_cent_pimp_lamundial_bulletridden_remix.mp3″ and put them on your eMule (kidding). Give it a listen.

Assorted geeky stuff

Hey, remember VisiCalc, the precursor to Lotus 1-2-3? Well, maybe you don’t. I do, mostly as a “business” app that I couldn’t afford (on a platform I couldn’t afford–the Apple ][). And I wasn’t that interested in that kind of software at the time, mostly games caught my fancy when I was trying to get a VIC-20 of my own.
Anyhow, what’s really cool, is that you can download the reference card and a working executable of VisiCalc (for the PC), from Dan Bricklin’s site. And great reading for the geeks is some of the design/programming notes from Bob Frankston’s pages. If you’ve never coded in a memory-limited environment, or in assembly, or for performance, it’ll be eye-opening reading. Lots of stuff that has been ingrained into my habits throws back to those days–including a few habits I’ve had to break to avoid premature optimization. I often think about students who learn Java as their first (does this happen?) programming language, are missing so much of the coding landscape, context which is entirely necessary to building quality systems. Sigh.

Got my my first issue of “ACM Queue” in the mail the other day. I was shocked they actually sent it to me in Spain, for the free intro offer, and supposedly at the same subscription rate as for US orders. Anyhow, it’s decent. A little bummed the first issue I got was the June (maybe the mail is just that slow), but content-wise there’s some really interesting stuff. The focus of this issue is ’storage’ and the interview with Jim Gray was pretty interesting; the article (primary) on physical disk stuff from a Seagate guy (Dave Anderson) was not that thrilling, nothing too new there. But the overall level of the articles is good, not quite up to some of the orther ACM pubs but worth the time. In the end, I doubt I’ll subscribe–I’ll just read the interesting-sounding articles on their free site. As much as for any other reason, I don’t feel the need to have trees destroyed and stuff mailed around the globe, for me to receive this info. On the other hand, I’m not giving up my New Yorker subscription anytime soon :-)

I forgot whose blog I found this link on originally (sorry), but I’ll link to this here too, ‘cuz it’s high on the geek factor: not quite a DIY project, but a nice one-off: a homebrew Segway clone.

Tool links: URL Bandit watched the clipboard and snatches out URLs it sees, handy, especially for blogging…

Reading blogs is depressing

Up front: I apologize for the meta entry.

I spent a bunch of my employer’s time reading blogs today. Which is really depressing, because a lot of people either have way more fucking time than I do, are way smarter than me, or both. I won’t start linking it off here, but wow, a lot of intelligent stuff swirling around to be read. Not all of it mind-blowing, but overall, consistently, intelligent. And links aplenty. These folks surf a lot more than I do to find this stuff, or get paid to blog, or ??? One guy wrote that blogging has essentially rekindled his faith in the internet as a medium. I wouldn’t go that far, but it has its compelling aspects. I’m looking forward to seeing Anil (from Six Apart) in 10 days or so when he comes to Barcelona–he always has a thoughtful take on things, and is definitely one of the blogerati (second apology of the post: for writing ‘blogerati’.)

Even people I regard as semi-idiots have a good rant on occasion. Urgh. Maybe it’s just me, today, being in the morass of the disaster which is my workplace situation. I guess this diversionary lack of productivity makes up for (one of?) those late nights fixing stuff that I suppose, as a contractor, I could have billed for but didn’t. Final apology: the self-pity contained herein. I’ll go ingest some sugar or something.

Becoming CD-free, and bad business ideas

A few years ago I thought it would be great, with all this fileswapping going on (Naptser was new), it would be cool if there was a way to pay artists when you download and like their stuff. A site, where the funds would go to them, and it would at least go easier on your conscience, even if you didn’t receive any kind of legal right to the content you might have received. This is fraught with problems in the Real World, such as the record companies wanting no business in this, what to do with collaborations (divx movies?!), how to make sure the artists themselves get the money, and the ever-present micropayment dillemas. (There’s lots more problems, but that’s the starter kit.)

Lately I’ve been finding this is an attractive idea to me again, but the problems aren’t really solved (maybe SMS helps with the micropayment issue a bit, in Europe, sort of, OK not really.) This is because I realize that I am quickly becoming CD-free, or trying to.

What does this mean? I moved to Europe a year ago; one thing I wasn’t going to take schlep overseas was a few hundred CDs (and especially not their cases). So I bought one of those big album thingys for CDs, and stuffed it with about 100 discs, and carted it over–I also brought my PC, which already had a sizable mp3 collection (probably 80% of which are from discs I own.) My CDs went into storage in the brother-in-law’s basement (as well as the DVD cases, and roughly 100 other boxes of junk.) Once I got to Spain, the first place I lived didn’t have a CD player, so I couldn’t play the CDs… but I could play them on my PC, and also drop stuff onto my mp3 player (a 192MB flash-based thing, good enough for a week of tunes without reloading.) The CDs collected dust. Before I moved I listened to CD-Rs burned of mp3s I owned, in my Aiwa aftermarket car stereo; partly because of the 10-albums to a disk capability, but also because I didn’t want my “original” cds to get stolen.

Later, I moved to a real place, but was never motivated to buy a real CD player (although did end up getting an alarm clock one, but only use the alarm clock functions.) Anyhow, I have this stack of CDs in the cabinet that I never look at or play. The songs are all ripped to mp3s on my or the wife’s computer (she is an iTunes fanatic, I’m windows boy.) Now I pull stuff onto her iPod and listen to it commuting back and forth to work, and no matter what, I don’t really have any use for these plastic disc things. They just take up space. I don’t miss the 500 I have in storage in the US, especially the ones whose content I really like, because the content is duplicated (”backed-up” if you’re reading this from the RIAA) on my PC.

Last week I was watching european MTV (Spanish I think, but we get several variants), and they played a video by some group (turns out one guy) called Four Tet. It was amazing. I searched emule and yah, the latest album is available. The next day (patience with the mule!) I was listening to the album, and really dug it. Great stuff. Before winamp delivered the last track, I was leaving him praise on his website’s comment form, and trying to figure out how to buy the album. Turns out it’s a small indie label (yay) called DominoRecords in the UK, and they have a pretty nice site. Within 15 minutes I had purchased that CD, and one of his previous ones as well. (The Internet is a great thing.)

That’s how I got back to the pay-the-artists-directly-website-is-a-great-idea (but really isn’t) idea. I want the music, and maybe the booklet would be cool, but damn, I don’t want more of those stupid prerecorded CD things. I would be much happier, and I suspect the artist would have been too, to just download the music off their site after I paid, and maybe pdf’s of the booklets. Virtual is good. I have lots of virtual space. Bandwidth is infinitely cheaper than pressing discs, printing booklets, assembly, packing, shipping, etc. I can’t be the only person who is willing to make the change (and if I could get a slight discount on the “license”, that would be great–but the 10 UKP was perfectly reasonable for the great music in this case, anyhow.) There’s no easy way to do this in aggregate, though. Maybe ASCAP and BMI could handle it for some music, since they already pay the artists, but that’s just a start (and methinks the RIAA would squelch this immediately anyhow.) And how do you pay painters, scultors of public art, dancers, and other people who you might want to?

Dealing with the status quo, I believe artists should probably all just have their own websites and accept Paypal donations or similar. It still leaves me with the problem of how I pay Bravo for the episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I’ve downloaded. I guess there will be a DVD set released at some point and I’ll buy that, just as my way of saying ‘thanks’. I can’t get Bravo in Spain, at all, but on the other hand, I had Bravo legitimately for years in the US and there was hardly ever anything decent on the channel, so maybe I’ve already “paid” for it. A problem for another day, and a more creative solution than I can devise now, to be sure.

Bad staff meeting? How about a game?

Wow, did I hold a crappy staff meeting today. But unfortunately I can’t discuss it here, now. Grrr.

How about some nice linkage instead? These guys have been in business for quite some time, but I had never heard of them. They make board (and other) games, but minus the essentially similar doodads that come with every other game you’ve ever bought (markers, dice, fake money, etc.) They tell you what to salvage out of monopoly and just sell you the unique bits for the game you want–really cheap. I gotta order some of these… http://www.cheapass.com/index.html
Now all I need are friends to play them with :-)