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title:
Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.

descrip:
One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com

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URLs I want to remember:
* Atari 2600 programming on your Mac
 * joel on software (tip pt)
* resume, mostly for Google * Regular Expression Introduction (copy)
* gpl xbrowser API for dhtml
 * mulder (old css tutorial)
* Using CommonDialog in VB 6 * Free zip utils
* that hardware vendor review site I forget about is here * Javascript 1.5 ref
* Read the bits about the zone * w3c.org index of HTML 4.01 elements
* Mozilla COM control * Quick intro to Javascript
* Editable Firefox Page * Parsing str's in VB6
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Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Pystar -- OS X clones minus OS X

I think the decision for Psystar to Change Tactics and Sell Mac OS X-Ready Computers? (Mac Rumors) is a more important test case than might be immediately evident.

With Apple having already won a judgment against Psystar for copyright infringement, Psystar's tactic of shifting the burden of OS X installation to the customer appears to be its new primary strategy for attempting to remain in business.

This reminds me of the GIMP without gif support or Audacity without LAME or Handbrake without whatever does the DeCSSing (in this case VLC, and the strange battle in Handbrake of making VLC be installed in the OS X Applications folder only). At what point is the gun close enough to being loaded that when it goes off somewhere it shouldn't that it's the seller's fault?

Boy, that was a horribly botched metaphor. Still, I think the point is a useful one. To butcher another, if there's this potentially illegal combination of a square hole and a square peg and I'm not only making the hole, but pointing it out in neon lettering and giving you instructions, as well as some, let's say, coupling technology that helps you insert it (I hate Freud), have I breached copyright? At what point might the law come back to attack Handbrake and Audacity? Pystar's is, it would seem, an important precedent-setting case.
posted by ruffin at 12/01/2009 01:48:00 PM
0 comments
 
Sunday, November 29, 2009

Magic Mouse works in Vista -- scrolling too

When I first tried Apple's Magic Mouse in Vista, I only got right and left clicks, and had to hold it slightly skewed to get it to move the mouse accurately.

Now, not only does it work in 10.4 (minus scrolling), it works in Vista with scrolling, horizontal and vertical, no problems.

Nice little upgrade. I'm assuming the most recent Apple auto-update added that little holiday gift there. Neat mouse.

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posted by ruffin at 11/29/2009 09:57:00 PM
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Thursday, November 26, 2009

FLAC to iTunes Happy Format

Thank heavens. A FLAC converter for OS X that doesn't leave you hunting around for libs, and even produces several lossless output formats, including Apple's own.

Found via How to Convert FLAC to Apple Lossless (MP4) on Mac OS X � Psychohistory:

FLAC is a lossless audio codec that is very popular on Linux and on Windows. However, it’s virtually non-existant on the Mac, which is a problem if you have a library of music that you have encoded in FLAC and you want to upload to your iTunes library.

There are various command-line solutions out there on Windows, but very few available for Mac OS X.

XLD is the answer.


Yes, this is essentially a follow-up on the Phish download from before. This XLD app is so much more reponsitive [sic] than the MacFLAC of yore.
posted by ruffin at 11/26/2009 09:44:00 PM
0 comments

Phish & Exile on Main Street

melophobe (whatever that is) has links to a download of Phish's recent cover of Exile on Main Street by the Stones and a link to eTree's torrent of the entire Halloween show.

Taper Info and Setlist:

Phish
Empire Polo Club
Indio, California
10/31/2009


I'm guessing it's not FLAC for the Exile-only link they provide; it's only 189 megs. The whole show torrent clocks in at 1.27 gigs and is FLAC 16.

I really can't stress enough how much I enjoy bands that'll put their stuff up for free (Crowes, Allman Brothers, Phish, Grateful Dead, Los Lobos, etc) and appreciate those that put up some bandwidth to host/torrent them. I really need to get back on Furthurnet, even if the community's died a bit, and resurrect the old Crowes SHNs I've got laying around.
posted by ruffin at 11/26/2009 08:04:00 PM
0 comments
 
Sunday, November 22, 2009

Is there such thing as "practically free" software formats?

I enjoyed thinking through Should we fight for Ogg Vorbis?, a contribution to the Linux Journal by Glyn Moody back in 2007. The most problematic statement in the piece, I think, is this one.

So my doubts about this campaign have nothing to do with any weaknesses in Ogg. It's just that I wonder whether this is really something the free software world should be expending much energy on when there are other more pressing problems. Whereas DRM and software patents, for example, are manifestly and unequivocally bad for free software (and indeed for everyone), that doesn't seem to be true for the MP3 format.


Is there a reason to have an open and free format when patent holders don't seem to care much about the folks who are making free software and aren't paying royalties/license fees? Rather, aren't there more pressing places where license holders are worried about enforcing patents where someone could be turning their OSS coding resources?

I'm not sure how to feel about this one. I know that I'm getting to the point that I prefer PDF over any other file format for printed works. I'm so freakin' tired of dealing with the way doc, docx, rtf, etc keep fookin' slightly whenever I open them in the wrong application. I used to make do with Microsoft Word, 1998 and 2000, and as long as those apps kept working I figured I'd make do. They don't work so well any more. Now that Word 2100 or whatever it's at now can save in pdf, I'd rather just see pdf files. It's harder for me to edit a pdf than even a wacky docx at times, but there are a wealth of fairly reasonably priced apps that'll allow one to mess with pdfs. At worst, I just print them out and scrawl.

Perhaps ODF is the best alternative, but PDF is the practically open format that seems to be doing best, and I don't even have to Google LAME to display it on most OSes.

Does this disinclination to support ODF more directly comprise my politics? Yes, I believe it does. We need a standard that will display well outside of its contemporary platform, and display that way for the foreseeable future and beyond. That seems to be pdf to me (and yes, I realize pdf can sometimes be no more descriptive than avi; you really don't know what's in the wrapper. Again, egg + face).

Still, is there "practically free" that should be good enough? I'm not sure. I don't like the mp3 reasoning any more than I did for gifs years earlier or pdfs, even after they've been declared an open standard (thanks wikipedia) in 2008. OOXML is open too, you know. Yet there's a certainly practicality to using these formats not designed to be open to humans and machines at the same time.

I hate bluffing. Is GNU/hurd ready yet?

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posted by ruffin at 11/22/2009 01:00:00 PM
0 comments
 
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Tracfone SMSing

http://abwaters.com/2007/03/04/tracfone-and-sms-email-gateway/

Well done.

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posted by ruffin at 11/15/2009 10:57:00 PM
0 comments
 
Saturday, November 14, 2009

Simple Ajax Example

Finally dug up an easy enough AJAX sample, and thought I'd share my slight variation on theme. If you put these two files into a dir on a webserver, you can play around a bit with the URL you're calling (URL isn't really a URL and must be relative -- calling off-site URLs seems to cause some security issue where you keep getting nothing back) and what you expect to find in the querystring and post vars. Once you've got this running, you're pretty much raring to go with AJAX. Many examples have more error checking, which would likely be useful, but this is working so I'm going with it for now.

ajax.php
<html>
<head>
<title>Simple Ajax Example</title>
<script language="Javascript">
function xmlhttpPost(strURL) {
    var xmlHttpReq = false;
    var self = this;
    // Mozilla/Safari
    if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
        self.xmlHttpReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
    }
    // IE
    else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
        self.xmlHttpReq = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
    }
    self.xmlHttpReq.open('POST', strURL, true);
    self.xmlHttpReq.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 
'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
    self.xmlHttpReq.onreadystatechange = function() {
        if (self.xmlHttpReq.readyState == 4) {
            updatepage(self.xmlHttpReq.responseText);
        }
    }
    self.xmlHttpReq.send(getquerystring());
}

function getquerystring() {
    var form     = document.forms['f1'];
    var word = form.word.value;
    qstr = 'w=' + escape(word);  // NOTE: no '?' before querystring
    return qstr;
}

function updatepage(str){
    document.getElementById("result").innerHTML = str;
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form name="f1">
        word: <input name="word" value="willBeInPOST" type="text"><br>
        url: <input name="url" value="ajaxCatch.php?foo=bar" type="text"><br>

  <!-- input value="Go" type="button" 
onclick='JavaScript:xmlhttpPost("/cgi-bin/simple-ajax-example.cgi")'></p -->
  <input value="Go" type="button" 
onclick="xmlhttpPost(document.forms[0].elements['url'].value)"></p>
  <div id="result"></div>
</form>
</body>
</html>




ajaxCatch.php
<html>
<head>
<title>Simple Ajax Example</title>
</head>
<body>
Test<br>
<?php
        foreach ($_GET as $key => $value) {
                $querystring .= $key."=".$value;
        }
        echo $querystring . "<br>";
        foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) {
                $strPost .= $key."=".$value;
        }
        echo $strPost . "<br>";
?>
</body>
</html>

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posted by ruffin at 11/14/2009 10:51:00 PM
0 comments
 
Thursday, November 12, 2009

Yes, Virginia, the Magic Mouse does work with 10.4

Look, long story short: I have newer Macs, wanted a Bluetooth mouse, and bought a Magic Mouse. I also still have a Mac Mini G4 with 10.4 and zero intentions of upgrading the old brick to 10.5. I tried the Magic Mouse with the G4 immediately after taking the Magic Mouse out of the plastic box and guess what? Not only does Apple's Magic Mouse work out of the box with 10.4, 10.4 recognizes right and left clicks. Not bad, huh?

Longer story: I've coveted the Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse 5000 for a long time. I found myself in the Office Depot this morning looking to buy a $15 Logitech USB mouse for my Toughbook and, in typical consumerist fashion, figured, "Why not throw that $15 at the Bluetooth model and use the old USB with your Toughbook?" This is the sort of thinking that gets you to buy a quad core iMac when you go in for a new Mini.

Still, I'll tell you why you don't throw in the $15 towards the Microsoft 5000. The 500 is still $50. For $20 more, I could grab a Magic Mouse and finally stop driving myself crazy grabbing scrollbars when I'm coding with my $20 Microsoft Blue USB special. I'd nearly talked myself into getting a new MacBook in large part for the multitouch trackpad, as having 360 degrees o' scroll would be wonderful. I was in the Best Buy just last week trying out the new MacBook. The touchpad really is wonderful.

So off to the Apple store to try the Magic Mouse out (and grab a Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter -- why I've left my old CRT monitor sitting in the corner for so long instead of running two monitors on my new Mini I have no idea). Scrolling with the Magic Mouse works great. There's not a goofy double-finger requirement to start scrolling, and it feels pretty natural. It's as if the entire mouse is a scroll wheel, finally delivering on the promise of the old Mighty Mouse with trackball. The mouse also has a good, solid feel to it.

I'm not sold on the swipe function yet, where two fingers allows you to move forward and back in your browser's history. The swipe in Safari is almost useful, I suppose. Swiping does a little less in iPhoto, and allows you to move between albums. In iPhoto, though, the albums are so close to one another, there's really no reason not to click on the next one normally, sans swipe. And if you have to swipe two or more albums over, well, there no time saved and the mouse is worthless. The two-finger swipe up on a mouse really isn't a particularly easy thing to do. When swiping, the mouse tends to move in ways your entire MacBook would not, and it's difficult to swipe anywhere other than the exact middle of the mouse. Swiping will, in other words, take some getting used to, which means I won't unless swiping starts doing something more useful.

Still, with Bluetooth and infinite-direction scroll combined the hope of a little more down the line (can I swipe into Expose with the next Magic Mouse update? Now we'd be getting somewhere), I splurged.

And so far, the best surprise is exactly what I wrote first: The Magic Mouse works with 10.4 out of the fancy smancy packaging, and it has right and left clicks by default. (Note: I think it's obvious that the Magic Mouse doesn't scroll on 10.4. It's more of a Magic Mouse there.) That's a really nice bonus for our G4 Mini, which only has two USB ports.

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posted by ruffin at 11/12/2009 11:53:00 AM
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