Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2018

Big news:
File-sharing service Kazaa has agreed to pay record labels a $100 million settlement for allowing tracks to be illegally swapped through its service.

Are you kidding me? And how much were those kids fined again before the Pepsi/iTunes commercial? Can you imagine how many millions if not billions if not... of copyrighted files, music, movies, etc, via Kazaa? And they shell out $100 and call things square?

from article: At its peak it had 4.2 million simultaneous users worldwide.

Okay, easily billions of files.

$100 is better than a kick in the face, and I suppose Kazaa nearly managed to make what they did debately legal by moving to whatever island it was, but let's face it, this is nearly a buy-out by the "record labels" for Kazaa to stop it.

Wonder what this'll mean for Gnutella usage? Is there another player in P2P file trading more popular than LimeWire? These things got so daggum trojan-ridden that I stopped even keeping up with them.

Topic 2:
Ever wish you could run faster? Be smarter? Know how to fly planes? Is the Air Force denying you a pilot's spot because of bad eyesight? Ah, it's time for you to try out Wish I were.... It won't solve any of those personal problems, but it will let your Classic Mac solve similar problems of its own.

The "Wish I were..." control panel provides a method for a system to identify its hardware as another hardware type, via the Gestalt "mach" selector.

The reason for creating this control panel was to assist individuals who install clock chippers, especially to Power Macs. Some applications (for example MachTen) use the response from the Gestalt "mach" selector to determine a Macintosh's hardware type, and thus perform run-time configuration. Clock chipped machines may respond with a value that does not correspond to an existing machine (for example, a clock chipped PowerMac 6100 response as a 6100/80), and some applications may be confused.

This utility can be used to force Gestalt to respond with an acceptable value, and thus the application will function correctly.

Topic 3:
In other news, Thunderbird on OS X is pretty second rate software. Lots of neat features (search is very good so far), and relatively solid, but man oh man does the interface stink. Buttons don't line up, keyboard shortcuts bork, and I feel like I'm running an app that doesn't belong on my platform. Great work getting it here, and a wonderful mail app for the price, but I still only use it for fringe addresses that I want to keep separate from Mail.app rather than consider it ready to be my primary application. Must I remind people of the Napkin Look and Feel?

from here:
Once you've got IMAP set up on your laptop, you can travel the world knowing that all those messages are sitting safely on the server, accessible from any Mac, at any time you want.

Ignoring for now great advice like, "If your ISP doesn’t offer IMAP, you can find a list of providers who do," the part of this article that catches my eye is the idea that using IMAP means you can get your email from "any Mac" rather than "any computer or OS created in the last decade or so." Granted, this is MacWorld and the fellow writing is billed as "author of the e-book Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger." He also starts the article by saying, "you use standard POP e-mail accounts and more than one Mac..." This is fanlit, and we can easily read "Mac" as the replacement for "computer" in here.

How many times have you seen such a substitution in a third-party e- or maga-zine for, say, a Dell or Alienware? Rarely. But why shouldn't you? Why hasn't one of these groups done more than simply rebrand IE but offer their own usability suite/Internet utilities? It really wouldn't be that hard for Dell or HP or Gateway to team up with some software development house and create a tabbed version of IE pre-7 and a from-scratch mail handler that kicks Outlook Express off of the desktop.

They could be Windows boxes, but still provide users the "Dell/WhatHaveYou Experience." Nothing's really requiring these co's to wait for Microsoft to change the experience.

Or is there? It seems like most of the time somebody does try to push a new utility suite, they start with Linux. Why? Just because Mozilla/Netscape failed to wrest the desktop away from IE and Outlook?

What hardware companies need to understand is that they already own the desktops of their machines. Oh, I know about Microsoft getting peeved when people take the MSN link off of there, but there's enough anti-MS sentiment around now I really can't see that being a problem any longer. Even if a Moz-like suite can't stay commercially viable (though Eudora still seems to do okay, if not nearly as well as it once did, etc), no reason it can be made in a way that it sells more hardware.

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 Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Friday, July 28, 2006
MSN Messenger Protocol - General - Connections I've been sifting through the MSN protocol thanks to a thread over on lowendmac.com's Vintage Mac list. The docs at the hypthetic.org site are actually pretty good reading. No more errors in grammar than one would expect, and though I [as one might expect for someone who has done this jive as long as I have] already knew most of the character encoding info, he does a good job breaking it down for the proverbial layhuman. One thing that I did learn was a good way to figure out if you need to "escape" a char in an http: MSN Messenger Protocol - General - Connections: Where URL-encoding applies, the RFC says that everything except numbers, letters, and the special characters $-_. !*'(),;/?:@=& should be URL-encoded. In practice, you need only encode those characters whose hexadecimal value is 20 or below (i.e. space and below), and the '%' character, which has a hexadecimal value of 25. However, you may encode any other character if you wish. Now that's easy to remember and implement. if you're interested in what ASCII & Unicode are, that is a good place to go find out. posted by ruffin at 7/28/2006 10:36:00 PM
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Java Technology Forums - target 1.1 nevermore ? Java Technology Forums - target 1.1 nevermore ?: With the 1.5 compiler the default source version is 1.5. So if you only specify 'target 1.1' then you are effectively saying 'source 1.5 target 1.1' But one cannot generate code for a 1.1 jvm from 1.5 source. Therefore, in order to get this to work with the 1.5 compiler, you need to explicitly set the source code version by saying: `javac -source 1.3 -target 1.1` Hopefully this means I'll be able to target my StarMax with jive I compile on my iBook with OS X. We'll see. posted by ruffin at 7/28/2006 07:43:00 PM
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MD5 Message Digest Algorithm for Implementing Digitial Signatures Ah, finally. I've stumbled over a reference implmentation of MD5 that seems it should work fine with Java 1.1.x. It's sitting on freeVBcode.com, a strange place for Java jive, and lives in a zip with VB and a dll in C. Still, seems to work just fine. MD5 Message Digest Algorithm for Implementing Digitial Signatures: MD5 Message Digest Algorithm for Implementing Digitial Signatures Version Compatibility: Visual Basic 6 [but also Java] More information: Various ports of the MD5 RSA Reference Implementation. This includes a VB Native Class, a C DLL (with VB wrapper), and a java port. Really doesn't seem all that complicated a task, now that I've finally bothered to look up the RFC and this code. Regardless, done and done. posted by ruffin at 7/28/2006 05:00:00 PM
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Listen up I've always been a little depressed by my iBooks' tiny speakers. They really don't get very loud. Good enough to listen to music in a quiet office, but not even quite loud enough to support a good Skype conversation in a simliar context. When I've read the iBook speakers slammed in reviews, I thought I understood. I didn't. I just heard someone watching a South Park clip off of YouTube last night on a 15" AlBook. Wow. Those were real speakers, as in you could give "filling the room" a shot. Why in the world are the ones in the iBook so much sorrier? To preserve battery life by ensuring noone even has the facilities to burn through the power? In any event, if you have the iBook and haven't heard the others, well, it may be much worse than you thought! posted by ruffin at 7/28/2006 12:54:00 PM
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Thursday, July 27, 2006
Wish I Were... Playing Catchup! Big news: File-sharing service Kazaa has agreed to pay record labels a $100 million settlement for allowing tracks to be illegally swapped through its service. Are you kidding me? And how much were those kids fined again before the Pepsi/iTunes commercial? Can you imagine how many millions if not billions if not... of copyrighted files, music, movies, etc, via Kazaa? And they shell out $100 and call things square? from article: At its peak it had 4.2 million simultaneous users worldwide. Okay, easily billions of files. $100 is better than a kick in the face, and I suppose Kazaa nearly managed to make what they did debately legal by moving to whatever island it was, but let's face it, this is nearly a buy-out by the "record labels" for Kazaa to stop it. Wonder what this'll mean for Gnutella usage? Is there another player in P2P file trading more popular than LimeWire? These things got so daggum trojan-ridden that I stopped even keeping up with them. Topic 2: Ever wish you could run faster? Be smarter? Know how to fly planes? Is the Air Force denying you a pilot's spot because of bad eyesight? Ah, it's time for you to try out Wish I were.... It won't solve any of those personal problems, but it will let your Classic Mac solve similar problems of its own. The "Wish I were..." control panel provides a method for a system to identify its hardware as another hardware type, via the Gestalt "mach" selector. The reason for creating this control panel was to assist individuals who install clock chippers, especially to Power Macs. Some applications (for example MachTen) use the response from the Gestalt "mach" selector to determine a Macintosh's hardware type, and thus perform run-time configuration. Clock chipped machines may respond with a value that does not correspond to an existing machine (for example, a clock chipped PowerMac 6100 response as a 6100/80), and some applications may be confused. This utility can be used to force Gestalt to respond with an acceptable value, and thus the application will function correctly. Topic 3: In other news, Thunderbird on OS X is pretty second rate software. Lots of neat features (search is very good so far), and relatively solid, but man oh man does the interface stink. Buttons don't line up, keyboard shortcuts bork, and I feel like I'm running an app that doesn't belong on my platform. Great work getting it here, and a wonderful mail app for the price, but I still only use it for fringe addresses that I want to keep separate from Mail.app rather than consider it ready to be my primary application. Must I remind people of the Napkin Look and Feel? posted by ruffin at 7/27/2006 06:27:00 PM
0 comments
Friday, July 14, 2006
MS, Bill, & Melinda Are there any connections between the corporate culture at Microsoft, say, five to ten years ago and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's today? posted by ruffin at 7/14/2006 02:24:00 PM
0 comments
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Macworld UK - 'Boot Camp' halo to drive Apple future - analyst from macwork.co.uk: Apple's future technology to enable Windows to boot on an Intel-powered Mac seems set to drive market share for the company, according to Piper Jaffray. The analysts expect Mac sales to rise - perhaps by the end of the year, a report claims. The conclusions are based on chats with 42 future PC shoppers. These talks showed that 8.3 per cent of those in the market for a new machine may turn to Mac - with Boot Camp the deciding factor. Okay, we've all looked the other way with iPods, in spite of the fact that I imagine 90% of them have some pirated content somewhere on their drives or flash cards. That's really no worse than a mix tape in a Walkman, and I suppose the iTunes Music Store is, in a sense, Apple's way of giving back to the record industry like that surcharge everyone pays on blank tapes. They sell iPods with pirated content and pay for that content by giving the companies a hefty share of the 99¢ iTMS track prices. Seriously, though, how many people are buying Macs so that they can also go out and spend, what, $200 on WinXP? Okay, a number of people likely are, as the people I've seen in Apple stores are, well, more affluent than your typical Best Buy customer. But many aren't, and they're going to be playing Windows using a "borrowed" registration number. I imagine when Vista comes out and gaming companies -- or, more likely, DirectX -- stop supporting Win2k and XP, those Mac buyers are going to feel a bit burned. Assuming, of course, that we're talking about the very small window of time Vista isn't cracked. In any event, once again, Apple hardware sales are going to benefit directly from pirated bytes, and nobody's talking about it. posted by ruffin at 7/11/2006 11:23:00 AM
0 comments
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Dell and mail handlers from here: Once you've got IMAP set up on your laptop, you can travel the world knowing that all those messages are sitting safely on the server, accessible from any Mac, at any time you want. Ignoring for now great advice like, "If your ISP doesn’t offer IMAP, you can find a list of providers who do," the part of this article that catches my eye is the idea that using IMAP means you can get your email from "any Mac" rather than "any computer or OS created in the last decade or so." Granted, this is MacWorld and the fellow writing is billed as "author of the e-book Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger." He also starts the article by saying, "you use standard POP e-mail accounts and more than one Mac..." This is fanlit, and we can easily read "Mac" as the replacement for "computer" in here. How many times have you seen such a substitution in a third-party e- or maga-zine for, say, a Dell or Alienware? Rarely. But why shouldn't you? Why hasn't one of these groups done more than simply rebrand IE but offer their own usability suite/Internet utilities? It really wouldn't be that hard for Dell or HP or Gateway to team up with some software development house and create a tabbed version of IE pre-7 and a from-scratch mail handler that kicks Outlook Express off of the desktop. They could be Windows boxes, but still provide users the "Dell/WhatHaveYou Experience." Nothing's really requiring these co's to wait for Microsoft to change the experience. Or is there? It seems like most of the time somebody does try to push a new utility suite, they start with Linux. Why? Just because Mozilla/Netscape failed to wrest the desktop away from IE and Outlook? What hardware companies need to understand is that they already own the desktops of their machines. Oh, I know about Microsoft getting peeved when people take the MSN link off of there, but there's enough anti-MS sentiment around now I really can't see that being a problem any longer. Even if a Moz-like suite can't stay commercially viable (though Eudora still seems to do okay, if not nearly as well as it once did, etc), no reason it can be made in a way that it sells more hardware. posted by ruffin at 7/09/2006 05:49:00 PM
0 comments
Friday, July 07, 2006
Google Groups : comp.software.shareware.authors I thought this was particularly interesting advice to shareware programmers: > Hi Group, > I'm getting more and more tired of CNet (download.com) and Tucows, and then > my big question is: Common answer is CNet and forget about Tucows. Build a community is the best now, not a download site. Of couse this requires that you have a 110% product, something many shareware authors do not. (bold emph mine) This is one thing I've noticed about many successful shareware applications. The companies seem more interested with some strange appeal o' pathos than with being the undisputable best or, when they often are very well written, to be something that makes a lot of economical sense. Note Delicious Monster's Delicious Library. Well named, nice looking site, very "sexy" product, whatever that means, but do I really need to pay $30 to have my computer keep track of what DVDs I own by reading barcodes through iSight? Yet Delicious Library has popped up time and again as a great app for OS X. I mean, don't get me wrong. Some people might love something like this. But the app's play has far exceeded its strange niche -- people using OS X who have scadzillions of DVDs in need of an organizer on their computer. This isn't iTunes, that both organizes and stores and makes accessible your CDs. This is just a list of 'em that may or may not link up with your shelf space. I don't get it. I mean, I do. It's exactly what the usenet poster talked about in the quote, above. It's about community, not product or usefulness ["usefulness at large", let's say]. And if this blog tells you anything by the way I've not pimped it at all, it should tell you I'm not yet interested in building and maintaining a digital community simply for the sake of sales. posted by ruffin at 7/07/2006 09:21:00 AM
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Thursday, July 06, 2006
System 6 vs. Today's PC -- Guess who wins? A cute read: For creative writing, System 6 is a real contender. In two real-world performance tests, time-to-ready and time-to-open, System 6 Macs match or trump a modern PC [3 GHz Pentium 4HT processor, 512 MB of RAM, runs Windows 2000 Pro with Word 2002]. posted by ruffin at 7/06/2006 03:18:00 PM
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Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam Welp, I'm losing again. Perhaps my email addresses have simply become popular enough now that I'm getting more spam, so the 1% that gets through represents a larger count now. I believe, though, that the junk filters of Mail.app & Entourage are no longer able to keep up. Not that it's difficult -- I believe I could regexp my way out of 80% of the new slip-throughs looking for variations on Cialis and sexual[ly]. I believe Thunderbird has an extension that will let me do that sort of thing, but I'm not quite yet annoyed enough to give up hope my current apps' filters will learn what's going on and put in the time to learn a new application. At this point, however, I'm starting to get ready to make a move somewhere. (Of course the biting issue is that I'd rather learn how to make the filter than how to use another. I'm tired of getting fish and never the pole/net/whatever. If someone could get me six months of free time, I think I could make the perfect mail handler [for me, at least].) posted by ruffin at 7/04/2006 10:27:00 AM
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Sunday, July 02, 2006
CRAZY UTILITIES GIVEN "AS-IS"; USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!! Another app added to my CRAZY UTILITIES GIVEN "AS-IS"; USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!! page. This time, a crappy util to help me automate OCR-ing scans. I call it... the OCRAutomator! Description stolen from my Wack Apps page verbatim, misspellings and all. The app is free and, as always, used only at the user's risk. OCRAutomator I OCR more scans than I'd like to recall, and I tend to do it using Abbyy Reader Sprint 5.0, the pack-in software that came with my scanner. Overall, the software does very well, but it's difficult to OCR more than one scanned image at a time, which is much more efficent imo than scanning using Sprint. Luckily Abbyy Reader Sprint 5.0 has a 'hidden' (okay, I'll admit I didn't read the instructions) command-line interface. If you 'Sprint C:\file1.jpg C:\myFolder\anotherFile.jpg', Sprint will OCR each one into a file (rtf or txt) of your choosing. Very nice, and makes batching possible. Unfortunately creating batch files is a pain for me, so I finally, after a few years, broke down and created a VB app that'll do it for me. Open the app, ensure the opening line points to Sprint.exe, select the files you want to scan (mouse required, I'm afraid), and let 'er rip. Once again, enjoy AT YOUR OWN RISK. This application will likely wack anything important on your computer and transmit your credit card numbers to Tony Blair. Not real sure why I singled out Tony there. Decent for a day's hack, though. ALL NEW CODE. posted by ruffin at 7/02/2006 10:11:00 PM
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Review: Apple's MacBook Pro - OSNews.com Now here's a plus for the new MacBooks I'd overlooked (from OSNews): TH: Running Windows on the MacBook Pro is a breeze. It's not something I personally need, but the ability to run Windows (or Linux) natively or via Parallels is a welcome addition for anyone contemplating a switch. No no, not running Windows. That I understand. I've been ignoring how useful that could be, and how I could trash my other computers if I upgraded the iBook. What I missed is that it'd be running Linux. Not just Linux, mind you, but x86 Linux with support out the wahzoo and all the apps you'd want precompiled. I've got Yellow Dog on my old iBook and mess with it occasionally, but it seems to lag a bit in performance and compatibility. If I wanted everything to be 10% more difficult, I'd use Mac OS, not Linux on PowerPC. Luckily I've not got the budget for a new 'book, so I'm sticking with the iBook G4, but that is an awfully nice bit about the MacBooks I'd completely spaced on. posted by ruffin at 7/02/2006 01:55:00 AM
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Saturday, July 01, 2006
Macworld UK - Broadband speeds restrict iTunes movie plans? Here's an article from MacWorld UK on a reason why there are no movies to download from iTunes just yet: Apple's director of QuickTime Product Marketing, Frank Casanova, told Technology Review that this is 'one of the reasons why there's no activity taking place in movie downloads'. With a 1.5GB movie file 'you could request a movie from Netflix [which delivers DVDs by mail] before this download gets to you,' he explains. I believe what that tells us is that the movie producers, for some reason, don't want to let out movies unless they have pretty high picture quality. Certainly they could release movies that are relatively pixelated at higher resolutions that download quickly, and to me that would help keep the iTunes movies from competing with DVD, much less something like BluRay, the technology that brings you The Fifth Element for just $25! The second take-home is that this tells us the number of pirates out there swapping movies at qualities the movie industry cares about are so small to be not worth pursuing commercially. If we refuse to sell them to people who are spending the time & bandwidth, well, can that really be all that large a slice of the pie? I guess the solution is better compression and slightly relaxed quality standards from movie co's. Either that or it's all a smokescreen to help Apple save face that says the industry won't deal. All too often technical excuses of relatively trivial, even irrational small problems are used to cover a political/cultural issue. posted by ruffin at 7/01/2006 08:55:00 AM
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