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

So my iPod Nano was AWOL for a while, and I broke down and bagged a Zen V Plus for $25 shipped thanks to a CNET Cheapskate deal (long since expired). Twice the capacity of my Nano (honestly, the extra space is great) with the ability to show video! Woohoo!

As if. Didn't find out until I got it that it didn't have any Mac OS support. There's an app called XNJB that marginally manages files, but it's been buggy and a real pain. I ended up duplicating what I wanted on there by dragging podcasts and music to a new folder from iTunes, and then would just add the whole duplicated smear to the Zen. Then XNJB would crash, I'd reboot, and try again. Nor does XNJB encode [short] movies for the player. After a while, I ended up using my Mactel Mini running Vista to sync with Windows Media Player, but I'm rarely running Vista.

Well, I bought that Toughbook a while back, and have been using it a bit. It does take a good, long drop well, and doesn't mind a little coffee spillige either. So I figure, what the heck, time to try the Zen V again, right? Still wrong. Creative has no Win2k drivers. Wtf?

Anyhow, thanks to a Creative support forum poster, we've got a good fix. Media Monkey runs sluggishly on the PIII 600 MHz Toughbook, but it does run. Finally, an iTunes-esque experience, podcast subscriptions and all. Not a bad solution, and the Zen is finally useful a short four months after I bought it. (Up until now, it still had podcasts, audiobooks, and songs from my Vista sync months ago.)

But anyone who wonders why iPods dominate the mp3 player world need look no farther than the Zen V Plus' interface -- which loses your place in a podcast if you pause too long or power down, and won't play, say, all rock genre songs (it's either All Tracks [All Genres, including podcasts] or you have to drill down to a specific rock genre artist. ?!!). And it's a cheap piece of plastic. And the little joystick sucks. And there's an extra, unnecessary click to start playing a song once you select it (you select a track with a click and get asked "Play or add to selected [list]?).

But if one did look further and, say, try to actually hook it up to a machine not running XP or Vista, well, forget it. Heck, Apple even keeps an old version of iTunes around for Win2k. Creative? Zilch. Without a random poster, some wacky driver download site that I checked for viruses, and a third party player, I got nuttin.

*sigh* /rant

Labels: creative, ipod

From AppleInsider | Microsoft's Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotage:

"On the iPhone, you sync your data with your PC/Mac via iTunes, and MobileMe in parallel syncs both the iPhone and the PC/Mac with 'the cloud" [at MobileMe]. If the cloud were to go down and everything lost (like I said, an almost completely inconceivable occurrence except by deliberate sabotage), your data would still be preserved on both your iPhone and your PC/Mac," a source explained.

'Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way on the Sidekick. The Sidekick was designed under the assumption that the cloud would always be available, and that your data would be safe there, so the device doesn't try very hard to preserve your data if you were to yank the battery or in the rare event of a phone OS crash/reboot. Instead, under these circumstances the device starts from an empty database and then reloads all of your data from the service when it comes back up." [emph mine -R]

So first, I guess we can say not only did MS screw Sidekick owners, so did the Danger folk that created a system without adequate backups. Ever since I started working with databases, I've said, "If you don't have your data three places, you don't have it at all." The iPhone apparently has this -- your home computer, the cloud (potentially), and your iPhone. Only a complete dope would have a cloud system where you could lose more than an hour's worth of data.

Honestly, what's happened to Microsoft? Can we directly connect this to Gates leaving? This, the Pink fiasco, the Xbox 360 build issues, Windows Vista (which wasn't that bad an OS, imo, but has serious flaws. "I know/worked with Win2k. You, sir, are no Windows 2000."), the .NET mess whose core really doesn't improve on the techs that came before it in any impressive way (no matter how much I like C#)... who is driving their bus?

I've thought for a while that Gmail was going to lose, say, three emails from 5% of their customers' accounts, and as people slowly discovered it, they were going to go ballistic. Never did I figure some cloud provider would screw up this badly. And if someone did, I would have expected Apple to do it, as they seem sometimes seem to be doing software dev on a shoestring and without the resources needed to match, well... it used to be "to match Microsoft," but I guess the king is dying a slow, painful death.

(The latest OS on a shoestring move... (Appleinsider.com):

Since Mac OS X 10.6 launched in late August, numerous reports online have detailed the issue, which is triggered by logging in and out of a guest account on a Snow Leopard machine. Upon logging back in to their regular account, users will find that it has been wiped of all data.

How does Apple get away with this crap? Microsoft has had some security issues, but they usually only hit those who weren't careful with their computers. The SQL Server worm sucked, but even then those that got hit hardest weren't particularly sharp developers -- or at least not deliberate ones. This Snow Leopard account erasure bug strikes without any warning. You could have a computer unattached to the Internet and lose everything. And Apple doesn't have a quick fix released two months later?

Shoe, meet string.)

Labels: apple, cloud, microsoft

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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Saturday, October 31, 2009
Only in America. And its economic zones. Is too much sleep making you tired? - CNN.com. The studies might be international, but the results are all too American, where by saying "American" I pull the colonizing move of meaning the USA. But if you habitually sleep excessively, it could be the result of an underlying health problem. And it could be cutting into your life span. "There's been at least two epidemiological studies to show that if people get less than five hours, or more than 10 hours of sleep, it increases their mortality," said Michael Breus, the clinical director of the sleep division at Southwest Spine and Sports in Scottsdale, Arizona. A 2007 Finnish study found that the mortality risks increased by about 20 percent for people who slept more than eight hours. That same year, a British study found that people who slept five hours or less and those who slept more than eight hours also faced increased risks. Another study showed that people who routinely slept more than eight hours a night had a greater chance of stroke than others with less sleep. I know of very few folk that need to get less sleep on a routine basis, but whaddya know, there must be enough that there's a market pitching treatment to them. "If you find you're sleeping a lot -- like more than nine hours on a regular basis, you need to talk to your physician, because that probably means you got poor quality sleep and that could be sleep apnea, narcolepsy or restless legs form of sleep disorder," said Breus. [emph of diagnoses mine] A recent This American Life show suggested that those who spent a great deal on lots of health care later in life did not necessarily have longer lives than those who didn't. Perhaps those who didn't were simply healthier. Perhaps the health system isn't smart enough to deduce good, long term rules for better health. I don't think the human has changed enough in 2000 years to warrant any flip-flops on medical advice for the whole. I'm reminded of my standard mantra on eating/dieting: "Eat whatever you want and then go running." I suspect that the suggestion that relaxing in general can kill -- the undercurrent of this "story" -- is the capital talking. posted by ruffin at 10/31/2009 11:38:00 AM
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Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Google Voice -- Is that Darth on the phone? I've been using Google Voice a bit recently. Having lots of phones go off when your number is called is neat... and having you cell go off at the same time helps you know a call's for you, even with a shared phone sans caller ID.[1] It's a nice way to make free long distance calls from the office and the home phone (yes, I still have a landline), but tonight, when I tried making a call around 8pm, it was the worst quality I've heard in quite a while. I couldn't understand what was going on on the other end, and even after re-placing the call, the quality still stunk. Later tonight, things went better, but I'm starting to figure out why Google is giving away free long distance. I'm betting they've determined how much bandwidth they're willing to dedicate to Voice and when call volume goes up, the compression goes up to match. If there are too many calls, well... But if I'm using an Android phone, which apparently integrates easily with Voice, and the call volume cuts out when I'm most likely to make a call, I'm not going to be a Voice fan for long. I ended up using Skype at four cents to connect and 2.1 cents per minute instead. And the connection with Skype has proven to be exceptionally clear recently -- much better than my Sprint cellphone that I just gave up on (and switched carriers). Even when I called around 9:30 tonight with Voice, the conversation often sounded like I was speaking to tech support in India, where you have the tinny, Darth Vader like voice and reverb at times. Still, Voice is pretty handy, and maybe calls in get priority. And maybe I'm extrapolating much too much from a couple of calls. Just thought I'd pass it along. [1] I'm still too dinosaur-like to see the advantage of caller ID. I mean, I enjoy having it on the cell phone, but willingly pay extra? That's crazy talk. Call waiting? Let them eat busy signals, like I did while trudging uphill both ways to make a call. Oh, and that's another good feature of Voice -- a free answering service. I imagine my messages are in the cloud somewhere being mined by Google for help with voice recognition (though can my callers' messages be used in any sustained manner (beyond simple transcription) if they haven't given their permission?), but it's better than my $10 Call Keeper answering machine at home. Seriously, no 9 volt battery and you won't remember jack? Goodness. Labels: Google, voice posted by ruffin at 10/28/2009 09:57:00 PM
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Seamonkey 2.0 released Seamonkey 2.0, the real successor to Netscape, is out. The good: * Doesn't seem slower. * Has the Firefox 3.5.4 engine. * Icons are much better (see pic) -- I can tell the difference between Composer and Mail windows now just by looking. ;^) * Apparently supports more Firefox add-ons The bad: * ProFontWindows is no longer displayed correctly in editable text boxes or for email composing; lots of pixel bleed. * Rendering speed a mixed bag. * Having some issues with pulling the contents of IMAP message from Gmail. I don't store anything locally with SeaMonkey. I wouldn't be surprised if that config wasn't tested so well, esp. since they're supposed to have changed IMAP in this version. I use the Monk b/c it's easier on my P3 600 MHz Toughbook -- less overhead when your browser and mail handler are using the same space. I also use it to test websites. I'll keep the site in Monkey and Google code/docs in Firefox, making reloading and testing an easy alt-tab affair rather than a ctrl-` fiasco. Overall, it's been a good browser for me. Admittedly, I'm still waiting for a search bar displayed by default. Can't have it all. Labels: browsers, seamonkey posted by ruffin at 10/28/2009 10:04:00 AM
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Thursday, October 22, 2009
Gmail ads -- influenced by sender? I've gotten some emails from someone recently whose gmail adverts aren't noticeably related to the content we're discussing or the sorts of ads I've seen in the past. They are, however, linked to the sorts of work the sender has done while programming in the past. Does the sender (and what some algorithm says about the sender) help determine ads? Do we project ye olde digital proverbial ethos with our emails linked to our online presence/brand as defined by some compilation corp? I mean, it's not a bad idea from the pov of profit if Google is doing this, but it seems close to an invasion of privacy. No reason everyone should be able to glean from ads connected to my emails that I, um, have read pretty much every codexically amalgamated word written by Frank Herbert [and much too many by his son, which, Dreamer of Dune excepted (barely), probably means any number above 1000]. EDIT: Now that I've replied, the adverts are gone. How the heck does Gmail decide when to show ads? Sometimes you just get offers to connect to Google Calendar or Maps, and sometimes there's nothing, though when it was just one email in the thread, I had probably twelve ads down the right hand side. Weird. Wow, busy day. Was going to upload the picture and the upload form for Blogger now has a pretty complicated "terms of service" which, though it's dated 2006, wasn't there last time I uploaded something. So we'll link offsite. Here's the text: In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. You mean services like Google Press' book on someone famous who just happened to be in a picture I uploaded? Wow. And so all your family snapshots are belong to multinational corporation. Make your time. Labels: evil, gmail posted by ruffin at 10/22/2009 10:12:00 AM
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The new iMac is your next Mini's monitor From Apple iMac Hands On - iMac - Gizmodo: The iMac has a new trick, too—its DisplayPort can turn it into a second screen, receiving video (and audio, pending availability of 3rd party adapters) input from DVD players or a MacBook. Apple said it was HDCP compliant so it should be fine for watching Blu-rays on, via the port, via a separate player. This is something I've wanted since the first iMac. Your monitor is one of the longest-living pieces of hardware you can buy, second only perhaps to a keyboard or mouse (post-USB), if you like them well enough. Buying a great monitor is certainly the best way to stretch your money. Putting the cash in up-front makes for years of increased real estate across a number of computers. Now this is still a fairly expensive monitor, even after subtracting the value of the iMac innards, but at least your purchase doesn't lose its value nearly as quickly as the old model. 17" G4 lamp iMacs are going for $100 on eBay now at times, and that monitor and stand alone is worth at least that much, I'd think, if you could hook a Mini to it. Even if this is, as Gizmodo give or take suggests, a way of getting BluRay coming through your iMac, now you'll be able to grab a Mac Mini in three years instead of tossing out the whole contraption. So the iMac is your next Mini's (or Windows tower's) monitor. And the 27" can be mounted on the wall. Perhaps it's your next TV. Ah, the beauty of input ports. Labels: apple posted by ruffin at 10/21/2009 09:28:00 AM
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Saturday, October 17, 2009
Free VCD App for Mac No idea why I didn't bump into this earlier. iVCD isn't bad for making VCDs on Macs, but still had a few rough edges. Just as nice, but $40 less, is Burn, a Free as in No Money app on sourceforge: Made your own movies and want to share them with family and friends? No problem. Burn can create a wide range of video discs. From VideoCD to DVD-Video discs. And DivX discs to fit more of your videos on a disc. Works well, and so far hasn't had any trouble converting my movie files from their original format to an mpeg for VCD. The only catch is making sure each of your movies is 64 minutes or less (I believe that's about the max VCD size. You might double check me). To make longer videos into VCD sized chunks, I'm using `splitmovie` from QTcoffee. Quicktime will split movies by itself if you pay for Pro, but I paid for Pro for QT 6 and am [neurotically] still a little upset that that didn't translate to 7, not even as a discount. So instead of firing up OS 9, I installed this QTCoffee mess. Here's the command line you'll need: `splitmovie -o originalMovie.mov -self-contained -no-fast-start -duration 64:00 vcdReadyMovieName.avi` And voila... you'll have files named "vcdReadyMovieName-1.avi" on up, as many as are needed. Kinda a dumb format, I know, but cheaper to burn two CDs than a DVD, and then you can tote movies to watch on most DVD players. There are some big blocks every so often, especially, it seems, when there's lots of black, but overall I don't get too broken up with the quality. posted by ruffin at 10/17/2009 07:03:00 PM
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Coal plants -- in the home Though this NYTimes.com article on Beijing's air pollution was somewhat fascinating: Every year, [a Chinese family interviewed] burned 1,200 one-kilogram coal bricks — one and one-third tons of coal — to stay warm. Until now: this month, Beijing’s city government gave the couple a two-thirds discount on the electric heater, and a laughably low nighttime rate for electric power, 3 cents a kilowatt-hour. Since 2004, Beijing has replaced 94,000 pot-bellied coal stoves with efficient electric heaters, eliminating the filth that came from chimneys burning roughly 100,000 tons of coal a year. I've admittedly thought about a wood stove, even if the only serious practical application would be to stay warm when the power was out. More interesting to me is that I believe we tend to forget how unclean the US was as it grew into an economic power. The advantage, from the perspective of environmentalists, perhaps, is that China and other econs slowly moving from ag to industrial and service econs, is that they can grab the low-hanging fruit from the collective experience we've already set down. There's less naivete, as exhibited by 1.) China's allowing families to depend on coal (in the words of the ole ball coach, it's "cheap and available") and 2.) China knowing that cheaper energy rates at different times of the day are both fairer and more normalizing than keeping rates flat. /shrug posted by ruffin at 10/17/2009 02:40:00 PM
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Thursday, October 15, 2009
Note to self: Non-square pixels AppleInsider \| Apple iMovie 8.0.5 update debuts new iFrame video format: "Digital camcorders began recording in MJPEG (Motion JPEG, a series of still photo captures) before moving to the better compression of the popular DV format. While DV recording allowed for high quality capture, it wasn't optimally designed for direct editing in QuickTime; it uses non-square pixels and is oriented toward TV resolutions and aspect ratios." posted by ruffin at 10/15/2009 12:38:00 PM
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Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Zen V Plus on Windows 2000 So my iPod Nano was AWOL for a while, and I broke down and bagged a Zen V Plus for $25 shipped thanks to a CNET Cheapskate deal (long since expired). Twice the capacity of my Nano (honestly, the extra space is great) with the ability to show video! Woohoo! As if. Didn't find out until I got it that it didn't have any Mac OS support. There's an app called XNJB that marginally manages files, but it's been buggy and a real pain. I ended up duplicating what I wanted on there by dragging podcasts and music to a new folder from iTunes, and then would just add the whole duplicated smear to the Zen. Then XNJB would crash, I'd reboot, and try again. Nor does XNJB encode [short] movies for the player. After a while, I ended up using my Mactel Mini running Vista to sync with Windows Media Player, but I'm rarely running Vista. Well, I bought that Toughbook a while back, and have been using it a bit. It does take a good, long drop well, and doesn't mind a little coffee spillige either. So I figure, what the heck, time to try the Zen V again, right? Still wrong. Creative has no Win2k drivers. Wtf? Anyhow, thanks to a Creative support forum poster, we've got a good fix. Media Monkey runs sluggishly on the PIII 600 MHz Toughbook, but it does run. Finally, an iTunes-esque experience, podcast subscriptions and all. Not a bad solution, and the Zen is finally useful a short four months after I bought it. (Up until now, it still had podcasts, audiobooks, and songs from my Vista sync months ago.) But anyone who wonders why iPods dominate the mp3 player world need look no farther than the Zen V Plus' interface -- which loses your place in a podcast if you pause too long or power down, and won't play, say, all rock genre songs (it's either All Tracks [All Genres, including podcasts] or you have to drill down to a specific rock genre artist. ?!!). And it's a cheap piece of plastic. And the little joystick sucks. And there's an extra, unnecessary click to start playing a song once you select it (you select a track with a click and get asked "Play or add to selected [list]?). But if one did look further and, say, try to actually hook it up to a machine not running XP or Vista, well, forget it. Heck, Apple even keeps an old version of iTunes around for Win2k. Creative? Zilch. Without a random poster, some wacky driver download site that I checked for viruses, and a third party player, I got nuttin. sigh /rant Labels: creative, ipod posted by ruffin at 10/14/2009 09:39:00 PM
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Tuesday, October 13, 2009
What's a data cloud on a clear day? Microsoft screws Sidekick From AppleInsider \| Microsoft's Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotage: "On the iPhone, you sync your data with your PC/Mac via iTunes, and MobileMe in parallel syncs both the iPhone and the PC/Mac with 'the cloud" [at MobileMe]. If the cloud were to go down and everything lost (like I said, an almost completely inconceivable occurrence except by deliberate sabotage), your data would still be preserved on both your iPhone and your PC/Mac," a source explained. 'Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way on the Sidekick. The Sidekick was designed under the assumption that the cloud would always be available, and that your data would be safe there, so the device doesn't try very hard to preserve your data if you were to yank the battery or in the rare event of a phone OS crash/reboot. Instead, under these circumstances the device starts from an empty database and then reloads all of your data from the service when it comes back up." [emph mine -R] So first, I guess we can say not only did MS screw Sidekick owners, so did the Danger folk that created a system without adequate backups. Ever since I started working with databases, I've said, "If you don't have your data three places, you don't have it at all." The iPhone apparently has this -- your home computer, the cloud (potentially), and your iPhone. Only a complete dope would have a cloud system where you could lose more than an hour's worth of data. Honestly, what's happened to Microsoft? Can we directly connect this to Gates leaving? This, the Pink fiasco, the Xbox 360 build issues, Windows Vista (which wasn't that bad an OS, imo, but has serious flaws. "I know/worked with Win2k. You, sir, are no Windows 2000."), the .NET mess whose core really doesn't improve on the techs that came before it in any impressive way (no matter how much I like C#)... who is driving their bus? I've thought for a while that Gmail was going to lose, say, three emails from 5% of their customers' accounts, and as people slowly discovered it, they were going to go ballistic. Never did I figure some cloud provider would screw up this badly. And if someone did, I would have expected Apple to do it, as they seem sometimes seem to be doing software dev on a shoestring and without the resources needed to match, well... it used to be "to match Microsoft," but I guess the king is dying a slow, painful death. (The latest OS on a shoestring move... (Appleinsider.com): Since Mac OS X 10.6 launched in late August, numerous reports online have detailed the issue, which is triggered by logging in and out of a guest account on a Snow Leopard machine. Upon logging back in to their regular account, users will find that it has been wiped of all data. How does Apple get away with this crap? Microsoft has had some security issues, but they usually only hit those who weren't careful with their computers. The SQL Server worm sucked, but even then those that got hit hardest weren't particularly sharp developers -- or at least not deliberate ones. This Snow Leopard account erasure bug strikes without any warning. You could have a computer unattached to the Internet and lose everything. And Apple doesn't have a quick fix released two months later? Shoe, meet string.) Labels: apple, cloud, microsoft posted by ruffin at 10/13/2009 08:07:00 AM
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Sunday, October 04, 2009
Combining multiple images into a single pdf with Preview How to combine multiple jpg scans into one PDF: In Preview I just drag all images into the sidebar, then select all in the sidebar, and print to PDF. Works great for me. Labels: problem solved posted by ruffin at 10/04/2009 07:37:00 PM
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