I own a simple MP3 player by a German company called dnt, the player model is called "Fun 256". It doesn't have any fancy features, doesn't play OGG, and occasionally chokes when presented with high bit rates, but it's adequate for my needs.
When I started using iTunes this spring I made up for its lack of generic player support by using a combination of a dynamic playlist, the "Copy files to folder" AppleScript from Doug's Scripts for iTunes, and an AppleScript that marks selected tracks as played. This way I could fill up the player with songs that I haven't listened to during the last couple of weeks, which is a rough imitation of iTunes' iPod integration functionality.
As I started using this I found that the player would accept significantly less than the advertised 256 MB of files, which isn't that surprising, considering most players keep their software on the same storage as the music. So I adapted the size of the dynamic playlist several times, making it generate a shorter and shorter playlist. At some point not too long ago, after having another copy error from a large playlist, I decided on a whim to make the playlist size sufficiently small so that it would fit in all cases (I was too lazy to open the shell or Finder to check for the actual size of available space), and so I set the playlist size down to only 230 MB.
This anecdote in itself doesn't say much; the above process of adapting the playlist size usually happened spontaneously, and without giving it much of a thought, so I can't say if the available space on the flash drive did indeed shrink. The comparatively large difference between advertised and available space is a but curious though.
Today I had another instance of a generated dynamic playlist being too large to fit on the drive; the AppleScript gave an error when it attempted to copy the last track of the playlist. After cleaning the drive of all files I checked the available space, which was only 100 KB under the 230 MB mark. And now I'm getting curious.
Read on for an assessment.
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If you enjoy reading Ayn Rand, and are thinking about learning some key facts of her "philosophy of Objectivism": don't.
I read "The Fountainhead" last year, at the recommendation of a friend. Only a small number of pages into the book I was already hooked, and finished the whole 700-odd pages in the course of three or four days. I enjoyed it immensely and still count it among my top five favorite books of all time.
As the back pages of the book were filled with quotes about Rand's Objectivism I became curious and consulted the Web.
The term Objectivism is not derived from objectivity, but rather from objective, as in aim, goal. Objectivism is a collection of ideas on the character of success. One example of such an idea is that you need to free yourself from the burden of other people in order to achieve greatness, which of course everybody can agree on who has ever been part of a committee. But Rand takes it much further and makes her collection of ideas a basic premise for a successful life.
In modern terms, Ayn Rand would be the ultimate Getting Things Done author, except that she has no intentions to be satisfied halfway through. Why build a collection of tips when you can just as well build an ideology?
Just to make myself clear: I'm fairly indifferent towards the actual ideas of Objectivism. It's a nice collection of insights into human nature, slightly twisted and elitist, but fine by me. But knowing the subject makes you aware of what it is that Rand is actually writing about, of what drives her plot.
I have just started another of her very popular books, "Atlas Shrugged", and while I'm only on page 50 (of 1100) I believe I won't be able to enjoy this book as much as the last one; Objectivism has spoiled it for me. I simply can't shake the idea that she's not so much interested in writing a great novel as she is interested in telling the world about her ideas.
This novel starts off as a one-dimensional and very one-sided vessel of propaganda, including ridicule for non-believers. Virtually every character in "Atlas Shrugged" seems to serve Rand as a showcase to get her point across.
There is nothing wrong with basing a novel on a philosophy. But I've grown up in the 80s and 90s when advertising was forced into us from every angle, and this has reflected on my attitude towards its methods. This novel is but a printed form of televangelism.
It doesn't help that the book came with a brochure of the Rand foundation, which appears to be a crazy mixture of book club, cult, and self-help seminar...
A short excerpt of current news, from my perspective.
Welcome to the next corporate Internet boom.
I've made some smaller changes to the blog's RSS feed; depending on your aggregator this could cause a little inconvenience, as blog entries might show up as duplicates, or because old entries might reappear as unread.
The changes I made remove all trailing "index.html" filenames from permalinks and entry GUIDs, which means links are now cleaner and less dependent on the blog software (I might be switching to TextPattern in the near future), and it also makes it easier for me to read my logfiles.
This will be the last time this happens, I promise (*knocks on wood*).
Now I only have to find out how to implement an equivalent URL cleansing of trackback requests.
I already gave a basic description of Pandora in my previous article, "Finally: An Alternative to Last.fm". Brief recapitulation: Pandora is a music streaming service that lets you control the kind of music that is played. You can define "stations" by bookmarking song titles or artist names, and the site then plays music that shares similar properties with your selected songs. In contrast to Last.fm, which is a social network, Pandora builds on a concept of rich metadata to find relationships between individual songs.
This time I had the opportunity to actually use the system, so this should make an article more focused on experience and less on speculation... I'll try my best. Executive summary: I'll be dropping Last.fm and will use Pandora instead. It's a really great service.
Read on for my review, which turned out to be the longest article I have yet written for this blog.
Full entry
Tom Conrad has apparently just presented "Pandora" at Bar Camp. Scoble quotes an email from Tom with a short description of the service:
"Pandora is a "music discovery service" designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It works like this: you give us the name of an artist or song and we instantly create a "station" that plays songs that share musical characteristics with the artist/song you entered. From there you can fine-tune the station to your tastes by giving us feedback on the individual tracks we play. You can make up to 100 unique stations that play all kinds of music - Pop, Rock, Jazz, Electronica, Hip Hop, old, new, big names, and small acts -- over 300,000 songs from more than 10,000 artists. Pandora is entirely web-based; you won't need to install any software to start listening."
...in short, it's the alternative for Last.fm that I've been waiting for. Judging from this description it is targeted towards very similar usage patterns, but has a slightly different focus. And it arrives just in time.
Last.fm had some major usability problems that prevented me using it more regularly. The major drawback of Last.fm was the slow server that liked to choke randomly when loading pages -- no wonder they were having these performance issues, they were serving some pretty complex pages. This seems to be adressed by their recent relaunch which involved a major overhaul of the site, but which also introduced a requirement of questionable benefit: you now need to install a player software to use it. This alone means Last.fm suddenly stopped being interesting to me. I'd like to choose my own tools, thank you.
Read on for an initial assessment of the concept, drawing from experiences I had with two friends while working on a remarkably similar project a couple of years ago.
Full entry
While writing another bug report for Apple's OS X feedback page I used the dictionary popup to look up the word "noticeable" (I always forget if it is written with or without an "e"), and found not only that I had gotten it right this time, but also that Apple has added a very nice description of when to use this term and when others are more appropriate.
I use the dictionary popup all the time, but I've never seen this type of content: an introduction to better English language usage. Very nice!
Here's the text:
noticeable
adjective
easily seen or noticed; clear or apparent
• noteworthy
THE RIGHT WORD conspicuous, noticeable, outstanding, prominent, remarkable, striking
A scratch on someone's face might be noticeable, while a scar that runs from cheekbone to chin would be conspicuous. When it comes to describing the things that attract our attention, noticeable means readily noticed or unlikely to escape observation (: a noticeable facial tic; a noticeable aversion to cocktail parties), while conspicuous implies that the eye (or mind) cannot miss it ( | her absence was conspicuous).
Use prominent when you want to describe something that literally or figuratively stands out from its background (: a prominent nose; a prominent position on the committee). It can also apply to persons or things that stand out so clearly they are generally known or recognized ( | a prominent citizen).
Someone or something that is outstanding rises above or beyond others and is usually superior to them (: an outstanding student).
Remarkable applies to anything that is noticeable because it is extraordinary or exceptional (: remarkable blue eyes).
Striking is an even stronger word, used to describe something so out of the ordinary that it makes a deep and powerful impression on the observer's mind or vision (: a striking young woman over six feet tall).
How about this for a definition?
It's just a small event, but their approach to invitations bugs me a lot. I was already wondering how O'Reilly could keep up their seemingly altruistic behavior on such a massive scale, to the point where they're now more talked about for their community involvements and conferences than for their books. Apparently they couldn't.
It should have been clear that their main interests are not simply to advance technology, to help create new ideas, but that these are just tools to earn money. I simply forgot about that, and liked them a bit more for their apparent openness and enthusiasm. For the apparent attitude of leaving behind the old economy, and for creating a place where ideas are exchanged for the sake of ideas.
Well that has changed; at FooCamp, ideas are exchanged for the sake of money, and first of all O'Reilly's money. When I now read Tim O'Reilly's list of "cuts" of the invitation process I get really pissed off. Every step of his description reads like blatant old capitalism, hidden under a guise of altruism.
Maybe I'm just annoyed because I dislike such quotas. I believe when you select all the guys that generate large numbers on your spreadsheet that you're missing out on important stuff. I have the suspicion that innovative ideas and monopolies don't play very well together.
I loved the Fuckparade, and I welcome the idea of BarCamp. I'm all for the opposition.
See also: "I’m not a FOO anymore either…", "Why I'm not going to Foo Camp", and a gazillion other blogs.
I'm on constant lookout for a better system to maintain this website -- currently it's a rather loose mixture of MovableType 2.6.x, custom PHP, and individual HTML pages, and it really shows. There is more inconsistency that I would like to have, and it is not easy to maintain -- every change to the layout requires modifying several template files, and modifying twice as many HTML files. Add to this the fact that some pages require different layouts (which sometimes involves custom style sheets). In short, it's a mess.
I'd like to have an integrated solution, and it wouldn't hurt if I had to code less and could still maintain the same flexibility, but there seems to be no perfect solution. I'm definitely not willing to install a complete CMS like Typo3 or Zope; these are more flexible, but involve too much work. And most of those full-fledged CMSs are really, really ugly. I rather like the solutions that have come out of the blogger "scene" -- I loved MovableType for the simplicity and design when I started using it, and currently WordPress and TextPattern look really interesting, and their interfaces and documentation are mostly beautiful. But I'm not sure if they can be flexible enough -- after all, this blog is only one part of the whole site.
One required feature: I need to have the flexibility to add individual pages outside the weblog that can also have a different layout than the rest, maybe even competely different HTML code, but that are still part of the CMS, and that don't require me to build a custom page template just for this single page.
MovableType 2.x certainly does not provide this feature. (I havent looked at newer versions since their license changed with the last big version jump). WordPress has a concept of individual "pages" that are not part of a timeline, but these are also template-based. WordPress is still targeted towards weblogs.
TextPattern looks like a good contender, and it has interesting CMS features that make it quite flexible; but TextPattern has another problem: it messes with your URLs. It basically changes the behavior of the web server.
I just found this by surfing Jon Hick's site, and I will use his site to give you an example -- I hope he doesn't mind. (He is using TextPattern for the whole site, and he is certainly using it for more than his blog, so his site is a good entry point to watch TextPattern at work.)
Go to any random entry in his journal, e.g. his last one: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/rss-feed-problems. If you look at this URL you can see that TextPattern does make it possible to define clean URLs that do not contain article IDs, script names etc. But at the same time the URL handling mechanism is deeply flawed, which you can see when you arbitrarily modify the last part of the URL; e.g., delete the last character of the URL which changes it to http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/rss-feed-problem, and then load the page -- it doesn't give you an error, but loads the journal index instead!
What happened to returning HTTP errors? What's wrong with good old 404? Maybe I'm overreacting, but this alone makes TextPattern unusable to me. You need to give an error if someone requests a wrong URL. It's one thing to try to correct a user error, but it's another to silently ignore broken input and simply show the default page. And how can you now keep track of broken links?
This can not only be seen on Jon's page, you can try it on any TextPattern-driven site. It's actually a well-known property of TextPattern, and there is at least one plugin that helps you fix some of the side-effects; but this introduces a potential list of additional issues, and besides, I don't want a plugin to remove a feature from the software that shouldn't really be there in the first place. This needs to be fixed, and until then I'll probably cope with MovableType 2.x and code the rest by hand.
