Archive for June, 2005
Tuesday, June 28th, 2005
Today Apple introduced iTunes 4.9 and the new iPod lineup discarding the non-color versions of the full sized iPod. It is unlikely that they will introduce new iPods next week (since they would have just waited and introduced the new lineup then instead of today). This does make you wonder what next week’s announcement might be. The only other suggestion I’ve heard is some kind of an alliance with Sirus or XM, but I honestly I don’t think that’s something Apple is interested in doing.
It does make me think, however, now that all of Apple’s higher end iPods support color, what’s to keep them from playing video as well? Not that I think the iPod should be a video machine, it would be a nice extra.
On another note, Sony is really pushing the PSP as a video playback device with their UMD format. It’s gaining a little bit of power (a number of movies are available, with more on their way), however I don’t really think that it will ever become any kind of a standard (the UMD movies are not DVD quality, and they are more expensive than DVDs).
I reiterate my opinion that now is the time to strike. Even if Apple can only align with a few key production houses (like Disney and Fox) with a few hundred films in HD at something like a $9.99 price point I think they could have a winner.
Posted in Computing, General, Movies/TV/Music | No Comments »
Monday, June 27th, 2005
Maybe you’ve read about the Supreme Court handing down the unanimous ruling against Grockster. If you haven’t heard about this the short and the sweet version is that the Supreme Court believes that since Grockster came up with an “open” version of Napster, and that Napster was shown as being created specifically for trading copyrighted material, that Grockster also was illegal. More importantly, the creator of the software was libel for what the users did with their software.
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Monday, June 27th, 2005
While out visiting Cara in MA over the weekend I caught showings of both Batman Begins and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
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Friday, June 24th, 2005
Last night a group of us were lucky enough to see one of the showings of Serenity (shown on Thursday in 35 cities). This would be considered a super “pre-release” since the film isn’t supposed to open until September 30.
There’s been a lot of talk in various movie sites about this movie. I’ve read a number of reviews of other test screening and after actually seeing the movie, I thought I’d offer my two cents.
I’m a geek, I admit it, but going to an even like this shows me that there are many many people out there who are far geekier than I. It’s a strange pity I feel for others and myself. For others because they are so excited about something like this that they dress up, sing songs and completely geek out. Pity for myself because I haven’t ever felt that way about a anything even remotely similar.
After a couple (not so rousing) sing-a-longs of the Firefly theme the lights finally dim and the projector starts. Joss Whedon appears and explains the only reason the movie got made (because they don’t make movies of TV shows that were canceled after a couple episodes), was because of the fan base and the DVD sales. He goes further to say that it is our responsibility to tell the world about the movie and urge others to see it.
Just a warning, there are minor spoilers (nothing that will ruin the film) ahead:
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Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005
I found an interesting bug when attempting to add elements to a selection element. The function allows for an optional second argument which defines which element you want to insert before (if you leave it out, the element will be placed at the end of the select list). FireFox kindly throws an exception in this case though:
Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Not enough arguments [nsIDOMHTMLSelectElement.add]" nsresult: "0x80570001 (NS_ERROR_XPC_NOT_ENOUGH_ARGS)" location: "JS frame :: https://localhost/index.html :: setJobMenu :: line 178" data: no]
The solution is to simply add “null” as the second argument.
Posted in Computing, General | No Comments »
Monday, June 20th, 2005
You know… sometimes something just pisses you off and you feel like you have to say something to someone to vent. That’s probably why I blog, because I’m pissed often enough that I need an outlet.
Lately that something has been Apple. I have to say that in general Tiger, Quicktime 7, iTunes and generally everything has been a bit of a disappointment. Sure there are great new features, but I’m seeing more and more things slip through the cracks. My latest two annoyances?
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Sunday, June 19th, 2005
Yesterday was my bachelor party. Brian planned things well and I think fun was had by all. My only complaint is my fault, which is that summers tend to be pretty busy for everyone (for instance, all of my weekends between now and the wedding are “spoken for”). We kicked things off playing paintball, which was a first time for most of us. We played for almost four hours before heading home to clean up. I think everyone agreed that we need to play again in the future.
I warn people not to read anything further if you’re easy offended by what may be considered and almost logical progression of this story…
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Friday, June 17th, 2005
Okay… the coolest feature of OS X yet. You can copy the contents of a text clipping! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to use the contents of a text clipping in an area that you couldn’t “drag and drop” into. So you would have to drag it into something like BBEdit, then copy it into the clipboard. Now you can just double click the clipping, command-C it, and go.
Sometimes it’s the small things that make us happy…
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Wednesday, June 15th, 2005
I’ve been reading a lot about usability lately. I’ve written a few web based applications in the past (and one particular larger one about six months ago), which were built with very little thought to the usability. That’s not to say that they weren’t usable, but that they were designed concurrently with the programming, so usability was secondary (or even lower) on the list of concerns.
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Tuesday, June 14th, 2005
Today I reserved a U-haul for Cara’s move in July. I’m not one to usually print out receipts from web pages, but instead I use the “save as PDF” option Mac OS X’s print dialog. 
Tiger ups the ante by creating “Printing Workflows” that allow you (I assume) run an Applescript using the PDF (so you could upload it to an ftp server or just about anything else you might want to do). I personally like the built in “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” which creates a folder in your user/documents and puts the PDF in there. How thoughtful and convenient.
On a side note, there is also now a “supplies…” button which goes to the Apple’s shopping site and lists any consumables available that can be used with your printer (it listed all colors of ink and about 10 paper choices for my Epson Stylus Photo R300). This is cool on one front, but a little invasive too (it borders on ad-ware).
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Monday, June 13th, 2005
I’m a little disappointed in Apple, not that Apple is the only company that can be accused of this, but there are technologies (past and present) that seem to languish. This makes me wonder how serious Apple is about these technologies. Were these technologies developed as marketing ploys?
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Wednesday, June 8th, 2005
Okay I admit it, as I think more about this whole Mac on Intel, the more excited I get at the possibilities. The rumor is that Intel based Macs will be dual boot, so you can throw Windows on a partition, boot up and do your thing.
Don’t get me wrong, dual boot will be nice, but not extremely useful. I don’t want to have to reboot to test a Web site for Windows. Give me the ability to run Windows applications side by side with my Mac apps, now THAT would be useful. There are a dozen ways I can think that this will work, but build the compatibility in there now. Even if that means that a user has to buy a copy of Windows and gobs of memory to run the software properly, make it possible from a software/hardware standpoint. Make it like running a Classic app on OS X (basically having two OSes running concurrently). If Apple can transition from PPC to x86, something like this can’t be that hard to do.
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Monday, June 6th, 2005
I’m tired of thinking about getting married. I don’t mean to whine, but my calendar is packed full of stuff that I need to worry about in the next five weeks. I’m typically a very lazy person which is great when it comes to reduction of stress, but not so good when it comes to getting stuff done.
I guess it wouldn’t be as stressful if it weren’t for the fact that it’s not just a wedding that I/we have to worry about, but also things like getting Cara moved from Mass to Connecticut in the two weeks preceding our wedding as well as attending Cara’s father’s wedding.
Of course I also will (finally) be getting the engine back for the Lotus which I really would like to get prepped to put back into the car.
That all said, it’s kind of a given that getting married can be stressful, maybe that’s part of the plan (so you can finally relax and enjoy yourself once it all starts).
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Monday, June 6th, 2005
Apple will officially announce today that it will be migrating to Intel chips over the next two years. Although as I write this there is no official word from Apple (that will happen this afternoon), but I think this is the real deal here.
The power behind this move is software from Transitive Corporation that is said to see no performance hit. Transitive company literature indicates that software runs about 80% as fast as a binary compiled specifically for the processor, so I guess Apple will have to make sure whatever goes into their new machines will be significantly faster than the PPC brethren to make up the difference.
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Thursday, June 2nd, 2005
Today the boys at ForeSite offered Brian a job, which is pretty cool. It’s interesting how things turn out. I’ll be working with one of my best friends, and I live near another good friend (one of my other grooms men).
Skinovative also asked me to come out to Arizona for the opening of their newest store on the 15th of June, but I had to turn them down (I’m just taking too much time off of work as it is). I’d really like to go back to AZ again, it’s a great state (to visit). I’ll probably get out there in the next six months or so (and hopefully take Cara with me).
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