the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Went to a company party for dinner this evening and all the employees got shiny silver iPod minis: 7 of them. All guys, so of course, they opened them up and played with them at the table (the “Don’t Steal Music” sticker on the display got a few laughs).
Very nice.
So the album art that iTunes generates is pretty easy to work with if you want to make simple paper CD sleeves.
Here’s an overview of the printout and the finished sleeves.
The first step is to cut off the top and bottom, using the crop marks as your guide (don’t rely on the fold lines: if your printer doesn’t grab the paper just so, your cover will be a little off-center). Cut off everything outside the crop marks. 
Next, use the crop marks to trim the sides: you can cut off everything outside them when you do the sides. Then cut a small (1/4 inch) slot from top and bottom along the center, where the cover or sleeve will fold. Fold the sleeve in half along the lines marked. Then fold the resulting parts down along the top and bottom. Apply a glue stick (or Elmer’s if you prefer: you really don’t need much) and press the seam flat. 
Now you’re going to have to work with me here: I would take another picture to illustrate this but my digital camera didn’t make it home from a Christmas party last night. Anyway, glue down the thin tabs on the back side (where the track information appears) and press it down, then glue the other tabs and fold the sleeve together, wrapping the tabs from the front around the whole sleeve so they close around the back. 
Press out the seams (the handle of a utility knife works well for this) and you should be done. You should have a CD sleeve that looks like the one in the picture. The trick is using the crop marks to ensure it’s the right size to hold the media. The crop marks work just fine for that, though I sure didn’t realize that the first time I tried this.
Movable Type Publishing Platform: Comment spam load issue:
Recently, however, there have been a number of reports about the escalating effect of comment spam on Movable Type installations, especially evident in shared hosting environments. At first, we assumed that these problems were caused mainly on legacy systems (i.e. MT 2.x) running without the benefit of the modern anti-spam measures (e.g. TypeKey, comment moderation, MT-Blacklist v2.x, etc.) built to protect Movable Type installations. After further analysis and load testing, we’ve actually found that this is not the case.
In fact, we have found that there is a fairly major bug (in terms of effect, but not code size) which causes page rebuilding even in the case of a comment submission which would be moderated and hence should have no effect on the live page. This means that even if you are using comment moderation in Movable Type and even force moderation in MT-Blacklist, your server load is impacted just as if a comment had been posted to the live site. This bug has been fixed in development.
Well, yeah, that would be bad: the software goes through the motions of posting a comment that has already been blocked with all the resulting load of page rebuilding. That would be bad.
Right now, I’m kinda happy I can just rename the parts of my site that generate comments and the site still works (woo hoo!) and spambots are a thing of the past . . . . when the collective brain trust at 6Apart can make that work, then we’re onto something.
Holiday 2004 iMix is complete. I made a few small changes, swapped in some tracks for ones that didn’t work for me, and it’s done. I burned and gave away a couple yesterday, and when I get a chance, I’ll post a HOWTO on making a CD sleeve from the insert graphics that iTunes generates.
So how would one go about getting the iTMS URI for an iMix?
<never mind> move along, citizen, nothing more to see here. iTMS sends the URL when the iMix gets published (oh, I’m supposed to read those emails?)
And as if I didn’t have enough problems today, now all comments in WordPress are blithely ignored. I get the contents emailed to me, but they never make it into the database.
Feh.
I can see out, but dimly: traffic seems to be coming in OK.
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping ebay.com
PING ebay.com (66.135.192.87): 56 data bytes
^C
--- ebay.com ping statistics ---
36 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping mail.apple.com
ping: unknown host mail.apple.com
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping smtp.apple.com
ping: unknown host smtp.apple.com
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping apple.com
PING apple.com (17.254.3.183): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 17.254.3.183: icmp_seq=0 ttl=49 time=30.023 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.3.183: icmp_seq=5 ttl=49 time=30.884 ms
^C
--- apple.com ping statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 75% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 30.023/30.453/30.884 ms
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping apple.com
ping: unknown host apple.com
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping apple.com
PING apple.com (17.254.3.183): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 17.254.3.183: icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=33.125 ms
^C
--- apple.com ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 83% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 33.125/33.125/33.125 ms
Well, things are OK now. It seems I may have some (more) flaky hardware, being one of the NICs in this aging hulk.
The comcast support droid wasn’t very helpful: he did suggest it was a NIC problem, but not from any gift of insight. In the course of the conversation (mostly consisting of advice about deinstalling and reinstalling devices and rebooting), I learned that comcast is “only licensed” to support Windows and Mac OS (version not specified) and only IE and Outlook. If you use Firefox or Eudora (and Mail.app, I suppose), they won’t help you and will point to the unsupported components as part of the problem. I didn’t get into the unlikelihood of needing a license for free software: it wouldn’t have been on the script.
Something somewhere is different, I know, because the address I finally got to stick (via DHCP) was in a totally different range than what I had before (67.x.x.x vs 24.x.x.x). I switched cards (reconfigured them from WAN to LAN and vice versa) and perhaps the presence of different card prompted the DHCP server to actually serve up valid details. I suspect it was an expiration or something that didn’t work: the dhclient.leases file shows an expire time of 20:14 last night. Things worked after that, I know, but nothing from some midnight until 6:50 when I discovered things were not right. Only 6 more hours until service was restored 100% or close to it.
For some reason, local name service (cached) doesn’t work: I have to rely on comcast’s servers. Dunno what that’s about yet.
Looking through my logs just now, I see lots of spurious requests with referer values for various businesses who seem to think that I’m going to give them some publicity or marketing assistance.
I wonder if there isn’t some way to cull these and create a central “wall of shame” clearinghouse: of course, one could easily put one’s competitors name up on the wall as easily as one’s own. But I doubt that’s happening: I think these are people as misguided and self-centered as Canter & Siegel (what, you didn’t know that it took lawyers to invent commercial spam?).
Commentary: Why OpenOffice.org?:
After all: software companies die, but information lasts forever. If a company takes the secrets of unlocking your data to its grave, where will that leave you?
Time for my annual visit with Ebenezer Scrooge.
And if I get a chance, I’ll watch this version and see if I can get through it without a tissue or two.