Month: March 2005

victimless disease

ongoing · The Great CD Migration:

For the Nay-Sayers There are those out there who consider that audiophilia is disease, that the effects are imaginary, the specifications misleading, the culture anti-scientific. The Wikipedia’s write-up (5) is generally coloured by this viewpoint. Lending support is the fact that some high-end vendors make claims that are ludicrously beyond belief, and that indeed, there is quite a bit of snake oil for sale.

It’s all a tradeoff. Once the notes are loosed from the instrument, be it the vocal cords of a tenor or the crash of a cymbal, any reproduction of them is less than the original. The arguments over whether tape sounds “better” than digital (11) recording in the studio or whether vinyl sounds better than CD still rage.

I figure this is all like finding sounds: maybe they’re not as pristine as we would like but we get to hear them just the same. There’s a diminishing return in it for me, as I can never count on optimum listening conditions (and unlike Tim, I’m not unplugging the fridge).


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more to this than I realized

I had been led to believe the Apple vs Think Secret, et al case was about the release of information about the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini. Coming on the eve (or near enough) of MacWorld, I didn’t see the harm.

The New York Times > Technology > Apple Can Demand Names of Bloggers, Judge Says:

The ruling came in the three-month-old lawsuit brought by Apple against the unnamed individuals, presumably Apple employees, who reportedly leaked information about new music software, code-named Asteroid, which the company said constituted a trade secret. Under California law, divulging trade secrets is subject to civil and criminal penalties.

[ . . . ]

Judge Kleinberg acknowledged that the public had a huge appetite for news about Apple, but said that “unlike the whistle-blower who discloses a health, safety or welfare hazard affecting all, or the government employee who reveals mismanagement or worse by our public officials,” the Web sites are “doing nothing more than feeding the public’s insatiable desire for information.”

Well, yeah, welcome to the Internets, the world’s largest back fence . . .

I still have a hard time getting beyond my (apparently old school) ideas about reporting/journalism as a potentially adversarial relationship: it’s a good reporter’s job to find a source of good information (good, adj. what people want) and the target company’s responsibility to close up leaks, however it cares to.
Continue reading “more to this than I realized”

WordPress 1.5

Shiny.

Easy to upgrade, and it looks like there are a lot more features than I am likely to use right away.

50,000 users had grabbed copies as of March 1? Impressive.

It looks good: the default layout (Kubrick) is nice and clean, and the admin interface looks very impressive. I like the Dashboard, with it’s links to pages hosted within the WP development community, as well as the high-level summary of activity.

Looks like a user-focused project . . . like they have really been listening.

I’m not seeing this

Daring Fireball: On the Credibility of The New York Times:

Speculation is not a violation of trade secret law.

Inducing someone to break a non-disclosure agreement is.

So if I take you into my confidence and tell you a secret, which you then divulge, I should be angry with with the person to whom you betray my confidence, rather than with you?

If the central issue in the Apple v Think Secret matter is that someone — Think Secret or some other party — induced someone to divulge trade secrets, will prosecuting Think Secret stop the leaks? Or will it, as in the case of file sharing, force it to become decentralized and harder to isolate?

While I’m sure it’s infuriating for Apple to have some guy’s website steal their stage-managed thunder, it’s not like someone has leaked the product roadmap or the Aqua source code.

annoyances

Working on my school’s yearbook today, I rediscover that the provider requires Internet Exploder. You cannot use anything else.

How 20th Century.

So I turn on Safari’s Debug menu (defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1) and try that.

Suckage

No browser will help here . . . I tried a couple of options, all with similar application breakage. Mebbe they should spend more time on that than on browser detection?

Interestingly, GMail displays a warning about trying to use a non-supported browser in those compatibility modes . . .

Now playing: Waitin’ For A Superman by The Flaming Lips from the album “The Soft Bulletin” | Get it

switch: all the cool kids are doing it

Crooked Timber » » The Great Migration (8):

CT has switched platforms from MovableType to WordPress

Keiran adds

it should be the end of double- triple- or even duodecuple-posted comments. These were becoming an embarrassing CT hallmark, thanks to our outdated installation of MovableType and way too much server load. Trackback spam and other blogging bugaboos should also become easier to manage.

I’m impressed with how little the look of the site changed . . . .

Continue reading “switch: all the cool kids are doing it”

more sysadmin jabber

More behind the scenes changes. I decided to see if updating from MySql 4.0 to 4.1 made any difference at all in my older setup.

By all accounts, it does. Sub-second page rendering times, something I have only seen rarely. So I am back to the old setup with the http listener co-located with the database. With so many components — the database, php, apache — so say nothing of network and client variables, I’m glad to see this much improvement. Hope it lasts.

Now playing: The Gash by The Flaming Lips from the album “The Soft Bulletin” | Get it