Category: del.icio.us

Tbird

Originally uploaded by TheOtherSimon.

I love how he does these.

• Paul’s Time Sink | Copying tracks to remote iTunes
  “When I want to add music to the Mac Mini’s iTunes, I need to mount the laptop’s drive on the mac mini, and then manually add the tracks to iTunes, with VNC or with the bluetooth keyboard. I decided to write an applescript to automate this.”
  (tags: Apple networking cleverideas music)

Poynter Online – Forums:

We can be provocative without being partisan. We can be truth-tellers without being editorial writers. We can and we must not only tell people what happened in politics today, but why it happened; what it might mean for our readers and their families; and what it might reveal about the people who presume to be our leaders. Sometimes, they’re just plain wrong.

Read the whole thing, as they say. It’s journalism 101, perhaps, but it’s worth a reminder/refresher after the past 6 years+ of utter laziness on the part of the Fourth Estate.

If someone lied, write it. If a program failed, write it. If a promise was broken, write it. And when you write it, write with authority and clarity. If you have the facts on your side, make that clear.

So the hue and cry about Apple playing the villain is getting tiresome. I guess this is the hangover from DRM, where music files had info the user didn’t want and felt limited/threatened by. But the RIAA got the desired end result — it became much more difficult to share files purchased through Apple’s music store.

But Apple was caught in an arms race against their own customers, and managed to leverage the success of iTunes to remove DRM from some files. Great news, right? I mean, people didn’t want the DRM removed so they could so anything they weren’t supposed/hadn’t agreed to do, right?

Not so fast.

EFF: DRM-free iTunes files carry “more than just names and e-mail addresses”:

Well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation picked up on this newfound information about the embedded personal data and investigated a bit further. As it turns out, the DRM-free AAC files from iTunes contain more than just names and e-mail addresses. While they decoded some DRM-free AAC files to PCM/WAV and found that there isn’t a watermark in the compressed audio signal, there are “surprisingly huge differences” in the encoded files. “Much bigger differences than just different tags, or even different signed/encrypted tags,” the EFF wrote.

Hmm, there is some additional information stored in the file. Wonder what it could be?

Apple’s File Labeling: An Effective Anticopying Tool?:

But there’s another problem – and a pretty big one. All a digital signature can do is verify that a file is the same one that was sold to a particular customer. If a file is swiped from a customer’s machine and then distributed, you’ll know where the file came from but you won’t know who is at fault. This scenario is very plausible, given that as many as 10% of the machines on the Net contain bot software that could easily be directed to swipe iTunes files.

Well, perhaps it’s something legitimate, like a hash of some unique data, like an iTunes account name/number, a timestamp of when the file was purchased, an order number. In fact, maybe the additional information is actually intended to protect legitimate purchasers who don’t make their files available on the network, and if they do, they have put themselves in a position to be prosecuted.

There is a big difference between privacy and anonymity. If you put your private information out on the street, you have no grounds to complain if by doing so you break the law and get punished for it. The EFF, et al, can thunder away about click-wrap agreements, but I think it’s pretty clear that there is an expectation that purchased goods will not be distributed freely.

Privacy and anonymity are conflated in a lot of these discussions. Perhaps this will serve as a way to clarify the issue.

Does this mean I agree with the RIAA cartel’s ham-fisted approach to customer relations? Not a bit of it. Their place in the pantheon of idiots is assured. But at the same time, do I think that people who buy something, even a string of bits with no tangible characteristics, and then give that away and deprive the seller of additional revenue, shouldn’t be punished? Nope.

If this is what Apple is doing, it’s perhaps the first intelligent thing to happen in this ongoing mess: cutting the supply of illegal goods will have more of an impact than going after the people who download copies.

Apple could be more transparent on this but at the risk of helping someone anonymize these files. What reason does a legitimate music listener have to do that vs someone who wants to distribute files with no identifying information?

Continue reading “ingratitude, redux”

Doesn’t everyone try beta releases the day they come out? Hmm, maybe this one needs a little more QA.

Wonder why it says that? Safari 1? What the . . . ?

Is there a debug menu/user-agent switch in this thing?

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Works just fine now that Safari 3 claims to be Safari 2.04.

I can’t pick just one tidbit from I Am Paris Hilton.

Savor the whole thing.

Well, three system reinstalls later, I think I have learned my lesson here. I don’t know how this thing does what it does but I’m done with it. I think the network settings are OK, but so many other issues, from no sound, PreferencePanes that wouldn’t open, and all kinds of Dock weirdness, makes me think I should have left it alone. Just ‘cuz it worked for Marc “I never have to work another day” Andreesen doesn’t mean it will work on my antiquated hardware.

Previously:
This little app came recommended by none other than Marc Andreesen (remember him?). The network settings looked like a fun place to start.

net.inet.udp.maxdgram: 9216 -> 65536
net.local.stream.sendspace: 8192 -> 256960
net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 32768 -> 224360
net.inet.tcp.mssdflt: 512 -> 2920
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 262144 -> 1048576
net.inet.udp.recvspace: 42080 -> 265152
net.local.stream.recvspace: 8192 -> 224360
net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 32768 -> 256960
kern.ipc.somaxconn: 128 -> 1024
net.inet.tcp.rfc1644: 0 -> 1
net.inet.tcp.newreno: 0 -> 1

If you feel like doing these by hand, you can use sysctl with those arguments:

sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.newreno=1

No idea if it will help, but why not?

Continue reading “no fun with MacPilot”

Local News | Hansa, Woodland Park Zoo elephant, dead at 6 | Seattle Times Newspaper:

Hansa, the 6 ½-year-old elephant at Woodland Park Zoo, was found dead this morning inside the zoo’s elephant barn.

Zoo officials believe the female Asian elephant died quietly in her sleep. Hansa had been lethargic and had a decreased appetite over the past week, according to the zoo.

My kids made her a birthday card when she was a yearling, and when we took it to the zoo, the keeper had quite a time opening it for her: she tried to get hold of it with the determination only someone that young can muster. She was a lot of fun to watch and learn from, and I’m sure there are a few sad kids around town tonight. I’m not feeling all that cheerful myself.

I know some readers here are using it: how does work for you all?

I am having issues with

• stability, as the backup jobs don’t always run
• with resource allocation, as the MozyBackup jobs run as root and force a lot of swapping.

So I am stopping my experiments with it for now. No idea why it fails, as nothing useful seems to be logged except tons of malloc() errors.

Disappointing, but perhaps fixable.