Category: Mac

Just setting up my new 1 GHz 15″ G4 PowerBook. It may take a while for me to transfer all the files off the old machine so that I can blog, etc. again. I know—sympathy may be lacking.

Lisa and I (Lisa in NJ, I in Seattle) got my mother in law set up with iChat AV and Timbuktu this weekend. Now we can talk in crystal clear CDMA-format audio, and we can watch her screen if she calls with a tech support problem. To which I say: Nifty. (We tried the audio chat built into Timbuktu first, but gave up: static-y, and half duplex—stepping on each other’s words—doesn’t cut it.)

Speaking of half-duplex, it appears that audio chatting with iChat AV degrades to a one-way conversation if one participant is on broadband and one on dialup. Thanks to Greg for trying the experiment.

I came home tonight and iTunes wouldn’t start, complaining that “the iTunes Music Library cannot be read because it does not appear to be a valid library file.” Here are some good instructions on how to fix it, courtesy Joe Crawford.

I have to earn a living and so won’t be live blogging Steve’s WWDC keynote this time. But Brian Jepson is filling the void (thanks to Dave for the tip). Looks like with the new AV features in iChat we might be able to do some videoconferencing to our East Coast family members—provided we can get them to Mac OS X.

Okay, this one is entirely my fault for partitioning a 30GB hard drive two and a half years ago, and letting it get to the point that the boot partition has less than 250 MB free and the other has less than 60.

But why is it that some apps are so VM hungry that they can actually chew up almost 200 MB of free disk space in a session? It’s probably me. I am in the habit of leaving NetNewsWire open for days at a time, and I think the app archives all the RSS bits that it receives so it knows whether you’ve read them or not. Last night I couldn’t print from Chimera. I then started quitting apps, thinking I might need to reboot, and got told by iTunes that it couldn’t save my library file because I was out of disk space. I cursed, quit NNW and Mail, and logged out and back in.

When I restarted iTunes my library was fine. But NNW was another story—all my subscriptions were lost and so were my weblog settings.

I’m not sure about the moral of the story: don’t bother partitioning your hard drive? Don’t leave NNW running for days? Or maybe, don’t build up an MP3 collection that’s almost 14 GB on a 30 GB hard drive.

Well, there will be one fewer Mac browser to worry about supporting in the future. Following on the heels of suggestions that there will be no future stand alone releases of Internet Explorer, Roz Ho of Microsoft’s MacBU said (and CNET confirms) that the Mac version of Internet Explorer is now browser history.

While I think that watching MacIE, Safari, OmniWeb, and whatever the heck will happen to the Gecko-based browsers compete would have been fun, I gotta say that as a web page designer I’m not unhappy to have one fewer platform to test on.

Yes, there was happiness at the end of the road. After obtaining a Bluetooth adapter for my home machine, I experimented with trying to sync my contacts (using iSync and trying to send one at a time from the Address Book) with no luck. I then turned to the web. MacFixitForums were unhelpful, but the MacInTouch reader reports on iSync pointed out something I had missed, namely that the phone tries to use port 3004 for the mRouter discovery protocol, and that opening ports 3000 through 3004 enables the communication.

I made the change, turned the firewall off and on, and then had to reboot—I suspect because I had to force quit iSync when it failed the first time. After the reboot I was able to synchronize my address book to my phone, all 1471 contacts processed seamlessly.

Remaining issues:

• What’s up with mailing photos from the phone? Worked yesterday, doesn’t work today.
• Bluetooth File Exchange doesn’t work. At all. Can’t move a file, can’t create a new folder.
• Why won’t iSync transfer iCal items to the phone? There’s a calendar on there after all.

Fun news from the world of iTunes: Apple will be meeting with a bunch of indie labels, among them Matador and local faves Sub Pop, tomorrow to discuss what it takes to participate in the Apple/iTunes Music Store. Story first reported on MTV.com; MacCentral has a confirmation from Apple.

Of course, if they’re just talking tomorrow, it’s anyone’s guess about how long it will take for non-major-label content to show up in the ’Store. But it’s a kick to think that Kinski, Ugly Casanova, L7, the New Pornographers, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Cat Power, Interpol, Guided By Voices, and, yes, the Jesus and Mary Chain could show up in an iTunes window next to the current headliners, who include No Doubt, the Doors, and Luther Vandross.

MacSlash: Price Drops on 15″ Powerbooks. This price break brings the 1 GHz 15″ PowerBook I’ve been lusting after down to $2599, which is still rather a lot but close enough to drool over.

Of course, what it really means is that by the time I might actually replace the Pismo, the 15″ model will have been replaced by an entirely new model. Apple lowering the price on an existing model is usually a sure sign that they’re clearing out inventory.

Heh. I’ll call your bluff, Craig.

I’m really bummed about the XML problem. I complained vocally when Radiohead and Sigur Ros disappeared from the store. But I won’t be crying about the shutting down of sharing beyond local subnets in iTunes 4.0.1. Why? Because the reality is that despite all the Brave New World stuff, Apple is piloting a brand new channel in the face of what I’ve repeatedly called out as one of the most consumer-hostile industries the US has ever seen. And I want them to succeed. And, as someone pointed out on Slashdot,

there are so many ways to legally share your music… heck, just setup a live365 station if you want to share your music. Why insist on doing it illegally, and ruining it for everybody?

Sorry, flame off. I am pissed off about the XML stuff—that’s one really good AppleScript that will never see the light of day.

In a comment on my article about Radiohead’s albums disappearing from the iTunes Music Store (as reposted at Blogcritics), Matt MacInnis makes excellent points about the leverage that bands like Radiohead and Sigur Ros may have in their contracts to negotiate better royalties for new form factors. I wonder why other artists with equally high leverage, like U2 and Sting, haven’t done so. Maybe because they’re on Universal?

The countdown has started. The page is up on Apple’s site. Apple’s new store in Bellevue Square Mall, a mere 3.8 miles from Microsoft Headquarters, opens on Saturday at 9:30 a.m. The CrazyAppleRumors guys will be there.

But, alas, I won’t. I have better places to be—like in an airplane flying to a family event in South Carolina. About which more details later.

In our IM conversation, Greg also pointed out that you can use the URL format suggested by What Do I Know, but fetch it with http:// instead of itms://. Why would you want to do that? Because you get the XML package that the server delivers, and you can pull out individual PlaylistIDs, so you can point even more directly to albums. Like: Why Is There Air? and Revenge, and even To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With. (Links only work with iTunes 4.)

Just got off a long IM conversation with Greg, in which he pointed me to, in no particular order:

• stevenf’s proposal for a standard way, called mtaste, to represent your musical tastes on a blog (more thoughts on this in a second)
• Jeremy Zawodny’s complaint that Apple’s music store doesn’t already know what he might like to listen to, through his iTunes file (more on this too)
• The assertion in Business Week that the Verizon piracy records ruling + the Grokster/Morpheus ruling = legislative ruling that piracy is behavioral, not technological. No more thoughts about this one, just thought it was interesting.
• Lessig’s thought that all the international and state DMCA maneuvers are a way to lock in the DMCA here makes a scary amount of sense. And it makes me wonder whose analysis of the law is right. Is BW right and all these laws are, courtesy the Grokster decision, obsolete? Or is Lessig right and the clawed hand of the RIAA is closing in on my iTunes? Or are both right, and the RIAA is betting that the forces of consumerism will get tired of getting all the laws struck down (or go broke doing so) by the time the RIAA sets them all up?

So, with that note… the mtaste thing. Comparing those files would be even more difficult than stephenf imagines. Basically, he’s describing something like what Amazon does, but decentralized.

The problem is, unless you have an exact match in your mtaste file with the other guy’s, you have to do the music match thing that Amazon does, which is a large clustering problem. To get a good match you need a good sample size—given the number of artists out there (428 in my limited library, probably a lot more in other places), probably thousands. Probably more. Because the record that you’re comparing to someone else’s is at least 428 artists long. By way of comparison, training data sets of around 1600 were needed to predict television show preferences, 5000 for a movie database, and over 32000 for movement around Microsoft.com in a 1998 Microsoft Research study by Breese, Heckerman, and Kadie.

So, it’s a hard problem. You’d need, oh, a large dataset from users and a database to process it, a collaborative filtering algorithm, and a lot of data. And you’d need a standard way to convert the mtaste file (which, as proposed, is an arbitrary flat file) to a standard data structure.

LazyWeb, anyone?

But if you could pull it off… it would disintermediate Amazon. Really. It would do away with one of their powerful competitive strengths.

Which is probably why Apple hasn’t done it. Anyone seen the licensing terms on which they got the rights to use the One Click business method from Amazon?

(Oh, and the traffic… thanks to MacNetJournal and MacSurfer for pointing to this morning’s article. For the record, it’s about 4:1 in favor of MacNetJournal at present.)

Some great discussion about how the iTunes store does its magic. From MacSlash, discussions of how iTunes does HTML, and some thoughts about how the information gets delivered from Apple’s servers. Bill Bumgarner identifies some nifty tricks you can do with search and music sharing. And Todd Dominey, at What Do I Know (an almost insanely well designed site, btw, though it appears to suffer when long unbroken URLs are in the content), reports on the format for creating links.