Put Together Quickly by Michael Biven writing

OS X iPhone, Evolution at a Cost of Choice

2010-01-31T23:05:01Z

After years of arguments that Microsoft's bundling of IE reduced choice we now find that Apple is doing the same thing with OS X iPhone but only with more far reaching consequences.

When the Department of Justice brought civil action against Microsoft it was on the charge that Microsoft had abused its position in the PC market to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows. This was the result of Microsoft unfairly restricting the market for competing web browsers. A point argued by some that are now vocal in defending Apple's position of not making Flash available on OS X iPhone.

By not allowing a Flash player Apple prevents people from installing software written in Flash for OS X iPhone rather than their own development tools. This also allows them to maintain control by restricting how software is installed - only with their approval through the App Store. If the choice of not allowing Flash on the OS X iPhone was due to Flash crashing it why don't we see the same restrictions placed on any other application that crashes the OS? The issue isn't as much as preventing a user to be able to use Flash as much as it is a point of Apple controlling what can be installed on the OS X iPhone to protect their interests. No third party email clients, no third web browsers.

From the beginning OS X has shipped with the development tools unlike Windows and OS X benefited from this with innovation and competition among it's independent developers. Now you need to sign up for the iPhone Developer Program, agree to a Nondisclosure and Nonuse of Apple Confidential Information agreement, pay for your membership in the program before you can even submit an application to the App store. A bit different than when the Mac OS X was released.

If this is the beginning of a new era of computing the actions of Apple appear to put us on a path that will be more restrictive than Microsoft was even at the highest point of criticism of them bundling a web browser with their operating system.

So no Firefox, no Thunderbird, no Flash - no choice.

At the same time I do think a device like the iPad is a step in the right direction for combining the best from a few different mediums (print, television and radio) into a new mix. And I see it as an obvious evolution of a device like the Kindle, but that is only with the device. The restrictions placed on what can be installed and used on it is the same reduction in choice that we had with Microsoft bundling IE.

What We Have Been Waiting For

2010-01-27T13:23:01Z

After Apple revealed the iPad, their new tablet device it places their purchase of Quattro Wireless in slightly different light. Quattro Wireless is a mobile advertising company that Apple acquired after losing it's bid on AdMob to Google.

Apple now has a large share of the digital media (music, movies, televisions) distribution and the devices and programs used to access it. Add books, magazines and newspapers to that distribution mix and new opportunities are created for Apple and content creators with iPod touches, iPhones and iPads.

Opportunities to create living magazines and newspapers for people to purchase and for television / trailer quality ads to be displayed along with traditional print content. This isn't to say that only Apple along with Quattro Wireless would be capable of this, but only that it has helped create the possibilities that many have been waiting for quite some time.

Attention Falls

2010-01-27T10:10:01Z

"Attention Falls" - trips, spills and spins caused by looking at small portable devices like the iPhone and iPad instead of paying attention to where you are walking.

Homebrew package management for Mac OS

2010-01-26T22:00:05Z

Update : After I stopped using Homebrew I pulled post this until I had a chance to edit it and then my time was focused on another project. So now here is the post with my edits and you can view the original here.

There have been several different package management tools that have appeared for Mac OS - Fink, MacPorts and now Homebrew. Created by Max Howell former developer at Last.fm (led the work on all of their desktop and mobile software) it has become one of the most popular projects forked on GitHub.

Like the others it's a simple method of installing open source software, but it is built to keep them in line with software that is already installed either by yourself or the default stuff in Mac OS. This is due to it giving you control over where it's installed,a loose policy of not duplicating what is in CPAN, Python Easy_install, pip or Ruby gems and that Homebrew allows you to see what is going on in the background during the install which hopefully encourages you to make changes yourself.

Requirements

If you plan on creating your own fork to add your own formulas you should install the following:

Where To Install

One advantage of installing it in /usr/local is that it is already in your PATH which lets any future software that you install work with stuff installed by Homebrew and for Homebrew to work with anything you already have there. You can install Homebrew anywhere, but it make sense to have it at /usr/local for the reasons stated above.

Download And Install

Grab the latest copy from Max's repository on GitHub and place them in /usr/local.

curl -L http://github.com/mxcl/Homebrew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C /usr/local

If you want to create your own fork go to Homebrew's GitHub page and click "Fork". Now to install at /usr/local run the commands below, but change YOURGITHUBNAME to your github account name.

cd /usr/local

git init

git remote add origin git://github.com/YOURGITHUBNAME/homebrew.git

git pull origin master

Starting Off

Now Homebrew is installed at /usr/local with the following directories:

/usr/local/Library/Contributions - contributions
/usr/local/Library/Formula - the formulas
/usr/local/Library/Homebrew - files for Homebrew itself
/usr/local/Cellar - placeholder for items installed by Homebrew 
(they get symlinked to /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib etc)

Two commands you should start off with is search and info.

search - search to see if there is a formula in the local copy of Homebrew, remember people are adding formulas and they will not find themselves added to Max's copy immediately. So check the tickets to see if someone has already created what you are looking for.

brew search apache

info - shows the version of the software that the formula installs, the homepage for the project, dependencies, if it is already installed shows its location and then any caveats (quick and dirty readme) that might be in the formula.

brew info apachetop

There reasons I stopped using Homebrew

When you install a formula Homebrew does not show you the dependencies and it will install them without prompting you. I don't like the idea of having a script making changes that I've not approved of and I shouldn't have to open up each formula and follow the dependency path to see what's getting installed. It is a common practice to display any additional packages that will be installed by a package management tool like in the example below using Yum.

The last point I have is more of a personal preference and observation. And that is how Homebrew works with any formula using version control to check out the software in place of downloading a tar file. If you look in formula.rb you will see the checks for the different URL prefixes that common version control systems use and a few that have to include the domain name and path for URLs that are using a common prefix like http or https.

Adding a regex check for these common URL prefixes will become a management pain in the ass and the user would be better served if the formula would specify the VCS used and if not formula.rb could still default to using the CurlDownLoadStrategy. As more formulas are added using version control additional regex checks would need to be added from time to time and specifying the VCS used in the formula would help keep things simple. And this wouldn't require someone to update formula.rb for any new formulas that use a common prefix along with version control. It would already be set.

If neither of these points are an issue for you and you would like to have your package management system use your existing installed software then you should fine Homebrew a good fit.

More information on Homebrew and some of the other package management tools for Mac OS.

Hornet Plus Three

2009-07-25T01:45:01Z

(Photographer/Lane Hartwell)

"We been landing on a runway for 28 or more years, we can't afford to do that because we're going to go back to the moon where we were 40 years ago - thats not leadership to me we have wonderful opportunities in front of us and to go backwards is to secede, to give away leadership in an industry that is indispensable to the security of our nation, the aerospace industry" - Buzz Aldrin

In this slideshow on the USS Hornet and her participation in the US space program. We talked with Pete Sutherland, Chief Operating Office for the USS Hornet Museum about the history of the Hornet, the Apollo 11 mission and what you can expect at the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 splashdown onboard the Hornet.

The Hornet recovered the unmanned Apollo capsule CM011A used in the AS-202 mission in 1966 and served as the Prime Recovery Ship (PRS) for both the Apollo 11 and 12 missions in 1969. The unmanned AS-202 mission tested the heat shield of the Command and Service Module and was the second test flight of the Saturn IB rocket. The capsule used in that mission will be on display along with the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) used by the Apollo 14 mission and helicopters similar to those used in the Apollo 11 and Mercury recoveries.

Sand By The Ton

2000-01-01T00:00:00Z

(Photographer/Lane Hartwell)

You might be wondering why the Oakland Fire Department had the entrance closed to Sand By The Ton at American Steel if you had already made it inside or were turned away Saturday night. Their reason for doing so was completely reasonable, but it could have been avoided as I explain here.

How Mac OS X almost had an official package management tool

2009-07-01T10:17:07Z

A package management tool is common to most Linux and Unix operating systems to automate installing, updating and removing software. In the early days of Mac OS X there were no such tools available and installing Open Source software usually would require a complex list of steps that created demand for projects like Fink and DarwinPorts (now MacPorts) to provide an easier method. The work on these projects gave the Mac community a set of tools that were missing in the OS, returned several improvements that are now used and along the way one of them almost became the official package management tool for Mac OS X.

In the fall of 2006 I started working on an article covering the package management tools available for Mac OS, the Metapkg Alliance and rumors that Apple considered adopting one of the projects as the official package management system for Mac OS. And for the last few years all of those emails and notes have been sitting unused until I decided to pick them backup and piece together what I had started.

1999 - 2000

The first version of Mac OS X was released as OS X Server 1.0 and we saw the public beta which was the first time the Aqua user interface was released to the public. At the end of 2000 Christoph Pfisterer started the Fink project, giving OS X it's first package management tool.

2001 - 2002

We saw the official release of Mac OS 10.0, two point releases (10.1 and 10.2), and the creation of two projects OpenDarwin (Apple's attempt at helping development of open source software for OS X and create a standalone version of the Darwin OS) and DarwinPorts (a package management system). With the former being founded by Apple with Internet Systems Consortium and the later including the involvement of a few Apple employees.

2003

Started as a way to share information on porting software to the Mac OS, the MetaPkg Alliance was created between members of Fink, Gentoo and DarwinPorts.

Unofficially Apple considered using Fink as the official package management system, but because of their reluctance of using anything licensed under the GPL, decided to disregard the idea.

Below are the results from the emails and notes left from when I was originally started on this in 2006. The only thing that is edited below is the order that I have placed the quotes to try to show a clear timeline of Apple's consideration of adopting Fink as the offical package management system. I could have fleshed out a bit more information, but I felt that I would never have time to complete it and decided instead to lay out what I have. Hopefully giving a small, but interesting piece of history of early Mac OS X development.

"I suggest you talk to Landon Fuller. Metapkg was his personal project from the beginning and I don't think anyone from OpenDarwin (or Apple) ever got involved at all. Landon would know the details - I was one of those who never got involved with it and probably have as many questions about it as you do!" - Jordan K. Hubbard, Apple's director of engineering for Unix Technologies

"When Mac OS X was originally released, porting software to the platform was considerably more difficult than it was today. It was highly unlikely that any mildly complex piece of software would work without (extensive) patching, and MetaPkg was intended to provide a venue for sharing the load of that porting work between Fink, DarwinPorts, and Gentoo." - Landon Fuller, former Apple BSD Technology Group engineer and MacPorts developer

"However, MetaPkg arrived just in time to solve a problem that was disappearing: - Apple improved Mac OS X's support for common APIs (eg, dlsym, poll, nls, etc.) - As the UNIX Mac OS X developer community grew, projects were ported to the platform by the upstream developers, and fewer changes were required. Simply put, the success of Mac OS X, and porting software to Mac OS X, quickly obsolesced the cooperative project. Good news, really." - Landon Fuller

It has also helped that libtool's support for OS X has greatly matured (thanks in large part to Peter O'Gorman, formerly a Fink core team member). - David R. Morrison, Fink

"Wow... a looooong time ago. As I remember it, Apple decided to name one of the package formats/repositories the "official" format at WWDC, very shortly after metapkg was announced, which seemed to go against the entire spirit of the metapkg alliance." - Daniel Robbins, Founder Gentoo

Was there any influence from Apple after the Alliance was announced to consolidate to one format or any other changes to have an "official" repository?

"Not especially. Apple had been struggling with the packaging question long before Kevin Van Vechten, JKH, and I wrote DarwinPorts, and until Apple selected a single packaging format there was little room for them to push for an official repository. DarwinPorts (now MacPorts) has never solved the packaging format question, though we did implement support for a variety of formats -- everything from rpm, to dpkg, to Apple's .pkg." - Landon Fuller

"We got an email from some guy at Apple telling us that one of the package formats was going to be declared officially supported by Apple at WWDC." - Daniel Robbins

"There were indications that Apple was seriously considering adopting one of the open source package management tools as the official one. (I don't remember the timing too well, but it may have been right around the time that Metapkg started.)" - David R. Morrison

"If I remember correctly, I think they chose fink. The whole series of events didn't seem noteworthy to me except to show me that Apple was being clueless and inappropriate in regards to community efforts, and that maybe I should focus my time elsewhere." - Daniel Robbins

"Well, Apple never ended up doing anything about package management... The closest they came was creating dports, and it actually made it into one of the seeds of panther, but was quietly removed again, and as we all know by this point, opendarwin and dports got pretty much ignored except by the few people on the BSD team that spent their own time on it. :)" - Benjamin Reed, Project Admin Fink

"I've heard some rumors of RPM support in leopard server but hadn't looked into it. I helped out on the early dports RPM-binary-generation port, RPM works pretty well on OSX and has the advantage of having an architecture designed for platform "variants" that should work reasonably well with universal binaries, so it seems a plausible rumor, if not likely." - Benjamin Reed

"The most promising code to come out of Apple in regards to a packaging format was Xar, originally written by Rob Braun (and contributed to heavily by Kevin Van Vechten), who was also a member of the BSD team at Apple, as well as the fellow responsible for the creation of the OpenDarwin project." - Landon Fuller

Installer.app in Mac OS 10.5 uses xarchives from xar for installing software which replaced the previous method of using gzipped pax files.

"Metapkg post-date's any official Apple discussions along the lines of package management, by the time we formed it, it was for our own edification --internal politics had made them punt "real" package management in OSX until some future release, and the Installer.app team "won" for the time being. We mostly did metapkg to save ourselves some time, but it turned out to not really work out that way, so it fell by the wayside, and we all continued on as we had been." - Benjamin Reed

Auto Fever

2009-06-22T22:45:05Z

Fever updates itself automatically

When I logged into my copy of Fever I got a splash screen that said Fever was updated to 1.01 successfully. Now while I'm happy to have the tools that I use maintained and the code updated I want to be the one controlling when to pull the trigger on the update. At first I was irritated that the code had automatically updated itself without asking me and then at myself for missing the fact that it behaved in this way.

Looking at the FeedaFever site I saw what I have overlooked. First column, second row - " Fever updates itself automatically".

For some people this behavior probably raises concerns about having the code make changes to itself and for the others it might not even raise an eyebrow. ~~Hopefully Shaun will consider changing this behavior or at least add an option to disable the automatic updates.~~

There was an option in the preferences to disable this feature which I had missed. While still not the default behavior I think is best for a self-hosted web application, I am happy to be able to disable this feature.

Discussions in Social Media between Observers and Protestors

2009-06-22T14:27:01Z

A few observations building upon the comments I had on Twitter and Social Media after watching this weekends events in Iran.

Fearful that Twitter and other Social Media sites are giving a false sense of hope and support to the protesters in Iran. Allowing them to believe that the governments outside of Iran will support the Iranian people, when there is no guarantee of such help or support. They do have the support of many people outside of Iran, but more than ever there are consequences to yourself and others from your words. Unfortunately I believe that there will be some event that will show the online community this in a very brutal fashion. Depending on how the events in Iran turn out we may be seeing such an event right now.

The Iranian Government supposedly already has the capability to monitor and data mine information coming in and out of that country. So by changing your time zone you do not provide the Iranian protestors any more protection or anonymity, but more likely will confuse those following the events by making it harder for those outside the country to identify people who are in Iran.

Calling Bullshit on Pulitzer

Already some of the most iconic photographs (Hudson River and Neda from Iran) taken this year were not by professional photographers, but by people with cell phones. Considering these and the countless other examples of photographs, video and text reports coming out of Iran how are these amazing efforts going to be recognized later by an organization like the Pulitzer Prize?

Submissions from online news sites are now accepted for the Pulitzer Journalism competition and a person of any nationality can enter, but they are only accepting submissions from sites that are published at least weekly and or dedicated to original news reporting. Would YouTube be an eligible web site for the Pulitzer?

All online material, which may include written stories, interactive graphics, databases, blogs and still or video images, must be published on an eligible Web site ring the calendar year and, when submitted, must depict its original publication on the Web, not its subsequent update or alteration. - Pulitzer Entrance form

With no safe way to contact the person who took the video of Neda and the fact that someone would have to submit and pay the entrance fee I'm not sure of the chances that the person who took what will probably be the most lasting image from the protest in Iran will be entered for the Pulitzer. These are important images and the person who put their safety at risk should be recognized for their efforts.

I have a Fever

2009-06-18T08:27:01Z

New self hosted feed reader from Shaun Inman (creator of Mint)

I got an email yesterday morning that Shaun Inamn's new application Fever had been released. To say Fever is just a feed reader is an understatement, because it includes a recommendation engine that sits on top of the feed reader to help you make better use of the feeds that you follow.

It took me a while to get use to using Fever, because I encountered a bug when using it in FireFox (3.0.11). When I clicked in the shaded grey area of an item it would not switch between the excerpt and the full post. Instead I would have to click on the link and load the post in a different tab or window (bug submitted via Fever contact page). It was a bit confusing and had me wondering how this would be a better replacement for my current feed reader - Google Reader with the helvetireader theme - but after creating a Fluid app for Fever I realized that it was a bug when used with Firefox on my end. I also found out later that there is a keyboard shortcut to switch between the excerpt and full view.

Just like with Mint, Fever is a self-hosted PHP application which has caused some people to question why it isn't a hosted service. They either have a short memory or did not have any experience with Feed Lounge. Feed Lounge was a great hosted feed reader from Scott Sanders and Alex King. The service encountered several stability and hardware issues that contributed to the service being shutdown. So instead of having to deal with the hosting of the service, Shaun places his attention on the code that runs the app allowing its users to use one of the many hosting options that are available.

Installation

Using the "Fever Server Compatibility Suite" you will test the compatibility of the webserver you're installing on and after successful completion of the test be able to install and configure the application.

Main Interface

When you log in to your new Fever installation, you're presented with the screen below.

You will find your three primary areas: Group list, Feed list and items (the actual posts). You can navigate between each of these areas by using the arrow keys - up and down keys to switch from the group list, feed list and items. The left and right keys will cycle you through the previous or next group or feed.

At any time you can select to view the keyboard shortcuts in the menu (shown below) under the Fever icon in the top left-hand side of the page. That is where I found the work around for the the bug that I encountered in FireFox by selecting "0" to switch an item between showing the excerpt or full content.

Feed Management

You can add feeds by either importing an OPML file from your other reader or using the Feedlet. If you do use an OPML file consider selecting "import automatically add new feeds to Sparks" in the preferences (shown below). This will make managing the recommendation engine of Fever a bit easier.

The Feedlet is a bookmarklet (located in the extras area of the menu) that will give the option to add the feed, pick which groups to add it to, authentication and how to display the content in Fever. You can then create groups to better organize your feeds and remember for any feed that is in the Sparks group it will not appear in either the Kindling or custom groups. You can add feeds to custom groups by either editing the feed or by simply dragging the feed from the Feed list to the group in the Group list you want to add it to.

In the extra section you will also find the information necessary to setup a cron job to refresh the feeds you have subscribed to.

Recommendation Engine

The way this works is that you have feeds in your "Kindling" supergroup (that includes any custom groups as well) that are on topics that you are most interested in and you use the feeds in the "Sparks" to increase the temperature of that topic. So you are getting the current hot topic displayed as a combined discussion from any of the feeds that you follow over a period of time that you pick.

I imported a few older OPML files that I exported before pruning my feeds and I added the RSS feed for the people I follow on Twitter. By adding both as "Sparks" I should be highlighting more of the topics that I follow in the Kindling supergroup.

Conclusion

After my first day using Fever I can see it replacing my current feed reader and I have replaced it with it, but I still have a few points that I would like to see fixed or changed. I have been encountering a few random blank white screens after moving a feed to a custom group. This may be due to PHP running under CGI and not using mod_php (not allowed at my hosting provider) and so far I've not seen anything in the Apache error log. Along those lines I would like to see better documentation. I've seen references to a debug mode, but so far I've not seen any documentation on how to enable or use it and this would be helpful to fix the blank white screens. Draggable modal boxes - there have been times that I'm not able to see the entire modal box when editing a feed due to the size of the browser window and being able to drag the modal would be very helpful.

Managing feeds could be more streamlined. I need to try it again, but it looks like when I imported feeds from an OPML file it did not add them to the sparks group even though I have that set in the preferences. Keyboard shortcuts or a way to do multiple deletes or "move to sparks" would be a welcomed change. Currently you have to delete or move each feed into the sparks group one at a time and the deletion include a confirmation step.

It will not be for everyone, because it is a self-hosted application and so far looks like you cannot run it locally. But if you are looking for a better way to get a handle on your feeds then Fever with it's recommendation system is a perfect candidate for you.

Twitter as a Critical Infrastructure

2009-06-16T01:17:04Z

There are too many benefits to lose by not supporting tools like Twitter for people who need them and are willing to use them.

Do not be fooled into thinking that by changing your time zone to match Iran that you would flood the Iranian security services with disinformation helping to protect those in that country. During the 2008 US election, Twitter maintained a steady stream of information on the election and the US news agencies did not have a hard time pulling out information. If a large portion of people using Twitter did change their time zone and location to Iran you are more likely to cause the service to become overwhelmed than confusing foreign security services.

Twitter is the Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty of our time

It has crossed the line and is no longer just some tool for web savvy people to share what they are doing and discuss current events. It has become among other things the 21st century's version of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Both are services created at the start of the Cold War to help discourage Communism.

Twitter has possibly become more successful at RFE/RL main mission - providing access to news and information to people who live in countries were the state controls how and what is reported. The added feature of allowing discussion between citizens in these areas with the rest of the world is one point where Twitter excels. By allowing open communication in these areas it has helped spread the ideas and democracy and has become a critical tool similar to how RFE/RL was during the Cold War.

Twitter had become a critical infrastructure in the world's discussion

The originally schedule maintenance of Twitter would have resulted in the service being down during peak hours in Iran, but after it's users called for that maintenance to be delayed it was rescheduled during peak North American hours instead of the peak hours in Iran. If Twitter is still at a point that a schedule maintenance brings down their entire service, a service that has shown itself to be very useful during times of national and international interest like the Mumbai Attacks in India, H1N1 outbreak in Mexico and the current events in Iran, then Congress or some other group should step up and provide funding to ensure the service is not open to such outages.

While news agencies are closing foreign bureaus and the world is becoming more interconnected, tools like Twitter have become very valuable. Providing an avenue to keep people informed on what is going on in the world.

Will Palm webOS bring back the Foleo?

2009-02-25T12:03:07Z

“I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market.”
-Ed Colligan, Palm CEO

Ok, Apple isn’t coming out with a netbook and Palm has announced the Pre which includes their new operating system called webOS. So how about reviving the Foleo? A device that received short sighted remarks in the press and looking back can be seen as a precursor to the current batch of netbooks.

It is easy to see how the Foleo appears to have more in common with current netbooks than with the original concept of being a companion to Palm’s other mobile products. Announced in 2007 at the D Conference by Jeff Hawkins it only survived a handful of months publicly before being cancelled in later that year in September. Used with a mobile device for data connection and document sharing it was planned to have a 10″ widescreen display, full-size keyboard, WiFi, Bluetooth and had a price of $500 (after $100 rebate)

“Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category.” -Ed Colligan, Palm CEO

Palm’s webOS

An embedded Linux Operating System with a custom User Interface
Can run on different hardware, size screens, resolutions, orientations, with and without keyboards or touchscreens
Native applications built on HTML, CSS and JavaScript

If webOS is the new platform that Colligan refers too then maybe Palm will create something along the original idea of the Foleo. Something so simple allowing Palm to define the netbook market the way Apple did with portable media players. Letting them make all of the other competition in the market look lacking in comparison.

Riots in Oakland over fatal police shooting of Oscar Grant

2009-01-08T12:31:05Z

Here are a few photographs and videos that I took from the protest Wednesday night in Oakland over the fatal police shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant that later turned into a riot. You can also see Lane Hartwell’s photographs from the evening.

At an intersection where police divided the crowd to disperse them into smaller groups and things started to appear to calm down.

Even to the point were some of the police officers started relaxing their riot gear they were wearing and walking away.

Bertrina Grant, the Aunt of Oscar Grant calling for the prosecution of the BART officer.

As the night went on we started hearing more frustration and anger in the crowd that started showing itself more than just verbally.

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums finished speaking to the crowd and walked into city hall after he had walked there from 14th street. At this point it appeared that things were dying down, but shortly shouts of “riot, riot” were heard and the night changed from an emotional and mostly peaceful protest to a series of violent riots.

We met back up with a friend who was there after she was luckily able to get to her car before the crowd damaged it. Many other cars were not so lucky and when we drove away to go to a different part of the riot we encountered the first and only instance of hostility towards us by the crowd.

…fires

We then met a photographer who was attacked by part of the crowd and tried to take his camera away. At this point I could see a group of three kids mocking a women who just ran down the street to find her car smashed.

…tear gas and then we started to hear shots fired (I’m assuming either the tear gas being fired off or rubber bullets. Some of the Oakland Police officers were caring shotguns with orange stocks labeled “less lethal” )

One arrest as Oakland police ran down a man on a bicycle tossing him to the ground as he resisted arrest.

It was very sad to witness as local businesses and personal property were damaged when only a few months earlier we were in the same area celebrating the election.

Added

Lane Hartwell’s photographs:

2400 miles later

2008-11-09T12:05:01Z

It has been a busy last couple of months for me with a cross country move and a new job.

I drove across the country (the third such road trip this year) from Frankfort, KY to Alameda, CA to move in with girlfriend, Bay Area photographer Lane Hartwell. Who I’ve had a wonderful summer with driving twice together cross-country, including driving through parts of Route 66. Driving 2400 plus miles with two cats was a test in patience requiring a stop every four or so hours to give both the cats and me a break.

The new job is working as the systems administrator with Crowd Science at their new office in Mountain View ( I do get to telecommute too). It is a great opportunity with plenty of technical challenges to sort out and I’m getting to work with some really sharp people who genuinely believe in their product and work. Like making real changes in the way online research is done. If you are an online publisher and looking for an audience analytics service take a look at Crowd Science Demographics.

The new job included a new MacBook Pro maxed out on memory which makes running some Solaris VMs in Fusion a breeze for testing. Being a Python shop this is letting me get up to speed on it and Django. I’ve always had the opinion of eating your own dog food so I’m planning to build a site using BluePrintCSS as I have it laid out here as a template and migrate over to Django here very soon.

Millennium Falcon Cake The KY to Maryland run in Less Than Nine Hours

2008-07-14T12:03:03Z

Photo by Michael Biven

First thanks to everyone who helped pull this off: Mom, Dad, Carrie, Lane, Kegan, Biddy, Tom, Charm City Cakes, the staff at Tsunami’s Baltimore and everyone who showed up. Without these people the event wouldn’t have happened, the cake would not have been made and I would have probably had a heart attack from stressing out trying to have everything work out. Thank you all big time!

UPDATE 7/15 Charm City Cakes emailed me today to say they are glad the cake was a hit and that it should appear in an episode in September.

A little over four months ago I started hatching a plan to surprise my brother Brian with a birthday party at Tsunami’s in Baltimore. The idea was to have some family and friends to come in from his home town of Louisville to surprise him with his friends in Maryland and a cake from Charm City Cakes. With Brian’s job and CCC both in Baltimore it seemed like the perfect over the top way to celebrate his birthday. The original idea for the cake was a simple round cake with some type of collage of little bits of his life; music (he plays in a couple of local bands), Tsunami’s (he manages and helped open the Baltimore location) and Star Wars (from his childhood). After talking with Mary Alice at CCC the idea of doing the Millennium Falcon was brought up and after thinking it over that is what we stuck with.

Brian tried very hard to wreck the plans twice. Originally he told me he was going to be working on his birthday which was going to make it hard to smuggle everyone into the restaurant plus the cake. Later I found out he had the day off and had a show scheduled with one of his bands, but with Carrie’s help we were able to get that show cancelled. Then he tells me he was thinking about leaving the restaurant and moving back to Louisville, I had to ask him to not rush into anything and at least wait till after his birthday since I had not seen the Baltimore location (there is a Tsunami's in Annapolis as well). The last thing that complicated things was that Lane and I had to drive in that morning from Kentucky and the GPS unit was not set correctly for DST and was showing us an incorrect arrival time. It was our responsibility to get Brian there at 6 PM and CCC was scheduled to be there about 6:15. A few frantic phone calls later with Lane’s, Carrie’s and Mary Alice's help everything was taken care of and we arrived with Brian a bit late surprising him with a group of close family and friends and a very kick ass cake!

Keep an eye out for the episode later this year on Ace of Cakes. I have a feeling that it will be the one were Duff is in Louisville delivering a cake to the Lebowski Fest. Brian was great on camera, but for myself I don't think they ever had a person who will be blipped so much in what gets aired. I was a bit excited, relieved and that was the first and last surprise party I ever organize.

Added for those viewing this in a feed reader and not seeing the comments. As Lane pointed out the cake was chocolate cherry with the cockpit and several of the other details made out of a very dense rice krispie treat. There was a couple of wooden dow rods to keep two pieces of the cake attached and it was mounted on a pedestal to give the look it was in flight. We did start to wonder how we would cut the cake, but Lane had the great idea to grab a knife from one of the sushi chefs there and as soon as it was in Brian’s hands he had no problem dismantling the ship. Another comment or assumption made by people is that it would not taste as good as it looked, while fondate isn’t the best the cake and the rice krispie tasted great. I don’t remember seeing anyone without a smile eating the cake and even with the large amount of fondate there was plenty of cake to go around.

Thanks for the comments, it was a great addition to Brian’s surprise party and to a very long week. Lane and I drove from San Francisco, CA to Louisville, KY; got a few days break and then drove from Kentucky to Annapolis, MD to check into our hotel, grab Brian and rush out to the restaurant in Baltimore.

Migrating WordPress to a different domain or server

2008-01-31T12:03:03Z

Two common questions I see both at work and from friends is how best to migrate a WordPress site from one server to another or how to go about changing the Domain Name. There are four different scenarios that will affect the changes you would be making:

Changing the Domain Name only or in combination with one of the scenarios below
Moving from one self-installed server to another self-installed server
Moving from a self-installed server to WordPress.com
Moving from WordPress.com to a self-installed server

Below are the steps that I suggest including backups, starting DNS changes, configuring the new server, database import and changes, verifying the new server, final DNS changes, 301 redirects and final verification. I will point out which applies to each of the different scenarios and also briefly go over a few tools that can help at the end of the guide. Remember though I don’t expect anything bad to happen this guide is completely use at your own risk and I do not take responsibility for anything resulting from following them.

Backup:

(applies to all four scenarios)

The very first thing to do is make a complete backup of the existing site for a few different reasons. First if you really do care about the work and effort you are putting into your site take the extra time to backup it up on some sort of regular schedule. Next is that we are about to make changes to the site and you will want a recent (as in the day your making the changes) backup to fall back on just in case something goes awry. And if you are moving from a self-installed copy of WordPress to another you will already have a copy of the plugins, themes and uploads to copy over to the new server. You do already have a current copy of WordPress and any plugins you have installed right?

So now on to backing up your site. I would suggest that you follow Lorelle’s guide to create a backup for WordPress and keep in mind the XML export would be needed if you are migrating from or to WordPress.com.

First set of DNS changes:

(applies to all four scenarios)

Try to make the following changes in DNS at least 24 hours before you plan to switch to the new domain name or server. Drop the Time To Live (TTL) for the A record that the blog uses down to something like 300 (make note of it’s original setting since you will need to change it back later). The TTL is in seconds so the 300 is equal to 5 minutes. During the migration to the new server you will be getting a new IP address, this way the TTL is dropped and since you made the change at least 24 hours before your migration you should only be looking at a 5 minute hiccup during the switch to the new server.

Configuring the new server:

(applies to all four scenarios)

Next on the new server go ahead and complete the basic install of WordPress. If you are moving to WordPress.com configure the new site, keep it set to private, but do not enable the domain alias at this point (under Options > Domains). For self-installed copies of WordPress depending on what type of access you have with the server you may need to edit your hosts file on your local computer to complete the install since you do not have DNS pointing to the new IP address, specifically when you run the file wp-admin/install.php.

Importing the data:

(applies to all four scenarios)

Now that we have the basic WordPress site completed it is time to import the data (posts, comments, pages) into the new server. Remember if you will be changing the Domain Name as well you will need to make the necessary changes in two tables in the database which I will go over at the end of this step.

If you are moving from one self-installed copy of WordPress to another use the backup of the database to create a new database on the new server. You will need to recreate the database user and edit the file wp-config.php to reflect any changes in the database name, user and password.

If you are moving to or from WordPress.com you will only be able to import the data to the new server from the XML export you created earlier. From the dashboard at the new WordPress.com site go to Manage > Import and then select WordPress. You will then be prompted to browse to the location of the XML from the previous export. Also when importing the file you will be asked if you want to change the author for the posts and drafts you are importing.

If you have changed the domain name used for the site and used the database backup to import your data you will need to make changes to two different tables. We need to change the Blog Address (URL), WordPress Address (URL) and the GUID for the posts. The Blog Address is listed as siteurl in the field option_name and the WordPress Address is home in the same field. You can use either phpMyAdmin or mysql if you have shell access, but the examples I give will be using phpMyAdmin.

The first two fields are located in the tables wp_options. After logging into phpMyAdmin click on the name of the database in the left hand side (you will need to select it form the drop down box if you have multiple databases) and then click on the SQL tab at the top of the page. In the “Run SQL query/queries” text box enter the following and press “Go” to change the Blog Address (URL):

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value =

replace(option_value, 'http://old.domain.com', 'http://new.domain.com')

WHERE option_name = 'home';

And to change the WordPress Address (URL):

(remember if you have your WordPress files in its own separate directory this URL will be different than the Blog Address)

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value =

replace(option_value, 'http://old.domain.com', 'http://new.domain.com')

WHERE option_name = 'siteurl';

To update the GUID with the new domain name enter:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://old.domain.com','http://new.domain.com');

And for any links to other pages or posts internally in your site with absolute URLs:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content =

replace(post_content, 'http://old.domain.com', 'http://new.domain.com');

Now that we have the data over get your theme and any plugins that you will be using configured on the new site.

Checking our work up to this point:

(applies to all four scenarios)

At this point you should have the new site up and running on the new server, but before we make it live by updating DNS with the new IP address or enabling the domain alias in WordPress.com you should take a moment to verify (thanks to the edit to the hosts file) that everything looks and behaves correctly. Consider viewing the site both while you are logged in as an admin and while logged out. You won’t be able to view a WordPress.com site while logged out unless you create a new user account and grant it permissions to access the site under Options > Privacy.

Final changes to DNS:

(applies to all scenarios)

After you are satisfied with the new install make the final change to DNS by either changing the A record or enabling the domain alias in WordPress.com. The changes for the A record includes updating it with the new IP address and changing the TTL back to it’s original setting.

301 redirects:

(applies to scenarios where the domain name changes)

So you just changed the domain name for the site and you might be asking yourself what about any links to the old domain name that are still getting spit out by search engines. You can take care of this with a simple .htaccess file in the root of your old domain names web server. Simply create or edit the file to include the following:

RedirectMatch permanent (.*) http://new-doamin.com$1

This will send any links to the old domain to their corresponding page at the new domain name as long as you do not make changes in the permalink structure. The longer you can leave this the better, but you should start seeing search engines updating with the new link, because we used a permanent redirect.

Final checks:

(applies to all scenarios)

It would be easy to think you’re done and stop right here, but I would suggest a couple more checks. Though you might have to wait a few hours or a day depending on how you made your DNS changes, take advantage of Google’s Webmaster tools, the Feed Validator, or Yahoo! Site Explorer to verify your sites robots.txt, sitemap, and any errors that they encounter with your site or feed. Also keep an eye on your bandwidth after the change just in case you have misconfigured something that is causing any problems with the site making calls to itself (ie using the RSS widget to load its own RSS feed) or anything else that we might not think of at the moment.

Closing and additional tools to help:

If you are planning on moving your site I hope you’ve found this guide useful, good luck and enjoy.

A few additional tips to help you check things as you go or troubleshoot (hopefully not) any problems.

Flush your local DNS cache:

In addition to making the changes in your local compuaters hosts file you may need to clear out your local DNS cache.

Mac OS 10.4 and older:

lookupd -flushcache

Mac OS 10.5:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Windows XP and newer (might work on Windows 2000):

ipconfig /flushdns

Query DNS servers with dig:

Being able to query the DNS server you are using or others is another handy skill to have when your mucking around in your sites DNS. On a Mac running OS X or Linux you can query your’s and other DNS server to see what they have listed for your domain using dig.

check your current DNS server for the A record

dig domain.com

check your current DNS server for the MX record

dig domain.com mx

check your current DNS server for the A record on a subdomain

dig sub.domain.com

check a different DNS server for the A record

dig @DNS.server.com domain.com

check a different DNS server for the MX record

dig @DNS.server.com domain.com mx

check a different DNS server for the A record on a subdomain

dig @DNS.server.com sub.domain.com

Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OS 10.5 or patching Dan Benjamin's guide

2008-01-25T12:02:43Z

Update: Dan has posted his updated guide for installing Ruby on Rails on Leopard.

I don’t think there are too many people who hasn’t come across either of Dan Benjamin’s guides when looking to install Ruby on Rails on a Mac. They are simple, to the point and you could basically copy and paste to get Ruby, Rails, MySQL and depending on which guide either Mongrel or LightTPD installed, but since the release of Leopard the instructions if unaltered would fail when installing Readline, Ruby and Subversion. Dan has mentioned that he will be providing an update to the guide for Leopard users, but with a new baby and job it might (and justifiably so) be a bit before he has the chance to finish them. What I’m going to cover are the additional steps I added to Dan’s guide to get everything up and running for me. First thing to do is read his guide making sure to note the following sections: What’s needed (except we are using OS 10.5 and Xcode 3.0), bash, Quick Warning, sudo and paths. To get the parts of Dan’s guide that would fail to work we will be applying some patches to Readline, Ruby and Subversion. If you are uncomfortable with this then I would suggest that you wait for his updated guide. And if you haven’t already tried installing the unaltered version on Leopard, consider running through each step to see the error before and after the patches. And remember just as he points out himself these instructions are completely use at your own risk and I do not take responsibility for anything resulting from following them.

Before you begin

Make sure to follow the steps from his guide to install Xcode, update your path and create the directory at /usr/local/src if you have not already done so.

Ruby

If you have tried his guide while using Leopard you probably got stuck at the first step when trying to compile readline. You will need to apply a patch from the developers, because the unpatched version of readline checks for the version of the operating system but does not include darwin9 (Leopard) in it’s list. We will be applying a patch to the file support/shobj-conf located in the readline-5.2 directory in /usr/local/src/ and then we can compile it without getting an error. You should also notice that we are installing the latest stable version.

curl -O ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-5.2.tar.gz

tar xzvf readline-5.2.tar.gz

cd readline-5.2

curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-5.2-patches/readline52-012

patch -p0 < readline52-012

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

make

sudo make install

cd ..

And now on to installing Ruby. While looking into why Ruby would segfault during the install I came across Laurent Sansonetti’s explanation and the set of patches that are applied to Ruby by Apple for the version that Mac OS ships with.

curl -O ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz

tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz

cd ruby-1.8.6-p111

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/dot-darwin.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/etc-irbrc.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/ignore-gsetcontext.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/md5_sha1_commoncrypto.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/use-dyld.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/use-setreugid.diff | patch -p0

curl http://chopine.be/lrz/ruby-osx-patches/words-bigendian-from-arch.diff | patch -p0

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/usr/local --enable-shared

make

sudo make install

sudo make install-doc

cd ..

RubyGems

Only change here is using the current version.

curl -O http://files.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com/rubygems/rubygems-1.0.1.tgz

tar xzvf rubygems-1.0.1.tgz

cd rubygems-1.0.1

sudo /usr/local/bin/ruby setup.rb

cd ..

Ruby on Rails

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

Remember one change in Rails 2.0.2 is that SQLite3 is now the default database. When you followed Dan’s instructions and changed the path you lost the SQLite3 bindings for Rails that Leopard ships with so we need to add them back.

gem install sqlite3-ruby

Mongrel

Just like RubyGems no changes here except it will be grabbing the latest version.

sudo gem install mongrel --include-dependencies

Subversion

This would be the next step that you should see an error while following the unaltered guide. I came across a patch from Brian D. Wells that allowed for me to complete the install.

curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz

curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz

tar xzvf subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz

tar xzvf subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz

cd subversion-1.4.6

curl -O http://homepage.mac.com/brianwells/.Public/apr_darwin_smb_patch

patch -d apr -p0 <apr_darwin_smb_patch

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-openssl --with-ssl --with-zlib

Edit the file /usr/local/src/subversion-1.4.6/apr/include/apr.h

Changing the line #define APR_HAS_SENDFILE 1 to #define APR_HAS_SENDFILE 0

make

sudo make install

cd ..

Capistrano

sudo gem install capistrano --include-dependencies

sudo gem install termios --include-dependencies

MySQL

And finally we’re ready to follow Dan’s instructions to install MySQL.

Alternatives

A big thanks to Dan for creating each of these guides and keeping them updated over the years. I hope you find these additions useful and remember usually there are a few different alternatives to doing something.

Optimizing performance for WordPress

2008-01-23T12:05:32Z

Taking responsibility of your WordPress site by keeping it up to date to the latest version and managing it’s load on the server hosting it is just as important as the content you’re writing for it. Security updates, performance improvements and other bug fixes will help keep your site running smoothly, but there are a few other steps you can take to improve it’s performance.

Keeping WordPress in check:

First thing is to make sure your install is current. It’s amazing the number of sites that you can come across that are still running older versions even with great tools like the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin written by Keith Dsouza of Techie Buzz which is a very simple way to update your site. It will backup your sites files and database, download the latest version of WordPress, place the site in maintenance mode (a simple splash screen), de-activate all plugins, updates WordPress and then reactivates the plugins after you have clicked the upgrade link. This step is probably one of the most missed tasks in maintaining your WordPress site and remember we’re not just talking about performance improvements here, but also keeping it update to any available security patches and preventing exploits like adding spam or reading copies of your saved drafts.

Caching in WordPress:

After making sure you have the latest version installed using caching is one of the simplest ways to improve your sites load times and also help reduce its load on the server. Donncha O Caoimh’s WordPress Super Cache plugin is an improved version of the WP-Cache 2 plugin by Ricardo Galli Granda. One improvement is that unlike the WP-Cache 2 plugin Super Cache will actually create a static HTML page instead of still having some PHP calls when served from the cache. It will serve simple HTML without having to use any PHP as long as the user visiting the site is not logged in or has not posted a comment. If they have commented or are logged in and tries to load a cached page the normal WP-Cache function will serve the page, but one of the best features of this plugin is the “LockDown” button. This will prevent the cache files from being deleted when a new comment is made. So if you think a post of yours is going to get hit by Digg or Slashdot you can have the server ready for the traffic or simply enable this after noticing any high traffic.

Comment and Pingback Spam:

Besides being just plain annoying comment and pingback spam can actually increase the load generated by your site. First make sure you are using the Akistmet plugin that comes with WordPress, then take a look at the using the comment blacklist feature under Options > Discussion. This will help reduce the number of spam that finds its way into your comments and pingbacks, but we also want to prevent blatant spam from posting at all to keep your queue of stuff marked as such as low as possible. To do that you can add some additional lines to your sites .htaccess file that I found at Perishable Press. By adding the rule found at the previous link you can keep any spammer from directly calling the file wp-comments-post.php to post a comment. If you do find that you have a large number of items marked as spam (hundreds or more of pages when you got to Comments > Akismet Spam) keep in mind that Akismet will automatically delete messages marked as spam greater than 15 days old. Depending on how your sever is performing it’s possible you might see the site slow down while its deleting all of those items marked as spam (a little later I’ll show you a tool that will help see what is going on in the background).

Offload as much as possible:

Any images, videos, audio, CSS and JavaScript files that you are serving from your server increase the number of requests that the web browser makes each time it loads your site. The good thing is that there are some very simple alternatives to place these files on a different server that is configured especially to serve static files. Instead of just using the obvious services from Flickr and YouTube for images and videos you can also use services like Amazon’s S3 to serve the CSS and any JavaScript files that your site is using. Also take a look at any additional JavaScript that you are adding for statistics, ads, calendars or basically any other information your are adding to it that is not a post or page. Consider using a web statistics product that is hosted on a different server (Google Analytics) instead of one that is served from your site like Mint for example. Other web stats tools like AWStats and Webalizer don’t actually place any scripts on the site, but instead use the web servers access logs to generate the statistics, either of these tools would allow you to remove a call to any type of a webstats tool, but remember these are generally created from a scheduled job that is run and would not provide you with any type of real time reporting.

Pruning the Plugins:

If there are any plugins that you are not using you should deactivate and remove them from the wp-contents/plugins directory. After that take a close look at each plugin and try to determine the value your site gets out of it and what actually goes on in the background when the it is used. In the next section I’ll briefly go over a few tools that you can use, but remember to check both the WordPress Codex, forums and the plugins site as some of the question you’re about to ask may already been answered. If the plugin actually interacts with the database look at the number of queries that it is sending to it and try to determine if it using any type of caching or can be rewritten without using the database. If you are lucky enough to find a way to improve it’s performance make sure to submit a patch to the plugins author to allow others to benefit from your hard work.

How to see what is going on:

Here are a few tools you can use to see what is going on in the background on the web server your site is hosted on.

Firebug

A Firefox add-on giving you tools to edit, troubleshoot and view CSS, HTML and JavaScript in real time for a web page. Allowing you to see the load times and sizes of individual files (images, CSS and JavaScript) it can help pin down what is slowing down a site. And if you add the YSlow add-on from the Yahoo Developer Network it will integrate with Firebug to give you some feedback on your sites performance and some suggestions on how to improve things.

LiveHTTPHeaders

Another FireFox add-on LiveHTTPHeaders will display the http headers showing you any redirects, sessions, cookies, compression or caching that may be happening when viewing your site.

Mytop

To see what queries are running in your database you could use mytop which is similar to the Top command, but looks at MySQL instead. This tool would require that you have shell access and the ability to install it if it is not already there, but it’s a great way to see real time what your sites is asking the database for and to do.

Access / Error logs

Looking at your web servers access and error logs can give you a great deal of information. Being able to see any web server or PHP errors, where all of that traffic is coming from if the site starts to crawl to a halt from high traffic, if it is getting crawled or scraped by a bot, and can show suspicious activity. If you see a problem or suspect something unusual is happening these logs should be one of the first places you look.

Phpinfo

And don’t forget to take a look at how PHP is setup by using phpinfo. Create a file called phpinfo.php and enter only the following in it:

<?php

phpinfo();

Save that and place it in your sites directory on the web server and you will be able to view the options, extensions, and a slew of additional information on PHP and the web server when you load the file in your web browser.

OK, that was a basic overview of some steps I take to optimize a WordPress site (or any site for that matter), but don’t forget another way to keep things humming along would be to consider actually hosting it on WordPress.com. Hopefully these steps will point you in the right direction to improving your site performance.

Staff reporter ejected from NCAA baseball game for "live blogging"

2007-06-12T01:17:04Z

This weekend I got to watch my favorite University's baseball team (University of Louisville) do something it has never done, it won a NCAA baseball Super Regional and has mad its way into the College World Series. Later I found out that a staff reporter from the Courier-Journal was ejected from the game and had his press credentials revoked after the NCAA asked the University to do so or risk not hosting another NCAA baseball event.

The NCAA manager of broadcasting, Jeramy Michiaels, released a memo before the game stating that a blog is a "live representation of the game and that any blog containing action photos or game reports would be prohibited". With the smart-phones, Blackberries and soon to be iPhones with web access, cameras and email; how do they expect to enforce such an unrealistic rule? I can sit at a game with my Blackberry Curve make posts using email, through the web browser, and send photos to a blog or Flickr. Besides the notion that this would be covered under the First Amendment. Michiaels goes on to say that "In essence, no blog entries are permitted between the first pitch and the final out of each game."

According to the NCAA not only can you not blog about these NCAA events, but you cannot provide live internet statistics as those "rights" have been granted to CBS. From a NCAA site "For clarification purposes, a live statistical representation includes play-by-play, score updates, shot charts, updated box scores, photos with captions". With the ruling by a federal judge last year that game and player statistics are not the intellectual property of MLB and that the First Amendment applies, it will be interesting to see how the live blogging and live internet statistics for the NCAA and other sporting events plays out.

Disco - disc burning simple and fun

2006-10-19T09:20:01Z

Originally written and published for Infinite Loop

They're having toast for breakfast. The makers of AppZapper create a new image and disc authoring tool call Disco for the Mac.

The makers of AppZapper have a new application getting ready to be released to beta next week called Disco to handle your daily disc burning and imaging tasks. After running an early copy of the beta, developer Austin Sarner was kind enough to answer a few questions.

After dropping your files onto Disco, you can either create an image or burn it to a disc using one of the supported formats. And except for files larger than a single disc, you can span them and easily create additional copies. Plus, with support for any type of optical drive supported by Apple, Sarner said "Disco will be right there with them" if Apple rolls out Blu-Ray and HD-DVD support.

The novelty of the app comes in at this point, because it can display a fluid dynamic model of smoke while it's burning a disc. You can even interact with the smoke using your cursor or the microphone to blow a gust of wind into it, but only modern Macs with a graphics card will be able to use this feature.

Another great point is Discography, basically a catalog of every disc you've created using Disco that you can search. This—and small things like using motion sensor support to shake the application that lets you know that whatever your burning might end up being a coaster—really makes it shine as a great app.

To start off, how did the idea for Disco get started?

AS: Disco actually started out as a much more basic idea. Initially, we wanted to create a simple step based disc copying solution. After we had begun implementing the workflow based interface, however, we realized we could easily extend it to much more in depth disc burning functionality. Doing this is a testament to the quality of Apple's frameworks, as we were able to quickly implement a large amount of functionality using the interface framework we had developed.

With the "We're having toast for breakfast" tagline, where do you see Disco in relation to Toast?

AS: Disco has never been conceived as a direct feature competitor to Toast. We are trying to offer most of what people use Toast for in a much smaller and accessible package. Too many people use applications that are unnecessarily large for simple tasks — such as using Toast to make a simple file CD. To sum it up, Disco is Toast without the bloat and a bit of fun thrown in.

Any chance that Discography could catalog the images created in addition to the discs?

AS: Not a bad idea — might just add that as an option.

Sites like macZOT work great for developers to get their apps out quickly after a release, but were you surprised to see how many people bought a pre-release of an app without knowing exactly what it does?

AS: I was completely surprised. Initially when we came up with the pre order idea we didn't expect the kind of response that we had, but we're certainly very happy with how things went. This just shows how passionate and involved the Mac software community is.

Between AppZapper, My Dream App and now Disco you've been pretty busy for a High School student. Do you have anything else in the works, more school or living "the life "?

AS: Right now I've recently finished up high school and am trying to figure stuff out :). In the immediate future at least, I'm completely tied up with the stuff you just mentioned. After Macworld maybe I'll have some time to sit down and evaluate where things are going, but for now I couldn't be more psyched to have the opportunity to work on such cool projects with such cool people. For instance I've been in Amsterdam the last few months working with Jasper Hauser and the rest of the Madebysofa guys and it has been the experience of a lifetime. There is something about sitting around in an office with other people who share the same vision as you that is incredibly fulfilling and fun at the same time.

I couldn't agree more and thanks to Austin for taking the time to talk to us.

Apple's next browser, Safari 3.0

2006-10-16T19:01:01Z

Originally written and published for Infinite Loop

With the next release of OS X, Apple will be updating its web browser with a number of new features.

When Apple releases Leopard, iPhoto won't be the only application getting some help from Google. Safari looks to be including protection against malicious web sites by accessing Google's information on sites it has flagged as possibly dangerous.

Several other new features will be included like "Web Clip" to create dashboard widgets from a site and "Web Inspector" to browse the DOM hierarchy from a pop-up window while highlighting the items selected on the page. You can try Web Inspector now by downloading the latest version of Webkit.

Being able to drag-and-drop a tab around in your browser’s window might not seem to be very important, but Safari has lacked this simple feature that the other Mac browsers have included. With the next version of Safari, this feature will be taken beyond the basic drag-and-drop by allowing you to consolidate all open windows into one and placing them each in their own tab, drag-and-drop tabs between windows, and allowing you to reorder the tabs in each window. OmniWeb has already included most of these features in addition to a list mode for when you have a lot of open tabs—there is a tab drawer with a thumbnail graphic of the site, which kind of reminds me of the scrapbook feature in IE 5 for Mac (about the only feature I miss from IE).

Taking a cue from the Dashboard, the new live search feature in Safari will dim the page while highlighting every match for the search term. And that is really two new items, because remember, it used to only show you the first hit for what you were looking for.

Adding a new feature from the next version of CSS, Safari 3.0 will allow the user to resize the text area on a form. The user will be able to turn this feature off and use the style sheet created by the designer of the site by way of a preference setting.

With these additions Safari will be sitting pretty to become stronger than ever as the browser of choice for the Mac.

Getting Apple's Mail sorted

2006-10-10T15:37:01Z

Originally written and published for Infinite Loop

Take Mail.app under control using available third-party tools for Apple's default e-mail client.

One of the biggest distractions while working, for some people, is the constant deluge of e-mails that can take out more than just time from your workday. This sends people in search of systems to get their inbox down to a manageable number. For those that need help, there are additional tools available for Mail.app that will get that inbox sorted out. Of the many available options, three stood out for me and became part of how I use Mail.

The first two tools from Scott Morrison are so useful that they should be included with Mail.app by default. Using MailTags, you're able to add keywords, projects, due dates, link emails with iCal "To Do" items, and when used with Mail Act-On, create a custom email management system to fit your needs. Signature Profiler from Scott Little will manage your signatures in Mail.app for multiple accounts and if you ever wanted to create a nice looking signature, this tutorial covers creating custom CSS signatures in Mail.

There are many ways and tools to manage your inbox, but I do wish Apple or someone would add support for microformats to Mail.app soon. Then I would be able to manage my e-mail the way I want.

Perian, bringing playback for all to Apple's QuickTime

2006-10-03T11:56:01Z

Originally written and published for Infinite Loop

Self-labeled as the "Swiss-army knife for QuickTime," Perian adds playback support in QuickTime for several popular video codecs. Lead Developer Augie Fackler answers a few questions about the project.

While it is easy to watch a movie or the latest Lost episode using QuickTime, trying to watch anything encoded in other common video codecs can lead to a more difficult experience. A new freeware component called Perian allows you to view most of those other codecs that QuickTime doesn't support, including DivX, XviD, 3viX, FLV, with plans for both Matroska and Ogg. The only major codec that isn't supported is Windows Media Video, which Flip4Mac already handles. With iTV less than a year out this should be great news to anyone wanting to stream videos to Apple's next set-top box.

Augie Fackler, the Lead Developer of Perian, was able to answer a few of questions for us.

Me: First, what prompted you to start the project instead of using existing options like VLC?

VLC is all well and good, but it won't ever fix Finder previews or Front Row. Now that iTunes 7 is out, that's also a compelling reason to fix QuickTime, although that didn't exist when I started things in July or August. Overall, I'm tired of VLC because even though it's a very good app, it's not quite native, and I like the idea of previews working, so this just kills two birds with one stone. This also means I can use the same player (usually NicePlayer, see below) for everything, including WMV since I have Flip4Mac installed.

Me: Besides what is in the timeline on the development site, are there any other big plans, like say, encoding?

Encoding is definitely on our radar, but for now just getting playback working is going to keep us busy. I believe finding ways to run portions of video decoding on the GPU was kicked around in IRC, but I don't know how that looks like it'll go right now.

Trac probably shows it - but we're working on getting Matroska (.mkv) support in, and my personal next major goal is Ogg support (.ogm). Ogg support will be harder.

Ultimately, we also plan on making a streaming importer, which will make playback start a lot sooner after opening large files in QuickTime. I'm hoping that'll make Finder previews faster as well, since it's still somewhat painful to have previews on for 700 meg avi files.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I recommend using NicePlayer over the standard QuickTime Player app - QTP uses *obscene* amounts of CPU for no reason (well, not no reason - it's a badly designed widget – Peter Hosey (from Adium) has more details on that if you really care). With Perian, you don't have to screw around with the (sometimes flaky) Xine backend in NicePlayer, and you can use QuickTime for things QT is good at.

Me: Any thought of working with the NicePlayer guys or do you see Perian being a stand-alone player later on?

I doubt we'll ever need to directly work with the NP guys - I'm not opposed to it, but what we're doing is fundamentally different - we're doing backend decoding stuff and making QT happy for anything that uses it, whereas they're leveraging what's available in the QT framework to make a wicked awesome player app - Perian is fundamentally a codec and to my mind will stay that way for the foreseeable future

Thanks to Augie for taking the time to talk to us.