Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Related entries

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I’m experimenting with Adam Kalsey’s Related Entried Revisited MovableType modification. It uses a MySQL database query to create a list of entries that should be somewhat similar to each entry, and lists them in the right hand sidebar of each entry’s individual listing page.

Just glancing through what it comes up with, it seems to be grabbing an interesting mix. Some posts I’ve been fairly impressed with what it comes up with, others have seemed fairly random. I’ll leave it in for a bit to see what I think of it.

Don't talk and drive

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Update: This was originally a post ranting about people driving and talking on cell phones at the same time.

Unfortunately, I seem to be running into a problem where, due to a bug either in Safari, in MovableType, or the combination of the two, sometimes when editing a comment (for instance, deleting a duplicate), the text of the comment gets put in the body field of the post being edited. If you don’t see this before saving the post, the post is wiped out, and replaced with the text of the comment.

Grr.

Ah, well. Guess I just need to pay more attention next time. I just wish I knew who to send the bug report to…

Newly Digital (Back in the Day, redux)

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Adam Kalsey has started a project he calls Newly Digital — a collection of stories about when people first discovered computers, got online, and so on.

In that vein, I’m updating and reposting my “Back in the Day” post from roughly a year ago, to contribute to the project. Enjoy!

The first computers I can remember playing with were the Apple II‘s that my elementary school had. Before long our friends the Burns had one of their own that I got to play with, while my babysitter picked up a Commodore 64 that gave me my first look at the BASIC programming language.

Eventually, my family got our first computer — an Osborne 1. This was a beast of a machine. 64k of RAM, a Z-80 CPU, two 5.25″ floppy drives, and a 5″ monochrome 80×40 greenscreen, all packed into a case the size of a suitcase that weighed about 30 pounds. The keyboard could be snapped up against the face of the computer, allowing it to be carried around — one of the first, if not the very first, “portable” computers! It ran CP/M (a precursor to MS-DOS) — aside from fiddling with the machines at school or at my friends’ houses, my first real command-line experience! There was a 300 baud modem available for the Osborne 1 computer, however my family didn’t get one until years later (when those of our friends who had also had Osborne 1 computers were giving them to us as they upgraded, allowing me to cannibalize parts from two machines to keep one running).

I first got online sometime in 1990, with the first computer I bought myself — an Apple Macintosh Classic with no hard drive (the computer booted System 6.0.7 off one 3.5″ floppy, and I kept MS Word version 4 on a second floppy, along with all the papers I typed that year), 1 Mb of RAM — and a 2400 baud modem. Suddenly an entire new world opened up to me. After a brief but nearly disasterous flirtation with America Online at a time when the only way to dial in to AOL from Anchorage, Alaska was to call long distance, I discovered the more affordable world of local BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems).

I spent many hours over the next few years exploring the BBS’s around Anchorage, from Ak Mac (where most of my time was devoted) to Forest Through the Trees, Roaring Lion, and many others that I can’t remember the names of at the moment. I found some of my first online friends, many of whom I conversed with for months without ever meeting — and many that I never did meet. Most of the Mac-based boards used the Hermes BBS software, which shared its look and feel with whatever the most popular PC-based software was, so virtually all the boards acted the same, allowing me to quickly move from one to the other. After springing the $300 for an external 100Mb hard drive (how would I ever fill up all that space?!?) I downloaded my first ‘warez’ (bootlegged software), at least one of which had a trojan horse that wiped out about half my hard drive. I discovered the joys — and occasional horrors — of free pornography. I found amazing amounts of shareware and freeware, some useful, some useless. It was all amazing, fun, and so much more than I’d found before. In short — I was hooked.

After I graduated from high school in 1991, I had a short-lived stint attending UAA (the University of Alaska, Anchorage). One of the perks of being a student was an e-mail account on the university’s VAX computer system. In order to access your e-mail, you could either use one of the computers in the university’s computer lab, or you could dial into their system via modem. Logging in via modem gave you access to your shell account, at which point you could use the pine e-mail program. However, I soon learned that the university’s computer was linked to other computers via the still-growing Internet!

I thought BBS’s were a new world — this Internet thing was even better! Suddenly I was diving into ftp prompts and pulling files to my computer from computers across the globe. Usenet readers introduced me to BBS-style discussions with people chiming in from all over the world, instead of just all over town. I could jump into IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and have real-time conversations with people in other countries. The gopher protocol was essentially a precursor to the World Wide Web, textual information pages linked to each other by subject. I was fascinated — more information than I had dreamed of was at my fingertips.

By the time I left UAA and lost my student account, the ‘net had started to show up on the radar of public consciousness, but still at a very low level — it was still fairly limited to the ‘geek set.’ That was enough, however, to have convinced some of the local BBS systems to set up primitive (but state of the art at the time) internet links: once a day, generally at some early hour, they would dial into a special node on the ‘net and download a certain set of information, which the BBS users could then access locally. It was slow, time-delayed, and somewhat kludgy, but it worked, and it allowed us to have working e-mail addresses. It wasn’t what I’d had while at the university, but it was certainly better than nothing.

Within a few years, though, the ‘net suddenly exploded across public consciousness with the advent and popularization of the World Wide Web. Suddenly, you didn’t have to do everything on the ‘net through a command line — first using NCSA Mosaic, and later that upstart Netscape Navigator you could point and click your way through all that information — and some of the pages even had graphics on them! It was simplistic by today’s standards, but at the time it was revolutionary, and I joined in that revolution sometime in 1995 with my first homepage.

Since then, there’s been no turning back. My computers have been upgraded from that little Mac Classic to a Performa 600/IIvx, from that to a PowerMac 6100, then on to a 6500, through an original Revision A iMac, and now consisting of a Blue and White G3, a custom-built PC (the first Windows-based PC I ever owned), and currently a Dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5, and currently a 27″ iMac, and now a 27″ Retina 5K iMac, and now an M1 Mac mini desktop and M2 MacBook Air. My website has grown as well over the years, passing through several intermediate designs to its current incarnation hosted off my G3 through the UN*X-flavored goodness of Mac OS X.

To quote Jerry Garcia, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” I’m only looking forward to seeing where it takes me from here.

No more standalone IE

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Here’s an interesting little tidbit buried in a Microsoft TechNet Q&A session:

As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation. … Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS.

Very interesting, especially in light of the blogged to death \$750 million AOL/Microsoft settlement that includes licencing IE to AOL for the next seven years (and possibly sounding Netscape’s death knoll). Makes me curious just how that’ll work.

Also — does this also kill IE for the Mac? IE already hadn’t been updated for the Mac in ages, and with the proliferation of alternative browsers available out there for OS X — including Apple’s own Safari — has Microsoft decided it’s time to concede the browser war as far as the Mac platform goes?

(via Jeffrey Zeldman)

Fact-checking Reuters re: iTunes

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There’s an article from the Reuters news service covering the iTunes ruckus that has some rather surprising errors in it, not to mention being amazingly clumsily written. And, since I can’t leave well enough alone…

Earlier this week, Apple released an update to its iTunes music software for its Macintosh computers, which allows subscribers to download songs for 99 cents each.

Minor nitpick: iTunes does a whole lot more than that.

One feature of iTunes, called Rendezvous music sharing, allows users to share downloaded songs between three Macintosh computers and also allows users to share songs copied from CDs to be shared over the Internet.

Minor nitpick: Rendevouz is a system-level networking technology that allows computers to auto-sense their network environment, configure themselves, and automatically discover available services. iTunes takes advantage of Rendevouz, but is not tied to it.

The update eliminates users’ ability to swap songs copied from CDs, but doesn’t disable the Rendezvous feature, itself.

Minor nitpick: See above, regarding Rendevouz.

Minor nitpick: Songs ripped from a private CD library were available for streaming before the update, and still are (just not over the ‘net at large). They were never officially open for swapping.

The new service has been a hit, with more than three million songs downloaded since the service was released a month ago, according to Apple.

Bad writing: The facts in this paragraph are about the iTunes Music Store. However, with its placement in the story and unclear subject (“The service…” — iTunes? The iTunes Music Store? The Rendevouz-based streaming?), it seems to say that over three million songs have been illegally downloaded over the Rendevouz streaming feature.

Subscribers to the iTunes service, who paid \$10 to join…

Major error: I haven’t got a clue what this might be referring to. Neither iTunes nor any of its features require a \$10 fee of any sort. iTunes is free, all of its features are built-in, and the only charges from the iTunes Music Store are those accrued when purchasing music.

…started receiving notices on their computers from Monday urging them to update their iTunes software. While the upgrade is not mandatory, it shows up on a daily basis, forcing users to reject it until it is downloaded.

Error: I’ve been using iTunes for years, and have purchased a few tracks from the iTunes Music Store, and yet I never got any notice from Apple urging me to do anything. What this probably refers to is the Software Update feature of Mac OS X, which is simply an automated agent that checks Apple’s servers at a regular user-specified schedule to see if there are any available software updates.

If someone had their Software Update scheduled to check in with Apple daily, then they could conceivably get a daily alert about the iTunes update — but then, they’d get a daily alert about any software update that was available and uninstalled. If you choose not to install an update, and don’t want to be notified every time that Software Update runs, you can simply select it and disable any further alerts for that particular upgrade. Nothing is forced or urged upon the customer.

Normally I don’t have much problem with the stories I see on Reuters — but then, I’m not nearly as well-versed in many of the subjects I read from them. If the rest of their news reporting is as solid as this story was, I should just stop paying attention.

Apple updates iTunes, web explodes

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Today, as I took the odd moment here and there to keep an eye on happenings in the web world, I was somewhat startled to watch Apple provoke absolutely ridiculous amounts of stürm und drang with an update to iTunes.

In brief, when iTunes 4 was released a few weeks ago, one of the new features was the ability to stream your music to other computers running iTunes. This was intended as a way for someone with multiple machines in their house to keep all their music in a centralized location, and still be able to listen to the music anywhere — even if the music was stored on dad’s machine in his office, the kids could call up the music collection on their computer in the living room, for instance.

Not too surprisingly, within hours after the update was released, people discovered that the streaming would also work across the ‘net, if the hosting computer’s outgoing bandwidth was strong enough. Not long after that tips were being traded on how to capture the music stream — and suddenly what was intended as a convenience for personal use became yet another way for people to illegally acquire music.

Today, the update to iTunes 4.01 was released. From Apple’s description (with emphasis added)…

iTunes 4.0.1 includes a number of performance and network access enhancements, and only allows music sharing between computers using iTunes 4.0.1 or later on a local network (in the same subnet).

…and the Apple-centric sites absolutely exploded with rage and indignation (and, thankfully, a few somewhat reasonable voices).

Noticeably upset:

Neutral, or posted with actual thought:

Quite honestly, I find this collective tempertantrum to be surprising, and more than a little childish. Apple is having to walk a fine line, balancing their desire to use as little DRM as possible with the music industry’s desire to actually be able to still make money. The fact that they’ve been able to come to an agreement with all five major music industry players that allows the iTunes Music Store to exist with as little DRM as there is, is impressive enough. The balancing act that they’re having to pull, with their customers ~~needs~~ demands on one side, and the music industry on the other, is one that I wouldn’t envy any company, and so far I’ve been impressed with what they’ve been able to pull off.

What we seem to be seeing, at its most base, is the battle between two very strong forms of greed: the greed of the music industry, and the greed of those users who seem to feel that it is their right to be able to listen to anything, at any time, for free.

I, for one, have never understood, or been sympathetic to those who feel that they have some right to free music. As a DJ for many years, I’ve amassed an impressive collection of music — some 1200 CDs or so — and have long lost count of the number of requests I’ve had to make copies of my music for people. Why in the world should I do such a thing?

First off, copying and distributing music is illegal! Yes, I know that the music industry is (very generally) Evil, that CDs are hideously overpriced, and that artists see very little of the money from music sales. However, no matter how small of a percentage an artist might get from any single sale, how much money will they be getting if there are no sales? A little bit of something is still something, but nothing is just that. If there is an artist that I like, I’d much rather pay the money and support them in what little way I can — they created the music, they should be able to reap what rewards they can from that creation.

Secondly, and equally as important in my eyes, I’ve spent untold hours and ungodly amounts of money on building my collection over the years. Why in God’s name would I turn around and proceed to give the fruits of that undertaking away for free? If someone hears music that I have and likes it, they have the ability to take the time and money to find the music themselves (though I’m afraid that many, if not most, are far more likely to spend the time on Kazaa or some other file-trading system than spend the money at a music store). It’s all out there somewhere, and I don’t have any secret tricks or magical conjurings that allow me to find the music I do. Time, patience, a little luck, and money is all it takes.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. The streaming feature of iTunes is a feature — not a right. It is a convenience — not a right. And, most importantly, it is for personal use, for you the consumer to listen to the music that you own. Had Apple allowed the iTunes streaming implementation to continue to exist as-is, they may very likely have faced suits and the dismantling of the iTunes Music Store (quite possibly the first realistic model for online music distribution) when the music industry decided that it didn’t want to support a service that was so obviously and prominently being used for illegal distribution, no matter what the original intent of the service was. Rather than do that, Apple added a slight restriction to the streaming service, so that while streaming still works, and will work in the home, it no longer works over the internet at large. Would you rather have had Apple pull the streaming feature entirely?

Grow up, everyone. This is truly a tempest in a teapot.