Tech

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

Internet Explorer .pdf files?

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IE .pdf's?

It’s the little things that get to me about Windows most of the time. Things like this — today, for absolutely no reason that I can think of, Windows has decided that Adobe Acrobat .pdf files should have Internet Explorer’s icon.

Why? Only Windows knows. I haven’t installed anything, changed any system settings, or done anything differently than the same basic things I do every day (opening, saving, printing documents). But it looks like this is what’s meant to be. At least until Windows changes its mind and either sets .pdf’s back to their original icon, or chooses something entirely different.

iTunes/www.applemusic.com

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Just some initial thoughts after playing around with iTunes 4.0 and the iTunes Music Store for a bit.

  • AAC: I’m sold. Through some very non-scientific, non-mathematical experimenting, I seem to be getting about a 40% reduction in file size with 128kbps AAC .m4a’s as opposed to 160kbps VBR .mp3’s. With a \~14,000 song, 75GB music collection, a 40% reduction in size is beautiful. Plus, they do sound at least the same, if not better.
  • iTunes 4.0: Basic functionality is still the same as previous versions of iTunes, which I was already quite happy with. They’ve obviously done some under-the-hood work, though — where I used to get “spinning beach balls” almost anytime I clicked around in iTunes, now the only time I get a wait cursor is when I’m getting info on multiple tracks at once. Much snappier performance — and on an aging 350Mhz blue-and-white G3, that’s pretty impressive.
  • iTunes Music Store: Again, I’m sold. Very nicely and simply integrated directly into iTunes, finding stuff in the store is a breeze. I’ve already purchased one track to replace a corrupted .mp3 file created from a scratched CD, and once the iTMS is tied to my .mac account, single-click purchasing works flawlessly. Could be dangerous, though — talk about instant gratification! The selection of music available could use a little work, though I suffer a bit in having more esoteric music tastes — the majority of the “big artists” seem to be pretty well represented, and Apple says that they’re constantly working on expanding their library. Can’t complain too much, though — I’ve even found some pleasant surprises that I’m thinking about picking up (lots of Bill Cosby, and even a fair chunk of Spike Jones albums!).

Excellent work, all around. As far as I’m concerned, all of the whiners at MeFi and /. can jump off a cliff — Apple’s got a good thing going here. The only downside I can see is that to take advantage of AAC’s smaller file sizes, I’ve got about 1500 CD’s to rip all over again…

Apple turns up the volume

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Well, today was the day that Apple finally made the announcments that rumor sites had been salivating over for the past few months. Lots of cool goodies…

  • QuickTime upgraded to v6.2, which includes support for AAC (more info on AAC here).
  • An iPod software update to v1.3, adding support for AAC, and longer battery life.
  • Redesigned and updated iPods, now in 10Gb, 15Gb, and 30Gb models, a slimmer design, software updates, and a price drop.
  • iTunes goes to v4.0, adding AAC support, Rendevouz local streaming (so you can stream audio from one Mac to others on the same local network), and support for the new…
  • …the long-rumored iTunes Music Store! Featuring 200,000 songs (and growing) from all the major music lables, previews of songs, one-click downloading, a 99 cent-per-song purchase price, and very reasonable DRM (unlimited listening time, unlimited CD burns, unlimited iPod support, purchased tracks can be copied to up to 3 other Macs), Apple looks to be making a good solid attempt to do the online-music experience well.

The new software just made it to my Mac — time to install and play!

Redesigning

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Redesign in progress.

This is a starting point, not an end point. Some things may look goofy at the moment — my most humble apologies. Comments, as always, are welcome.

Yet to come: color (not one of my strongpoints, but I’m not planning on sticking with pure black and white for too long), some graphics to spruce the place up a bit, and, oh, whatever else that might fall out of my head along the way.

Meme proposal: YAAMR

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A proposal for the ‘net community at large, and for Microsoft, in an effort to make complaints about/criticisms of Microsoft and its software easier to collect and analyze, with the intent of letting any concerned party at Microsoft sift through them at will for subjects relevant to their area of expertise.

Requirements: a weblog with an active RSS feed.

Methodology: The methodology from the user end is simple: include the acronym ‘YAAMR’ (for Yet Another Anti-Microsoft Rant) in the relevant weblog post; preferably in the title, though including it in the body should work also.

On Microsoft’s end, the process is also simple: create a Feedster search for ‘YAMMR’. Then, as Feedster allows one to subscribe to an RSS feed of a specific search, the MS employee could then subscribe to that RSS feed in their newsreader of choice.

End result: a real-time, constantly updated feed of issues that MS would do well to pay attention to, in order to improve relations with their current user base.

It goes without saying that this same method could be used for other companies or organizations also, requiring only the selection of a convenient acronym or set of keywords that could be used to trigger Feedster’s search results.

I don’t really expect this to get picked up, or put into practice. But I like the idea. Maybe it’d be more useable for smaller companies? In any case, there’s potential here, I think…

More random ideas connected with this: perhaps a Movable-Type powered site, with different categories for different companies or organizations (or one site for a specific company, with categories for the various software packages). These categories would be set up as TrackBack ping receivers for rant posts.

For instance, a hypothetical ‘www.microsoftrants.com’ could have categories for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc., then posts about issues with the software could ping the corresponding category. MS employees in the various software groups could subscribe to RSS feeds for the categories, enabling them to keep an ‘ear to the ground’ of what the ‘common user’ faces when using their software.

Hrm. Ideas? Questions? Comments? Words of wisdom?

I think I’ll toss this one out to the LazyWeb community. It’s not really a ‘problem to be solved’, as such, except that I don’t really have the resources (budget) to set this up on my own, and I don’t even know that the idea would catch on (not to mention that as I’m not an ‘A-list’ blogger [or even B- or C-list…probably somewhere around Q-list, I think…], there’s no gaurantee anyone would ever see this proposal otherwise). Better to toss it out to people more integrated with the various tech communities to see if any of them want to pick it up and play with it.

But what about the little guy?

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Robert Scoble pointed to Scott Johnson’s YAAMR post. Two hours after Scott made his post, he had an offer in his comments from a tester at Microsoft to pass on information about his crash to the appropriate team at Microsoft.

First thought: that’s cool.

Second thought: too bad things like this aren’t likely to happen for the rest of the poor shmoes battling Windows (like, oh, say…[ahem]…me, for instance). Offering high-profile bloggers help after they’re linked to by another high-profile blogger is certainly a nice thing to do, and nothing in itself to sneeze at, but all of Scott’s complaints with Windows are perfectly valid, and are the kinds of frustrations that many people have to deal with on a regular basis.

The fundamental problem itself is still unsolved — Windows is often a royal pain in the ass to deal with. Most of us have to deal with it on our own, though, and common experiences like Scott’s are going to keep happening, and Microsoft is going to continue to be perceived by many people as a lumbering, unstoppable behemoth of a company that can’t actually write decent software, but doesn’t seem to care because they’ve got such a lockhold on the industry.

Somehow, I just don’t see that happening anytime soon.

No more 404's

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I just implemented a very nice little PHP script for my website that ties into my site search function — the end result being that my site no longer has a “404 File Not Found” error page!

In brief: if a visitor puts in a URL address that doesn’t exist, it gets shunted to my search script. If the script returns multiple hits, that listing is displayed, but if the script only returns one hit, the visitor is automatically forwarded to that page. Very slick.

As a bonus, it provides a convenient shortcut to searching my site — just put in whatever search terms you want after “http://www.djwudi.com/” and see what you get!

(script via Scriptygoddess)

Too…many…windows…

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I’ve been told I need to stop posting so much information on my site, as the subsequent preponderance of tabs was threatening to take over one of my reader’s windows.

djwudi.com tabs

Not wanting to cause any undue stress to any of my five loyal readers, I should probably resolve that henceforth, I shall no longer blog about anything other than my pets, what I ate for lunch each day, and the annoying things that my co-workers did today.

Unfortunately, I don’t have pets, I tend to forget to eat lunch on a fairly regular basis, and now that I’ve moved to a new position at work, I’m not dealing with annoying co-workers on a regular basis.

So I’m afraid you’ll all just have to put up with the usual blather.

My humble apologies.

;)