On this day, I own a buttload of Apple gear: iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook Pro, Apple TV, Apple TV 2, Time Capsule, Mac Mini… I’m planning on getting an iPhone 4S as soon as possible.

I was (and am) a big open source dork at heart, but Apple’s simplicity and ease of use, especially the past 7 years really spoke to the pragmatic side of me.  It turned me into a fan boy, I guess.  It didn’t hurt that OS X is NeXTStep is UNIX… I touch OS X and Linux every day.

One of Dinah’s first words was iPod which she taught herself so she could ask me to turn on music for her.

In college, I loved using the NeXT computers we had. My first class in college used scheme on the NeXT’s. The NeXT is one of the first places I played Doom.  I took calculus using Mathematica on the Mac in college.

Steve also touched my kids’ lives via Pixar. (Okay, my life too, I saw Toy Story in the theater first run, long before I had kids.) Also through their first computer, a Mac Mini.

There were too other public figures who’s lives and deaths touched me the way Steve’s passing is touching me today: Jim Henson and Fred Rodgers.

We’re stuck with one vexing problem at work that’s Lion related:  We have all of the work Macs tied into Active Directory and that’s working pretty well.  However, we can’t seem to mount a Windows 2008 file share if it has access permissions on it.  This worked fine in Snow Leopard, but I’m getting an error dialog with “You do not have permission to access this server” when I use the “Connect to Server” GUI box.

However, if I go to the command line and issue a mount -t smbfs cifs://server/path/to/share /some/path it mounts just fine.  I’m not sure what the command line is doing different from the GUI, but seriously WTF?

Its holding us back from doing wider deployment.  I can live with doing a manual command, other users, not so much.

[Update: I've opened a bug with Apple.]

[Update 8/24/2011: Apple has put up a Knowledge Base article addressing this at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4829 which explains the behavior differences. I don't have a great workaround yet but we know the why now.]

The infographics after the jump.

It started when Rev Tom e-mailed me via flickr with the following:

Your photos have smashingly rich EXIF metadata! And Flickr seems to respect it, too, amazingly. What do you use? I take it you add XMP tags because some of them look remarkably unlike standard EXIF tags. Is that right?

(A good example is the metadata on my recent moon photo as seen on flickr.) Some of the following I’ve shared here before, but it was in the mail to Tom so I’ll reuse it here:

I’m using Aperture on my Mac to handle my photos these days. I have 16,382 photos, so I was out-growing “directories of images,” so I moved to iPhoto, which gave me the added bonus of being able to sync photos to my iOS devices and AppleTV.  I then outgrew iPhoto for keeping them straight once I got the Canon T2i and started doing 18 megapixel RAW images, iPhoto was just choking on editing them.  (And it looks like I’ve added 3,153 of those since I got the T2i according to a quick search I did.)  In either case, I had to move to Aperture or Lightroom, and since there was a direct upgrade path to Aperture from iPhoto, and I’m drinking Cupertino Kool-aid these days, Aperture was an easy choice.

So, the answer on richer metadata is that I’m filling out the IPTC set for my personal information.  It looks like some of the standard metadata like caption is also tossed in there.  XMP is a super-set of IPTC (due to some collaboration) and looks like that’s how it ends up being shared when I expose it.  (Check out this about.com article that quickly overviews EXIF, IPTC, and XMP and its relationships.) Aperture also directly is uploading into flickr for me, so it might be using some other stuff in the flickr API to fill it in.

The following images are screenshots of what Aperture lets me fill in when I select the “IPTC Core” metadata.

The next image shows the large amount of metadata subsets that Aperture will expose to me.  Most of those screens have a few pieces of redundant data that can be found on the other, but each tab has a few unique things to fill in.

One of the things you can do on Aperture is have some automatic actions performed at import time.  The next image is what I’ve got automatically done when I import photos.

I mostly add the IPTC bits, but I also rename the photos on import to the YYYY-MM-DD_HH:MM:SS that I’ve been using since I got a digital camera in ’97. That also becomes the default title, but I generally override that in images I share, or at least I try to.

Once I discovered that some of that stuff was exposed in flickr, I started filling in photos I KNEW I was gonna share with as much data as I’d ever used or added to the flickr experience.

(BTW, the above if a flash based slideshow from flickr…sorry iPad users, but I’m experimenting with flickr.)

Even the Justice League has been hit by the economy.  Batman must not be funding the jets anymore, and with Ted Kord dead there’s no one to drive the Bug, they are down to a van.

Not that I’m an internet security expert, but it’s seems a pretty straight-forward software token implementation. On Google’s side, to seed the software on your smartphone, it uses a QR code. (I point this out as its one of the few uses of QR codes in the wild that I’ve seen that doesn’t make me want to vomit everywhere. For the record, the only other use of QR codes that I have condoned is @tcar using them to rickroll people.) They also give you a hand full of one time password codes for you to print out to keep in your wallet in case you are without your smartphone.

In practice with Google’s accounts, when you log in, you’re additionally asked for the current code.  At that time, you can choose to have google assume the machine you’re on is good for 30 days.  For a home or work machine that isn’t going anywhere, that’s probably safe, but I find myself not checking that box a lot.

The only downside is that any application you have that interacts with a Google service but can’t do a secondary form of authentication, such as an mail/IMAP client, you’ll need to set up “application-specific passwords.” These are passwords that application alone uses to get to your account that you can revoke at any time. Its not difficult, its just tedious as I ended up needing to create 10 different passwords due to the variety of applications I use that interact with Google.  However, now that they are set up, I don’t have to touch them again unless one of the passwords get compromised.

In any case, if you depend on some google services, and you have a smartphone, I highly recommend looking into this with your account.

After using Google Authenticator for a few days with google, I became aware of their project on google code. Besides having the code for the Android and Blackberry applications, it contains code for a PAM module. That really peaked my interest as I’ve always toyed with the idea of implementing two-factor auth at home and on the server I share with my friends, but there hasn’t really been a conveniently deployable way to do it.

Here’s where the linux part starts

There’s no code release for the PAM module yet, so you’ll need to check out a copy using Mercurial.  Once that’s downloaded, you want to make sure you have your PAM development libraries installed.  I also suggest (as the Google wiki’s page says) having libqrencode installed so the google-authenticator command line setup tool can spit a QR code out at you to more easily activate it in your smartphone.  Once those are there, its a pretty easy compile since the Google folks seem to be developing it on Linux. If you’re on another platform, your milage may vary.  I also see via a comment on the wiki page that someone made a Ubuntu ppa of it, so that might simplify matters as well.

By default, the PAM module is all or nothing, so either all your users need to be set up for two-factor auth or no one can be.  There is a patch that allows you to modify this behavior to ignore two-factor auth if it hasn’t been set up or not, which would work for a good transitory period. I haven’t implemented this yet, as its from a recent comment on the wiki page, but when I go to implement this on my shared server I’ll be making use of it.

On my ubuntu server, once the PAM module was installed, I just added the following line to /etc/pam.d/sshd after the existing “@include common-auth“:

auth required pam_google_authenticator.so

Once that was added, I ran the google-authenticator command line tool to create the shared secret and control file for the two-factor authentication.  Once you run it you should see something like this:

Once you say yes to that question and capture the QR code with Google Authenticator on your smartphone, you’re bleepin’ golden.  (Yes, I dummied up an account to generate that, took the screenshot, and then erased that account.  I’m not completely dumb.)

One thing you might need to do is edit your sshd configuration to make sure that ChallengeResponseAuthentication is turned on.  This allows ssh to interactively do extra challenges as required by PAM.  By default this is off in Fedora and Ubuntu.

This will be a long one, so I’m gonna put the break in here for you front page readers…

Editing the Images

A majority of my post-processing takes place in Aperture.  I received Aperture for Christmas and have been VERY happy with it.  The two big things I really enjoy out of aperture is that it handles my large volume of photos (currently at 14,518) very well and it is great at handling the RAW from the T2i. Both of those come at the expense of memory.  My experience has shown that you want at least 4GB of RAM in your Mac, but i’m finding 8GB is really where its at.  The other benefit is I can do most of the photo manipulations I’d do right within Aperture. My needs aren’t usually fancy enough for jumping out to GIMP or Photoshop.  I’m still learning to use all of it, but its been great.

So, how do I get the images into Aperture? Aperture can suck them right off my iPhone, so that’s easy if my phone is hooked up to my laptop vis USB. Both of the other camers use SmartMedia cards which the MacBook Pro I use has built in. Aperture can see that and suck them right in.  Sometimes I use a cheat to get images from my iPhone to Aperture when I don’t feel like finding a sync cable, and that cheat is called using Dropbox. The Dropbox app on the iPhone allows one to copy images from the iPhone’s built-in photo album into their Dropbox folders.  Once my laptop syncs that up, I can pull the image into Aperture there. Since I also have a Dropbox client on my iPad, I can also pull the images into there… but more on that later.

Occasionally I’ll be unable to get to a computer to do the post, so if I’ve taken the image on my iPhone I have a few tools at my disposal. For quick and dirty simple photo manipulations, the free PS Express app fits the bill.

On my iPad, which doesn’t have a camera, I can either get the images via Dropbox from the iPhone or use the Camera Connection Kit to take the photos off the other cameras SmartMedia cards and onto the iPad. Once on the iPad, I use Photogene as my image editor. Overall, I like Photogene and its got a lot of great tools and effects built in.  The downside is that its been a bit unstable for me.  I can get it to lock up the entire iPad requiring a reboot fairly often. I suspect that part of the issue is that I’m blowing out the iPad’s RAM by having it deal with the 22MB RAW files that the T2i generates.  Supposedly its supposed to work on the JPEG previews built into the RAW file, but it must have to do some processing of the raw, and that’s when the app seems to be most vulnerable.  I should do an experiment sometime where I give it much smaller JPEGs to play with and see how it does. That said, it does seem to be more stable after each release. (And I do have PS Express on the iPad in case Photogene is just refusing to cooperate that day.)

Putting it on the blog

If I’m only using my iPhone or  iPad, as I did on my recent trip to Seattle where I didn’t bring my laptop, the universal WordPress app tool is where its at. It operates a ton better than fighting the WordPress backend in MobileSafari.  I can create the blog post and associated text while I’m offline, and then once online, I can use the app to push the image files up and link them in.  This isn’t my favorite way to do it as the thumbnail creating and image resigning built into WordPress doesn’t fire off.  Luckily, the iPhone pictures are usually small enough that its a non-issue and, on the iPad, Photogene lets me export to a sane size before I get to the upload point.  The other issue is that added functionality things like notifying twitter of a new blog post via the Twitter Tools plugin don’t fire off.

When I’m on my laptop, I just use the normal build-in WordPress tools to upload the image, put it in the post, and add a gallery on days when I have bonus images. The only tweak for photos I’ve made on top of a vanilla normal WordPress setup was to add the jQuery Colorbox plugin to automatically give the nifty jQuery image pop-up boxes when you click on the pictures.

I have one remaining issue I’d like to solve, but it isn’t super-annoying me yet enough to solve it.  Since I like having WordPress themes with two sidebars, my thumbnail images can be to wide for the theme depending on your monitor/browser size.  I haven’t really found an idea size I like yet, but I’m using 600×600 as the max right now.  I’m thinking about dropping down to 500×500.

This was your little drop behind the music..er..photos.  I’m sure there are probably better ways to do some of what I’m doing with WordPress, so I’d love to hear any suggestions.

The major changes in this release:

• Commercials are detected and chapters are added around them.
• Added “clean up” functionality so that you can deleted unneeded files and the database and rss feeds can reflect that.
• Increased the wait time for locating the tivo from 2 seconds to 5.
• Fixed problem created by quotes in the show description.
• Attempt to avoid re-encoding dupes by checking the program id.
• Lost of behind the scenes refactoring.

The first item I consider a major enhancement, so I put it in italics.  To make that work, you’ll need to get wine, comskip, and build a helper app.  The documentation is in the hastily wrote README. (A reminder, this is intended for PERSONAL USE ONLY, do not set up podcast feeds and violate the ethics (and also the laws) of copyright left and right.)

As always, this has run daily for months and months on linux. It should work on other UNIXes just fine. On Windows, I have no idea.

Download: tivoscripts-20110123.tar.gz

In any case, this point was to share that something that shouldn’t at all be fun is, but also to test to see if the blog migrated okay.   If you notice anything weird, please let me know.  But if its broken, you probably can’t let me know, and i’ll live in blissful ignorance.

photo credit: jquiz

In news that disrupts major portions of my life, there’s this happening:

Robots in disguise will likely alter your commute for the next few days as filming for the third installment of the Transformers film franchise takes over the Magnificent Mile.

Michigan Avenue between Wacker Drive and Ontario Street will close Thursday night and will remain shut down through 5 a.m. on Monday, July 19.

But that’s okay, because that’s a pretty cool thing to have the filming of Transformers 3 in town.  Even cooler is what’s on Michigan Avenue between Wacker and Ontario:  my office.

Because I don’t intend to sit in the office all weekend, I’ve set up a web cam pointed down at the street.  On Friday I’ll aim it better, but for now, you can watch the traffic on Michigan Ave.

Free video chat by Ustream

Also, here’s a bonus photo of my buddy Chris with an Autobot he found in the loop last weekend. (Click for the full size.)

Early on I made the design decision to put chapter markers in around the commercials rather than cut them out.  The main reason for this is “What if the detection is wrong?”  For a 30 minute show, you’d end up missing more than half it in a worse case scenario.  Since its easy to jump ahead to the next chapter on my iPhone and iPad this seemed like a good decision.

Here’s the three most important facts I learned in my research…

1. Commercial detection: No question, comskip is the right tool to use here.  The downside is that by default its a windows-only command line tool.  It works perfectly under wine, so that mitigates it.  Right now I use it via wine, but the source is available, so in the long run it would be good to have a native linux binary to call.  Comskip creates a variety of output formats, so I picked one that seemed to be the easiest to work with.
2. There is no good command line tool to add chapters to an existing mp4/m4v file: I dug around and found a lot of potential solutions, but the all were either not on linux, couldn’t take the resultant files that comskip spit out, or just not a good fit for what I was doing.
3. The MP4v2 library had primitives for adding the chapters: From this point forward, it was just writing some code that did exactly what I wanted.

The code below expects three arguments: 1) The video file to work on, 2) The chapter file output from comskip in ZoomPlayer chapter format, 3) and the total length in seconds of the video file.  The last one I might be able to remove once I have more brain time to devote to this.

#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include <boost/lexical_cast.hpp>
#include <boost/regex.hpp>
#include <mp4v2/mp4v2.h>
 
// Compile with something like: g++  AddChapterInfo.cpp -o AddChapterInfo -lmp4v2 -lboost_regex
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    char *m4vfilename = argv[1];
    char *chapfilename = argv[2];
    uint32_t total_length = boost::lexical_cast<uint32_t>(argv[3]);
 
    std::ifstream chapfile(chapfilename);
 
    MP4FileHandle m4vfile = MP4Modify(m4vfilename);
 
    // Add the chapter track, have it reference the first track
    // (should be the video) and set the "clock ticks per second" to 1.
    // (We may want to set that to 1000 to go into milliseconds.)
    MP4TrackId chapter_track = MP4AddChapterTextTrack(m4vfile, 1, 1000);
 
    boost::regex chpre("^AddChapterBySecond\\((\\d+),");
    boost::smatch rem;
    std::string s;
    uint32_t last_time = 0;
    while (getline(chapfile, s))
    {
        if (boost::regex_search(s, rem, chpre))
        {
            uint32_t t = boost::lexical_cast<int>(rem[1]) * 1000;
            if (t > 0)
            {
                MP4AddChapter(m4vfile, chapter_track, t - last_time);
                last_time = t;
            }
        }
    }
 
    if (total_length - last_time > 0)
    {
        MP4AddChapter(m4vfile, chapter_track, total_length - last_time);
    }
 
    MP4Close(m4vfile);
    MP4Optimize(m4vfilename);
 
    return 0;
}

I’ve been using this code for over two weeks straight and has been operating perfectly, but obviously this code could be made a lot more robust, especially in the areas of error handling. I’ve only run into issues when comskip guesses commercials wrong, which is only payoff for putting chapters in instead of nuking the commercials all together.

In the long run, I should either write and release a generic tool that helps the next poor sap like me or work on using swig bindings to mp4v2 so I could just do the calls in ruby.

• Duration is no longer hard-coded to 32:00 and actually reflects the duration of the show
• The script will attempt to find the TiVo via Bonjour/mDNS/ZeroConf/DNS-SD/whatever unless passed a -t flag with the TiVo’s IP address. If you have more than one TiVo, it will go with the first one it finds.
• Moved the stuff in lib to lib/tivo so the package is more easier sucked in by something like encap or stow

Download: tivoscripts-20100314.tar.gz

When I get some motivation later in the week, I’ll put the git archive online, incase anyone wants to clone it and do some development on it.

After two years of saying I was going to fully automate the process of downloading and transcoding shows for my iPhone, I finally got off my ass and did it.  The script is called TiVo2Podcast and it not only does the downloading and transcoding, but it stuffs the resultant video into a an RSS feed for easy consumption/playback by a podcatcher such as iTunes. I’m now automatically getting the shows off my TiVo and onto my iPhone for easy commute-time consumption. (I commute by train, I do not recommend commute-time consumption if you are driving.)

The ruby script wraps tivodecode, HandbrakeCLI, and AtomicParsley and is intended to be run from cron.  I’ve tested this on Linux, but it should run on any UNIX-alike, but it won’t run on windows since I make liberal use of the system() call. Also, this is intended for PERSONAL USE ONLY, do not set up podcast feeds and violate the ethics (and also the laws) of copyright left and right.

This is a very early version and can certainly use some tweaks and enhancements, primarily in configuring the shows you want to capture.  Right now, configuration is in the form of doing INSERT statements in SQLite.  Not very friendly, but it gets the job done until I can make a quick and dirty question based TUI. Here’s an example of setting up getting the best fucking news team on the planet:

insert into configs (config_name, show_name, rss_filename, rss_link,
                     rss_baseurl, rss_ownername, rss_owneremail, ep_to_keep, encode_decomb)
            values ('tds', 'The Daily Show', 'tds.xml', 'http://www.thedailyshow.com/', 
                    'http://example.com/podcasts/', 'Keith T. Garner', 'kgarner@example.com', 4, 1);

Download tivoscripts-20100304.tar.gz and let me know what you think. Make sure you read the README!

[Update 3/5: Forgot to add that all the code I wrote is under the Simplified BSD License, so have at it.]

Actually, all things considered, right now is pretty awesome. You can buy a device for about $200 which has more floating point computing power than a Cray did in 1972 and carry it around in your pocket. Its battery can store energy equivalent to a small hand grenade and can run the device for hours without plugging into the wall. And you can use it to communicate with virtually anybody on the planet, sometimes by bouncing radio signals off of aluminum canisters we’ve flung into outer space.

That’s pretty cool.

I totally concur.

Last week the 3.0 software update for the AppleTV came out.  On-line there was a lot of grousing about it, and that has inspired this post.

The Roku SoundBridge that we had in the family room was taken out by Thor.  We didn’t realize how much we liked having a digital music player there until it was gone.  We let it go for a few months, but it felt like something was missing.  In the meantime, my buddy JD was talking about how much he liked his AppleTV and was going as far as dropping cable due to it.  While out visiting, I got to see Evo and Sheila‘s AppleTV playing music with the photo montage screensaver gliding by as we chatted.  All that together, plus some reading up, planted the seeds for my purchase of an AppleTV with the 160GB drive earlier in the year.

Upfront I should make it very clear, what I was looking for initially was a replacement digital music player, and the AppleTV provided that.  I considered it a bonus that it had the ability to show photos, youtube, and video content on a screen more conducive to group watching that any of our laptops or monitors, our 42″ DLP HDTV.  Overall, we’ve been extremely happy with it.

Maybe its because we came into it with the proper expectations.  It is in a really weird product space that not many consumers understand.  Many companies have entered it with similar (and even less featureful) products and left the space.  An example would be my once beloved Turtle Beach Audiotron.  Others keep plugging along like Logitech’s Squeezebox line.  Apple has called it their hobby, and I think that may be because its difficult to tell consumers why they might want one.  Or it could be I’m just the weird person who wants it and consumers in general don’t want one.  I do think its poorly named, though.  The name implies, to me, you can watch TV on it, instead of purchased/downloaded/sycned content.  I can see people thinking its a DVR based on the name.

A lot of the bitching I’ve seen about the AppleTV has been about what its not.  Its not a Media Center PC, it isn’t a DVR, it can’t play every format under the sun, its underpowered, it can’t play DVDs, it can’t do better than 720p, it has to be slaved to iTunes, etc.  Except for the format issue, I don’t care about any of the rest of them.  In fact, the fact it syncs to iTunes like any other device is one thing I like about it.  When I’m modifying playlists, etc, for my iPhone and other iPods, its reflected in the home media player.  Anyway, how it is now, works for me and my family, and we get a lot of use and enjoyment out of it¹.

99% of the time we’re playing music and enjoying the mosaic of photos that goes by.  Actually, the photo montage screensaver has increased the enjoyment we get out of our digital photos.  Every once in while we see a photo we’ve almost forgotten about and its a pleasant surprise. The other 1% of our usage time is playing back video that I’m slowing ripping from our DVDs library for the kids. Having whatever they might want to watch without switching DVDs or getting them scratched or forgetting them in the car, etc, is pretty nice. I ripped all the Disney Classic Cartoon Favorites we have so far, and the kids can easily watch any one of those in any order.  Its playback is good enough for what I’ll use it to play back, despite people’s wanting of more.  Maybe in the future we’ll want more, but it does what we need, again.

Anything could be better, so what could be better for me?

• Mostly supporting a wider array of formats.  It plays MP3s and AACs fine, so I’m good on audio, but the video is kinda limiting.  However, I can rip right to the MP4/M4V/h.264 format it wants but random longer non-youtube things off the web require conversion.
• Maybe some better cooling.  That box runs hotter than hell when its playing back video.

Just a couple of general thoughts on the 3.0 upgrade:

• The 2.x software had some quirks and slowness, and I’ve noticed in the past 5 days a lot of that are cleared up.  It still stutters when iTunes connects to it, but the going catatonic while you sync when is playing has gone away.  Overall, syncing is more pleasant.
• The menus seem to be MUCH faster
• The menu placement of “My Music/Movies/Etc” being first is much better. I’ve got the AppleTV to play my stuff, not always rent stuff.
• I’ve been loving the Genius Mixes on my iPhone and iTunes, I’m so glad to have them on the AppleTV

The Remote app that Apple released for the iPhone and iPod Touch is also a great addition.  You can use it to follow control the AppleTV with an interface similar to the iPod app on the iPhone/Touch.  It also will pop up a keyboard for when you want to enter text into things like the YouTube search box.  This is really useful when using it with the next thing I talk about…

There is one other feature I’ve set up, but I haven’t had a chance to fully use is the fact that the AppleTV can act as an AirTunes host.  When paired with my Airport Express (and it is in turn paired with some speakers) we can have the start of whole house music.  Next party we have I’m going to put this to a practical test.  Walking around controlling the tunes from my phone through the whole house… It doesn’t take much to excite me these days.

In any case, my main point here was to address that the AppleTV does work as it is for some people.  It’s not a media center, and that was okay for me as I wasn’t looking for one.

[1] And…because of my nature, I have hacked it to run boxee, but I didn’t use that all that often. So there is some under the cover upgradability that isn’t too bad.

Since we used a lot of open source libraries to save us time, I need to have those built super-universal as well.  The first one I tackled was curl, which had some issues due to configure, so I had to write a shell script to do the hardwork for me.  It needs to run configure three times, and I got a lot of the information for it from http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2009-05/0000.html.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27

#!/bin/sh
export CFLAGS="-O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -arch i386 -arch ppc"
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/encap/curl-7.19.6 --with-ssl=/usr --without-ca-bundle --disable-dependency-tracking
 
cp include/curl/curlbuild.h include/curl/curlbuild32.h
 
make distclean
 
export CFLAGS="-O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc64"
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/encap/curl-7.19.6 --with-ssl=/usr --without-ca-bundle --disable-dependency-tracking
 
cp include/curl/curlbuild.h include/curl/curlbuild64.h
 
make distclean
 
export CFLAGS="-O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -arch i386 -arch ppc -arch x86_64 -arch ppc64"
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/encap/curl-7.19.6 --with-ssl=/usr --without-ca-bundle --disable-dependency-tracking
 
cat > include/curl/curlbuild.h <<EOF
#ifdef __LP64__
#include "curlbuild64.h"
#else
#include "curlbuild32.h"
#endif 
EOF
 
make

There will be more of these as I build the other dependencies.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Some of the reviews I read of this book lead me to believe it would be more focused on the business side than the technology side. I was presently surprised that I felt it was 70% or greater about the technology. Having had a C=128 and using the heck out of it and having admired Amigas and their uses (but never having owned one,) my look at this book may be a bit biased.

From the technology side: for those who think they know how the personal computer space started, this book provides a different point a view from the very Apple and MS-centric stories you normally here. Commodore definitely deserves our praise every time we use cheap PCs at home, as they were the progenitor of “computers for the masses.” I was really entertained learning about the personalities that come up and developed the technology behind commodore and in the amazing amount of time they did it. Because I am the geek I am, I did easily identify with many of the people and I fondly remember using the technology they came up with.

From the business side: Its really illustrative of what someone with a vision can drive people towards. It also clearly illustrates how when the vision goes away how the waters get muddied quickly. There’s also lessons to be learned in not screwing people you need to succeed and maintaining a good relationship with them.

View all my reviews >>

It turns out the problems were broken id3 tags.  Now, if you ask me how they were broken, I honestly have no idea.  What I ended up doing is for mp3s that still had v1 tags, I removed the v1 tags.  My first thought was it was mp3s where v1 tags didn’t match v2 tags.  I used the excellent command line tool id3v2 to strip off the v1 tags, and then revisited the songs in iTunes information panel to make sure iTunes’s database matched what the songs now looked like.  Sync the iPhone, disconnect the iPhone, reconnect the iPhone, sync again, and boom, those files weren’t synced again.  Rinse and repeat until all were fixed until…

I ended up finding that a few of the 44 only had v2 tags, so it wasn’t the v1 tags alone.  On a whim I tried this fix which seemed to work: In iTunes I converted the v2 tags from say, version 2.3 to 2.2 and back, do the sync, rinse and repeat dance from above and that seemed to fix it.

On a related note, I found an excellent OS X only iTunes utility that does two very cool things I had been doing by hand: adding album art and lyrics.  Actually, I hadn’t been adding lyrics, but I’m considering it now that there is an easy way to do it.  The cool it called GimmieSomeTune.  What makes its album art gathering go above and beyond the iTunes’s native searching of the iTunes store is that if its not in the iTunes store, it’ll try to gather the album art from Amazon.  Amazon’s art has been hit and miss in terms of quality, but I prefer to have something there rather than the empty music symbol.  (You can also create your own default that will be put in place if iTunes can’t find it in either place.)  It also has some interesting features like last.fm integration, but I haven’t had a chance to play with that yet.

So, in brief, the permissions and WP_TEMP_DIR settings from the older article still stand.  However, you no longer need to edit wp-admin/includes/file.php. Now you just need to edit your wp-config.php and add the following towards the bottom:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

In looking at how little I blog at times, those bookmarks were often the only thing making my feed grow. I also can’t get much feedback on those links in how it works. So in thinking about how I want to present myself and my site online, I’ve decided to separate the tags back out.

For all zero of you who want to follow my bookmarks just follow the feed from my delicious feed.

One of the turning points for me was an observation a friend of mine made “What’s centrally located in everyone’s cube?  What’s the one thing they use more than anything else?  Now tell me, what’s the one thing they know the least about.”  People who are knowledge workers in the year 2009 should be able to do a few basic computer tasks.  If you cannot do those tasks, well…  “There are many exciting career opportunities in the fast food industry.”

So, I’ve decided to build a test…  I’ve got a few items for the test, but I think I’ll need some more.

1. Can you locate a file and copy it to a flash drive?
2. … burn it on a CD?
3. … attach it to e-mail?
4. … post it on the web (in any form)?
5. Can you create a simple PowerPoint/OpenOffice Presents/Keynote presentation?  (Prettiness not required.)
6. Can you sort data in Excel/OpenOffice Spreadseet/Numbers?
7. Can you navigate to a webpage (without getting the link in e-mail?)
8. Can you plug in a mouse/monitor/keyboard?
9. Can you add an entry to your cell phone address book? (No answer is okay if you don’t have one.)
10. Can you take the photos off your digital camera? (No answer is okay if you don’t have one.)
11. Set the screen saver to be password protected?

Okay, I do need more questions, but I’m off to another meeting at the conference I’m at.  More later…

And his first tweet appears to be “Comics are for children.”  He IS my evil twin.

It also makes me want to link to Anne’s idea of the best to learn Linux.

But I am always up for a game of strip specifications.

Thanks to David Harris for pointing out my doppelganger on twitter.

As with any iPhone app not made by Apple, when you leave it, it will shut down and that won’t be much good until the notification API is up and around, and even then, it’d need IRC servers to support doing the notification and keeping some sort of connection/client information.  That’s right out as I don’t see any IRC servers really wanting to take on that additional tasks.  Reading the Colloquy FAQ, it suggested that one use an IRC bouncer/proxy.

On and off I always have considered making a middle wear irc server to persist connections and so I could use multiple clients.  However, I’ve never been motivated enough to really do something about it.  In general, gnu screen and ircII/irssi have filled my needs.  With the mobile Colloquy, I’ll want to be able to keep a persistent connections coming in and out of the app.  So I get the happy circumstance of where I go “I’d like something like this” and the Internet provides and saves me a bunch of time and gives me a working solution.  (The downside is a lot of cool coding I could have done, but probably never have gotten around to.)

After doing some quick web searching, I’ve decided to give ZNC a go as that middleware layer.  It seems to do everything I want, including the ability to have multiple irc clients hook into the instances its running for me.  It also works with any standard IRC client, which is a huge plus.  I didn’t have to retrain myself at all.  It doesn’t matter if I’m using irssi from Linux, Colloquy from my MacBook or iPhone, or xChat from wherever, its all the same irc instance with the same messages AT the same time.  Each client hooks into ZNC which has already hooked into the servers and channels that I frequent.  I can hook into ZNC over ssl from any standard IRC client and it just works.  I can also see writing a module for ZNC that will take advantage of the iPhone notification API should it ever arrive.

About 6 hours in, and I’m loving it.  IRC session ubiquity and I’m happy.  I can pop it up on my phone and IRC on the go, or just use a local client on my mac instead of sshing back home and using irssi.  I’ll probably still use irssi 99% of the time, but having options and being able to jump on from my phone will help.  IRC, how like crack you are and how I can’t quit you.  I did run into one problem with irssi and it not being able to do multiple connections to what it thinks is the same host, but I found a way around it after reading this.

Also, in rereading this post before I put it out on the web, I realize it doesn’t take much to amuse me these days.

First, the games I’ve spent the most time playing:

Buzz Quiz TV – The name pretty much sums up what it is, a multi-player trivia quiz show for your PS3 and a very welcome addition to our house.  There are numerous versions of this game for the PS2 and PSP with different question slants and this is the series first entrance onto the PS3.  It comes with 4 wireless “buzz” controllers for the players.  Its a nice little interface that works well with the game.  A common complaint online, and one that I have as well, is that for a game called “Buzz” you hardly ever use the big red buzzer at the top, most of the time you’re using the multi-color answer buttons.  We’re enjoying it a lot, especially when you have more than 2 people playing.  At least two of the multi-player rounds work better when you have more than one competitor to pick on.  If you don’t have any friends with you, you can also play ‘sofa vs sofa’ online.  The game is also easily expanded through additional categories purchased via the Playstation Store or via user-content quizzes created at MyBuzzQuiz.com.

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe – One day the people at Midway’s video game division said “Keith Garner does not own enough of our stuff, how can we make a game JUST FOR HIM.  Let’s see, he’s a big DC comics dork and he’s always been fond of Mortal Kombat, while not always being that good at it.  Hey!  Let’s make him a video game peanut butter cup.”  Honestly, I like this game too much so I don’t know if I can honestly say if its a good game or not.  The gameplay has gone back to more classic Mortal Kombat mostly 2D fighting compared to the last two PS2 games, which is good for me as a player.  (You can still move in a 3rd dimension usefully, but its not a huge requirement.)  The characters from both universes look really good (thanks, Unreal engine!) and the DC characters special moves are pretty good and in-line with what they should be.  For example, Captain Marvel does have the awesome Shazam lightening attack that’s been popular post-Kingdom Come.  It just makes me giddy as a school girl to hear things like “Kitana vs. Green Lantern…FIGHT!”  This game sets the fan-boy in me to 11.  Even if you don’t like DC comics, its a pretty good fighter.  You can also go online to get embarrassed with how bad you are.

The games I’ve played a bit, but not enough:

Fallout 3 – I’ve always been a big fan of the Fallout series, despite not completing the first two.  Come to think of it, I was a fan of Wastland way back in the day, which was done by a lot of the same people.  I think I’ll be firing up Parallels just to play those first two again and actually try to finish them.  I’ve played about an hour of Fallout 3, which means I’ve just barely scratched the surface.  To be fair, I played the first hour twice as I was working to understand the UI and combat the first time.  Its not that its bad, I’m just rusty with these games.  In fact, I find the interface really nice now that I’ve gotten the hang of it.  I do find myself being a little too goody-too-shoes, but that’s my nature, I guess.  In any case, the feel, the voice acting, and the concepts so far are stellar.  I just need to find time to lock the kids away and play it.  Looks like lots of late nights coming up.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – I downloaded the demo on the PS3 and liked it enough to request it as a potential Christmas gift.  So far, I’ve only played the first mission.  You get to play a Jedi in full control of his powers in a 3D environment, how can you go wrong?  So far, I’m liking it.  Again, I’m still getting the hang of the interface and powers, but I’ve done the first mission (or 2 if you consider the prologue) and am looking forward to playing more.  My only complaint with this game is load time.  Despite loading 2.5 gig of stuff onto the hard drive, it seems to take forever to leave the game environment and go to the options screens and then to move around in the options screens.  I’m not sure if that’s a bug in the current version of the game, or if its just being hampered by the PS3′s “measly” 256MB of RAM.  In either case, that’s been an annoyance.  As long as you stay in the game, its a non-issue though.  I just had too much Evan messing with the remote, jumping on my lap, etc when last I played so I really noticed it then.

I should also mention I got the Sony PS3 Wireless Keypad.  For the PS3′s browser, Sony Home, or any game that has some text input/chat, this keypad isn’t too bad.  It can snap onto a sixaxis controller or you can use it separately, as it has its own battery.  It reminded me of typing on a Hiptop/Sidekick so I was right into it.  Not sure if its a good value at $50, but its been a good accessory to have.

The episode I was on clocks in at about 25 minutes and I didn’t make too much of an ass of myself.  A lot of random talk, and a heck of a good time.

After the podcast we went to Sheila and Evo’s place to continue the conversation and drink a bit more.  Awesome people, awesome hospitality.  Whenever I’m in AZ again, I’ll definately try to visit them.  Hopefully they do the same when they are out this way.

photo credit: CC Chapman

“If you haven’t been bookmarked, retweeted and blogged, you might as well not have existed.” – Will be part of the next Found Things.

Which, for some reason inspired me to parody Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything:

I don’t want to blog anything, tweet anything, or podcast anything as a career. I don’t want to blog anything tweeted or podcasted, or tweet anything blogged or podcasted, or podcast anything blogged, tweeted, or podcasted, or retweet anything blogged, tweeted, or podcasted. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

[Update: Evo explains the origin of his comment.]