Good things about Safari

Lots of folks are busy documenting the bad things about Safari (I sent in about a dozen bugs, and I’ll wait for the next beta before looking again). One good thing I noticed is that it has the appropriate hooks to make OS X’s summarize engine work. Select the text on a page, tell it to summarize, and you get a dynamically condensed version of the text. If the interface weren’t so clunky, it would be really handy for deciding if you really want to read further in someone’s site.

It would be trivial for the developers to add a button to the toolbar that selected the body text, called the summary service, and returned the results in a new window, nicely formatted. Since Safari is more-or-less scriptable, I was able to knock together a quick AppleScript that shows off the idea. Drop it into ~/Library/Scripts and run it on whatever page you’re currently looking at.

Fun with iTunes Music Store

The LXG soundtrack sounded promising enough that I decided to support the iMS exclusive release of it. There was some other stuff sitting in my shopping cart, so I bought it all, synced the iPod, and drove to work.

You wouldn’t think that LXG, Dean Martin, Liz Phair, John Philip Sousa, and Ray Brown would make a good driving mix, but it worked.

Why I’m not a Switcher

I own two Windows machines that I rarely turn on any more. Even at work, the only thing I use Windows for is handling expense reports and accepting meeting invitations. I own two Macintoshes and an iPod (well, two, but only ’til I find a home for the old 10GB model), and I’ll almost certainly buy a dual 2GHz G5 later this year.

I spend most of my time using Macs these days, but I insist that I am not a Switcher. Why not? Because the Switch ads aren’t about technology; they’re about validation. For years, Mac users have been the whipping-boy of the mainstream computing world, and they’ve responded with a “cold, dead hands” attitude and a cultlike devotion to all things Apple. The Switch ads play up to that.

Sometimes it’s not the network

My job was Unix support for Corporate Services, which basically referred to everything in the company that wasn’t related to developing, selling, or training customers how to use our products. In practice, though, it usually just meant MIS, because HR and Legal were composed entirely of Mac people, who had their own support team.

The oddest exception started one day when an HR manager asked me to help him set up a beta-test of a Lotus Notes-based applicant tracking system. The application was being developed on OS/2 servers and PC clients, but we wanted to test it with a SunOS server and Mac clients, since that’s what we had.

Online music done right

Just for amusement, a list of the albums and songs I’ve purchased from the iTunes Music Store since it went online.

Complete albums:

1. A Wonderful World, Tony Bennett & k.d. lang
2. Jazz Cello, Ray Brown
3. The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years, Ray Charles
4. In Blue, The Corrs
5. Count Basie’s Finest Hour, Count Basie
6. Getz for Lovers, Stan Getz
7. Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio, Stan Getz
8. Best of Al Jarreau, Al Jarreau
9. B.B. King: Anthology, B.B. King
10. Late at Night with Dean Martin, Dean Martin
11. The Best of the Moody Blues, The Moody Blues
12. Confirmation: The Best of the Verve Years, Charlie Parker
13. Blues Etude, Oscar Peterson
14. Tracks, Oscar Peterson
15. We Get Requests, Oscar Peterson Trio
16. With Respect to Nat, Oscar Peterson Trio
17. Oscar Peterson: Stéphane Grappelli Quartet, Vol. 1, Oscar Peterson & Stéphane Grappelli
18. Liz Phair, Liz Phair
19. The Dynamic Duo, Jimmy Smith & Wes Montgomery
20. Great American Marches I, John Philip Sousa
21. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Trevor Jones & The London Symphony Orchestra

Individual Songs:

1. You’ve Made Me so Very Happy, Blood, Sweat & Tears
2. Do You Wanna Hold Me?, Bow Wow Wow
3. Takin’ It to the Streets, The Doobie Brothers
4. What a Fool Believes, The Doobie Brothers
5. Radar Love, Golden Earring
6. The Day Basketball Was Saved, Jackson 5
7. I Think It’s Love, Jermaine Jackson
8. Laura, Billy Joel
9. Beth, Kiss
10. Detroit Rock City, Kiss
11. King of the Night Time World, Kiss
12. Shout It Out Loud, Kiss
13. Head to Toe, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam
14. Insanity, Liz Phair
15. Don’t Stand so Close to Me, The Police
16. Every Morning, Sugar Ray
17. Macho Man, Village People

More from the iTunes Music Store

The only thing that keeps me from spending even more money than I already have at iTMS is the limited selection. Broad but not deep, that is. Some recent artists that I like aren’t listed at all, while some old favorites have just a fraction of their catalog online. And then there are the ones who were never on a major label, or who have renounced their sinful past (warning: the Flash in this site ground my browser into the dust).

Anyway, here’s what I’ve bought recently.

iTMS takes me back

Okay, my iTunes Music Store purchases are getting a bit silly now:

I love this kind of bug…

People often wonder what sysadmins do for a living. It’s a mostly-invisible profession, where you’re only noticed when things aren’t working. Mostly we solve problems, but often we first have to figure out what the problem really is.

I don’t want to know how long it took someone to get from “my password doesn’t work” to this:

If you used Open Firmware Password utility to create a password that contains the capital letter “U”, your password will not be recognized during the startup process (when you try to access Startup Manager, for example).

Note that it applies to Mac models going back several years, but wasn’t posted on the support site until this week. No doubt there’s a small pile of bug reports that have been sitting around for all this time, with their status field set to “WTF?”.

iTMS weekly reports

No, I didn’t buy another big batch of music from the iTunes Music Store yet, although I probably will soon, to stock up the iPod for my next road trip to Las Vegas. I have been keeping an eye on the store, though, and after corresponding with Brian Tiemann, I decided to investigate an oddity we’d both noticed: the week-by-week “Just Added” report ain’t no such thing.

Today is a good day

New PowerBooks are out. Must wet pants with joy. They all look good, but I’m leaning slightly toward a 15” model with an 80GB disk and 1GB of RAM; not sure I’m ready for a 17” boat anchor.

Yesterday, on the other hand, was definitely not a good day. For some time now, I’ve been installing Panther betas on my iBook with the Archive & Install option, which preserves almost all of my applications and customizations while completely replacing the OS. I’ve always backed up my home directory first, but haven’t bothered with an extra full backup. Cuts the total upgrade time down to about an hour, most of which is spent watching the disks spin.

On another day, I’d consider including a comparison to my last Windows upgrade horror story. Unfortunately, things went terribly wrong this time. Twelve hours later, my iBook is almost back to normal.

iObey

Okay, most of them are lame, and many will grate on the nerves of anyone who has two brain cells to rub together, but this one was worth it.

Apple Jazz

Herbie Hancock, on Apple.

Herbie Hancock, in the iTunes Music Store.

The interview is interesting reading (“I was using it [OS X] before other musicians were using it.” and “I hate OS 9 (laughter). I hate going back to that.”), but what I really like is the commentary on the “celebrity playlist.” Sheryl Crow has a bland paragraph that was probably written by her publicist, but Hancock explains in detail why each of the tracks is interesting and significant (sometimes to him, sometimes to the world). Note to Apple: Hancock’s commentary sells, Crow’s doesn’t.

[and if you’re a Windows user who hasn’t installed iTunes yet, Great Googlimoogli, what are you waiting for? It’s not as fast as it is on a Mac, but all of the features are there, including Rendezvous music sharing.]

Update: After purchasing Hancock’s picks, I’d say that I like everything except Missy Elliot’s Slide. Miles Davis’ 27-minute Bitches Brew starts off rather … “non-musical” … for my tastes, but picks up several minutes in. Elliot I just don’t get; Hancock sees something in her music that separates it from typical posturing {c,}rap, but all I hear is the surface, and it’s so grating that I can’t get past it to look for what he found. Obviously I won’t be buying her recommended playlist.

OS X 10.3 downer

So I’ve been using the OS X Stickies app for a while. Its primary limit has always been scaling; it doesn’t track the z-axis ordering of notes from launch to launch, it doesn’t let you search notes, it doesn’t supply multiple note sets or 3M-style “noteboards”, etc.

With Panther, they added the title line of each window to both the Windows menu and the contextual menu on the Dock. This isn’t a bad thing, as such, but it definitely doesn’t scale! It also doesn’t work quite right, since it often inserts gratuitous whitespace in this menu (which will change every time you view it).

What I never noticed during any of the betas, and only spotted today because a third-party app managed to rearrange my Stickies so that some of them were offscreen, is that they’ve removed the “arrange windows” option in Panther. If it weren’t for Exposé, I’d have never been able to select them all to get them back on screen.

[I suspect Burning Monkey MahJong as the culprit; it insists on switching video resolutions on startup. blech.]

Another misfeature in Panther Stickies, which I did spot right away, is the use of tooltips to show you the creation date and time of each note when you hover the mouse over it. This frequently interferes with actually reading the note, and there’s no way to turn it off.

So, two steps forward, one step back, one step down.

[and before I forget, yes, the data format is still binary garbage]

Dark Grey Screen Of Death

Now here’s something I hadn’t seen before:

Fortunately I save early and often, and in the worst case I have a full backup that’s only a few days old (minutes, now!), but this was the first honest-to-gosh kernel panic I’ve had since I bought an OSX-equipped Mac. Quite a surprise.

/Library/Logs/panic.log seems to blame it on the Airport drivers. I can cope with that, as long as it doesn’t happen again. Then I’d have two reasons to send my shiny new PowerBook in for service (the first being the famous “white spot” problem that’s finally starting to become visible on my screen).

One question answered…

Latest Apple press release: “With Apple Loops support, future versions of Logic Pro will easily import projects from GarageBand.”

That wipes out about half a dozen common complaints about GarageBand.

GarageBand notes

First off, the iLife ‘04 installer does not ask if you want icons for all five apps added to your Dock, it just puts them there.

Second, when you launch GarageBand for the first time (or, at least, when I do), it pops up a dialog box saying:

Can not find /Users/jgreely/Music/GarageBand
Please make sure this directory exists

Why won’t it just create it for me, or find it after I create it? Because GarageBand can’t follow aliases. iTunes is happiest if your iTunes library remains in ~/Music (although that bug might be fixed finally), but I wanted to strip down my home directory for backing up onto DVD and investigating FileVault. So I made ~/Music an alias to /Users/Shared/Music. iTunes is perfectly happy with this, although .Mac Backup is not. Add GarageBand to the list of Apple-supplied applications that are incompatible with Apple OS features.

Third, only one project can be open at a time. This would be fine, given the memory requirements, if it weren’t for the fact that the program exits when you close that project. Just as bad, it insists on opening the last active project at startup, so if you want to start a new one, you have to sit through the overhead of loading the old one, and then remember to use “New” in the menus before closing it. Blech.

Workaround: clear the “Open Recent” menu. On the next launch, you’ll get the Open/Create dialog again.

Fourth, faux wood grain and “dark brushed metal” looks silly.

Update: the overhead of loading a project is non-trivial. I created a simple 32-measure “song” with four loops, and loading it at startup added fifteen seconds to the application’s launch time (1.25GHz PowerBook G4, 1GB RAM). Oddly enough, the far more complicated demo song “Reflection” that’s included in the package added only eleven seconds.

Update: changing the length of a song does not trigger a “do you want to save?” dialog box. I thought that was interesting, especially since it’s ridiculously difficult to drag the end-of-song slider around. As far as I can tell, it has a selection area that covers approximately 3 pixels, and if you miss them, you move the playhead instead. Hello? UI designers? Make the damn triangle bigger!

Other than that, I’m having fun mixing loops and discovering just how much (or, more precisely, how little) I retain from the piano lessons I took 24 years ago. On that note, I’m glad I didn’t order one of the USB keyboards that Apple is pitching as a companion to GB. I got to try one out at an Apple Store, and while it’s a decent enough gadget that fits nicely on a desk, I grew up with an honest-to-gosh piano in the house — a spinet grand — and cheap plastic keys just feel wrong.

Then I spotted this Roland FP-5 with a USB interface…

It will be a while before I recover any kind of skill at playing, so for now I’m amusing myself with loops. Since all the other kids are doing it, here’s a highly-repetitive background track I knocked together out of the included percussion loops. I used all the default settings for a new “song,” so it’s 6:40 long (at the default tempo, the shortest possible song is 1:02).

Mind you, it loops every four seconds, but both iTunes and my iPod insert a short delay when they loop back around, so the long version minimizes the breaks in the sound. If you don’t really feel like downloading 6 megabytes of, well, crap, here’s the 1MB version.

If you have GarageBand and Jam Pack, the really short version is “drag these loops into the timeline and tweak their volume and balance knobs”:

• Conga Groove 01
• Conga Groove 11
• Djembe 01
• Indian Tabla 01
• Motown Drummer 24
• Tambourine 01
• Shaker 11
• World Bongo 04
• World Maraca 03
• World Triangle 01

GarageBand resource usage

There are a lot of discussions about how GB seems to be a bit of a pig, especially compared to other applications that have much the same functionality (or, in the case of Soundtrack, include many of the exact same samples and features). So, naturally, I did some testing.

On my 15-inch 1.25GHz G4 PowerBook, with 1GB of RAM and the optional 5400 RPM hard drive, I can have at least a dozen software instruments playing at the same time, as long as no more than three of them are pianos.

In my testing this evening, I created an unplayable song that had eight software instruments: two drums, six pianos. Drop one of the pianos, and it pops up an error dialog and then continues to play some of the instruments. Drop another one, and it plays fine, although the display updates are sluggish. Add in four non-piano software instruments (specifically, a shaker, a triangle, a bongo, and an upright bass), and it still plays, although the display can barely keep up.

I was even able to add seven sampled instruments after that without creating a failure, although the display was hopeless and top claimed GB was using 384% of the CPU (when it finally managed to update). top also reported that GB had about 250MB of active physical memory and 450MB of active VM.

Obviously, in addition to the existing recommendations about CPU and disk speed, GarageBand users who are having problems need the following advice: “buy lots of RAM or cut back on those darn pianos!”

Oh, and an interesting note from my testing is that it wouldn’t let me have more than sixteen software instruments in a song, even if my system could support them. The error message was badly written, implying that I couldn’t add any more tracks, but it definitely meant “tracks containing software instruments”.

Definitely version 1.0, and an update is obviously needed soon (especially for improving how it interfaces with MIDI keyboards and audio input devices), but still worth playing with.

Update: passed this along to MacInTouch, after someone with the slightly-faster 17” PowerBook complained that it took forever to launch GB and open a song. The person who read my response asked me set the Energy Saver settings to “Automatic” and unplug the AC adapter. That actually worked fine, and didn’t affect load times or playability. Setting it to “Longest Battery Life” slowed down the launch and load times by maybe 15%, and stopped playback dead in its (17) tracks. And, unlike the earlier error dialog, this one clearly identified the processor performance setting as the culprit.

Oddly enough, when I went back to my standard high-performance settings, I was able to add another piano track without killing playback. I suspect there’s a memory management issue that is cleaned up by saving your song and restarting GB.

Update: The sixteen-software-instruments limit is configurable under the “advanced” pane of GB’s preferences. It’s currently set to “automatic” on my machine, and no doubt it auto-adjusts based on system specs. There’s also a tweakable “voices per instrument” setting, which may be the smoking gun in some of the dramatically different results people are getting on similar hardware: if the heuristic used by the “automatic” setting is flawed, it may be overestimating the power of certain hardware configurations.

Update: The guy with the sluggish 17” PowerBook has now reported that running the usual mix of disk-repair utilities (one of the most common solutions for odd OS X behavior) fixed his GB problems.

GarageBand: adventures in UI design

GarageBand only allows you to have one project open at a time. This is not an obvious or necessary feature of a music program, but at first glance, it’s defensible in the context of Apple’s iLife package. For a bunch of more-or-less free tools designed for light use by non-professionals, allowing multiple documents adds the risk of clutter and confusion (not to mention memory management and engineering effort). iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD all work the same way, right?

Well, no, they don’t. iTunes and iPhoto simply don’t have the concept of multiple projects. Something is either in your library or it isn’t. iMovie and iDVD are single-project-based, but the projects generally have a much larger scope. I’m sure a lot of iMovie users wish they had an iPhoto-like clip library to store their favorite video elements in, but for the most part, few people are going to want to edit more than one movie at a time.

This is not the case for music, especially in an application that encourages experimentation. One of the very first questions I saw on the various GB forums was “how do I make my own reusable loops”. Tied with it was “how do I import MIDI tracks”.

The answer right now is “through painful workarounds.” To make your own loops, you export your performance to iTunes, find the AIFF file on disk, load it into the SoundTrack Loop Editor that’s part of Apple’s free AppleLoops SDK, manually mark it up, drag the tagged file into GB’s loop browser window, and then wait while the complete index of available loops is rebuilt. To import MIDI files, you download two third-party freeware packages and string them together to fool GB into thinking that you’re playing the music on a keyboard.

Even the simple act of cutting and pasting between songs is made difficult by the single-project design. You can do it, but only within the same session, because GB clears its private clipboard on exit. And it exits whenever you close a project. So, if your goal is “copy my cool bass track from RockDude into BluesDude,” the order of operations must be Cut, Open, Paste. Anything else will wipe the clipboard and force you to start over.

Sure, after you’ve done it a few times, you’ll adjust your behavior to match GB’s expectations, but isn’t that precisely the problem that consumer-friendly creative applications are supposed to avoid?

getting MIDI into GarageBand

First pass at a third-party MIDI importer for GB, courtesy of Bery Rinaldo. Much nicer than the previous workaround.

More GarageBand resource usage

I finally got around to testing my piano overload song on my other Mac, a dual 1GHz G4 tower with 768MB of RAM, booted off of a 4200 RPM external FireWire drive. The second CPU more than made up for the slower hard drive and lower memory, allowing me to add four more software pianos than I could use on the PowerBook.

Final total: nine software pianos, five software percussion instruments, a software acoustic bass, and seven sampled loops. I’ll try again when I finish rebuilding the fast internal hard drive, to see if that will let me squeeze in another piano.

Update: Nope, the faster hard drive didn’t make a difference. It looks like CPU and RAM dominate, and dual CPUs make a big difference (as they should).

Update: Past a certain point, more RAM doesn’t make a big difference, either (says the guy who just bumped his PowerBook to 2GB). It looks like 512MB is a good working minimum, and 768MB or so will handle just about anything a G4 or two can keep up with. Above that, you’re basically adding buffer cache to compensate for the speed of your hard drive.

Minor GarageBand update

It’s not on Software Update yet, and it’s not prominently linked on the support site, but GarageBand 1.0.1 was released today.

It looks like they’re just clearing up the performance warning dialog boxes (many of which were either confusing or just plain wrong).

Update: Some folks are reporting other improvements, such as performance of some keyboards. I noticed that the online Help includes some new FAQs (and a working link to the keyboard shortcuts), but nothing else yet. The error dialogs are definitely clearer, though:

Apple hardware service

2/3/2004 — well-known “white spots on PowerBook display” issue finally annoying enough that I call AppleCare.

2/4/2004 — box arrives at house, driver waits while I pack it up.

2/5/2004 — AppleCare web site acknowledges receipt of unit.

2/7/2004 — AppleCare confirms problem, orders part.

2/13/2004 — AppleCare web site updated with “Begin testing” and “Ready to ship”.

2/13/2004 (cont.) — box arrives, brand-new screen installed. J verifies absence of white spots, and lack of dead pixels (better than the original).

2/13/2003 (cont.) — Overjoyed, J splurges on additional gigabyte of RAM.

Even when it’s free, they’ve got to cheat

Some people have figured out how to examine Pepsi bottles to find the ones that contain codes for free songs from the iTunes Music Store. At least one high-profile site has a detailed how-to on the subject, demonstrating their affection for gaming the system.

Should Pepsi have been more clever about securing the codes? Sure. The technique has probably been used against them for years, but it didn’t get publicity until it combined two of the Internet’s favorite obsessions: downloading music and outsmarting a large corporation. Fucking over your neighbors is just a bonus; after all, if they were plugged in, they’d be able to do it, too. Feh.

[Oh, and the site I found the link on is the same one that once posted a link to a site in France that contained a large archive of Playboy centerfolds; they thought it was just so cool that someone had made it possible to compare twenty years of Playmates online. They were so thrilled by this service that I almost didn’t have the heart to point out that the people who actually owned the pictures did it first. And better. And legally. Made me want to ask them if that EFF group they’re so fond of was really called Easy Freebies Forever.]

Moving songs from GarageBand to Logic

Another potentially useful hack for GB: BandToLogic.

iPod mini

I found myself near an Apple Store on Friday afternoon, and saw the line forming for the new iPod mini. I’d been thinking of buying one, using the failure of the wired remote on my existing iPod (poor strain relief) as an excuse. “Hey, it’s like a $40 discount.”

Sadly, the mini doesn’t come with a wired remote, so I had to invent a new excuse. “Now I can leave the 30GB model in the car all the time, and not have to fiddle with cables when I want to go for a walk or get on the cross-trainer.”

Not as compelling a reason, but it does at least include the practical advantages of the mini. Smaller, lighter, much better controls, full compatibility with my existing iTunes library (including playlists and iTMS purchases), and compatibility with most 3G iPod accessories.

Sadly, the accessory I’d most like to use it with, the Belkin Voice Recorder, is not currently supported by the mini’s firmware. Hopefully Apple will fix that soon, since I’d love to take notes while I’m out walking. Dodging traffic seems to stimulate my creativity. :-)

New accessory I’d most like to see: a horizontal version of the clip-on holster it comes with. I’ve got one of these for my cellphone (which is about the same size…), and it’s very nice.

Oh, and by my rough count, there were 150 people waiting in line at the Valley Fair Apple Store at 6pm to buy a mini. There were eight people in line at 4:30pm, which I know because I was number nine. Fortunately I had my other iPod and a large stack of magazines to read.

GarageBand Jam Pack update

A pleasant surprise in Software Update today, a small patch to the GarageBand Jam Pack that adds additional effect presets. It’ll be interesting to see exactly what they’ve done.

There’s also a reliability patch for iDVD, a product I haven’t had a chance to really use yet. Maybe if I get some decent footage of the TI Sirens show on my next trip to Vegas…

iPod programming?

I’ve seen multiple claims that iPods have a built-in JavaScript interpreter that is user-accessible. Unfortunately, I’ve found zero supporting evidence for this claim. No documentation, no sample code, no SDK, not even a dead link.

I’m left with two possibilities: either it doesn’t exist, or they’ll only tell you about it if your last name is “Belkin”.

GarageBand Is (Not Is)

David Was takes GB out for a spin. Being NPR, the commentary also comes with a different sort of spin, but what can you do?

iPod mini a victim of its own success

Apparently the worldwide rollout of the iPod mini has been delayed, basically because Hitachi can’t make 4GB MicroDrives fast enough to keep up with demand.

As the pleased owner of one (silver, by the way, and I’d have gone for a nice dark gray if they’d made one), I’m not surprised. People who viewed it as a barely-cheaper iPod with much lower capacity were missing the point; it’s not cannibalizing sales of full-sized iPods, it’s capturing the demographic that wasn’t willing to buy an iPod at all, for various reasons.

And gadget freaks like me, of course. The mini is my third iPod, and I still have the second one, which now lives full-time in the car and makes long drives more pleasant. And I spend a lot of time driving, mostly by choice. When the next round of full-sized iPods comes out, there’s a good chance I’ll buy one of those, too, mostly because Apple supposedly has adopted the mini’s excellent controls to replace the unreliable non-buttons on the 3G iPods.

Note that the success of the mini also means that as soon as the demand is met, Hitachi will be able to flood the market with 4GB MicroDrives, and that’s pretty cool, too.

iTunes Music Recommendation service

This is a new “if you like X, try Y” service set up as a student project at University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana). Does it work better than Goombah? Dunno yet; so far I haven’t been able to get it to work. I can upload my iTunes database, but it fails trying to download recommendations (probably due to being Farked, Slashdotted, BoingBoinged, Lileksed, Instapunted, or some other combination of high-profile links).

I can think of two reasons why it’s a better bet, though: first, it looks like they’re doing the work on the server side, rather than chewing up hours of CPU time on your computer, and second, Goombah hasn’t updated their client or database in months.

Ah, just got through, and discovered one disadvantage to server-side processing:

Your music database is being processed. This window will show your recommendations once they’ve been computed.
Notice: The server is a little backed up, hence the long wait. Once the server gets caught up the wait will be ALOT shorter, until then I would recommend that you don’t hit the resend button.
Your estimated wait for results is 8 hours, 44 minutes, 40 seconds. You may quit and log back in at anytime to check on the status of your recommendations.

Return of the Keyboard

A company in Canada has decided that the time is right to bring back the tank-like keyboard that old Mac users loved and hated, in an up-to-date USB version.

It’s already sold out through the end of April.

Trojan horse or false advertising?

This claim from Intego doesn’t pass the sniff test. If it actually worked the way they claim, the correct response would be a trivial security patch from Apple, not the mass purchase of a third-party “protection” package. I smell marketing, not security.

Update: the story finally hit Slashdot, and, sure enough, their explanation of the “security hole” was nonsense. The proof-of-concept “trojan” has to be distributed in a StuffIt archive, because the actual problem is the presence of code in the resource fork, which will not survive standard Internet distribution methods. It has nothing to do with embedding executable content into an MP3 file; it’s just an old-style Mac application with a funny name.

Update: here’s a free tool to check downloads for any attempt to make use of Intego’s mob-marketing gimmick. Much better than paying $60 for a week’s worth of “insurance”.

Update: here’s a free folder action you can attach to your download folder to automatically catch any attempts to exploit this vendor publicity scheme. See, aren’t you glad you didn’t send Intego any money? :-)

And the winners are…

4 days, 19 hours, and 45 minutes after submitting my music database to the in-development iTunes Music Recommendation service, here’s what it came back with:

Gaming the system

Finally downloaded a new set of results from the beta iTunes Music Recommendation system. My previous run was more amusing than useful, but it had potential.

This time? Utter nonsense. Some clowns decided to corrupt the database by uploading garbage. There’s no other reasonable explanation for the results I got, in which the first 32 of 50 tracks recommended all come from albums named “Unreleased” by such famous bands as Syph Clap and the Orgasmic Meatrats, Marc Coulter, z..Marco, and Vital Cry.

If they allow this to continue, in a few months their data might be as unreliable as CDDB.

Update: things have improved, either through database maintenance or, as the creator would have it, the natural consequences of increasing the size of the database. I’m betting on the former, myself. Suddenly all the garbage went away, restoring the results to the quality of my initial run. Much faster now, too, enough to justify spending a little time tinkering with the data to see what happens.

Safari: righting wrongs

For some time now, I’ve been mildly annoyed by Safari’s “Open in tabs” option at the bottom of every menu entry in the Bookmarks Bar; it’s too easy to select by accident with certain pointing devices. This is second only to my annoyance that the Bookmarks Bar doesn’t obey the same UI rules as standard Mac pulldown menus.

Well, I’m still stuck with the second one, but I just discovered that someone on the development team recognized that it was a little too easy to wipe out all of your open tabs and replace them with thirty new ones. It’s not obvious, but immediately after selecting “Open in tabs”, the back button acts as an undo.

GarageBand 1.1

Mostly bugfixes and minor tweaks. Still need third-party freeware for many import/export tasks.

Update: It’s being reported that 1.1 silently fixed a bug that prevented use of free third-party instruments.

“Hey, I’ve got a great idea! Let’s make it scriptable!”

This Mac security hole has been all over the web recently. The thing that makes it dangerous is that it’s ridiculously easy to exploit. The thing that makes it annoying is that anyone on the development team should have seen it coming a mile away, especially given the many well-publicized scripting exploits in Windows software.

How did it happen? WebCore. In an effort to produce a common HTML/HTTP library for all applications, functionality that used to be restricted to the Help tool was suddenly embedded in everything that retrieved or displayed web pages. Apple’s pervasive AppleScript support completes the circle.

Ask not what you can do with scriptable applications; ask rather what scriptable applications can do to you…

Update: The official fix is available via Software Update.

Update: You still need to turn off the Open “safe” files after downloading option in Safari, because disk: URLs still work, and mounted disk images can include auto-execute programs. Yes, there are two stupid features in the previous sentence.

KonfabuDashboard

After hearing all the whining about another example of how Apple is killing off third-party developers by “shamelessly copying Konfabulator” (which can fairly be described as Super Desk Accessory Toolkit, an update of the classic Mac OS utilities), I decided to take a look at this amazing product that I’d somehow overlooked.

Um, where’s the fire? I just went through the gallery of Konfabulator widgets, and far too many of them are like these two:

A small handful of them were useful, but while some of Apple’s sample gadgets from the Tiger beta are badly designed, at least they’re good for something. In fifteen minutes of browsing, I couldn’t find a single Konfabulator widget that was interesting enough to encourage me to buy and install their application. Indeed, the trite “get the original Dashboard now” page at their site showcases a bunch of gaudy widgets that I simply don’t want on my computer.

There’s a fugly clock that slavishly emulates a low-resolution, low-legibility digital clock; another one that slavishly emulates the limitations of an old analog wristwatch; a color-coded pseudo-3D to-do list that’s covered with redundant buttons; a Google searchbar that looks like it’s supposed to be inserted somewhere; and a user-hostile iTunes controller (okay, Apple screwed that one up, too). And how do you gain access to these screen toys? Through a pull-down menu, just like the old Apple desk accessories.

Designing your own means learning to use their XML layout schema. Designing a Dashboard gadget, on the other hand, is as easy as laying out a web page, because it is a web page, rendered with the same engine as Safari. In fact, you can create it with your favorite text editor and graphics program, leveraging your knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Apple’s Dashboard: sample gadget

I’m not really a programmer; I’ve been a Perl hacker since ’88, though, after discovering v1.010 and asking Larry Wall where the rest of the patches were (his reply: “wait a week for 2.0”). If I’m anything, I’m a toolsmith; I mostly write small programs to solve specific problems, and usually avoid touching large projects unless they’re horribly broken in a way that affects me, and no one else can be persuaded to fix them on my schedule.

So what does this have to do with learning Japanese? Everything. I’m in the early stages of a self-study course (the well-regarded Rosetta Stone software; “ask me how to defeat their must-insert-CD-to-run copy-protection”), and authorities agree that you must learn to read using the two phonetic alphabets, Hiragana (ひらがな, used for native Japanese words) and Katakana (カタカナ, used for foreign words). A course that’s taught using Rōmaji (phonetic transcriptions using roman characters) gives you habits that will have no value in real life; Rōmaji is not used for much in Japan.

So how do you learn two complete sets of 46 symbols plus their variations and combinations, as well as their correct pronunciations? Flashcards!

The best software I’ve found for this is a Classic-only Mac application called Kana Lab (link goes direct to download), which has a lot of options for introducing the character sets, and includes recordings of a native speaker pronouncing each one. I’ve also stumbled across a number of Java and JavaScript kana flashcards, but the only one that stood out was LanguageBug, which works on Java cellphones (including my new Motorola v600).

When the misconceptions about Apple’s upcoming Dashboard feature in OS X 10.4 were cleared up (sorry, Konfabulator, it will kill your product not by being a clone, but simply by being better), I acquired a copy of the beta (why, yes, I am a paid-up member of the Apple Developer Connection) and took a look, with the goal of building a functional, flexible flashcard gadget.

Unfortunately, I’ve spent the past few years stubbornly refusing to learn JavaScript and how it’s used to manipulate HTML using the DOM, so I had to go through a little remedial course. I stopped at a Barnes & Noble on Sunday afternoon and picked up the O’Reilly JavaScript Pocket Reference and started hacking out a DHTML flashcard set, using Safari 1.2 under Panther as the platform.

Note: TextEdit and Safari do not a great DHTML IDE make. It worked, but it wasn’t fast or pretty, especially for someone who was new to JavaScript and still making stupid coding errors.

I got it working Tuesday morning, finished off the configuration form Wednesday afternoon, and squashed a few annoying bugs Wednesday night. Somewhere in there I went to work. If you’re running Safari, you can try it out here; I’ve made no attempt to cater to non-W3C DOM models, so it won’t work in Explorer or Mozilla.

There’s a lot more it could do, but right now you can select which character sets to compare, which subsets of them to include in the quiz, and you can make your guesses either by clicking with the mouse or pressing the 1-4 keys on the keyboard. I’ve deliberately kept the visual design simple, not just because I’m not a graphic designer, but also to show how Apple’s use of DHTML as the basis for gadgets makes it possible for any experienced web designer to come in and supply the chrome.

So what does it take to turn my little DHTML web page into a Dashboard gadget?

Why I just deleted Konfabulator

It lasted about fifteen minutes on my laptop. Why? First, because the supplied widgets were primarily designed to be pretty. The weather and calendar widgets are translucent; you can’t make them not be translucent, even if you have wallpaper on your screen that makes them unreadable. The (thankfully not translucent) to-do list doesn’t allow you to edit in-place; anything you want to do with a to-do item involves popping up a bog-standard Mac dialog box and clicking “Okay”, which pretty much renders it useless as a “quick! write that down!” tool or organizing tool. Most of the other standard widgets are similarly long on chrome and short on function, to the point that I have trouble remembering them mere minutes after trying them out.

I was already underwhelmed by the contents of their user-submitted widget gallery, so I’m left with no possible reason to purchase this product, nor can I imagine it ever becoming a significant commercial success. This renders the whole “Apple stole our idea” and “Dashboard was designed to be a Konfabulator killer” claims completely moot. Konfabulator in its current form could never have made its way onto the desktops of a significant percentage of Mac users; it’s just not that interesting.

Will there be a lot of high-chrome, low-content Dashboard gadgets? Sure; as the man said, 90% of everything is crap. The difference is that you don’t need to learn a proprietary development environment to create gadgets for Dashboard. Hell, you don’t even need to learn JavaScript; Dashboard will cheerfully run Flash applications with a trivial DHTML wrapper. You can also embed Java applications, QuickTime videos, etc.

Konfabulator can’t do any of that.

If, for instance, I wanted to build a nice kana/kanji chart around this remarkable collection of QuickTime videos that demonstrate the correct stroke order for the entire hiragana and katakana syllabaries as well as all 1,945 Jōyō kanji, I could (and likely will, if only for my personal use), because a Dashboard gadget is just a web page, and web pages can have embedded QuickTime videos.

The closest thing they’ve got over in Konfab-land is the new Kanji-A-Day widget, which uses /usr/bin/curl to scrape a Japanese web site and import its content into a (cough) pretty window. Maybe that’s the one that will justify the $25 they want for the product…

Got sleeping pills? Need some?

The iTunes Music Store has put up free audiobooks of the DNC speeches. Knock yourself out.

No, really.

Airport Express: call me when it’s ready

I wasn’t surprised to find that my receiver takes a second or so to sync up to a new digital audio stream; this is not an unusual flaw. I was surprised that Airport Express isn’t sending a continuous audio signal to the receiver when it’s active, and that iTunes sends each song in a playlist as a separate digital stream.

Net result? My Kenwood VR-407 loses the first second or so of every song unless I set iTunes’ crossfade option to at least four seconds. With that, the first song is still chopped, but as long as I don’t change tracks manually very often, the majority are ok.

This would be acceptable as a short-term workaround, even though I despise crossfade, except that the device isn’t terribly stable. Several times in the first hour, the audio stream simply locked up and had to be restarted.

Bottom line, until there are updates for both iTunes and Airport Express, it won’t get much use at my house. I could switch the connection to analog to avoid the crossfade, but that won’t do anything about the unstable connection.

Thanks for noticing…

So, I just received email from Apple, thanking me for registering iLife ’04 and GarageBand Jam Pack. Which I registered in January.

.Mac foolishness

So I decided to increase the iDisk storage on my .Mac account, mostly because I’m using the password-protected Public folder to share a largish database with some friends, and mounting DAV volumes is easy, convenient, and doesn’t involve bandwidth that I pay for. The fact that it autosyncs to every Mac I use is just a bonus, of course.

The problem? The confirmation screen for buying upgrades to your .Mac account includes your plaintext password. Sure, it’s a secure web form, but this is a receipt, and I print out receipts for online purchases. I suspect other people do as well.

This transaction did not involve changing a password, adding a sub-account with a new password, or anything similar, so why is my password being printed out? More significantly, why is .Mac storing plaintext passwords in the first place? This is an old security mistake, and anyone designing a service on top of Unix should know better.

Update: a few days later, they decided to bump disk storage for everyone and cut the price of bumping it further. Unfortunately, they also bounced a lot of email for a day with bogus “over quota” errors.

Update: well, that’s at least useful. The standard .Mac account now has a total of 250MB of storage, which can be divided up between email and iDisk however you like. My upgrade to 200MB of iDisk storage is now to a total of 1GB, divided evenly by default. I quickly cranked the email storage down to 50MB and put the rest into the iDisk. You still can’t safely sync it when you’re on a wireless network (your .Mac password is sent in the clear for non-SSL WebDAV), but it’s still a handy tool.

Zen koan nowhere

Creative Labs has announced their new iPod Mini killerclone, the Zen Micro. It comes in ten different colors (face-plate only, and they all have a blue border), is slightly shorter and thicker, adds an extra gigabyte of storage, and includes FM radio, voice recording, and a removable rechargeable battery, all for the same price as the Mini.

Oh, yeah, and it’s hideous:

More iPod Roadkill

Pretty much every new portable music device that comes out is evaluated for its potential as an “iPod-killer”. I’m sorry, but as long as they keep building things that look like this, they’re not the killers, they’re just a flat patch of fur on the side of the road.

Dear Apple,

Please take the iPod Shuffle design, and replace the headphone jack and shuffle button with a small microphone and speaker. Record in a standard audio format, save in a standard FAT32 file system, and please don’t make it a multi-function device. Just record voice memos really really well, for playback on any computer.

And make it a different color, so people don’t confuse it with the Shuffle.

iPod Shuffle to the rescue!

So, yesterday afternoon I went in for some quick outpatient surgery. Nothing major (or ahem life-altering), just some quick drainage work, and then I’d be able to drive myself home. I figured I’d stop at Costco on the way back and pick up some steaks to grill.

That was 1:30PM. At 2PM, the surgeon finished looking at my “right axillary abscess” and said he wanted to take me across the street to the O.R. and do the (still simple, still minor) procedure under general anaesthesia. Not having spent much time under the knife, I didn’t immediately translate this to “you ain’t driving home, son”.

After getting me into one of those silly gowns and inserting an IV, the nurse asked who was going to pick me up. I explained that everyone on my list of possibles was at least 70 miles away and stuck at work for several hours, and found myself being admitted for the night.

Then they told me it’d be at least 5:30PM before they started. Then 6:30PM. At 8:15PM, I was finally knocked out with a clever assortment of chemicals, and woke up at 8:45PM with a well-packed bandage under my right arm. I got about an hour’s sleep last night, and finally got out of there around 10:30AM this morning.

The point of this story? When I left the house to start this little adventure, I stuffed my iPod Shuffle into a jacket pocket, figuring I might need some entertainment for half an hour or so while I waited for the surgeon. It saved my sanity. Except for the relatively short time that I was otherwise occupied, I was able to stay entertained with an assortment of music and Japanese talk radio.

Being partially color-blind, I couldn’t decipher the red/orange/green LED that signals remaining battery life, but it never ran dry. It warded me from the chatter in the hospital hallways, the burbling of my roommate’s oxygen supply, the dreadful basic-cable offerings on TV, and the small stack of relentlessly defeatist newsweeklies that passed for reading material.

And since the Shuffle correctly syncs play count with iTunes, I knew which talk-radio shows to delete when I got home this morning, making room for more.

Oh, and everyone I ran into wanted one. Most of them found the price as attractive as the product.

GarageBand is officially a success

M-Audio has announced this custom controller for it, with matching faux-wood paneling.

I’d love to see the market numbers that drove this decision. Macs have always been big in the creative market, but making custom hardware for an application that comes free with the OS? Hmm…

Update: I’m not exactly a fan of Nine Inch Nails, but any band that releases a track from their upcoming album in GarageBand format for their fans to play with is officially cool.

Safari 1.3, two steps forward…

…half-step back. I’m a big fan of the increase-text-size button in Safari, so while I appreciate the definite improvements in the version included with the 10.3.9 update, I have some…issues:

This anime review site displays just fine at the normal text-size setting, but Safari 1.3 persistently hoses the images if you’ve hit the increase-text-size button. Sometimes a forced redraw fixes it, sometimes I have to decrease text size and then increase it again.

Best Tiger feature so far…

Open the Keyboard Viewer. Click the Zoom/Maximize button. Compare to its “zoomed” size under Panther. Thank the person responsible.

(of course, to reach this point you must first open System Preferences and select the International preferences, switch to the Input Menu tab, and check the Keyboard Viewer palette and “show input menu in menu bar” boxes; only then will you actually be able to use the Keyboard Viewer. I think this is one of the most convoluted methods of enabling an essential utility yet devised, and I can only hope that Apple moves the damn thing into Dashboard real soon now.)

Macophile?!? Them’s fighting words!

Okay, technically it’s one word, but an amusing one nonetheless, coming from an unexpected source. I haven’t mentioned it here before, but when I interviewed at Apple last year, the off-the-record explanation for why I wasn’t hired was that I just didn’t seem to be enthusiastic about the company. That, and I kicked off my sandals during the interview, which really freaked somebody out.

Never mind that I walked in with a PowerBook, an iPod Mini, two decades of Mac experience, an ADC membership, a NeXT connection going all the way back to the original beta hardware, a thorough understanding of t