Membranophonist’s Ramblings

Although I’ve never been to New Orleans, I have a special appreciation for the city that birthed so much of the music I love.

Help out by donating if you can spare some dough. The Red Cross is a very efficient organization, using more than 90% of funds for services.

After all, no one has noticed that while we’ve been jerking off, Apple has come from behind to now lead our OS in many areas. Or that we’re still 2 years out from shipping our next rev despite having been at it for 5 years already.

Anonymous Commenter on Who da’Punk’s “Bob Herbold, The ‘Fiefdom Syndrome’, and Bob’s Message to Microsoft”

Ha!

Via Andrew Wooster.

I’m still looking for a good movie management application. MovieGallery, from Sweden’s Bitfield AB, provides most of the features I want; ratings, playlists (manual and smart), and different ways to view my collection (as thumbnails or a list), etc. The biggest functionality gap I see is the lack of support for movie formats not supported by QuickTime. Adding support for Real, DivX, and Windows Media Video is probably more difficult than QuickTime, but it really is a must if the application is to be a comprehensive movie manager.

Comments and suggestions based on MovieGallery version 1.3.2.

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Delicious Library’s Spotlight result display would be better if the results included artwork and whichever metadata string matched the query (displayed next to the item’s name as with my previous Spotlight mockups).

• Spotlight results for Frank Herbert
• Spotlight results for Robin Williams

Update: Delicious Library items do indeed include their artwork in the Spotlight results window, but artwork was only appearing for new or modified items for me, probably because I’d installed several of the 1.5 beta releases. Deleting “~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Delicious Library Items” forced the index to be rebuilt, so all artwork is now displayed as the Delicious Monsters intended. I’d still like to see the text string that includes the query term(s) displayed in a future release.

Last June, Robb Beal invited me to join him via IM in brainstorming a better SubEthaEdit document collaboration experience. For this improvisatory review we both used SEE v2.0.1, which was then the latest release (the collaboration interface has not changed appreciably in subsequent releases).

Robb Beal and Daniel J. Wilson review SubEthaEdit’s document collaboration

A summary of our recommendations:

1. The collaboration interface should be designed around people, not permissions.
2. Labels should clearly indicate functionality and/or status.
3. The distinction between Internet and Bonjour-based sharing need not be strictly enforced.

The two steps forward:

1. Documents exported to PDF from applications such as Pages now have metadata embedded in them.
2. The filesystem indexes this metadata and can use it to filter and group PDFs (through Spotlight).

The step backward is that metadata embedded in documents such as Pages and Word files is not translated to PDF metadata. Instead, the user’s name is set as the Author and the file name (sans .extension) is set as the Title. This is a reasonable thing to do when the user has not manually input any metadata, but not otherwise.

I will walk through and illustrate the problem with a recent Walter Pincus story from the Washington Post, “British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War“.

1. I copied the text of the article to a Pages document, allowing me to trim out the advertisements and links that would remain if I saved the web page directly as a PDF.
2. I added a few bits of information to the Pages document using the Inspector’s Document Inspector -> Info section.
3. I exported the Pages document as a PDF.
4. I opened the PDF in Preview and opened the Info window (Tools -> Get Info) to see what metadata from the Pages document had been carried over. None.

Based on my (possibly totally incorrect) understanding of the Quartz 2D Programming Guide’s “Creating A PDF”, it should be possible for applications to write their internal metadata to exported PDFs. It may just be that the APIs are new or updated, meaning that developers will need to update their software to use them.

I grew up near Paris. Five years ago, only France Telecom could provide DSL access. For €50 you got 512 Kbps. Today, you can get 20-Mbps Internet access, unlimited national calls, and about 100 digital TV channels for less than €30. Anywhere you move, at least 20 DSL companies fight to have you as a customer. Now I live in L.A., and I spend $45 a month for a 3-Mbps cable connection, because the only company offering DSL in my area stops at 386 Kbps. What’s going on?

Nathan Hazout in a letter to Wired

The availability of true broadband at reasonable prices isn’t the most important issue facing this country, but it would likely help start another economic boom.

Dr. Cerf said part of the reason their protocols took hold quickly and widely was that he and Dr. Kahn made no intellectual property claims to their invention. They made no money from it, though it did help their careers. “It was an open standard that we would allow anyone to have access to without any constraints,” he said.

NYT: Laurels for Giving the Internet Its Language

In addition to being co-creator of TCP/IP, Cerf is a natty dresser. Geeks need not be slobs!

My sister Carrie is living with my oldest brother in Maple Valley, a suburb about 45 minutes outside of Seattle.

Since transferring to a 92% white area high school there, she has heard the following from fellow students (paraphrasing based on her relay of these conversations and encounters):

• The Japanese internment didn’t really happen.
• If it did, they deserved it.
• If it did, they were given money afterward, so they should just get over it.
• The proper term for Japanese-Americans is “Japs”.
• The Holocaust didn’t really happen. Devious Jews made it up.
• “You have black friends?”

From a woman leading a church youth group she was invited to visit by a fellow student (again paraphrasing):

• Seattle Public Schools teach kids that homosexuality is acceptable.
  I give Carrie credit for informing the woman that Seattle Public Schools teach kids to treat people equally — sexual orientation has nothing to do with it.
• Homosexuality is a sin.
• Homosexuality is a choice.

Those red values come shining through in all their ignorant, bigoted glory!

Here are the query results Amazon returned for “Barton Fink”:

I opened the Amazon page for Performance Sea Kayaking and searched for “Barton” and “Fink” — nothing!

I searched for “Barton Fink” at Amazon from their page and got the same thing, so it isn’t a bug with Delicious Library.

Very odd.