Extra88

More on iTunes4

Blogspace is certainly abuzz about iTunes4 and the Music Store. This article nicely summarizes how URLs to specific parts of of the Music Store are structured. If you want to see what the URL delivers, just change the "itms" to "http" and your browser will display the returned XML document the best it can (bad in Safari, pretty good in Mozilla and IE). One thing you can do with the XML is copy the URLs which point to the preview files (which are DRM'd AAC files, just like the full tracks) and download the preview files (the URLs are regular http).

iTunes4 sharing is HTTP

I found this article by pudge, Slashdot editor, MacPerl maintainer, and all-round Mac+Perl guy to be interesting. Basically he found that the service iTunes4's sharing creates uses HTTP on port 3689. This does not open up your whole Music folder for browsing but he did find a way to download a track instead of stream it.

Also, iTunes4 adds at least two protocol types (which are really just http assigned to specific apps) to your system, itms: (iTunes Music Store?) and daap: (Digital Audio Access Protocol?). itsm URLs point to specific pages within iTunes Music Store and daap: URLs point to servers providing iTunes sharing. So if my Mac is mac.goofus.com and I turn on sharing in iTunes4, someone can enter daap://mac.goofus.com:3689 in their browser and their iTunes4 will launch and connect to my shared playlists.

It looks like the downloading vs. streaming may be only applicable under rather specific circumstances. For one thing, the URL includes a "session-id" which is probably only generated when the iTunes4 client requests the track. It would be interesting to see if that URL could be used to stream the track using a different player on a different computer. The different player part shouldn't matter since pudge is using "curl" as a client to download the file but I wonder if iTunes4 on the server side ties the IP address of the client to the session-id. Probably not.

About the daap: protocol, it's not clear how you might construct a URL to point to a specific playlist or track or if it's even possible. A program called ServerStore has been made as a way to access a list of available iTunes sharing servers and quickly connect to them.

Someone else is working on a more detailed (and inscrutable!) examination of the sharing protocl.

Oh, and in case it wasn't obvious, iTunes4 only shares music when it's actually running. If the server quits iTunes4, clients can't listen.

KFC in a "war zone"

No, not the Middle East, Northern Ireland. I was interested in seeing this picture because Leah saw this herself when she visited but she didn't get a shot of it.

America's Most Talented Kid

Apparently Antonin Scalia is not only a judge on the Supreme Court.

I'm an April Fool

This morning I'm kicking myself because I should have done April Fool's Day entries in the blog.

"Switching to a stand-up desk"
"Got a tattoo"
"Announcing: CurtisOS for Palm"
"Everyone's password should be 'password'"
"Cat can talk!"

Eh, at this point it's like being critical of my performance while singing in the shower.

Kung-Log adds Image Thumbnailing

One of my earlier criticisms of Kung-Log was it couldn't take advantage of MT's use of ImageMagick to create thumbnail versions of images. Well, now it can create thumbnails.

Currently listening to Radio Paradise - eclectic intelligent rock - music info & listener community at radioparadise.com

Disconnect USB Audio, crash your App

Mac OS X: Audio Application Unexpectedly Quits If Third-Party Audio Device Is Disconnected or Turned Off

It doesn't affect only USB audio devices but also FireWire. Their solution is to quit the app before disconnecting the device. Seems pretty lame, I hope they fix that in a patch before releasing 10.3. We have a bunch of Macs which we want to switch to OS X this Summer but we'll be going with 10.2 because that's what we already own.

That reminds me, this year, we need to make sure our Mac orders are placed late enough to definitely get 10.3. included.

"Most Wanted" Iraqi Treasures Cards

Instead of the U.S. military's Most Wanted Iraqi's cards, these are cards showing missing historical treasures. I think it's a good idea to highlight what a loss to humanity the looting of Iraq's museums. I also think it's a good idea to "de-criminalize" the looters and to offer rewards for the treasures, no questions asked. It's our best chance of getting some of them back. It's not like we need to "send a message" to would-be looters so when the U.S. overthrows, their government, they know they'll be hunted down.

www.MyCatHatesYou.com

This is almost anti-kitty porn. This site has pictures of cats with various "evil" looks and bad attitudes. This one's all for you, Kevin.

http://www.mycathatesyou.com/

A Cute Kitten

I had to make a new category. I feel bad starting off this category with a kitty other than my own but it was a spur of the moment thing.

Warning: I had to make a thumbnail picture for this by hand because even at a reduced size, some people will not be able to cope with the level of cuteness displayed here.

Liquid Bandage Usability

I was browsing around the site of a usability wonk and came across his assessment of Band-Aid Liquid Bandage. Usability is cool and so is idea of liquid bandages so article was right up my alley. The short version is the current experience of using a liquid bandage leaves much to be desired but it does have its advantages.

I recently had to have my skin professionally opened. I thought the procedure would culminate in stiches but I was hoping, it being the 21st century and all, that it would be more like building a model airplane than hemming pants. Unfortunately it was neither, it was more like construction workers covering a pothole with a steel plank except this pothole oozed and stuck to the "plank." This made removal of the plank rather painful but subsequent, self-applied planks were of a non-stick variety.

Send me a S.A.S.E. for a translation of the paragraph above.

FileMaker->MySQL migrator

Not that we don't love our FileMaker databases but at some point we might need the FmPro Migrator. Someone on MacSlash had an interesting idea. They might use FileMaker as a database prototyping system the use the migrator to move everything to MySQL when it becomes a production system.

demo available but I'm not sure what the demo's capabilities are. The migrator can also handle FileMaker-to-Oracle but I don't think we'll be using Oracle databases anytime soon.

Colossal Colon

From Wired:

Curious about the colon? Wondering about colorectal cancer prevention, early detection and treatment? You're in luck! As part of the National Cancer Education tour, a giant colon replica will be traveling to 20 cities in the United States from February 2003 to November 2003. The "Colossal Colon," a 40-foot-long, 4-foot-high replica, was modeled after a real colon taken from colonoscopy film footage.

Exhibit visitors who crawl through the colon will see various stages of disease from polyps to full-blown colon cancer. The Colossal Colon was created in honor of Amanda Sherwood Roberts, who died from the disease last year. "We're trying to educate as many people as we can so nobody has to go through what we had to go through," said Amanda's father, Bernie Sherwood.

I'm sorry Bernie but a 40 ft. simulated colon is something else I don't want to "go through."

Lego Church

I believe these are photos from Kevin's next workplace ;-) I bet the all-Lego construction makes running conduit a snap!

90% Give Away Password

I almost put this in the "Work" category since password security is a part of my job. Instead, I made up a new category since the general subject is something in which I'm interested.

Office workers give away passwords for a cheap pen

"Workers were asked a series of questions which included: What is your password? Three in four (75 per cent) of people immediately gave their password."

The other 15 percent gave it up after just a couple of leading questions.

"Of the 152 office workers surveyed many explained the origin of their passwords. The most common password was "password" (12 per cent) and the most popular category was their own name (16 per cent) followed by their football team (11 per cent) and date of birth (8 per cent)."

The methods used weren't very scientific but I think the results are probably pretty representative.

Slashdot put this story in their "Funny" category which tells you what computer geeks think.

White Paper on FireWire port failures

This isn't strictly a Mac issue but many people have reported problems with failing FireWire ports on their Macs.

FireWire Port Failures in Host Computers and Peripheral Devices

This guy makes a lot of FireWire devices (we have one at work for connecting a 2.5" laptop hard drive to FireWire) and should know what he's talking about.

Nice touch in Software Update

A nice thing about OS X's Software Update is it can check for updates for applications which are not a standard part of the operating system. For instance, if you have the Safari beta web browser installed, Software Update will let you install the latest version. This is also true of other, more exotic applications like QuickTime Broadcaster.

Fugu 1.0 available

"Fugu is a native Mac OS X Cocoa GUI wrapper for OpenSSH's commandline sftp client. SFTP is a secure replacement for FTP: the session is encrypted via ssh, so nothing--most importantly passwords--is sent in the clear."

It's also free and open source.

Masked Wrestler Wins Japan Assembly Seat

BoingBoing pointed me to this Reuters story. Click on the story's picture to see a bigger version.

A professional wrestler who fought his way to victory in local assembly elections under his ring name and wearing his trademark mask has vowed the mask will not leave his face even after he enters the staid halls of Japanese politics.

"This is my face," the wrestler -- known as "The Great Sasuke" -- was quoted by the Nikkan Sports newspaper as saying of his black and white full-face mask with bright scarlet streaks and golden wings by the eye holes." American politics is so boring. Jesse Ventura never even wore a mask.

Bizarre Record Covers

As you can imagine, I got this link from the April Winchell site.
Bizarre Record Covers

Here are just half of the categories!

"Music"al oddities

April Winchell: Multimedia

This is a great site, this page has a bunch of MP3's of the most horrible, wacky and funny audio ever recorded, most of it was at one time called "music." Bad renditions of songs, along the lines of William Shatner's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, dominate but there are also TV show outtakes, "original" songs, and various kinds of spoken word pieces.

Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun by Steve & Eydie

Leonard Nimoy "singing" Put a Little Love in Your Heart

Johnny Cash singing I Walk the Line in German. There's a whole "in German" section.

You might have heard of "mash ups," where someone strips the vocal track from one song and replaces it with the vocals of another song. I've only heard a couple and didn't think too much of them until now. This is Eminem lyrics over some classic ragtime music. I almost wet myself laughing.
Eminem vs. Ragtime (Uncensored) by Freelance Hairdresser

Eminem With or Without Me has a whole collection of Eminem mash-ups that based on their descriptions I must listen to very soon.

SARS-a-licious

This caught my eye A) because it mentions Taichung (where my brother and his wife are) and B) has a picture of a cat wearing a "surgical mask." Awwww. Everything's actually ok in Taichung, right guys?

I'm not sure how fast the SARS bug is spreading, but the meme's pretty infectious

MT trouble linking to ".mov" files

It's crazy but the software used to run this blog seems to have problems saving entries which contain links to files ending in ".mov" (QuickTime movies). This is why I didn't link directly to the new Animatrix QuickTime movie. If I tried to save the entry containing a URL ending in ".mov," the form submission would never finish and eventually just stop. If I changed the ".mov" to ".html," the entry saved as quickly as it ever does.

Other people seem to link to QuickTime movies without problems so I wonder what the deal is.

New Animatrix short available

The latest animated short set in the world of The Matrix is now available.

If you're off-campus, you'll probably want to just view/download it from their web site but if you're on-campus you'll probably get it faster from my machine.

Detective Story

On campus, click "detect_640_dl.mov"

ABC - The Reality Network

You can't quite call this an April Fool's joke because I don't think it fooled anybody but it's pretty funny.

ABC - The Reality Network

My favorite "new show" is The CAT .

Who is... THE CAT?
From the producers of The Mole comes a new challenge. Eight contestants, working together for a million dollar prize. But one of them is secretly.. THE CAT!"

Running GUI apps as root

Mac OS X Hints has this hint:
Launch GUI programs as root which is kind of obvious to Unix veterans. Here's the meat:

"sudo path/to/application/Contents/MacOS/app_name &
For example:
sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit &"

It was noted that you can't really tell which GUI apps are running as root but one of the comments shared a somewhat subtle way to tell them apart, change root's coloring. If you run this command:
sudo "/Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences"
you can set system preferences for root. To change the coloring, go to General and set the Appearance to Graphite and maybe change the Hightlight Color to something else as well. Doing this will make any GUI app running as root have different coloring on it's window elements (scroll bars, open, close minimize buttons, etc.) In something like a text editor, a differeent highlight color could be very noticable. I suppose changing root's language to Français would be pretty obvious too ;-)

Bug & workaround for Sysprep'ed machines

We haven't used Sysprep yet but we probably will. This will impact procedures for using Sysprep.

Opportunistic Locking May Not Be Granted If Windows Is Installed by Using Sysprep

The workaround is to delete the data from this Value after running Sysprep on the master but before shutting it down.

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet \Services\lanmanserver\parameters
Value: GUID