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Farewell, Six Apart.

Instead of taking days to write the perfect post about the Six Apart news (in case you don't know, Six Apart is now SAY Media), I wanted to simply  jot down some of my thoughts while the news is still, well, news. I know a lot of folks have questions and I don't have all the answers right now. However, I think that just a couple points are worth mentioning.

via www.dollarshort.org

Despite being "just" a "jot[ting] down of some of [her] thoughts", Mena's post about the end of the current chapter in Six Apart, and the beginning of SAY Media, is wonderful, and exactly captures my feelings, as well.

Roots

We launched a new sixapart.com a couple of days ago, and I'm so proud to work with the team that built and implemented such a beautiful and useful site!

Joel on standards

From Joel on Software: Martian Headsets:

If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to understand them all well enough to avoid traps and landmines, and you’re safer just asking for the fruit plate.

This made my morning, and it's only one of many fantastic quotes.

Fire Eagle and Movable Type

Having had a longstanding interest in geo-location--and, well, its intersections with blogging and online identity--I'm really excited about Yahoo!'s new Fire Eagle service.

I'm also really excited that we now have Fire Eagle for Movable Type plugin connecting an MT profile to a Fire Eagle account. This makes an MT profile location-aware and, just like Fire Eagle itself, opens the door to tons of other interesting features that the plugin provides: adding a map of your current location to your blog; tracking changes to your location in your Action Stream; &c.

I've written more about Fire Eagle for Movable Type on sixapart.com.

"The geek at your feet says you're neat..."

I can actually write (marginally) technical posts, too!

• Six Apart's first (no, second, or perhaps third) child grows up! I'm thrilled about the idea of people taking a look at TrackBack, improving it, standardizing it, and the like. Ping!


• Plagger (by Tatsuhiko & others) is a fantastic idea. Having developed a bunch of miniature feed-related apps, what I love most about this is that it's essentially the perlbal/qpsmtpd of RSS/Atom feed frameworks.


• Okay, one non-technical link: OMG Girls Aloud reality series! (via)

Cry me a river—of money!

Oh shit, BillG and JT together at CES! [1]

Announcing MTV's new music service, Urge, together, onstage at Gates' keynote at CES. Best keynote EVAR!

[1] Thanks to Anil for bringing this to my attention.

"She asked me if we could be friends..."

So, I recorded Sign o' the Times on our TiVo this past weekend, and ever since I've been trying to figure out how to get it off of the TiVo. As in, off of the TiVo, and onto a DVD or my (Mac) laptop.

But so BTW, before I delve into the tech stuff, a brief aside that's worthy of the main post, as opposed to a footnote: Sign o' the Times is so fucking awesome. And it's not really easily available on DVD, which is just totally lame.

Favorite things about Sign o' the Times:

• When, during "Hot Thing," Prince slides across the stage under Cat Glover's legs, and rips off her skirt with his teeth. (Or, I guess, almost—he actually appears to grab it with his hand, then transfer it to between his teeth. Yes, I've now watched this part too many times in the writing of this post.) But still: how awesome is Prince!


• This movie is just so brilliantly directed. The cuts & closeups are as good as a music video, which is pretty incredible with what appears to be concert footage. [1]


• This is a really great mini-review of the movie. Of course, it would be, as the author wrote a book on the subject.
  


• "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man". Best. Song. EVAR.

So, all of that said: We only have Macs around the house (around 6 of them now that we've amassed, but quantity doesn't help, in this case), so we can't use TiVoToGo. And really, what I most want is just to be able to burn this to a DVD, so I can watch it over & over again. It seems so simple: it's a file, made of bits, on a hard drive on (what is basically) a Linux box, that is on our fucking network. Why can't I just mount the box and copy the file to my laptop, then play it? [2]

So finally, from a comment on this post, I figured out part of the answer:

Open up a web browser and go to https://(the ip address of your tivo)/nowplaying/index.html and login as tivo with a password of your media access code (from the Tivo view settings screen) It will let you access a website where you can download the *.tivo files of your shows.

Yay! Now I have the .tivo file, though I can't actually do anything with it without a PC with TiVo ToGo.

And yet somehow, just the idea of having this file on my own hard drive makes me feel so much more secure!

Prince: you're safe now.

[1] Of course, it's not actually concert footage, which is the reason it looks so good. It turns out it's a lot easier when you reshoot the entire movie at your own studio!

[2] This is a rhetorical question.

OS X 10.4.3 Redraw Problems

I upgraded my laptop to OS X 10.4.3 the other day, and immediately upon reboot I started seeing massively annoying redraw problems. Windows would randomly get redrawn with part of another window on the screen, dock icons would be replaced by images found elsewhere on the screen. It was almost unusable.

I did some searches to find others afflicted by the same problem, and only found this post on a message board, which didn't have any answers or solutions.

So I started reading more about 10.4.3, and found out that it breaks support for Quartz 2D Extreme. Which is strange in and of itself, because I thought Quartz 2D Extreme was something new in Tiger—so why would they break it in a maintenance release for Tiger?

Anyway, everything I read suggested that Q2DE was disabled by default unless it was supported by the video card. There are hacks to turn it on even on machines that don't support it, but I'd never done that.

But I figured I'd check, so I opened up the CoreGraphics configuration file, and astonishingly, Q2DE was enabled! So I disabled it, rebooted, and the problem was solved.

If you're having the same problems with 10.4.3, here's what to do:

1. Open up the file /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/ Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Configuration.plist in a text editor.
2. Look for the lines:

   
       <key>Quartz2DExtremeEnabled</key>
       <true/>
   
   

3. Change the "<true/>" to "<false/>".
4. Save the file, and reboot. That should fix the redraw problems.

Rails developers kill kittens!

Let's get this out of the way up front: I actually really like Catalyst. And I also really like Rails [1].

But if you'd like to read something really funny, take a look at the history of the Catalyst vs Rails page on the Catalyst wiki.

Leaving aside the fact that this page—that is, the Catalyst vs Rails page—used to claim that Catalyst was more mature than Rails because its version number was, what, 8 times higher than that of Rails—leaving that aside—take a look at this amazing entry on the changelog of that page:

Removed comment about Java programmers dying to be full-time Ruby programmers.

Wow! Finally, a balanced critique of two different—and, presumably, not that highly competitive—development frameworks!

[1] Note, BTW, how much better Rails is at marketing than Catalyst (and I mean this as a compliment for Rails, though I'm sure some may take it as a compliment for Catalyst).

Rails: "Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups."

And Catalyst: "Catalyst is an Elegant Web Framework, supporting the MVC pattern, as well as a number of experimental web patterns."

I know which one I'd pick if I weren't already a Perl developer. [2]

[2] That said, I have a lot of respect for the technical framework the Catalyst team has built, and I am a Perl developer, so there you go.

So Much Drama in the last.fm

I don't know why, but I've gotten into the habit of obsessively checking my last.fm profile over the last couple of days. And the thing is, nothing actually ever happens on my profile. I have no neighbors; I have no groups; I have no tags; I have just one friend.

The only thing that changes is my list of recently played tracks, & there's really no logical reason why I should obsessively check which songs I last listened to when I, um, just listened to them. But there's some bizarre pleasure that I get when, after reloading my profile, I see the song that I'm listening to/just listened to at the top of the list. Web services are magical!

Today, last.fm & I had some drama, because I'd listened to 8 songs that hadn't yet appeared on my profile! I kept checking, & the songs didn't show up. And when they finally did show up (they were queued, I guess), I must say, I was pretty relieved. last.fm was my friend, again.

I guess the point being that I feel like there's a lot of richness to last.fm that I'm somehow missing.