08.31.07
Posted in technology at 8:45 pm by coldclimate
I have a problem. It is exactly the same as the problem in this forum post, namely (*entering blind cut and paste mode*) i have a rather large itunes collection that i keep on a network drive.
however, as well as my ipod, i would like to have a ‘local’ database library on my laptop.
i can use programs like itunes program manager and Libra, but i just don’t like them to be honest (although libra is much better than the former).
anyway…
i was thinking that since the ipod is just ‘thought’ of as an external disk (with some DRM and stuff), whether it would be possible to mount say, a DMG, AS an ipod on the mac…
that way, i could synchronise between the local powerbook dmg and my network share - just like having an ipod connected to my laptop… (*exit blind cut and paste mode*)
That was exactly my idea - some sort of local directory or disc image, or something, that appeared as an ipod, allowing me to sync my “recently added items” directly to my local machine, to take with me.
Annoyingly, nobody seems to have come up with a solution yet, but as I was learning this afternoon, it’s asking the right questions that is the important thing. Yeah!
Permalink
Posted in food at 5:18 pm by coldclimate
I have a quiet affection of saurkraunt. I’m not sure why. The jars of it you buy are, generally, vile, which is a real shame. The best stuff I had was un Austria, and it went perfectly with the tarragon hinted mstard and meaty sausages I and my then girlfriend ate standing in the freezing cold after too many beers, surrounded by old men in big coats, also half trollied.
Anyway, I digress, nothing new there. I quite fancy a go and this cheats reciept for Grand Central Baking’s Quickled Kraut, quickling being their term or cheats pickling, done over night and in the fridge. Still, if it’s better than those huge jars of soft soggy pulp I buy every so often and then watch rot, it’s a good thing.
Permalink
Posted in technology at 4:31 pm by coldclimate
I really like the attidude of this post “Four Realizations about Hiring“. It ties in really nicely with Joel on Softwares book about hiring techical staff. Hire people with skills, not people with CVs.
Permalink
Posted in technology at 3:46 pm by coldclimate
Interoperability is something most PC users just don’t think about, ever, but as the popularity of mobile devices and other bits and pieces, I think people will start to notice that emailing Microsoft Word documents as a default doesn’t work.
There are lots of more interoperable things out there. I like plain text, I send all my emails in it. It does mean I can’t have a 2 inch high lime green signature, but I don’t consider this a major lose. I write as many documents as I can either online, or in Latex, and I try to distribute them as PDFs, plain text or other formats. I do this for three main reasons:
1) I am a stubborn Microsoft basher, and probably always will be. It’s just in my nature to dislike them for some reason.
2) I work on a mix of environments. Windows XP for work (their requirement not mine), an iBook for personal mobile computing, a linux desktop and a variety of other things (Solaris servers, embedded linux on network devices, a few more exotic things). Having to open a Word document and paste the commands across using Putty is a bloomin’ nightmare when I could have wget’d the text file, vi’d out the bits I didn’t need and run it in situ.
3) I firmly believe that if you promote a monoculture which is tied to a commercial interest you are on the road to ruin.
Now, there are moves to introduce on open standard for documents, spreadsheets and other such things. This is a great idea in principle, though extremely difficult to do in practice. Anybody who has opened up a badly written webpage in a browser only to find all the text squashed against one side and the images all overlapping (checkout my sidebar for a current example I’ve not got round to sorting), will know how difficult it is to write documents that appear the same way no matter where opened.
Microsoft have jumped into the fray, and are pushing Open Office XML (OOXML). There are some good things about it, namely that it is XML based, and many bad things about it. XML is often used as a magic bullet for writing schema based documents, but it’s not a bad idea in this case I believe. I’ve seen some truly terrible XML tags in my time (oh the stories I could tell form work), but generally well thought through and planned XML is a good start, and there lies the problem.
Thinking stuff through is a good idea. Dirty nasty hacks to get you through are not. Having to support legacy products by using tags such as (lifted stirght from wikipedia - your milage may vary but that damned document is 6000 pages long) “autoSpaceLikeWord95″, “useWord97LineBreakRules” and “useWord2002TableStyleRules” shows you have a problem. A big problem.
So it starts to look like a good idea, badly implemented. I imagine it would be a lot easier if it was broken down into stages possibly by application use eg. An open spreadsheet standard, an open document format (aka. Word document, not document general), an open diagram standard. This way you wouldn’t have to cope with it being monolithic, it would instead be modular.
Another good step would be draw a line under existing formats and adopt it going forward. Why adopt the standard to allow documents to look exactly like they would have in Office 97, it’s ten years ago. It will mean that if a document is opened it will need converting, but surely that’s possible.
If we start down the road of a crap standard all you’ll get will be people working around them to get what they want, fragmentation, and lack of adoption, and that before we get onto the internation strong arming and vote rigging!
Permalink
Posted in rant at 2:34 pm by coldclimate
i really really like the idea of audio books. I spend all day looking at screens, and my eyes get sore. I also love reading, and hammer though a book a week and then some. To be able to go to bed with my comically huge 1970’s headphones and listen to a book from my mp3 player (actually yes, it is an ipod, but I don’t want to fall intothe trap of all mp3 players being refered to as iPods, in much the same way as my friend Ben tries to stop all GPS navigation devices being refered to as TomToms. Annoyingly I have an iPod, and a TomTom, anyway….) would be ideal. The thing that prohibits me form buying audiobooks fall into two catagories.
1) I really like owning the actual book. My flatmate gives away his books once he’s read them, paying for them much like a service. I hang onto my book, prefering to cause the ceiling in the livingroom to sag under the weight of the shelves in my bedroom. It’s also nice to be able to make notes (on stickies!) in some of the business related texts too.
2) Audiobook are freaking expencive! I’m happy to pay £6 for a paperback, but paying 15 quid for a lit of light relief? No thank you.
What promted this mini-rant? I was reading a post over at Seth Goldin’s blog and it rang a bell. It’s actually why I didn’t buy somehting from audioble.co.uk a few months ago. The nice thing to discover is that his books on there are not too expencive. I was about to pay £4 for the paperback version of The Dip, I might now pay £4.37 for an mp3 copy. Note: MP3! not some silly DRM slimed Windows only thing. This is good. This means I can pop it onto my phone and listen on the way to work, or play it from my headless linux audiobox. Open rights means more use!
Permalink
Posted in randomosity at 1:00 pm by coldclimate
I can’t beleive I didn’t think of this before. Westwood Drinking. Genius.
All thats missing are calls for “drop the bomb!”, “the big dog”, “back to the street”.
(editted because I’ve obviously offended somebody, which was never my intention, for once).
Permalink
Posted in business, ideas, technology at 9:42 am by coldclimate
I’m reading a really interesting article from changeThis and the following paragraph struck a note.
“Ever wonder why some solutions lack inspiration, imagination, and originality? It’s because we don’t think as deeply or as broadly as we must to solve the problem. We tell ourselves the optimal solution is a luxury. We throw some resources at the problem and move on. Or tweak a previous solution and fit it to the current situation. We favor implementation over incubation. Then we wonder why the reaction to our idea is ho-hum.”
Is this why big IT firms who rely on reuse (not good code reuse - total wholesale reuse of documentation, design, code, testing methods and financial agreements) end up building semi-customised systems where they have to bodge togehter a final solution that is not fit for purpose, elegent or (by the end) cheap? I suspect so.
Another interesting point it makes is “We’ll take whatever seems to meet the bare minimum requirement to achieve the goal. Then we stop looking for the best way to solve the problem. Essentially we say: “good enough.” ”
You could have lifted this from a course I was on a few years ago. Descoping, requirements filtering and catogorisation are some of the methods of cutting down the amount you have to do, and if you follow that up with tight deadlines and budgets what you’ll end up with is a solution which is “good enough”. eg. legally it does what you agreed (which is vastly reduced on the inital contract because of some excellent descoping and budget-linked change requests). What you don’t end up with is something which is “good”.
Permalink
08.30.07
Posted in food, interweb at 1:17 pm by coldclimate
I love the writing style of Allegra McEvedy. As it’s not obvious, click on the permalink to read each full article.
Permalink
08.29.07
Posted in technology at 1:01 pm by coldclimate
yes, xkcd is too accurate today.
Permalink
Posted in randomosity at 11:37 am by coldclimate
(shameless plee)
Please please please can you do something random to help somebody you (probably) don’t know. Go to http://www.godosomethingnew.co.uk/?a=vote&save=1&uid=1580&eid=2 and vote for my old friend Heidi.
She’s currently winning, but a very orange coloured lady is creaping up the leader board.
Permalink
Posted in rant at 11:23 am by coldclimate
As pointed out very recently, I’m having some problems with my Buffalo LinkStation Live. I’ve just re-emailed my details to them and rang up to make sure the email had arrived. The person I spoke to pointed out that “written details were pointless because we can’t work form them”. When I asked how excatly I should get them a copy of my reciept details I was told to either fax the reciept (no offer of a number was made) or “photograph or scan it” and attach this to the email.
This will be done tonight. Meanwhile I am directing thought of evilness at them.
Permalink
Posted in interweb, rant at 10:09 am by coldclimate
Buffalo Technology’s UK help desk is appalling. Rude, snappy and frankly appauling.
A few weeks ago I bought a Buffalo LinkStation Live (320Gb version) and very nice it was too, for the first 2 days. After 2 days, it simply made a beeping noise, and did not do anything more.
After 2 phone calls to Buffalo, I finally got them to admit I had a faulty drive and they would send me an email about how to replace it. After 2 days I had not received an email, so I rang back and a pleasant enough bloke apologized and resent (or possibly sent) the email again. I filled in all the blanks, and sent it back.
A week later, and I’ve not heard anything, so I’ve rung up, and after 10 minutes on hold, was barked at by an irate Irishman, who told me I hadn’t replied to the email, and when I said I had he said that it would take
“a few days to come through”. I pointed out that it was a week ago, to which he replied that they were “having problems with their email, which is provided by a third party, and they couldn’t do anything about it”. I asked what I should do, and suggested ringing back every few days, to which I was told I should definitely chase it.
Worse customer service I’ve encountered in ages. I will not be spending money with them again.
Permalink
Posted in randomosity at 8:54 am by coldclimate
malacia (mu-LA-shuh, -shee-uh) noun
1. An abnormal craving for spiced food.
2. Softening of the organ or tissue.
Personally I suffer the first quite often, though it may cause the second meaning.
Permalink
08.25.07
Posted in randomosity at 4:29 pm by coldclimate
Who can believe that “The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts.” People are actually “afraid that they will sexually harass [them]”.
Nightmare.
Permalink
08.24.07
Posted in food, interweb, randomosity at 2:11 pm by coldclimate
I lovelove love the last cartoon strip in todays BasicInstructions. I might possibly have done xtream roast chicken in the past. I brought it though. Definately.
Permalink
08.21.07
Posted in randomosity at 10:53 am by coldclimate
OK, as I’ve just made this work and not got time to document it “properly” here is a very quick way to record BBC Listen Again stuff to your local machine for listening again at a more convienient time (and then probably deleting because they take up space and there’s another one on next weekend anyway).
You need to get hold of the .ram file for the programme you want to record. You can probably do this by right clicking on it in the listen again page. Download this .ram file to your local machine and then open it with a text editor (notepad in Windows, vi in *nix). You’re looking for the locator. Cut and paste this locator to the end of your call to mplayer (which you’ll need installing), something like this:
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile -bandwidth 999999 -ao null rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/comedy/tue1830.ra?start=”0:00″
(the locator is the rtsp: until the :00″). When run this will dump out a .ra (real audio) file to your current location. You can then go on to convert this to mp3 should you need to use it with specific hardware. I imagine you can do this with mplayer too.
I wonder if the new iPlayer will affect this? One imagines so.
Permalink
Posted in interweb at 10:40 am by coldclimate
Just lately I’ve had to start going through my spam box in gmail because its started catching lots of my actual emails. Most of the messages I get from a certain wellknown social networking site - spam. Most of the comments on here - spam. Emails from me to me (to rememebr things) - spam. Very odd.
Until now it’s been really good at picking out the chaff, but just lately it’s caught quite a bit of wheat too. Annoy, as I get about a thousand spam messages a day, it’s actually quite hard to pick the real ones out. I’m sure I’ve deleted some by accident.
On another note, my fuck vista post seems to be getting a lot of attention. I’ve now got access to a laptop with Vista installed, so I can have a play. So far, setting up wireless network access was a pain.
Permalink
08.20.07
Posted in interweb, randomosity at 4:46 pm by coldclimate
I just recieved this gem of spamotry, which sounds strangley like something from Clockwork Orange to my ears:
Babes always whizgiggled at me and even boys did in the urban water closet!
Well, now I whizgiggle at them, because I took (product name removed)
for 5 months and now my putz is excessively bigger than civil.
Whizgiggled! Urban water closet! Excessively bigger than civil! brilliant!
Permalink
08.19.07
Posted in randomosity at 9:48 pm by coldclimate
I might have refered to Karl Rove as a fat twit not many posts ago, but it would appear his father was a very interesting bloke! (not work safe, child friendly, or for those who think getting piercings is wrongin the eyes of the Lord, etc etc, you have been warned).
Permalink
« Previous entries
