RasterWeb!

Ok, I’ve gone with the title “Brad joins Six Apart” instead of “Proprietary Software Company hires Open-Source Developer” but that won’t stop me from worrying… (I know, it’s a bit sensational, but so am I sometimes.)

What, me worry? Sure! Why not… Brad has written some nice code in the past. I’ve especially gotten good use out of his port of Textile to perl. The code had a liberal license, I’d call it an open-source license. (Though the OSI would have to check on that to be sure.)

My worry comes from the fact that while working for Six Apart, we won’t see any innovation from Brad that won’t be a part of Six Apart’s non-open-source code. Maybe I’m just being selfish, but I’d hate to see some of the best open-source developers go to work for non-open-source companies and have their contributions to the community disappear. I’m not saying this will happen in this case, or that it happens very often, maybe it does, and maybe the community deals with it well enough. I suppose since I’m unlikely to be in such a position, it’s easy for me to comment on it. (Job openings for “Hacker-type who hates Windows” are sparse right now…)

Anyway, good luck to Brad in his new endeavor! I know it would take the right offer (and then some) for me to uproot the family and move across the country. I hope it all works out.

Inspired by the likes of Adam Curry, Dave Winer and others, I’ve started to experiment with the thingy known as “audio blogging” and you can now experience RasterWeb! in a whole new way…

First, you’ll want to add this feed to your enclosure capable aggregator: http://rasterweb.net/raster/feeds/rwaudio.rss

All set? Good… Then you will recieve the first transmission, aptly titled “RasterWeb! Audio 2004-08-18” – and let me tell you, if you want aimless rambling, with poor production values, and crappy sound quality – in audio format – you’ve got it!

I used a handheld cassette recorder, and later transferred that to my Mac, and eventually converted it to an MP3. I used to do this stuff years ago, but for some reason I had all sorts of problems with this. It’s definitely something that’s not easy enough to do on a regular basis, unless I get a good process in place.

Oh, as long as we’re talking about audio experiments, Adam has been cooking up something called iPodder, which is an enclosure aware aggregator for Mac OS X. I’ve been using my own tools, which consist of some bits of Perl, and cron, and AppleScript to do much the same thing. As I mentioned there, the only thing I’m missing is the iPod. But you can help with that…

I know, I’m a bit late on this, but if anyone wants to help me get an iPod, just use this freeiPods referer link. (See this Engadget story for background on freeiPods.) You’ll need to sign up for an offer, which you can always cancel later on.

Come on, when’s the last time I asked you for something, hmmm? An iPod is something I definitely can’t fit into the budget anytime soon, but don’t worry, I’ll keep working on the whole audio thing, since I’ve still got the old Rio 500 to work with…

Channel 9 is some sort of broadcasting thingy for Microsoft right? Right…

Now, I rarely go to Channel 9, because I really don’t like Microsoft very much, but if something interesting comes along, I’ll take a peek. Following is my user experience with Channel 9, which may or may not be typical for most Mac users, I don’t know…

I followed a link to a video with Dean Hotchpotch the IE guy at Microsoft.

On the page was a screen shot of the video with a link to the video, but the link uses the protocol mms, of which I am not familiar with. I know http, ftp, scp, etc, but not mms.

I also notice the file extension of ‘wmv’ which I’m guessing is ‘Windows Media Video’ or something, I’m not sure.

Of course clicking on the link (which starts with mms://wm.microsoft.com/) gives me a ‘mms is not a registered protocol’ message from Firefox. Hmmm, I try changing ‘mms’ to ‘http’ which does download a file named ‘DeanH_Hottest_Seat_56K_110K_300K.wmv’ which seems to be a stub file pointing to the real video that should launch Windows Media Player.

It does not launch Windows Media Player, but that’s ok, I double click the file to launch it, and Windows Media Player tells me ‘Windows Media Player cannot play this file because the player does not support this codec’ which makes sense I guess because I’m using version 7.1.x and it seems that Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X is the most recent and probably has the right codex, but since I’ve wasted all this time just trying to see a freaking’ video clip about the guy in charge of Internet Explorer, I no longer care to waste anymore time on this so I give up.

Once again, I can’t help feeling that Microsoft just doesn’t know how to play well with others… If this is evangelizing their stuff, they’ve got a lot to learn.

Channel 9, signing off!

I started toying with class.jabber.php a bit, and am thinking about tying it into my hacked up version of Feed on Feeds to provide some notifications.

Jabber is like SVG, one of those really interesting technologies you keep wishing will move into the mainstream a little quicker, but you just keep waiting, and waiting…

There’s a lot of interesting projects at JabberStudio to dig into, and in the past I’ve messed with Perl and Net::Jabber, but sady enough, my old Perl code doesn’t seem to be working now, but the new PHP code using class.jabber.php is. Hurm…

So anyway, if I get into it, I’ll probably build some other notification apps, though there is one thing that has always bothered me about Jabber, and correct me if I’ve got it wrong, but you can’t seem to send from your own account to your own account. What I mean is, if I’ve got an account jabber@fubar.org and try to write code to log on, and send a message to jabber@fubar.org (myself) it doesn’t seem to work, which means I have to create another account. This seems silly. I mean, I can send myself an email, right? This might not be unique to Jabber, I think AIM has the same limitation. Still, it makes it just a bit more difficult for quick & dirty things…