RasterWeb!

Last night I had a project to work on. I sat staring at my Sony 17″ Trinitron monitor while transferring files and all of a sudden there was a bright flash and the monitor went dead. Since I didn’t kick out the power cord, and there was no UPS beeping, I determined that my monitor finally died. The smell of something burning was also a tip off…

I’ve had various syncing problems with this monitor before, so I did some tests. Reboot, no good. Connect to PowerMac 8500, no good. Connect to Motorola StarMax, no good. So I smashed it into tiny bits. (Ok, in reality I just took it off the desk and put it on the floor.) Next I tried to put an old Apple 15″ monitor onto my G4. Well, after digging through boxes to find a VGA adapter. That didn’t work. Syncing issue I was guessing… I rebooted, zapping the PRAM with the hopes it would set the system to 640×480. Again, no good…

Luckily I was able to actually use my Mac, sort of. I ssh’d in via the iMac. Upon doing so I discovered that it had booted off of my backup drive. I found that interesting. Obviously resetting the PRAM changed where the system looked for a startup drive/folder. This just would not do, as I at least wanted my system up and running, doing it’s (cron) job and so on, even if I couldn’t see it. What to do?

bless. That’s what to do…

From our old pal, the knowledgeable Mike Bombich comes Some Useful and Interesting Terminal Commands for Lab Managers:

You can use the bless command to bless a System folder. This is particularly useful if you want to install system software by imaging rather than a standard installer. bless can also be used to bless a Mac OS 9 system folder, which is handy if you need to bootup Classic, but the system folder is not blessed. Finally, bless can be used to set the startup disk from the command line!

That last bit bless can be used to set the startup disk from the command line was what I was looking for. A few attempts to get the syntax right and my G4 was running off of the correct drive. All is well with the world again. Except the monitor, which will be replaced tonight…

bless you Mike Bombich!

Since I’m one of the half dozen people who don’t use Movable Type, but actually use a home-grown CMS, I get to do things like add my own, and other people’s code, into my system. So what’s the latest addition? It’s the Feed Validator. Mark mentions bringing it to the people, and I’m all for that. So now when I create an entry, and the pages are rendered, the four feeds we’re providing are checked using a local copy of the validator. If there’s a problem, I’ll know it before anyone else does, unless I’m not paying attention or something.

The other recent relevation is that you should subscribe to your own feed. I never even though of telling people this because I thought everyone was already doing it. So with the combined might of the downloadable Feed Validator, and actually viewing my own feeds in aggregators, I’m pretty darn confident that I’m producing well formed and valid feeds. So there! ;->

(Don’t worry, you’ll still see plentey of speling erors heer and their… they’ll just be contained within valid markup.)

Oh there’s been much talk about Atom being XML, and being dealt with as XML, and if RSS is dealt with as XML, or as a collection of tags tied up with strings…

My thought, if anyone cares, is pretty much the same as Tim Bray’s thoughts on Atom:

An Atom feed is going to be defined as an XML document, which means that if it’s not well-formed then it’s not Atom.

I say this because I’ve been working with RSS for the last 4 or 5 years, and I’ve too often dealt with RSS as a bunch of text between tags rather than as XML. Regular expressions have been used rather than nice XML toolkits. Liberal feed parsers were probably a good idea for RSS at the time, as RSS was often not XML, well, poorly formed and broken XML perhaps, but not quite XML. I look forward to getting an Atom feed and using an XML library to parse it and do as I wish. I think that’s only going to happen if we ensure that Atom is XML, and I think we do that by creating good tools to create Atom feeds with.

Recently I had to create a syndication feed for a site using ASP, and while I would have preferred an Atom feed, I wasn’t confident enough that the code we had would always produce well formed XML, so we ended up creating an RSS feed instead for now. I mean, sure, it’ll have errors and not validate sometimes, but that’s just how RSS is. I want more from Atom, and once the tools are there to easily create a valid Atom feed every time, then that’s what we’ll do.

Yes, continue I must on this iPod quest…

I was telling the female about the new iPod minis, saying that they were smaller, but had less space for music, after I used the word ‘gigs’ and was reprimanded, I told her that the iPod mini might hold 1000 songs while the regular iPod might hold 4000 songs, to which she thought I was nuts for thinking that was some big deal, explaining that she doesn’t even have that much music anyway. (I had to guess on the numbers, she caught me off guard.) Of course I would have responded that I do have that much audio, and would like to have a large pocket firewire drive, but instead I gave up. The iPod mini will find it’s niche. (A side note to this would be that she might be used to loading up a device before use, as she does with the Rio, but again, I didn’t feel like pursuing the issue.)

Now, what if Apple had gone the other way? No, not made them bigger, but kept the same size of the old iPod, and added features. A Network connection? The Rio Karma has an ethernet port, which sounds very interesting, perhaps Apple could have incorporated wifi into the iPod. I suppose you could do this with a Rio Karma by adding a wireless ethernet bridge, of course it would be nice to have it all in one little package. Don’t you think the geeks out there would like a 40 gig wifi-enabled hard drive and digital audio player? Of course you’d have to figure out battery charging, or replaceable batteries, or an AC adapter, but those are minor issues… Again, maybe the technology just isn’t there yet for Apple to do it right. Evidence to this would be the following on the RioWorld forums: Re:Ethernet – have you gotten it to work?

Rio responded to my support e-mail stating there is a known issue with ethernet compatability and they are looking into it, whatever that means!!!!!!

Whatever that means, indeed. It seems to mean it “sort of” works, and as we know, Apple isn’t into things that “sort of” work. You’ll find other messages in the forum regarding how to repair old players on your own, with tips like: "have you tried bending the battery contacts outward slightly?" and such.

Archos (and others) also seem to be doing a bit more with portable players, like making them recorders as well. The Ondio 128 FM Recorder records directly into MP3 from a built-in FM radio, and does voice recording as well. What if voice recording and/or FM tuning had been added to the iPod? Besides perhaps angering 3rd party add-on manufacturers, I think people might welcome these things.

So what’s the point? Only that we’ve just begun, and these devices, whether they play audio, record it, or do a dozen other things, are quite interesting, and will hopefully only get more interesting in time…

Stay tuned!

There’s a whole bunch of back-and-forth going on in respect to the thoughts and opinions on the iPod mini. Some say it’s smaller (in physical size and disk space) so it’s not worth the price, other say it’s smaller (in physical size) and is worth the price.

Look at Apple’s Powerbook line. There’s a 12″, a 15″, and a 17″ PowerBook. Ask people which one they have, or would like to have, and you’ll get varying responses. And guess what? They come with different size hard drives, 40, 60, 80 gig, respectively. Oh sure, you can get a 12″ and put an 80 gig drive in it, which is something you can’t do with an iPod. Yet…

Digital audio players are a fairly new technology, and Apple is definitely helping define where they might be headed, but it’s no surprise than an Apple product might have a premium price. These things will all play out in time. If $249 for 4 gig is not appealing, then what is? $200 for 2 gig? $100 for 1 gig? And at what physical size? Personally, if I could get an iPod for “around” $100 that held “about” 1 gig, and was “roughly” the size of the original iPod, that would be ideal to me. What is a good price/size/capacity ratio will be different for different people. Apple can’t build/sell what would be ideal to everyone, no company can. (At least at an affordable price.) And yes, I’d pay a bit more for an Apple product because I trust the name, respect a well designed UI, and would expect it to work properly with what I currently use.

(In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy my Car MP3 Player.)