Can you get to that?

Funkadelic is in the iTunes Music Store. Holy hell. I can’t believe I’ve gone so long in my life without hearing “Maggot Brain.” In fact, I distinctly remember being a snotnosed 21 or 22 year old at the (apparently late lamented) Olsson’s Records in Georgetown, checking out the Funkadelic section on the strength of the George Clinton connection (I was a mighty Parliament fan), seeing the cover of Maggot Brain, shuddering and passing by. More fool, I. The title track really is one of the greatest guitar tracks of all time. And it doesn’t stop there.

Aside: I don’t know if there is a band that had a better gift for album titles. On the strength of Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow and Standing on the Verge of Getting It On, Funkadelic should have won some sort of lifetime achievement award.

Mac laptops to buy (or avoid)

Currently being Slashdotted: the Macintouch iBook and PowerBook reliability survey. Usual statistical cautions apply: while the overall sample size of 4,614 repairs out of 10,627 respondents should yield reliable answers at the top level (when did your ‘book need to be repaired? did you buy AppleCare? have you ever dropped your machine?), it’s unlikely to do so at the machine level.

And yet. For the two machines I’ve owned (the Powerbook G3 Firewire and the 1GHz G4 TiBook), the stats are dead on. To wit: the three things that gave me problems on the G3 were the power adapter, the RAM, and the optical drive, and I’ve experienced serious case problems on the G4 TiBook.

Fortunately for Apple, it looks like recent AlBook models have been much more reliable. Which probably means that Apple really is due to introduce some new designs to shake things up at next week’s MacWorld Expo.

WordPress 2.0 hits the streets

Missed this over the weekend: WordPress 2.0 (née 1.6) has been released. I will be looking at the process to upgrade from 1.5 on the Boycott Sony blog, which is currently on WordPress 1.5. (This blog is on the Manila platform.)

Changelist, and what’s new from a developer’s perspective. I’m most excited about the default inclusion of Akismet for distributed spam blocking, as comment moderation for spam comments takes some time today.

Media wiring, penultimate chapter

On New Years Eve, I got a chance to work on a long stalled project—hooking up the cable wiring in our distributed media outlets. As you may recall, back in June and July I ran coax to outlets in the first and second floor bedrooms and connected them to a distribution block—really an oversized panel-mounted tee connector—in our structured wiring panel. That left the last step: connecting the distribution block to a live cable feed.

On Saturday, Lisa and I (with help from Esta) mostly finished this part of the job. What was required:

First: Reroute the existing cable hookup in the basement back behind the fake wall. This takes some explaining: Our basement is built with one finished room, which has drywall walls at a standoff (about six inches) from the actual foundation wall. This leaves a convenient space to run electrical cables back and forth to the service panel, since the panel is mounted in the false wall, as well as for other kinds of cabling projects. There is even a door in the false wall, which is for accessing the house water shutoff but which works well for fishing wire.

Back in 2004 when cable was installed in the basement, the installer drilled a hole through the left top of the window frame and dropped the cable directly into the room. I drilled a hole through the false wall on the upper right side of the window and pulled the cable across behind the blind hardware at the top of the window and through the hole into the access space.

Second: Fish coax cable from the media panel into the laundry room. This was straightforward, since there are lots of cables and ducts passing through openings in the wall between these two rooms that will be boxed in at some point in the future. With everything still open, I could just pass the cable by hand through the wall into the laundry room.

Third: Fish coax from the laundry room, inside the finished ceiling of the library, and down into the access space and connect it to the live feed. This was the nightmare. The last time I looked at the access space, it wasn’t too bad: just a few cables strung across. One of our electricians had even been thoughtful enough to leave a nylon string in place for pulling future cables through. Unfortunately, that was before the first floor ductwork and the bathroom renovations were completed. End result: it took about two hours to work my hand up and fish the coax across, without getting snagged on any live electrical wires or puncturing the insulated ducts, and then to retrieve the fish tape.

Oy. Finally, though, almost all the connections have been made. Still remaining: actually test the cable outlets in the two bedrooms; insert one more tee in the false wall; install an outlet on the wall in the library bedroom; and tack up the cables in the library and the utility room. I’m most nervous about the first item. Anything could have gone wrong with the coax going up to the bedrooms, including bad connector attachment (by me), drywall nails driven into the coax (also me), insulation damaged by the HVAC guys… etc. Well, we’ll see how it goes.

Dealing with a truculent iPod

My second iPod has reached the point of battery senescence. I hadn’t noticed the problem before, primarily because I normally keep the iPod plugged into a charger while I am driving. However, as I tried to update the iPod with some Christmas music, I realized that the thing no longer holds enough charge to complete a sync.

The problem is worsened because of my temporary setup during the Project. I have the single FireWire port on my TiBook tied up by the external 300GB drive that holds my music (and must, therefore, remain attached during the sync). That means I have to connect the iPod to the FireWire port on the back of the external drive, which is, unfortunately, an unpowered port (something I missed when I selected the Venus enclosure). So the iPod has to rely on its flickering battery during the sync and ultimately it fails.

I figured out a workaround this morning—sort of. I ejected and powered down the drive, then reconnected it using the USB connection. I then plugged the iPod into the FireWire port on the back of the TiBook, where it happily charged away. And a good thing, too, because the TiBook only has USB 1.1, which is slow. I think I got about 150 songs onto the device in 45 minutes. But it will do, for now.

The ultimate solution? Well, for one thing, once the Project is done I will be accessing the music files over the network, so there won’t be that problem any more. In the meantime, I think I need to look into battery replacement for the iPod, which means I’ll be updating the iPod Autopsy page with pics from the innards of my 3rd G device. I have some other ideas as well, but will try the battery replacement first to see how it goes.

Update: There’s also an Apple support note on five things to try with an iPod before sending it in for battery replacement. We’ll see.

Tech Trek hits the media

CNET News.com: MIT grads to size up Silicon Valley. Heh. Funny that this makes the news, with so little substance. There’s a lot to say about the Tech Trek (which is unnamed in this article), but this article doesn’t say it—just suggests that MIT finds the Valley interesting. Which it did back in January 2001, when I participated. But it’s good to see that the Sloan crew can still raise press attention.

Project update: somewhat stalled

It had to come. My initial prediction, which said that 275 GB would be enough for my collection, was just a little too smug.

As of today, tracks from The Project, my endeavor to losslessly rip all my CDs to a hard drive, comprise 7746 songs from 569 albums, lasting 24:17:58:02, at a total disk cost of 166.57 GB. Unfortunately, the other tracks in my library—those purchased from eMusic or the iTunes Music Store, or ripped from CDs I no longer possess, or downloaded from other sources—also take up space on the drive. So, at the start of digitizing the other half of my collection, my rock and pop CDs, I only have 70 GB free on the drive—about half what I need.

What went wrong? Well, for one thing, I think I underestimated the number of albums I owned by about 100. (Oops.) For another, I underestimated the number of classical discs that I owned that were actually 2 CDs in length. Each album weighs in, on average, at 0.2927 GB—somewhat fewer than my anticipated 0.297 GB per album. So the biggest contributor to “scope creep” appears to be undercounting the discs I own.

What to do about it? Well, “purchase more space” is certainly an answer, but not the one I want right now. Should have gone RAID to begin with, I’m afraid. So for right now, my answer has been to halt the digitization until I can figure out the best solution to add the additional disc space I need. The other option—to use lossy ripping for the rest of the collection—is one I’m not comfortable with.

Great things about 2005

  1. I got a job. This is actually numbers 1 – 5, because through that job I got to bring a really cool set of products to market, liveblog the Gartner IT conference, and visit our German subsidiary. But more importantly I got a chance to confirm my value as a marketer and product manager and enabled us to have the financial capital to do a ton of stuff on the house. Which leads me to…
  2. We fixed our house. Or a lot of things with it, including: air conditioning, heat, got rid of the oil burning boiler, media wiring, new windows and front door, insulation, rejuvenated bathrooms, improved storage, closed up walls, fixed the back lawn… Also found my way into a community of like minded individuals from whom I’ve learned a lot about home improvement projects.
  3. Before I started the job, I learned a lot about myself through teaching SAT prep. I didn’t write about this experience too much at the time, but I think getting in front of people—especially high school kids—two or three times a week was just the kick in the pants I needed to get my self confidence back to secure a job.
  4. I got to listen to some really good music—and review a lot of it, thanks to my association with Blogcritics.
  5. Speaking of music, Sony BMG’s DRM mess wasn’t a great thing about the year, but the way the blogosphere, the public, the press, and the legal establishment responded to it, including the response to my Boycott Sony blog, was. I’m very grateful to all my readers on that blog for their contributions to the story.
  6. And speaking about music again, I’ve had a chance to sing with two great musical groups, the choir at Old South Church and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Between the sublime moments like singing Mahler’s 8th at Tanglewood opening night and the semi-ridiculous ones like the Pops Christmas shows, it’s been a lot of fun.
  7. I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with family, including one big road trip to my parents and a wonderful holiday (my inlaws were here through a few days after Christmas, my parents arrived on the 26th and left on Saturday, Esta took off this morning). And I’ve had the pleasure of another year with my loving and wonderful wife and our dogs, which is the best thing of all.
  8. Lastly, I’m grateful to you, my readers. I am always surprised and humbled to realize how many people read this thing, and am frequently astonished when old friends contact me because they found the blog on Google. Here’s hoping that next year will be just as great as this one was.

It’s time for the Muppet Wiki

Nice database of all things Henson related shaping up at the Muppet Wiki. There are already some pretty comprehensive Muppet sites out there, so it will be interesting to see if the wiki format adds anything new. But you have to be impressed with a format that includes a full biography of Mahna Mahna and a listing of every appearance of the Swedish Chef.

The NSA: another candidate for coals in the stocking

Boing Boing: NSA stops using web cookies on NSA.gov after privacy protests. This after news that whitehouse.gov also drops cookies, these from a third party tracking site. Both actions are in violation of federal directives banning the use of persistent cookies.

Especially juicy quote from security consultant Richard M. Smith of Cambridge, who reportedly “questioned whether persistent cookies would even be of much use to the security agency. They are great for news sites and others with repeat visitors, Mr. Smith said, but the agency’s site does not appear to have enough fresh content to warrant more than occasional visits.” Heh.

Interesting, btw, how many times Richard M. Smith drops a choice quote for stories like these (see his comments on the DMCA and on Sony BMG). He’s becoming the Larry Sabato of computer security stories.

New mix: “steal the crumbs”

My latest mix, Steal the crumbs, has been posted at Art of the Mix. I may post it to the iTunes Music Store but will need to spend time finding a bunch of the tracks, since only about half of them showed up when I posted it earlier.

The mix is a response to Fury’s food mix of several months ago, More Spice Than the Frugal Gourmet. Esta has indicated that she’ll be making a food mix as well. Maybe we should make a chain and see how many different CD-length food mixes we can make without repeating a song.

Duck a la hairdryer

It’s been a nice long holiday so far. We saw Lisa’s parents off this morning, mine came yesterday. We took Esta skiing and have generally been having a good time. It’s been nice getting away from everything, including the blog, for a while, just to think and be with family. I highly recommend it.

Oh, the title? Just a quick note: if you want to cook a duck with good flavor and a crispy skin without drowning in fat, pack your hairdryer and your Marcella Hazan. I wish I had thought to get pictures of my wife and my mother-in-law bending over our two ducks for Christmas dinner, fresh out of their boil in the pot, waving a hairdryer over them with intense concentration. It was worthwhile. The skin was thin and crispy, the meat flavorful without being greasy.

Congrats to Dan Gillmor

A year and change after announcing his departure from the San Jose Mercury News, Dan Gillmor announced the formation of the Center for Citizen Media yesterday, a nonprofit think tank with a focus on the “grassroots media sphere” and “citizen journalism.” The center starts out with two partnerships–one with Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and one with Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. That also makes Dan a double fellow–an I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow (Berkeley) and a Research Fellow (Berkman).

Institutional support from organizations like the Center for Citizen Media won’t singlehandedly make or break the case for citizens being taken seriously as part of the global flow of news, but it will raise the profile of citizen journalism and bring some much needed balancing perspectives to discussions of the rights of bloggers. This is very good news indeed.