January 2005

iPod Shuffle an opportunity for Podcasters

January 17, 2005

Michael Singer's article on the iPod Shuffle demonstrates the bias that a handful of programmers would like to present. The article Apple's iPod Shuffle Stifles Podcasting quotes pundit Doc Searls, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, citing problems moving around inside a podcast. His take is that it is a problem on the regular iPod and instead of fixing the problem Apple eliminated the functionality.

Hopefully the people have tried to set the record straight about the incorrect stories in the tech press, will not ignore this issue because they are on the other side. Here is a bit of the reality for those who stop by. Many are a reprise from my earlier article on what Podcatchers (podcast listeners) want.

Drupal 4.5.2 Upgrade

January 17, 2005

Drupal is out with its 4.5.2 upgrade. It is a very simple upgrade and I had zero problems. Checking the changelog reveals Drupal is now four years and two days old (based on the 1.0 date of January 15, 2001). Happy birthday Drupal! Those of us using it are looking forward to several more great years.

Later today I will likely write a little more about Ranchero Software's Mars Edit which I've been using the last couple of days. Great software. Drupal users have to tell it to use Movable Type settings to get all the extras to work.

Update Looking at a post on the Drupal site it seems tracker isn't working. The tracker module has two changes of significance. Lines 70 and 73 have added 'AND c.status = 0' to the SQL statement. Removing that statement restores previous tracker behavior. What does it break?

Drupal everywhere

January 16, 2005

Echoditto and Lulu are two of several companies I've encountered using Drupal. The best kept secret in content management systems (CMS's) seems not to be such a secret for those who are looking to do the heavy lifting.

iPod Shuffle and audiobooks

January 16, 2005

Apple has posted a tech tip about on the iPod Shuffle. Three cheers for a superb implementation. Put it in shuffle mode and it knows to skip the audiobooks. The only minor thing that would have been nice is a way to tell Autofill to include books but putting them on manually is a minor inconvenience.

AppleMatter has a of the iPod Shuffle and iRiver's CEO proves they .

Oops!

January 16, 2005

At the time it seemed like a good idea. A dozen or so hours ago I was working away on the new photo website for Nevada Boys State. It is a work in progress that shares web space on this server. There were a few glitches that made setting up Gallery in a sub-directory of Drupal difficult. I found a way around that and all was good to go. The Boys State photos aren't quite up yet, but everything else looked good. So I headed out to go on a horseback ride.

Oops!

There comes murphy! I didn't check to see that I didn't make a boneheaded mistake and leave my main websites down all day. Of course, having failed to check they were down. Tonight a few tweaks on the Boys State site and then a click to test and the '404 Not Found' error pops up. Head over to the error logs and sure enough nothing has been working all day.

A boondoggle?

January 16, 2005

Aaron Adams, star of one of Apple's "switcher" ads thinks the Mac Mini "doesn't make much sense," for switchers (those switching from Windows PC's to Macintosh). Maybe he is right, maybe not. My experience is very different. Of the two people I've talked to about it, both PC users, one is ordering a Mini and another is contemplating.

Theory of Evolution

January 15, 2005

Thursday's decision by Judge Clarence Cooper means that the Cobb County, Georgia, has to remove stickers from their textbooks reading "Evolution is a theory, not a fact."

The issue here is one of linguistics. In the scientific realm things which are well understood are called theories. In order to be equitable other theories would include the theory of gravity. Both gravity and evolution have roughly the same amount of supporting evidence. It is the desire of some religious factions to deny the origins of the human race that led to the stickers in the first place.

Judge Cooper correctly recognized that this is a religious matter, not a matter of science.

Task master

January 14, 2005

Recently I back to a tool I haven't used for a while. Alex King's Tasks Pro webserver application is one of the best out there. The user interface, via a web page, is better than many applications made for the desktop. It surpasses many desktop applications in terms of interface, works well with PHP iCalendar and therefore is simple to integrate with calendar programs.

One thing I didn't see made terribly clear in the documentation is you don't need to run cron on the same machine as the web server. Certainly there are advantages in not having problems caused by network communications, but there is no need to do so, an advantage if you don't control cron on the webserver but do on a remote machine.

Next I plan to add a service module to allow clients to submit their tickets through a web interface directly into my task manager.

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