Month: June 2004

ecto’s iTunes interface

If you are in the habit of keeping good ID3 tags in your iTunes library, you can link in some useful information when you display a “Now playing” link in your posts.

I put the Amazon ASIN info in my comments field, so when I export my iTunes library with iTunes2html, the album links are there for interested buyers. So why not add that in here as well?

This in Preferences -> iTunes:

<em>now playing</em>: <strong>ˆt</strong>#a from the album ˆa#a#p by ˆp#p | <a href=”ˆk”>#kBuy it#k</a>

yields this:

now playing: There There (The Boney King Of Nowhere) from the album Hail To The Thief by Radiohead | Buy it

Democracy preserved?

The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising > Senate Votes to Repeal Media Rules:

WASHINGTON, June 22 – The Senate voted on Tuesday to repeal rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission that make it easier for the nation’s largest media conglomerates to expand and enter new markets.

The new rules have already been blocked temporarily by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, which is considering a challenge.

By a voice vote, the Senate approved a provision to repeal the rules and restore tougher restrictions.

There has been a lengthy thread of comments at Crooked Timber on the topic of what news organizations publish and it effects the tone and content of public discourse. If the rules allowing few voices are overturned, that’s all to the good. And it gives me something to say when my kids ask, “what did you do in the war, dad?”

As bad as things are with the (lack of) left-leaning media, it could be worse: let’s hope not.

did you know iTunes stores related artwork in the music files?

Surely, there is some way to edit an mp3 file and remove or alter any extraneous stuff like that? In any event, perhaps this will be useful to someone else . . .

I was working with iTunes’s custom playlist feature today, with an eye to burning a CD and making a custom case sleeve. I inadvertently applied the wrong artwork to a track and when I created a mosaic for the sleeve, I realized the artwork for that track was wrong. So how to fix it?

I tried applying the correct artwork (dragging and dropping from Amazon is so useful), but that just adds an *additional* image: who knew you could have more than one?

So I figured I’d just drop down to the filesystem and remove either the images or any links to them: I assumed the image files were stored in disk and associated with a given track in the XML datastore. After searching around and then hitting Google, I learned that the art is actually inserted into the file. I guess there is some space for non-audio data in the file (comments, meta-data, whatehaveyou).

Sigh.

So I dropped the track from the playlist and my iTunes Library and re-imported it from the CD I had (fortunately) already burned. Sure enough, the re-imported track, having been burned as a WAV file and then reduced to an mp3, had no image file. Associating it with the rest of the album tracks got me what I needed, but what a convoluted journey.

Surely, there is some way to edit an mp3 file and remove or alter any extraneous stuff like that? In any event, perhaps this will be useful to someone else . . .

Talk about “not getting it”

Daring Fireball: The Location Field Is the New Command Line:

The conventional wisdom was in fact correct — the web has turned into a popular application development environment. Where I’d gone wrong was in getting hung up on the idea of it needing to be high-quality before it could become popular.

I was thinking in terms of the apps that I used every day, circa 1996: BBEdit, QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Eudora. There was simply no way that a “web app” could ever provide the same quality experience as the “real” apps I was already using.

Amazing that someone would think that their application experience — running graphic design applications with no mention of anything related to business software — was typical and that, based on that, web apps were doomed to failure. Did John Gruber not realize why Netscape came in every flavor of OS under the sun? Had he never heard the quote about relegating Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers?”
Continue reading “Talk about “not getting it””

the downside of always-on broadband

CNN.com – E-mail providers: Unplug spam-sending PCs – Jun 22, 2004

Consumers who allow their infected computers to send out millions of “spam” messages could be unplugged from the Internet under a proposal released Tuesday by six large e-mail providers.

That seems a bit draconian, especially since it will affect so many users (all those Windows users).

Looks like Comcast has a better idea: they can manage their network, if not the nodes on it, after all.

The biggest spammer on the Net? Comcast? – News – ZDNet

Comcast’s high-speed Internet subscribers have long been rumored to be an unusually persistent source of junk e-mail.

Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. “We’re the biggest spammer on the Internet,” network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week.

[ . . . ]

IronPort Systems’ statistics for comcast.net show that while the company’s six official mail servers have a monthly outgoing e-mail index of 6.2, there are at least 44 Comcast subscribers with similar scores of 5.8 or higher. Overall, Comcast is the single biggest source of all types of e-mail, with a higher volume than the next two, Time Warner’s Road Runner and Yahoo, combined.
[ . . . ]
Based on my conversations last week, Comcast’s network engineers would like to be more aggressive. But the marketing department shot down a ban on port 25 because of its circa $58 million price tag–so high partially because some subscribers would have to be told how to reconfigure their mail programs to point at Comcast’s servers, and each phone call to the help desk costs $9.

Instead, Comcast’s engineers plan to try the innovative approach of identifying the zombie PCs and surreptitiously sending the subscriber’s cable modem a new configuration routine that prevents outbound connections on port 25. Zombie-infected users won’t even notice, the thinking goes, because most people use Comcast’s mail servers for outgoing e-mail. Anyone wrongfully blocked can call and complain.

Elegant and effective. Now if they can go back and figure out a way to do the same thing for nimda and similar crap . . . .

Another for my wish list


Amazon.com: Books: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914:

“The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are only the fever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused the fever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one must operate within the framework of a whole society and try to discover what moved the people in it.”
–Barbara W. Tuchman

I have found everything else of hers to be first-rate and this book (how have I missed it?) covers a period I am interested in anyway. But that quote — typically vivid and insightful — seems to resonate with our present circumstances. Can we hope to understand what motivates and fuels those who oppose us without understanding their world?

I have understood the First World War as the beginning of the modern world, but as with any event, there are causes and forces that drive and shape it: time to learn more about them.

We’re going to Oregon later this week with a trip to Powell’s City of Books: I’ll hunt this up while I’m there.

I’m sure Cheney will say this guy was in “deep cover” rather than admit they had the wrong guy

You Say Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, I Say Hikmat Shakir Ahmad — Let’s Invade Anyway:

So it turns out — and this is kind of hilarious — that whole Iraq/al Qaeda thing? A bit of a mix-up there. When the administration said an al Qaeda operative was also a member of Saddam’s Fedayeen, they may have confused Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, the official al Qaeda “airport greeter” (so polite, the jihadists), with Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, the Iraq militia man. An administration official has suggested that this mistake was a bit boneheaded, noting that it seems odd that a lieutenant colonel in one army would collect people’s bags in another organization: “By most reckoning that would be someone else.” But come on now: There’s only, what, six letters and an entire word transposition difference in their names! Anyone could get it wrong.

And it’s not like it’s never happened before: Who can forget the madcap sit-comish hijinks that ensued when the U.S. supported Ira-q rather than Ira-n back in the 80s? Yikes! But you know how they all look alike.

UPDATE: more here:

The connection supposedly was unearthed earlier this year by a poly sci professor moonlighting as a Pentagon intelligence analyst (do you think I could make something like that up?) It consists of a name – Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, or, variously, Hikmat Shakir Ahmad – that the professor, one Christopher Carney, found on a list of officers in the Saddam Fedayeen – the Iraqi dictator’s personal militia, whose members were blown away in vast numbers by the U.S. Army during last year’s invasion.

UPDATE (with minor edits): War and Piece: :

Here’s a handy guide:

* Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, a.k.a. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad == Iraqi Fedayeen Ltn. Col.

* Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi == al Qaeda greeter/fixer in Malaysia

* Ahmad Hikmat Shakir != Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi

historical traffic analysis

Crooked Timber: Crooked Timber’s Greatest Hits :

In the course of the recent great database fiasco, I took a look at the history of traffic to this site. The AWStats program gave me a the number of unique visitors for every day from our launch last July through to June 16th this year. I was interested in which posts had made the biggest splashes.

I have been keeping a running tally of my most popular URLs over time and by day (in the left navbar on the index page of this weblog and at the top level of the site). But I’m curious to see this plotted over time as well: my nightly Webalyzer runs are useful but only in the aggregate. I’ll have to look into whether awstats can run on historical data or if it has to be in the loop all the time.

In the meantime, I took a look at visitors and ran this report. It’s a very fast program, but it’s hard to compare it against webalyzer since it doesn’t do DNS resolution or even make use of the work webalyzer has done (webalyzer has a 41 Mb cache of DNS lookups archived) .