An Offer We Can’t Refuse
We’re heading up to Virginia for my niece Ashley’s first communion this weekend. It’s going to be even more special because Holly and I will be up there as her Godparents. That’s a very special honor, and we’re glad that my sister chose us for it.
It’ll be hard for me to avoid making Brando jokes, though.
I Never Would Have Guessed
Bluestone Middle School, in the middle-of-nowhere Skipwith, VA, has open wireless internet access in the school. Passing the time here has just gotten much more interesting.
If Only
It’d be very nice to be able to pick up 40 acres of farmland back home and live on a nice property with a creek.
Eye Candy
I need to learn DHTML so I can do cool stuff like Google X – a version of Google’s main page with a MacOS X-like “dock” menu. Quite nice. Fun without being intrusive.
Seen courtesy of Chikai Ohazama on the Google Blog.
Don’t Steal^H^H^H^H^H Share Music
Apple is up to their old tricks, slipping a functionality downgrade unannounced into a product upgrade. In this case, The Register reports that Apple’s LAN sharing feature in iTunes has been quietly switched from allowing five local users to connect to your shared music at a time, to five local users per day, total to connect to your library. A discussion at Apple’s support site confirms the change in iTunes 4.7.1.
This is lame on many levels. Apple had already removed the ability to connect to remote iTunes libraries via IP (allowing browsing outside of your LAN) in an unannounced “upgrade.” That move I could at least make sense of. This one, however, is moronic. The whole idea of limiting sharing to a LAN is that you’re at least near the people you’re sharing with. I fail to see how this helps users, and will probably prove to be enough of an inconvenience to many that they’ll switch to grey-market products like OurTunes.
Apple at one point had a nice balance between the usefulness of its product and the paranoid demands of the music industry. I have a feeling that they’re slipping, which makes their music products more unattractive.
Denied
Looks like I won’t be going to Portland this year. All three proposals I submitted for OSCON were denied.
Ah well, I thought at least one of them had potential. At least it didn’t cost anything to try.
Service With A Smile
I had an idea the other day for some new technology in Mr. Voice. I have a website set up for voices from other improv clubs to trade music. They can upload songs that they use, and download songs other people use. But the site doesn’t get much use at all. It’s probably pretty inconvenient to find the raw audio files, HTTP upload them one at a time, and repeat.
So my idea is to build some web services into that website, using XML-RPC or SOAP to hook some of the online functionality directly into Mr. Voice itself. The idea being that you could right-click a song in the search box, choose “Upload this song”, and send it to the website without any further interaction. There is even a possibility for browsing and/or playing songs that exist on the website from within Mr. Voice, just like they were local.
I’m doing some initial tests using XMLRPC::Lite, and the results are pretty promising. I’ve got a CGI XML-RPC server up, and have built a command-line client that can connect to the server and upload a song into the online database. It should be pretty trivial to move that functionality over into the Mr. Voice app itself.
Now the big question is whether to implement the service in XML-RPC or SOAP. The Perl modules for both seem pretty straightforward. XML-RPC appears to be a simpler protocol, which is good, but it’s also somewhat limiting, especially in terms of fault handling. SOAP is more complex, but seems to have a bigger future. If any of my readers have suggestions on which to use, I’m all ears.
Even if this doesn’t get widespread use, it should be fun to code.
Wow, That Dog Is Really Zzzzzzzzz….
In one of my first psychology classes at W&M, the professor was showing us a video on various psychological ailments. She pulled out the ol’ laserdisc player, and we were treated to some early 80s productions.
There was one segment, though, that was really pitiful. It was also hiliarious, which is why we watched the 30-second loop probably a dozen times in a row. “One more time!” was the cry.
Over the years, I would do an occasional search for the clip, but no dice. However, this week, ISCABBS user Jack Of Itself posted the link to it in the Check Out This Site> forum. It was the real deal, back after all these years.
Now I share it with you.
Courtesy of milkandcookies.com, I present to you:
The canine, the myth, the legend….
Rusty, the Narcoleptic Weinerdog.
All is right with the world.
They Really Are Everywhere
Charlie Todd, a North Carolina improv alum in New York, and his incredible creation Improv Everywhere, are getting some good press recently. They were the Yahoo! Pick for March 3rd, and were also profiled in the New York Times!
Their website is also hosted at SkilTech, and I did the code to provide their RSS feeds, so there’s my personal connection to improv greatness.
I highly encourage readers to check out their site and see the innovative improv they’re doing in public places.