One feed to rule them all

So, the results of the poll were fairly dispositive: not a single dissenting vote with regard to rolling the bits into the main feed.

Don’t ask for, but don’t oppose, and it shall be done — the bits are now part of the main feed and are prefaced there with “[bit].” I’m not sure I’m going to keep that style (i.e., I may end up using a symbol or something else to draw a distinction between the two types of posts) and may even reverse it so that the main posts are ‘highlighted’ instead of the bits. *shrug*

If you’re wondering whether you need to take any action, the answer is no, unless you are only subscribed to the bits, in which case you’ll want to subscribe to the main feed.

Poll: What do you think about an integrated RSS feed?

Update: This poll has been closed. Thanks for participating.

I’ve been debating for a while the possibility of interjecting, into the main feed, the bits (or, to be more accurate, not separating them to begin with). The thing is, I don’t want three feeds (i.e., main, bits, and main+bits), and so if I were to go through with this, I’d just turn the main feed into main+bits and then do away with the bits feed altogether. I don’t think this change would cause too much havoc as most, if not all, of the people subscribed to the bits feed are also subscribed to the main feed.

I would obviously set the bits off from the regular entries somehow; probably by prefacing them with something like, “[bit].” Creative, I know — it’s what I do.

Justin, circa 2006

In keeping with the “circa” tradition, I thought I’d put up this shot from early 2006. After showing this photo to my girlfriend, she had this to say (why am I sharing this?):

I like the picture, it’s good. I like the tone and I like the way your eyes look. But, it’s kind of the look you give me when you think I’ve done or said something stupid, so I wish you had a different expression. It looks slightly arrogant and confused at the same time, kind of like, “I can’t believe you just said or did that” — I feel like I have seen that face a lot.

A “blog” and a “blog post” are not the same thing

At some point in the last few months, the word “blog” has come to mean not only the weblog itself, but also its constituent entries. I can’t be the only one out there who hates it when someone says something like, “She wrote a blog where she said…,” or, “I wrote a blog on that.” It makes my skin crawl. I’ll concede that “weblog” has succumb to just “blog” in the popular vernacular (though I still maintain use of the former whenever possible), but I just can’t let this “blog post == blog” thing go.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to temper my self-righteous, curmudgeony sensibilities with some real-world news and remind myself that none of this really matters anyway.

Dear lazyweb, I need a new microphone

What’s the best sub-$100 microphone I can get for my Mac? It will be used mainly for Skype (or similar). I can probably be persuaded to pay more if some threshold requirements are met.

iPhone, the elephant in your pocket

The web was in an absolute tizzy last week over Apple’s announcement that Leopard, the forthcoming version of its Mac OS X operating system, would be delayed by four months. The reaction ranged, from chicken little yelling that the sky/stock was falling, to “who cares?” I think Brent Simmons, one of the best-known independent Mac developers, put it well:

Developers doing a Leopard-only release—I can understand their being upset, because it means they can’t ship until October. But other folks? Tears? Really? 10.4 is such a burden to use, we can barely stand it?”

Seriously people, Tiger is the best OS in the world — I’m sure you can muster up enough strength and courage to use it for another few months. Curiously though, the fact that Leopard was delayed was not the real news; the real news is why it was delayed, at least ostensibly. In the very same press release, Apple claimed that the reason for the hang-up was that they’ve had to “borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from [their] Mac OS X team” to ensure that the iPhone shipped on time.

The iPhone? What in the world does the iPhone have to do with Apple’s core operating system? Answer: OS X. Without getting into too much detail here (see Gruber’s OS X), the iPhone runs a specific version of OS X, much like Macs run a specific version (Mac OS X) and the Apple TV too.

Now, I’m not sure I buy the whole we-don’t-have-enough-people-for-both line (regardless, my immediate reaction paralleled Daniel Jalkut’s), but at the end of the day does the reason really matter? Sure, in the short-term they’ll suffer some lost sales on both the hardware and software front and ruffle a few feathers along the way to a release, but come on, I don’t think I know a single person who is dying to get their hands on a final build of Leopard (save the demographic mentioned by Brent Simmons in the quote above).

Will I upgrade? Of course, everybody upgrades, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I’m made to wait a few more months. It’s not like this is a Mac OS 9 -> Mac OS X transition — it’s an incremental, systematic upgrade to the OS — it’ll be slightly faster, some new programs will be introduced (e.g., Time Machine), and the Finder will still suck.

The point is, in the grand scheme of things, the announcement that Leopard is going to ship late wasn’t news at all, but for the fact that the iPhone was blamed for the delay. That said, and as Peter Cohen, editor of Macworld, put it, “the iPhone isn’t a distraction, it’s the point.”

The iPod’s second act

OK, first things first, I realize that the iPhone hasn’t even shipped yet and so the excited, though informed, picture I paint below may seem a bit ambitious, but please indulge me.

In my rushed, though still long-winded, iPhone piece, I said the following (I apologize for getting a little meta here):

From Obviously the iPod is dead, which I penned almost 2.5 years ago: “oh, just imagine an OS X-based mobile phone.” The fact that the device runs OS X (notice that they didn’t say Mac OS X, which is a bit telling for at least a few reasons) is probably the biggest deal for me, and surely others as they come to realize (as Apple starts to push) what a mobile computing device is truly capable of given the resources. While this is obviously a stripped-down, optimized version of the OS, one can conclude that the end goal is to have these devices run Mac OS X proper at some point.

As most of you know, I come from a heavy Linux background and never really thought about getting a Mac until Mac OS X matured and the constant championing of the OS started to pique my interest. Before making the switch a few years ago, I felt much the same way as Paul Venezia, who said the following in a recent piece of his:

You wouldn’t have gotten me near a Mac before OS X. I didn’t like the UI, I didn’t like the hardware, and I certainly didn’t like the IP stack. It was great in the 80’s and early nineties, but by the time OS 9 was released, it was a joke. Way too many features had been bolted on the side, duct-taped to the rear, and glued on everywhere else. Apple had to rebuild their entire OS.

The fact is, after Mac OS X stabilized, Macs offered me the best of both worlds: UNIX underpinnings and the best GUI in the world, Aqua. The elephant in the room is that Apple is on the cusp of doing the very same thing for the mobile space, which is going to be, if it isn’t already, the space that rules them all.

One of the questions I hear so often within our somewhat insulated Mac circle is what effect the iPhone will have on iPod sales, to which I silently scream (1) who cares? They’ll buy one or the other — consumers aren’t going to suddenly jump from the Apple ship because they’ve come out with another device; and (2) isn’t it obvious the iPod will die a slow death as it morphs into the iPhone?

Yes, the two devices are going to ‘compete’ for some time, but eventually the more capable of the two is going to win out. Consumers will demand it. They’re just starting to come around to this music-on-your phone thing and will eventually catch up to everything else — things they didn’t even know were possible or desired — ultimately, their life in their pocket. Think of the iPhone as a general-purpose computer, rather than as a phone capable of myriad functions.

I think there’s an unstated point of contention around the fact that it’s called “iPhone,” implying a mobile phone first and everything else second. Again, referring to my initial iPhone post:

The [iPhone name] immediately conjures up “iTunes” in my mind and how dated that name now sounds (truthfully, I always thought it was a bit limiting) in light of everything else the iTunes client/store now manages/sells (e.g., music videos, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.).

I hate to break it to Cingular (and Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, all of whom will eventually carry it, even if unofficially), but the “phone” aspect of the device is the least interesting part, and in a lot of respects, irrelevant. It’s a given that the device we have on our person at all times has to be able to make/receive phone calls, be that through a GSM/CDMA network or the Internet.

However, as every provider is being made more aware each day, the money is ultimately going to be in the services provided, not the pipe used to enable them — as WiMax, its brethren, and free metro-area networks become more and more common, carrier networks will become increasingly marginalized (i.e., people will simply make phone calls over the Internet).¹

I think the point I’m trying to make, and struggling to put into words, is that the “phone” element will eventually be an afterthought — something you can “add” to the device if you need/want it — the iPod will equal the iPhone will equal a full-fledged pocket computer.

Devices want to converge

I’ve been saying it for years, but I’ll be the first to admit that it hasn’t exactly played out that way. Sure, there have been some mass-market strides in that direction lately (think of all the mobile phones now that tout, as their big feature, the ability to play music or watch videos, and digital camera integration before that, and PDA functionality before that, etc.), but no one has been able to pull it all together and really push the envelope (indeed, I had all of these features on devices five years ago, yet they’re still being peddled as the “new hotness” today).

I hate to say it, but iPhone v1.0 won’t do it either. Save the interface, it’s not really bringing anything wholly novel to the mobile game. However, it is causing consumers to think differently about what they should expect from the computer in their pocket. You kind of have to think long-term here, years down the road when your “mobile phone” is your wallet, the keys to your car and house, the… you get the idea. Apple is going to get its foot in the door (and its hands gripped on consumers’ heartstrings) with all of the fluffy, shiny chrome in iPhone v1.0, but this is just the hook into the untapped cash cow that will be mobile computing.

I’m no floating pre-cog, but…

I think time will morph the iPhone into a more UMPC-like device, a concept that is, admittedly, still being experimented with and fleshed out. That said, do you know anyone who has a UMPC? Didn’t think so. And when was the last time you actually saw someone using a Sony Vaio Micro PC? Right, never. This space is practically begging for someone to sweep in and convince consumers it’s a space worth filling (you know, kind of like how the iPod convinced people they needed 60GB of music on their person at all times). Some will argue that there isn’t yet a market for this sort of device, and I’d probably concede that to some extent, but I’d ask in return the concession that the right device simply hasn’t been built yet.

Speaking of UMPC devices, have a look at this video on GigaOM illustrating Intel’s perception of a UMPC-driven future. This is just the sort of thing I’m talking about, the direction I think Apple can and should take the iPhone — always connected, always synced, and always useful.

It’s my hope that Apple comes out with a sub-notebook² this year (more on that in a future post) as I think this will give us the best idea of where the iPhone is ultimatey headed; that is to say that I think the sub-notebook [ideal] and the iPhone are going to eventually meet somewhere in the middle of awesome to give us ultimate freedom. This brings me back to a partial quote of mine I used earlier in this post: “…one can only imagine that the end goal is to have the [iPhone] run Mac OS X proper at some point.” In light of that, and without getting too far into the future, imagine for a second your Mac Pro tower condensed to the size of a pocketable device. Hard to think of now, I know, but it’s coming — as time presses on, the differences between your “home” computer and the computer you carry in your pocket all day are going to approach zero.

There’s a reason Wall Street is still bullish on Apple even after the Leopard news; they know that the future is mobile and that Apple is not just preparing to ride the wave, but could actually have a large hand in controlling/creating it.³

The iPhone isn’t just another networked device, it’s part of the first evolutionary stage of an impending mobile revolution.

Smart Archives v1.9

When I initially decided I was going to release a new version of Smart Archives today, I didn’t intend to include so many changes/fixes, but as it usually goes with these sorts of things, I couldn’t stop myself.

Time zones

Previously, if your weblog was set to a different time zone than the server that hosted it (e.g., you lived in Florida, but your webhost was in California), you probably experienced a delay, equal to the difference between the time zones, in having your new posts show up on the archives page.

While I should have fixed this a long time ago, it was one of those things that didn’t affect me directly and so I kept putting it off. It was rather easy to fix — I basically just looked at my Relative Dates plugin , where I had solved this problem before, and made the necessary changes. Funny thing is, none of the stuff needed for the other plugin was necessary for this fix. I simply added the following line:

Multiple-category exclusion

About a year ago I added category exclusion to the plugin because I needed it. At the time, and until now, it only allowed you to exclude a single category, but enough people wrote in requesting multiple-category exclusion that I’ve finally implemented it. Instructions on its use can be found on the project page.

When I released the first version with category exclusion, I wrote the following:

I initially had the code setup such that it would only check the first element of the category array, which meant that the category you were trying to exclude had to be the only category attached to a particular post (in which case it would be the first and only element of the array). While this worked for my situation (and truthfully, I still do it that way because it’s faster), I knew that others would likely have multiple categories assigned to individual posts. Because of this fact, I ended up having to cycle through the array looking for any instance of the excluded category, no matter where it fell. If anyone knows of a faster, better way of doing this, please let me know.

I’m still using that method, and now, given that multiple categories need to be checked against multiple excluded categories, the CPU hit is even greater. I’d like to put this check into the initial SQL queries so as to eliminate the need to do it later in the plugin. However, I haven’t been able to come up with a “good” implementation because the categories are stored in a table separate from the main posts. If you’ve any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

An extra “Dec” in the block

I took care of this a few versions ago, but I never liked my admittedly crappy solution. It’s been redone. Well, not so much redone as just not needed any more given the way I now retrieve the post information from the DB.

SQL queries

When I first conceived of this plugin, I used only “raw” MySQL queries, instead of the built-in WP functions. I can’t remember exactly why I did that, but I think there was something I wanted to do that the WP functions wouldn’t allow. In any event, quite a few months ago I made the change to WP-only SQL functions on the version I use and haven’t noticed any problems. It’s been rolled into this version.

Curiously, a ton of people wrote me about this; I’m not sure their reason for wanting to use the WP functions, but it certainly wasn’t an isolated request (and in fact many people went ahead and changed this themselves).

Speed

While you should notice a speed increase from past versions, it still isn’t nearly where I would like it to be. As it stands now, I’m still making more DB queries than I would like. Currently, if you aren’t excluding any categories, it makes number-of-months-with-posts + 1 queries, which isn’t too bad. But, if you are excluding categories, that number goes up substantially (i.e., it’s commensurate with the number of posts you have).

Archive links

Again, this is another thing I changed in my version a few months ago, but am just now getting around to putting in the public release. I think the way I handled links in previous versions confused people when there was no need for them to even know what I was doing. The way I’ve done it now should eliminate the confusion by not requiring any input from the user regarding their permalink structure.

I should also note that I’ve removed the trailing slashes on all of the year/month archive links (e.g., /2004, 2004/03, etc.).¹ This is strictly an aesthetic preference of mine (and I’m trying to pressure everyone else into following suit :). If you’re as anal as I am about your URI structure and want the trailing slashes back, e-mail me and I’ll tell you how to do it. Either way, WP will probably add the slash back once the link has been clicked on (unless you go to great lengths, as I have, to stop WP from doing this).

Your permalinks should show up just as you have them setup in WP.

Is SuperDuper!’s “smart update” feature broken?

I’ve long recommended SuperDuper! for mirroring Macs to an external drive, but I’ve recently been having quite a bit of trouble with the application and may have to rethink my recommendation going forward.

Specifically, the problem I’m having is that the external drive is completely filling up, seemingly at random and despite the fact that the drive I’m mirroring is only about half full. This has happened three times in the last few months. I’m using the “smart update” feature which, like any good mirroring program, updates the external drive only when something changes on the Mac. In other words, it maintains the mirror incrementally instead of doing a full wipe + copy each time. The advantages of this method are obvious: much faster updates (usually ~30 minutes for me), less wear and tear on the drives, and less chance you’ll lose all of your data — except when it doesn’t work.

After having dealt with this issue a few times, I did a little research and quickly found out I wasn’t alone. Unfortunately, there is no fix and the developer’s explanation is a bit weak. From the user guide:

If the destination volume is actually full, and the source volume should definitely fit on the destination, this could be because Smart Update needs more “working space”. This is because Smart Update works its way through a volume in a single pass, and copies or deletes files and folders as it encounters them. If you rename a large folder or file, or add one folder and delete another, Smart Update may encounter the new file or folder before it deletes the old. In that case, it temporarily needs enough disk space to hold both the old and new versions.

While this situation may apply to some people, it certainly doesn’t explain why I’m having trouble, because (1) I’m not using my computer at all when SuperDuper! runs at 4AM every morning¹ and (2) there is more than enough “working space” (as I said, both the source and destination drives are less than half full and no single file is anywhere near as large as half the drives’ 250GB capacities). I just don’t understand how a backup program can let 125GB of meaningless data trickle onto a destination drive over the course of three months.

To be as fair as possible, I’ll reiterate that this has only happened to me three times in the last few years, but I’ll still tell you that that’s three times too many; backing up my data is something I take very seriously — it doesn’t get much more mission-critical for me. Am I just going to have to revert back to rsync?

Has it really been 14 years?

The last time I played Monopoly I was 13 years old, and during this particular game I ended up owning everything — there was literally nothing more I could buy, no more hotels to build. For whatever reason, that whole moment flashed in front of me today and I realized that I haven’t played the game since. Not once in 14 years.

Some may call that cowardly. I call it going out on top (and maybe a little cowardly).

How to get me to buy something I might otherwise not

1. Make part, or all of it, transparent, so that I can watch it work (or simply see its constituent parts if non-moving).
2. Fabricate part, or all of it, out of carbon fiber.
3. Give it Wi-Fi (I don’t care if it’s an ant farm, a toaster, or a pepper grinder).
4. Convince me that I need it, even when I absolutely do not, by making sure it’s the best thing in the world for the job. I have to have some ammunition to defend the purchase when the inevitable do-you-actually-use-it question comes about. “Well, not really, but look at it! No other ABC can do XYZ faster/better/etc. Do you see it!? What do you mean you don’t care? Wait…”

Any combination of the above and I’ll likely pay double or triple what any sensible person would already call too much.

Are you alright?

If the leading track, “Are you alright?,” off of Lucinda Williams’ latest album, West, doesn’t make you tear up, then you were either born with a stone heart or haven’t experienced enough pain in your life.

Go Gators!!!

The Gators have just won the NCAA Championship for the second year in a row! I think a recap of the last 365 days is in order:

• April 3, 2006: Florida wins the national basketball title
• January 8, 2007: Florida wins the national football title
• April 2, 2007: Florida wins the national basketball title

Unheard of. Unbelievable. History has been made.

“I said it’s great, to be, a Florida Gator!” Indeed.

Comcast and its growing on-demand service

Perhaps I’m late to the game here, but I can’t recall this ever being discussed on any of the sites I follow. It seems that at some point in the last few months Comcast has added a lot of network and cable TV shows to its on-demand service. Since discovering this for myself I’ve been told by others that Comcast has been advertising, on TV, the availability of these shows for quite some time, but because I never watch commercials, I was unaware.

I have to say that the HD selection is a bit disappointing as compared to the breadth of available SD titles, but it’s no more off-balance than the current HD/SD programming ratio; surely this disparity will continue to decay, and eventually flip-flop, as more and more people get HDTVs and demand HD content.

Comcast/the network is the DVR

What’s funny about this whole thing is that it isn’t the on-demand element that excites me, but rather the fact that I can now offload onto Comcast the storage that would otherwise be hogging up my DVR, and in the case of HD television, that can amount to a serious chunk of space. Moreover, in a good number of situations, this will solve the I-only-have-two-tuners problem (never mind the fact that I have such a problem to begin with  :P).

Another plus is that this service minimizes the amount of time I need to persuade the DVR to do what I want — the Comcast HD DVR (by Motorola) is the single worst piece of electronic equipment I’ve ever owned — anything that can reduce the time I spend each day fixing its mistakes is a good thing.

The only downside to this system that I’ve been able to deduce is the fact that you can’t fast-forward beyond the slowest fast-forward speed (the 30-second trick breaks too), but this annoyance is somewhat mitigated by the fact that these shows have fewer and shorter commercials.