A little bit about iTunes for the iPod generation.

“I felt like a dope, I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.”
—Steve Jobs, CEO Apple, Inc. on digital music Fortune

Mark mentioned that he’s planning on buying an iPod Shuffle and later blogged that iTunes is missing features like skins. That hit me as a blast from the past.

Skins was one of the features that got axed when Apple bought SoundJam from Cassady & Greene to create iTunes. A program called Audion supports that and a wealth of other features for those people who need their daily dose of feature creep in their music player. You can read the excellent history of the player that almost was.

I remember buying MacAMP and later SoundJam MP. I remember being really pissed when I found out that iTunes would be introduced and SoundJam would be shelved. I remember skins. Ahh, let me tell you about those days…

They sucked.
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The new iPod Shoplift

LuxPro Super ShuffleNow that I finally gave my brother his gift, I was going to blog about the iPod Shuffles I got him and Caitlin. But then on Friday, I read something amusing.

Think that the picture to the left is an iPod Shuffle? It’s actually a photo of the LuxPro’s “Super Shuffle” which DAPreview snapped a shot of at CeBIT 2005 (mouseover for the backside). What a clear case of trademark and trade dress infringement! And just after they were asked by Apple Legal to remove them on Friday, they put them back up the next day because “Apple said nothing about Saturday.” I guess that’s what happens when you live in a country that is perennially sanctioned under the U.S. Trade act.
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T-Mobile's web security

It made all the websites yesterday that Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile Sidekick got hacked leading to a public viewing of her cell phone pictures (some on the pornographic side) and hundreds of crank phone calls to famous people who had the misfortune of being in her address book.

I remember the first time this happened it led to an amusing sound bite:

“It became obvious to her what was going on. She was pretty upset about it. It’s one thing to have people looking at your sex tapes, but having people reading your personal e-mails1 is a real invasion of privacy.”

But since I work for a company whose whole business is managing people’s customer data, I am more curious about the security hole that lead to the hack. Continue reading →

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Who really never gets anything?

naoca eyeglasses case Every time Apple comes out with a new product or idea (e.g. AppleStore, iTunes Music Store, and iPod Mini), some foreigner screams bloody murder and how unfair it is. This bothers me because it is the height of hypocrisy. These people are probably playing Final Fantasy X International Edition which is available in every region but Region 1. Last time I checked, Friends is a United States show, but every season was out on DVD in Great Britain while they were still trying to sell “Best of…” crap to the Americans. And how many times have they watched Americans anxiously await cell phones that have been selling for years in Asia and Europe? The Playstation Portable is outselling the Nintendo DS in Japan, where is it in the US?

My freshmen room mate in college was from Idaho. He told me you don’t see any good potatoes in Idaho because they export all their best ones. Contrast that with Japanese domestic brands which are superior and never sold outside of Japan.

But this entry isn’t about domestic brands, Friends Season X on DVD, cell phones, or PSP—those things eventually make it to the United States. Nor is it about the iPod Mini since that eventually made it to Europe and Asia. This entry isn’t even about some pissy Europeans.
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Rubber ducky, you’re the one.

Cyberduck Application IconWell I wanted to get Caitlin’s blog up and running. Then it hit me I had to allow her to edit her blog without the command line. Sure it is easy getting the Linux box to talk to the Mac Apple Fileshare, but how to get the Mac to work with the Linux box? She can do remote control with Chicken Of The VNC but what about file transfer? I’ve stopped using FTP in 2001 when the wu-ftpd bug turned a whole bunch of my company boxes into DDoS zombies. Besides, the password is unencrypted. And I am tired of going through the Apache configuration file hoops in order to set up WebDAV again.

What to do?

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Giving my Powerbook the middle finger

two finger trackpad scrollWhen my Powerbook G4/800 was stolen last year at Amsterdam, I gambled that Apple would have an interim release in January 2005 and announce a Powerbook G5 as early as June 2005, so I purchased my Powerbook hoping to tide me over for a revision B Powerbook G5 in 2006 at the earliest.

A couple weeks ago, Apple announced a kitchen sink release for the Powerbook. You can tell that they are running out of things to put in by what they put in—what used to cost money now comes standard. The speed bump is reminiscent of Apple circa 1999.1

One nice new feature is the two-finger scrolling: Mac notebooks don’t have the integrated pointer/scroller that the Thinkpads do, nor do they have scroll zones like some other tank-sized laptops. The solution that uber-geeks use is SideTrack, which effectively acts like the latter and can be tricked out to do much more.
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Another (PHP) Framework

Last month I read Adam’s call OSCON papers. I mention this today because I have to submit something this weekend, but I remember reading something funny.

As usual, they’re desperate for PHP papers. In fact, the only thing they won’t take is a paper about your database abstraction layer or “Yet-Another-CMS“. I find this amusing and true. There are way too many PHP Frameworks out there. Sure PHP-Nuke/PostNuke/XOOPS are great for making a website if you don’t know PHP or have design sense, but knowing any PHP is worse than useless—the more PHP you know, the more offensive they become.

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My computer, the porn star…

BulbasaurAfter I left my second startup in 2001, I’ve been obsessed with small, cheap and powerful computers.

At the time I used to say, “Common sense says that the converse of Moore’s Law1 is that a computer today is going to cost roughly half that in 18 months—i.e. you shouldn’t buy computing power until you need it: it’ll be half off in a year and a half.”
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My path to the Nikon D70

Olympus C2500LMy last real camera was an Olympus C-2500L digital camera purchased in late 1999. It was my first digital camera and the merging of two dreams: digital images and SLR cameras.

I’ve been obsessed with digital images ever since 1984 when I first played with MacPaint. When I got my Macintosh in late 1985, I got a video digitizer and a ThunderScan (a line-by-line scanner that would hook up to an Apple ImageWriter). I thought about digital photography ever since the Apple QuickTake came out. By 1999 quality digital cameras were finally becoming affordable and I was ready to purchase one.

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