CS and the City

Besides yesterday being the most undeserved snow day in Waterloo history, it was also MS’s turn to drop a mighty news making bombshell: Microsoft bid $44.6 Billion for Yahoo. I figured Dr. Evil would be appropriate.

This is the sort of news that gets my geek blood pumping. An event like this sends millions of different wavelengths of possibility flying in every direction, interfering constructively and destructively in peaks of likely outcomes. The analysits are doing their absolute best to help point them out too: Will Google bid too? Maybe News Corp. will. What does Microsoft gain? Is this the end of Google’s dominance? Will Yahoo employees even want to work for Microsoft? It might be better than getting canned outright.

To be fair, Yahoo has some great properties that Microsoft would be well guided to leave the hell alone. Let’s see here: Flickr, Upcoming, Yahoo Mail, Finance, Music, IM, etc. Of course, this would only compound the absolute most frustrating thing about working at Microsoft: If you’re working on a project, chances are there are at least two other groups in the company doing the same thing. Adding a parallel internet product offering stack is not going to make the situation better. Even if Microsoft’s essentially admitting defeat in the race for internet viewer keystrokes, you can be sure it’ll be Yahoo products that get the axe before equivalent Microsoft ones.

What I wouldn’t give to be back at Google when Marissa Mayer gives the “This is our position” talk to the PM corp. Or to be a fly on the wall as Jerry Yang decides what to do with the offer, or Steve Ballmer waits for the response. It’s hard to under emphasize the effect this offer will have on the tech landscape. I’d be wise to actually make the effort to organize my thoughts and the ones on the other news site. Somebody will write a book about this and make a whole lot of money. Might as well be me. I sure as hell didn’t make any when Yahoo!’s stock jumped 50% yesterday.

I’ve found that Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) isn’t always ejecting mounted DMG files in the usual methods (i.e. dragging to trash, right clicking and choosing eject, you know, the way it should work).

I found the following command works until Apple fixes the bug. Next time, I’ll also try using Disk Utility (thanks to the guys on Apple support forums for both tips).

Open up a terminal, cd to /Volumes, get the name of a mounted DMG file, and try like this:

(in my case the volume was /MailTags2.2b4):

maggie:Volumes blloyd$ hdiutil detach MailTags2.2b4
“disk1″ unmounted.
“disk1″ ejected.

Link to specific message

A proper review of the Amazon music store is en route, but I wanted to separate the review of where it is now and where I think it’s going to be.

Amazon’s not building a music store so much as a platform. All of the elements are now in place to allow anyone to set up a simple music store interface that can be accessed by millions.

• S3 – Amazon’s “in the cloud” storage service provides storage for any MP3 store owner’s collection.
• FPS – Amazon’s online payment system geared specifically towards micro transactions let store owners charge as much or as little as they want.
• MP3 Download Portal – The store front, complete with search, previews, and reviews.

You don’t even need to think of store owners on the scale of labels. A band can simply open up shop on Amazon and start selling their wares to interested fans, right along side the big names without having to reinvent the architecture.

The only stumbling block Amazon may face is the link between the website and the media player application. Amazon’s download manager is a good first step, but it needs to integrate further into all popular media player applications not just iTunes. Winamp, Amarok, Windows Media Player, and Songbird all come to mind. The less the user has to be concerned about the transition from purchase click to listen, the more likely they’ll click at all.

If Amazon positions itself correctly, it could do what so many online music stores before it couldn’t: Actually compete with iTunes.

I have more web browsing software in my Applications folder than any sane person should have. The usual suspects of Safari and Firefox, Internet Explorer Mac 5 (just in case…), Flock, Opera, and OmniWeb. Missing for whatever reason was Camino.

Camino is a Mac-only browser implementation on top of the Mozilla core which powers Firefox. Essentially, you get the best of both worlds: The power of the Gecko rendering engine and the tight integration you’d expect from a Mac only app.

I can’t explain its absence. I may have tried an earlier version, who knows. In fact, it wasn’t until I watched Mike Pinkerton’s presentation on the history of Camino that I decided to (re-)give it a go.

And I’m impressed so far. The load times are noticeably faster than Firefox, and the memory footprint seems smaller (though not as much smaller as I expected after dumping all of Firefox’s cross-platform interface stuffing). There are still some stability issues to be ironed out.

I’ve also filed my first feature request. As I wrote before, I am in absolute love with how Safari handles PDFs. Though Camino boasts about harnessing the true power of OSX, they still turn a blind eye to PDFs.

So I filed my first feature request bug with Camino. It promptly got marked as a duplicate. I didn’t think I’d be the first one to miss Safari’s perfect PDF functionality. I hope anyone that stumbles upon this article will do both of us a favor and go “Me too!” the feature.

The reason they haven’t added the feature is that OSX’s PDFKit is a 10.4+ feature only and Camino boasts support for 10.2 and up. Legacy support is a sensitive subject depending on which side you’re on so I understand the Camino devs being hesitant to leave users behind. I just wonder how much of the user base is still that far behind? I don’t want to have to wait till Camino 2.0.

Interesting note: The dictionary that Camino uses for its in-line spell checking says the word “Camino” is incorrect.

Google announced today the roll out of the enterprise version of their Google Apps package: Google Apps Premier Edition. Download Squad and SaaS Blog have pretty good round-ups on the reaction across the net, and the reaction has been wide spread.

Google’s not the first to tackle this problem. ThinkFree and Zoho already have mature offerings. Hell, even Microsoft has their Office Live Premium ($39.95/month). Features vary (Zoho has presentations, MS handles mail and web only). There is obvious demand and interest for such a product. So why is has Google’s entry got enterprises lined up do hand over their data?
Read the rest of this entry »

Puretracks – Canadian Online Music Retailer goes DRM-less on indie offerings
Moosehead tackles last Canadian holdout: Saskatchewan
How to get iTunes to sort your albums (almost) exactly how you want it
Ariel Atom coming to Canada for a test drive
Dynamic languages hitting home on the desktop

The IIPA, a powerful group representing Software, Movie, and Music companies in the states wants Canada black-listed alongside Russia, China, and Belize for not *modernizing* our copyright policy.

I believe that Canada’s copyright policy is acceptable and properly protects fair-use rights. My fellow Canadians should be damn happy the CRIA can’t just sue the pants off anyone who owns an iPod like the RIAA does in the states.

I can’t sum up how ridiculous this is enough to do it justice, so I’ll let poster “rumblin’rabbit” on the slashdot article do it instead:

“So they want Bush to blacklist Canada, their biggest trading partner (last I heard), their NATO ally, whose troops are now fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban, possessor of the second largest petroleum reserves in the world, and whose government is one of the very few who are not overtly hostile to the Bush administration?

Over video games?

Cool.”

Let your MP know that you do not respect a Government that bows to every US whim. While you’re at it, ask them to can Bev Oda, before the media companies buy her soul.

And would someone please put Michael Geist in charge of copyright legislation?

My Team Lead asked me to do a little digging into Service Oriented Architecture before my co-op term wrapped up. I got a copy of Service-Oriented Archiecture by Thomas Erl from the library and starting flipping through it. Some CTO/CIOs don’t understand their developers disdain for Enterprise buzzwords, but I can sum this one up for them in one sentence I discovered in Erl’s text (top of page 37):

“The application of service-orientation principles to processing logic results in standardized service-oriented processing logic.”

At first glance, it reads like an impressive sales pitch. But at second, you realize there is absolutely no content whatsoever in that sentence. None. It is completely devoid of any useful information. Coders find beauty in simplicity. Enterprisiness is anti-beautiful.

I hate cell phones. It’s unfortunate, because I am a huge gadget fan. I don’t hate cell phones for the technology and shinyness. I hate the bullshit that comes with them.

I hate when people drive while talking on their cell phones. I hate when people talk on their cell phones on the street loud enough for everyone to hear that they’re being dumped. But most of all, I hate cell phone companies.

Disclaimer: I own a cell phone. I have no land line in Vancouver so this is the only way my parents can get a hold of me. It’s a Rogers pay as you go phone. I was given the phone for free and bought the SIM card on Craigslist.

The local Rogers cell phone shop comes by our company every few months to offer employee pricing on plans and phones. I went down and talked to one of the guys who came to the building to take a look at the deals. At first, the deal looked quite reasonable. $20 a month for a quite a few minutes, free evenings and weekends, etc etc. I told the guys I’d think on it and would stop by their shop after work.

A did a bit of digging back at my desk and came up with some concerns. I liked the Motorola L7 they had on discount, but I really wasn’t looking to replace my iPod and for the price I know I’d be happy with the L2. If I wanted to go all out, I’d be looking at the SE 810i because of the 2 Megapixel camera. I also wanted to know what my final monthly bill would be, considering all the various rebates and promotions. I just wanted a single number. I went back to the shop with the intention of buying a phone and a 2 year plan. I left with nothing.

I asked, pointing to they flyer they had given me, “What are these fees you mention here in the fine print?” The guy I was dealing with said flat out, “Don’t worry about those.” Now I wish I was quicker on my feet because I should have said “So you’ll cover them with the deal then.” But I just stood there, awestruck. I mentioned I’d be looking at the L2 and I actually had to fight with him to stop trying to sell me the L7. Instead he just wanted to sell me the POS phone they were almost giving away with the plan, one that I wasn’t really looking forward to hauling around. I was told shouldn’t worry about needing caller ID or long distance either, just go with this plan now and then figure out later what I might actually need. After 15 minutes of trying to get straight answers from numb nuts, I thanked him for his time and left.

I know used car salespeople that aren’t that pushy. In fact, I don’t know one that is.

What kind of industry needs to bind their customers in 3 year terms in order to make profit? Why are customers so desperate to leave that they have to be legally tied to stay? How come looking for a cell phone carrier is really just a competition to see who sucks less? All of this frustrates me to no end. I’m a gadget guy, I like the idea of cellphones, but I cannot bring myself to deal with the high pressure scare tactics that the carriers employ on a daily basis.

I think car salespeople used to be synonymous with this kind of consumer experience, but they’ve grown past this stage. It’s time for a new provider to adopt the Toyota model. Or the credit-union model. Someone please give me an alternative to the lesser of three evils situation I’ve got right now.

I wonder why it is that Windows apps have brutally straight forward names like MP3 Tagger and Windows Journal and Mac apps have names like Tangerine. Do Mac developers strive to make their names as unrelated as possible? I have to know these things if I’m going to become one

Here’s the money shot: Tangerine does cool stuff with your iTunes library that would have taken you way to long to do yourself. Sort of like SoundFlavor (I guess… my PC owning buddies have been rubbing that one in my face for a few days now). Get on the free beta here or better yet, get yourself a license for blogging about it.

Tangerine is a tool that analyzes the songs in your iTunes music library by beat intensity (amplitude?) and allows you to create playlists by specifying ranges of BPM and intensity and then making arrangements of songs based on your parameters. For example, you can create a playlist that starts with slow tempo music and then builds in the middle, effectively making a perfect (and random) workout soundtrack.

But keep in mind, it’s beta software. It’s hard to tell at first though (I’m really impressed how fast it flew through my music collection).

Things to watch out for:

• Since Apple in their infinite wisdom decided to store album art work outside of files, it appears that any albums you’ve tagged with Artwork using the iTunes get album feature won’t properly display in Tangerine. It’s too bad too, the playlist view is very very cool. It would be even cooler without all the ‘?’. Hey, do Apple one better, want to go populate those BPM fields on my songs for me? I know I’m not going to…
• Tangerine seems to have trouble with some of my songs. Sometimes it evaluates the BPM incorrectly (fast for slow, slow for fast), but worse is that I think it fails on some of my songs. Instead of indicating that, however, it just doesn’t show them in the library. I can only assume that’s why they aren’t here.
• I really wish I could simply drag a song in and then have Tangerine generate a playlist based on that first song. Sort of like Pandora but for iTunes. I don’t really need songs that rise and fall over the course of the playlist, but if it’s raining in the morning. I’d love to be able to tell Tangerine just to give me a bunch of songs based on this one Sufjan Stevens track and throw it on my iPod. Which leads me to…
• Yep it’ll save the playlists back to iTunes, but I wish I could save it directly to the iPod. Technically Tangerine should just be a plug-in to iTunes, but I think they’re quite limited by Apple’s API so I understand why it’s a seperate app. Still, I don’t want to have to switch between them if I can avoid it.

As always, things are bound to change between now and 1.0. I’ll give you an update once it comes out. Definitely give it a sneak peak while you can though. The UI is tres pretty (as Potion Factory apps seem to be). Man, who needs all those Web 2.0 apps anyway?