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Paul's Time Sink

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thoughts about S3 and Google Platypus

Paul Westbrook | 14 July, 2006 00:20

Last month, I mentioned that I attempted to use Amazon's S3, through JungleDisk to store music.  Now that Google is potentially coming out with their Platypus storage service,  I was thinking about this a little more, and I think that I know what use cases I would need before I would really use a service like this.

When I copy a file to the "online drive", I will want to be able to access it in the following ways:

  1. Through standard HTTP 1.1 protocol.  – If this is a music file, I should be able to access it directly from xmms or iTunes.
  2. Through a cached virtual file system – Access to the file will cause it to be downloaded locally, so subsequent accesses will be fast.  Also, any changes made to the local copy, would need to be syncronized back to the online version
  3. Though a non-cached virtual file system – From the client's point of view, this will appear as a standard file system.  But an open will cause the http 1.1 session to be opened.  Every seek will cause an http resume at the correct offset.  And every read will just pipe the data off the http socket to the caller.

It doesn't matter if these features are implemented in the core, or some third party developer implements them.

[via TechCrunch, Download Squad]

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Harmony remote shielded?

Paul Westbrook | 13 July, 2006 23:30

Ever since we have moved into our house, we have noticed that the picture on our Sony XBR wasn't looking as good as it used to.  Colors would bleed in the corners of the picture.  Usually degaussing the tube would fix the problem, but eventually it would come back.  (There isn't a degauss button on the remote, so this requires unplugging and plugging the TV in.)

Since degaussing seem to alleviate the problem, I thought that there must be something that is causing electro-magnetic interference.  The two main differences with our setup from before we moved  is the Mac mini underneath the TV, and the Harmony Remote next to it.  Since I really didn't want to move the Mac mini, I move the remote to the other size of the room, and degaussed the TV.  So far, after a couple of days, I have not seen the problem.

I am not sure if the problem is the remote, or the charging base, but either way, they are staying away from the TV.

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Parsing iTunes library

Paul Westbrook | 13 July, 2006 01:04

In this post, I mentioned how it would be great if Apple made the API to parse the iTunes library available.  Johnathon S. wrote that he doesn't think that Apple has made this public.

I found some other solutions for this:

  1. ITMLReader is a java class that will parse the iTunes library xml file.
  2. This page mentions using xsd to parse the file into native structures.  When doing this you will have to convert the DTD to an xml schema.
  3. PHPtunest is a php script that parses the xml file and creates an html page.

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watermarks in gallery

Paul Westbrook | 13 July, 2006 00:09

We use Gallery 2 to host our photos that we share with our friends and family.  I am interested in trying the watermark module for these photos.  Unfortunately, it looks like the watermarks is only applied when adding a new images or when editing individual images.  Maybe there is a way to do a mass edit.

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Filterset.G and Adblock

Paul Westbrook | 10 July, 2006 21:39

I saw this post yesterday that mentioned Filterset.G.  I have been using Adblock for a while to help block web ads.  Filterset.G is a set of filters for Adblock.  I have been pretty impressed with the effectiveness of these filters, in fact it is able to block text-based Google Adsense ads. 

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OpenDNS

Paul Westbrook | 10 July, 2006 17:22

OpenDNS is a company that provides DNS resolving for networks or individual computers.  They offer some interesting features:

  1. Phishing protection - Will display a warning page when attempting to view a known phishing site.
  2. Increased speed for browsing - OpenDNS has a large DNS cache to speed host name lookups.  In addition to this their DNS servers are located near the computer making the DNS request.
  3. Fixing spelling mistakes - OpenDNS will help with common spelling domain name spelling mistakes

I am going to try this out on our network at home.  Unfortunately this really does not work for me on my laptop, and I think that they need to call the following situation out more clearly.
 (More)

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newTunes

Paul Westbrook | 10 July, 2006 14:05

newTunes seems like a pretty cool dashboard widget.  It will let you know when new music is in the iTunes Music Store for any of the artists in your iTunes library.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work well for me.  I installed it on Friday, and on Monday it still doesn't display anything.  The problem is that the widget launches an AppleScript that, I believe, is building the list of the artists and the local tracks for those artists.  On my library that has 7800 tracks, this takes a long time. 

I think that it would be better for this widget to parse the iTunes Library xml file itself.  (I believe that Apple has an API to do this, this is what iPhoto uses to show the list of tracks for slideshows.)  This would be a lot faster, and would allow the widget to show status while the list is being built.

[via TUAW]

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Power-Pipe

Paul Westbrook | 06 July, 2006 02:23

PowerpipeA while ago, my wife wrote about how we are trying about finding ways to save money on energy.  The Power-Pipe is a way to recover the heat energy from waste water.  To install this, you would replace a section of the main PVC drainage pipe, with a copper pipe, that has smaller pipes coiled around the large one.  Cold water is run through the small pipes, where it will acquire heat from the drain pipe, and then it would run into the hot water heater.

Supposedly the Power-Pipe will increase the cold water from 10 to 24 degrees C.  This is possible since 90% of all hot water energy goes down the drain, and the Power-Pipe can recycle as much as 60% of this energy.

Unfortunately, the website for the US residential distributer is not up.  On Canadian site, the Power-Pipe costs between $270 - $1200.

[via Gizmodo]

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minimum browser requirments

Paul Westbrook | 06 July, 2006 01:17

I find it interesting sad when websites have pretty old browser requirements.  Here are the requirements for logging into XM Radio's account login

Minimum Browser Requirement:

Cookies are enabled
Microsoft Internet Explorer - Version 5.01 and higher
Netscape Navigator - Version 4.x and higher
AOL - Version 7 and higher

The problem here is that they don't recognize Firefox 1.5.0.4 as newer than Netscape Navigor 4.

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Mac OS X calling home

Paul Westbrook | 05 July, 2006 11:12

With the 10.4.7 update of Mac OS X, the OS is calling back to Apple's servers periodically.  There is a new process called dashboardadvisoryd with makes the tcp connections.  The tech note on 10.4.7 has this entry:

You can now verify whether or not a Dashboard widget you downloaded is the same version as a widget featured on (www.apple.com) before installing it.


If this were just for this purpose, this check could have been done when installing a widget.  I assume that this process is also checking the currently installed widgets to see if they are up to date.  I think a better implementation would be to have a button in the area of the screen that shows all of the installed widgets, that would check for updates.

[via The Apple Blog]

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iTheater

Paul Westbrook | 03 July, 2006 21:41

ItheaterNow you can look like Geordi too.  The iTheather simulates a 50" video screen for iPods or any thing that can output video.

[via Gizmodo]

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