Tuesday, May 18th, 2004
Setting up PHP and MySQL on Mac OS X
I recently set up php and mysql on my ibook to get some coding done and play around with the new wordpress 1.2 rc. Thanks to some helpful articles the process was quite easy: for enabling php i recommend HOWTO/Enable PHP on Mac OS X by rui carmo and marc liyanage provides instructions for setting up mysql.
Migration completed
I already finished the migration to my ibook as my main machine a week or so ago and now that i’m stuck on a slow train might be the right time to outline how it went. Herein a short description of how i got my rss subscriptions, itunes music, addressbook and emails from sharpreader, itunes (windows), and outlook to netnewswire lite, itunes (mac os x), addressbook and mail. (more…)
Friday, May 14th, 2004
Recommendation engines
I’ve a somewhat twisted relationship to recommendation engines: ever since i experienced amazon analyzing my browsing behaviour and suggesting stuff i might be interested in i’ve been fascinated by them though i don’t think i made a single purchase based on such results.
One of the most interesting projects in this area i’ve found is gnod: you enter an author, movie, artist and it’ll present you with a nice map of suggestions floating around. The closer an entry is to the original search subject, the more likely you’ll like it. Simply click an item in this cosmos and it’ll gain focus and suggestions matching this item are displayed. Two minor caveats: for some reason beyond my comprehension the search form for music artists is buried so deep i can’t ever find it. Besides that and the fact that the site doesn’t work too well in safari it’s great, definitely my favourite recommendation engine up until now.
Recently boingboing pointed to musicplasma, half public-music-taste mapping effort, half recommendation engine (as far as i can tell) with a snazzy interface. It basically does the same thing as gnod (but only for music, not authors and the like) but far prettier. There’re two great improvements however: Not only does music plasma display familiar artists, but it also plots the connections between those artists. This gets really interesting when you start hunting down narrow intersections where only one artist acts as a connecting hub between two sets. The second improvement is that popularity of a given artist is also displayed in the maps. After playing around with it a little i think their database isn’t quite as huge as gnods, but if you’re a sucker for eyecandy give it a try anyway. And if you’re on the adventurous side, try hunting down a connection between two completely different acts (i’m currently trying to find a path between rage against the machine and kid loco).
Monday, May 10th, 2004
Apparently Sony Connect sucks
I’ve never been a huge fan of sony and as a freshly baked apple zealot and convinced ipod lover these two heavily linked articles about sonys new connect online music store make me feel some schadenfreude:
[...] The whole thing feels put together by accountants, not music lovers. [...] But in its first incarnation, you’d never guess that this service comes from a company that’s both the world’s most recognized consumer-electronics brand and the owner of one of the world’s biggest record companies. For the time being, maybe they ought to call it Sony Disconnect.
writes the new york times and the washington post writes
The tool you must use to download and manage your purchases, Sony’s Sonic Stage (Windows 98 SE or newer), is a bloated, bug-ridden beast of a program. [...] This service is an embarrassment to the company that gave the world the Walkman. And it didn’t have to happen this way: To see a different path Sony might have taken, just look at the improvements Apple made to its iTunes Music Store and software on April 28, one year after the store’s debut.
Not that anyone would’ve thought that sony would get this one right…
Blogger redesign
Everyone’s writing about the new blogger introduced recently (today? yesterday? something like that…) and usually i get bored rather fast by this kind of uberattention in the blogosphere. The first and second post about something are interesting, but then the usual congratulations and rundowns get kinda dragging. Therefore i was even more surprised to find “thoughts on template design” by steven garrity @acts of volition genuinely interesting. If you only read one post about the blogger update, read this one (and perhaps “the new blogger” by douglas bowman and “introducing scribe from blogger” by todd dominey).
Update: so i’m slow on this one, but i just recently stumbled across this post linking to all(?) new blogger templates. I’ve already seen most of them, but there’s some really nice stuff in there that i haven’t seen before.
Saturday, May 8th, 2004
Happy Switcher
I received my ibook on tuesday and have a slow migration going since then. Moving subscriptions over was easy (ex- and importing an opml file with slight interim editing), moving the itunes library and addresses went so-so, but moving my mail archives from outlook to apple mail sucks. Outlook got the most useless export features i’ve ever seen (lock-in?) and apple mail import isn’t great either. My last approach was to import my mail from outlook into thunderbird 0.6 on windows, copying the thunderbird mailboxes (which i think are in .mbox-format) over to the mac and importing them into mail, but this usually results in apple mail hanging up and sucking tons of system performance until i forcefully terminate it. Next try: the same approach with eudora for windows as the middleman.
The ibook instantly replaced my old box as my main machine and so far the experience has been really sweet. I didn’t have a single moment where i thought “i wish i was doing this on windows” or “windows handles this better”. Mac os x is really well thought out and easy to learn, i felt quite comfortable with the system within a day. I really like that apps aren’t closed when you click the small red “x” but keep running hidden somewhere, makes getting back to them so much faster and you won’t start cursing if you accidentally close an app. I guess it’s also the main reason that macs demand tons of ram. I currently have 512 mb and even though it’s performing fine i think things would work a little better with more. I’m glad that ram is about the only thing that you can easily upgrade on a notebook, as it’s the only thing i find lacking at the moment. Eventually ram prices have to go down again, and there’s a lot of room for improvement. Let’s see how much a gig costs in a few months.
I was a bit concerned about the smaller screen of the ibook (12″ vs 14″ on my old machine) but they both run the same resolution, so i haven’t really lost any screen space, but got smaller pixels, crisper looks and better portability. So far i got the impression that mac os x works best with tons of screenspace, so i might have to pick up a nice new lcd screen for my ibook. That or move my old crappy 17″ crt over.
So far i’m very satisfied. Considering the price i paid it’s perhaps the best purchase i ever made. If you are in the market for a new notebook, get an ibook. Not that i didn’t tell that everybody who asked for suggestions in the last year, but perhaps i’ll be a little more successful now that i got something to back my recommendation up.
I’ll post more about the migration from my old box to the ibook when i’m done with it.
Tuesday, May 4th, 2004
Modular camphones followup
So apparently yesterday was my “make a complete ass of myself”-day with my first post about modular camphones. Always happens when i miss a night of sleep. I admit, i didn’t take the time to read the article, but then noone should be blamed for not reading rob enderle. Today i received the following email by peter rojas:
If you read the eWeek article closely, you’ll see that he specifically is NOT talking about camera attachments, but actual integrated modular pieces which could be popped out:
“This means that the camera should be designed in but be removable, rather than a third-party add-on, so that usability doesn’t become a problem. In addition, a designed-in solution often looks better, and these devices are often as much personal statement as they are tool.”
The fact that these AREN’T attachments is exactly his point, and is what I was referring to. I’d appreciate you clarifying your post.
Regards,
Peter
Granted the examples given yesterday were bad and rob enderle specifically pointed out that he wasn’t talking about camattachments, but now that i’ve read his article i think he wasn’t talking about some sort of “pop out the lens”-approach either (at least not exclusively), e.g. he also suggests bluetooth enabled cams which connect to your phone as a solution. He concludes with the following statements:
[...]It will be interesting to see which manufacturer creates a device family of products such as PDAs, cell phones and cameras that work together out of the box.
While we can speculate on when smart phones will step up to the integration challenge, one thing is clear: If one part of the combined device is regularly banned, then the all-in-one approach simply won’t work, and it is time to take another approach.
So here are two more little gizmos, both by nokia, which imho pose a viable solution to the problem: the fun camera is a tiny, crappy, overpriced stand alone camera that you can attach to your phone for image transfers. The difference to the attachments i posted yesterday is that you don’t have to attach the cam to your phone for image taking, but only transfer. Not as nice as bluetooth connectivity, but still. The other one is the camera headset, a wired headset with integrated camera for your nokia phone that imho qualifies as a “designed-in” solution considering the high level of integration into existing phone and accessory infrastructure.
An even nicer approach would be changeable faceplates that simply spare the lens thus rendering the cam unusable. Afaik the lenses of the nokia 3650 and 6230 (and possibly others) are integrated into their faceplates, so i guess it should be easy to come up with something like this.
Monday, May 3rd, 2004
My iBook will be here tomorrow
I’m getting really anxious now…
Modular camphones
Rob Enderle over at eWeek suggests some kind of modular system where users would be able to pop the cameras out of their phones and PDAs (sorry, but that is never going to happen) or (somewhat more plausibly) that people abandon their all-in-one gadgets.
People, start your wayback machines and watch in aw and wonder the ingenious engineering of times long forgotten: siemens quickpic camera iqp-500, sonyericsson communicam mobile camera mca-30, veo photo traveler 130s, and there’re lots more of these add-on cameras. Everyone i know hates the idea of add-on cameras and i don’t know anybody who actually bought one.
I’m less surprised that rob enderle tries to sell some old stuff as his personal insights, but rather worried that the fine folks over @engadget suffer from some kind of memory loss, i mean they basically spend all day searching for new gizmos but can’t remember the dawn of multimedia capable phones?
Update: you can read a followup here.