aaron evans

Apple hasn’t released an update that has required me to restart in a while: aaron@localhost > uptime 20:59 up 29 days, 14:35, 2 users, load averages: 0.90 1.23 0.78 That’s pleasant.

I’ve turned iTunes2web into an open-source application and released it under the New BSD License. I’ve chosen Google Code to host the project. The project page is pretty minimal at this time but you can browse the repository and build the project.

I chose Google code because I like Google and I like subversion. I really didn’t put much thought or research into that decision but my expectations are pretty low.

I chose to make iTunes2web open-source and free because I can’t give customers the support or the product the attention that it deserves. I hope to give users a better product by utilizing the open source community.

I’ve also updated the iTunes2web product page. I used iWeb to design the page. I think it turned out fairly well and I’m happy to delegate the task of web design to a computer. I think iWeb has some room to grow but it is generally a pretty good first version of a program.

I’ve released iTunes2web as a Universal binary but I have yet to really test it on an Intel Mac. I’m hoping that either someone will come forward and address any problems or that I’ll get an Intel Mac soon. The latter may be more likely.

I got a Dell Latitude D820 for work. What follows is a fairly predictable rant from a longtime mac user.

First, it doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would. Sure, it’s ugly but I get the impression Dell is really trying. However, many of the typical PC oddities are present on this machine:

1. Lights that flash all the time to indicate that certain things are on or off. Why is there a WiFi light? Why does the battery light keep flashing sporadically? Do I need this kind of incessant reassurance that something is happening.
2. Ports all over the place. Some on the front. Some on the left. Some on the right. I guess you get the dock/port replicator if you want your ports in one place.
3. Missing features: no DVI out!!! What year is this? I can’t hook this up to my DVI monitor without buying expensive cables. Why is there no bluetooth?
4. Excessive buttons: why are there two left/right mouse buttons and two ways to move the cursor? Sure, people like choice, and this argument always wins in favor of simplicity in the PC world.
5. It’s big. It’s not huge; but there is not really a feeling that they tried that hard to make it small.

Overall, I’m not that unimpressed with this laptop. The Intel Core Duo is fast and it does its job.

My real gripe is with Windows. This is an operating system that hasn’t been updated in over five years and it really shows. It’s just painful to use. Here’s a list of gripes:

1. Lack of consistency. Let’s say you want to check out some info about your wireless network connection. Okay. You go to the Task Manager and you click on the little white icon that represents a wireless signal. Fair enough. Now, you can see you list of preferred networks and their settings. This is fine. Here’s where it gets odd. You click on ‘View Wireless Networks’, and this closes the previous window and spawns a list of wireless networks. If you want to see the TCP/IP settings for the wireless network, you click on ‘Show Advanced’ and this window closes and spawns the network connection properties. Here, you can change things like your gateway, dns, etc. It’s just not clear to me what the logic is behind having three windows that show different aspects of a wireless connection that link to each other in exactly one order. Window A spawns B which can spawn C. But you can’t go from A to C or even understand why the advanced tab in the first window is different than the advanced link in the second window. It’s just odd if you think about it too much. But, I guess the idea is that users don’t think, they memorize. So, I’ll just memorize which settings go with which windows and go on with life.
2. No zero-conf networking. Bonjour is so nice and has simplified my life. I find it so archaic to have to find the IP addresses of machines to connect two machines on a switch or hub.
3. Microsoft Apps try to predict your next move. I’ve heard that they finally stopped trying to predict a user’s actions in the newest version of office. I have to use Outlook and I have trouble understanding why I have to turn off many features to be able to type an email without it trying to correct my every keystroke. I also hate that menus are apparently so poorly designed that we have to hide the options that nobody uses and a user has to explicitly click on an expander element to view all items. Sure, you can turn this off, but it amazes me that people thought this was a the right solution to the problem of cluttered menus.
4. Common necessities aren’t built-in: The built-in Windows unzip package sucks and refused to open a valid zip. I had an ISO image that I wanted to burn and you can’t do this without googling to find out which software to install.
5. Announcements are annoying: The task manager keeps telling me things that I don’t care about or already know. Yes. I’m aware that I just unplugged my network cable. What’s worse is that announcements are controlled on an app by app basis and there is no easy way to figure out how to turn of announcements. Some announcements are simply impossible to turn off as far as I can tell.
6. and on and on…

I installed Ubuntu and it’s cool.

I predict a 50/50 split of the senate. I made a map at the NYT.

I’ve added ads to the site. I’ll be curious to see what ads are shown and if they turn into revenue. I’m expecting the selection of ads to be good and for them to generate little to no revenue.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article written by Motoko Rich (Select membership required to legally view the article. To read the article without a subscription, perform a search for the title of the article). In the article, Rich discusses how in his latest album Modern Times Bob Dylan has borrowed from 19th century poet Henry Timrod and some people, such as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, think this is a testament to his genius while others, such as a random 8th grade teacher in Albuquerque think this is theft. I’m completely serious about the contrast of the two references used in the NYT piece to frame the debate.

In any case, a similar controversy (if we can call it that) arose in 2001 when it was discovered that some lines in Mr. Dylan’s last album Love and Theft were borrowed from a book written by Junichi Saga, Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan’s Underworld. Saga was apparently ecstatic to be referenced by such a well-known songwriter. It is also worth noting that several lines in the song Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum are also influenced by Timrod. Wikipedia is a good source for more information on this topic.

So, these events have raised questions: has Dylan lost his touch? Has his work devolved into a sampling of obscure poets and novelists? Is Dylan a thief?

If anyone believes the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’ then I’m afraid they fundamentally misunderstand Mr. Dylan’s body of work. To understand why, I would direct them toward Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin. Ricks’ extensive knowledge of poetry allows him to extract the influences from many of Dylan’s songs. If Dylan is a thief today, then Dylan has always been a thief. If there is one theme in Dylan’s work, it is a consistent allusion to poets he respects.

I planned to conclude this post by finding my favorite Dylan songs and including some Dylan lyrics and the relevant text from the influence of that lyric. This can be easily done by paging through Visions of Sin. I quickly realized that someone had probably already created such a list. I found an article written by Matthew Zuckerman in 1997, before either Modern Times or Love and Theft were released, that traces the influences of 33 Dylan songs. From this list, it should be clear that some of Dylan’s greatest work has been the result of borrowing from other poets. It still baffles me that intelligent people can’t understand why he does this or why such allusions are a manifestation of love and not theft.

I was waiting in the airport and decided to buy a Sudoku book. I knew the game and thought it would be a nice way to pass some time. I bought the book with The Times logo on it.

We only had a pen with us and I knew that people typically used pencils because people like to make try values and backtrack if they’re wrong. I decided I could use a pen.

The book arranges puzzles into difficulties of easy, mild, difficult, and fiendish. The easy games are somewhat mindless and I didn’t regret the use of a pen. I only needed an eraser when I hit difficult. I never finished a difficult puzzle because I didn’t like the idea of guessing the value of a square and seeing what happened and then backtracking if I was wrong. This was my first clue that a general solution to the problem may not be trivial.

So, when I returned home I decided to write a little Sudoku solver in Java. I didn’t try to see if simple solutions were available on the web or what the complexity of the problem was; i just tried to solve it. The techniques I used were simply the same techniques I used to manually solve the puzzle which are generally known as Candidate Elimination. I used dynamic programming to speed things up and the solutions that were generated were generated instantly. The solver could solve the easy, mild, and difficult puzzles I fed to it. However, I could not solve all puzzles and at this time and I started to contemplate using a backtracking technique to solve puzzles (guess a value, see what happens, retry on failure).

I couldn’t bring myself to write such code because I knew that such a scheme would likely make the algorithm superpolynomial and I have no interest in writing such algorithms and hate the thought of doing so if some polynomial solution exists. I didn’t feel like trying to prove the problem NPC when Google is oh so close. Faced with this reality, I googled Sudoku and was greeted with the good news that, in the general case (nxn board), Sudoku is NP-Complete. Whew! I would have felt stupid if there was some clever dynamic programming algorithm to solve the problem.

So, with that news, I’ve ended my effort in writing a Sudoku solver because the mystery of an elegant solution has faded.

I (finally) started using del.icio.us and rearranged links on the sidebar on this page. Here’s my del.icio.us. I promise it will improve over time.

Sharing photos online has gotten a lot easier in the past few years due to the appearance of many photo sharing sites. My camera has grown old (Digital Elph s200) and I stopped putting photos online about two years ago. I used to use Apple’s .Mac which worked pretty nicely with iPhoto. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t really done much with the photo sharing portion of .Mac since I became a member at its inception over 4 years ago. Over this time, many sites have sprouted up to facilitate photo sharing and they the services offer slightly different sets of features catering to particular audiences.

I had largely ignored these differences until my wife got a new camera (new Elph). I just got married so now we have wedding and honeymoon photos to share. Here’s what I was looking for in a sharing site:

1. decent mac support: I refuse to upload images one at a time via some crummy web interface.
2. sale of high-quality prints: If I make an album, I’d like to allow anyone to buy prints at an affordable price.
3. support for modern web features: rss is cool
4. pleasant web interface: I’m a stickler for style

So, here were the sites I checked out and my thoughts:

1. Flickr: Every nerd’s favorite photo sharing site, they have great support for modern web technologies and an iPhoto plugin is available. I like a bit more structured organization and I have doubts about ease of use for the non-technical. Moreover, how can I easily purchase a 4×6 print for all of the photos in a set? To be really usable, you have to spend $25/year which seems fair to me. One thing I don’t like is that you can’t download the original image, only a lower resolution copy. Conclusion: great site for electronic sharing of photos but not necessarily suitable for use by mom.
2. Shutterfly: It’s free to upload as many photos to Shutterfly as you like. We purchased a ‘Save the Date’ card via Shutterfly and were satisfied. Pictures are uploaded as albums and the organization is straightforward. The dark side of the “it’s free to upload as much as you want” policy is the “we can advertise and coerce you to buy as much crap as possible” side effect. As far as I can tell, there is no support for rss. The appearance of the site is fairly ugly and the mac support is mediocre. I’m not sure there is any attempt to facilitate electronic sharing of photos unless you send someone a link to a gallery where they can view your photos in a browser and buy shit. Conclusion: okay for buying stuff but not much more.
3. Smugmug: For $40/year you can upload as much as you want and have a download cap of 6GB. Collections of photos can be easily organized into galleries and the look of galleries is very nice and can be customized. There is a functional mac uploader app. Users can easily purchase prints as they browse and add prints in bulk from a gallery. RSS feeds are provided and you can easily download and link original (or scaled) images from the site. Conclusion: awesome if you want to spend $40/year.
4. Snapfish: (see Shutterfly)
5. Picassaweb: I’ve heard great things about the Windows app Picasa and Google is ramping up a photo sharing site picasaweb. For the moment, it seems very basic. No support for buying prints or tagging. This google service is still in ‘Test’ status. Maybe someday it will enter ‘Beta’ status and be a bit more full-featured. Conclusion: promising but lacks the ability to buy prints, tag photos, or share and find photos from other users.

I forked over $40 and became a smugmug member. More galleries to come.

This phone apparently sucks. See that cool scroll wheel (just like the iPod!!!)? Turns out it’s a poorly designed four-directional pad.

Okay, WWAD (What would Apple do?). Let’s assume they’re designing a phone (which everybody believes they are). My guess is that they will attempt to minimize the number of buttons on the phone and perhaps have no buttons at all, just a screen that doubles as a keypad when you’re dialing. I’m not the first person to think of this idea. Synaptics has a concept phone that uses this kind of interface:

Still looks a little too cluttered but maybe that’s just the super-futuristic interface in the screenshot on the phone. Again, the following is not my original idea but I think Apple will make the screen the whole front of the phone and have the screen’s color match the case so that the screen effectively disappears into the phone when not in use. Apple could even make certain parts of the screen active so that the phone looks like an iPod (part of the screen acts as a scrollwheel, the top half acts as a display). Then, the user touches something and the relevant part of the phone becomes a keypad. Sound confusing? I’ve got faith that Apple can do it and others will copy it.