"Back in my day..."

The people complaining about the iPad not having Flash sound a lot like the people complaining when the original iMac was released without a floppy drive. The product is going to fail, how can people get along without such a requisite technology, etc.

Well, people did, and finding a computer with a floppy drive has become rather difficult these days. Flash is a resource-hogging, bloated security risk on computers these days, and while technologies like HTML5 might not be a complete solution just yet, Apple leaving Flash off of such devices as the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad are a nudge in the correct direction.

Just spent the entire day trying to track down a bug that was haunting a work script only to find that the file I was working on in Perl had Mac linebreaks.

Fixing that solved the problems immediately.

Do not ask me why an OS X program is spitting out data files with Mac linebreaks, but...

Just a quick question: Why does MobileMe (nee .Mac) not offer developers a quick and easy API for backing up data to the user's iDisk? The corresponding restore API would be nice, as well.

I am generally thinking of configuration and preferences files, not necessarily user data.

So an application run for the first time could check to see if the user has a MobileMe account and, if so, see if there is a backup already saved to the iDisk. A quick prompt to see if the user wants to restore the data and POOF! - the data is back.

I realize Apple is pushing Time Machine, but this does not help with offsite backups, and nothing short of making sure you backup /Library and ~/Library with it can you guarantee you are backing up configuration files. Even then, there is no easy way of knowing which preferences file you need to restore with Time Machine.

On 5 October 1993, I sent an email message from a Macintosh computer using Eudora, a mail client licensed by Cornell University for its students to use. This was not the first time I had done this. I had been at Cornell for over a month by the time this event occurred, and had been emailing regularly. What made this message different is that I saved it, moved it to my main computer at the time, and therefore still have it in my main mail client's mailboxes today.

I had been sending and receiving emails for at least two years by this date in the fall of 1993, but most of them have been lost to the sands of time.

This message has made its way through at least five different computers, countless versions of Eudora, and now OS X's Mail.app.

It is joined by about 5000 other outgoing messages saved on my main computer now, and probably well over 15,000 incoming messages.

How far the Internet has come in those same fifteen years, but email stays as it always has.

I have been without a television for several months now, so I have resorted to downloading episodes of shows I want to see. In the past I used Azureus and its RSS handling abilities. As the program has grown into the Vuze monstrosity, I have been moving over to other things if possible.

The first step was moving to an RSS downloader to automatically download .torrent files. With minimal work I got RSSDler working. Great, so now I have a folder full of .torrent files.

I tried several command-line BitTorrent clients, but I either could not get them installed or could not get them working effectively. rTorrent looks the most promising, but I never could get it to work. I will have to give it another try soon. The other option would be cTorrent, although I am not sure cTorrent supports a watch-folder, so a little more work would have to go into getting that to work.

In the meantime I have continued to use Azureus, set to watch the folder RSSDler is downloading to. It works, but moving to a non-GUI client would be nice.

So more work on the UPnP server today. One big annoyance has been that Twonky would not correctly import my iTunes playlists. I finally sat down and hacked my own solution to this.

Some parts that went into this: A little bit of XSLT and Saxon to process the XML using the XSLT.

At first I thought I would have to generate Twonky style .playlist files, but Twonky will correctly show the original .m3u files if you just point it at a folder full of them. Easy enough!

Next was on to video sorting. I DVR a lot of television shows, and while I previously worked on a solution to get Twonky to work well with the scheme eyeTV uses for its recordings, I still ended up with a huge list of videos. I would have to skip through twenty or so episodes of "Boston Legal" to get to the first episode of "Chuck", for example.

In a very quick five minutes I got the script to not only create the well-named symlinks to the original eyeTV recordings, but also auto-generate folders to contain any series it finds. This means that all of the episodes of "Boston Legal" end up in a "Boston Legal" folder, and that means I only have to skip past *one* folder to get to episodes of "Chuck".

The plan is to eventually get some of these scripts (and maybe some better documentation) online.

So at work we had been waiting the release of Leopard Server so we could roll out a solution to a large customer of ours. The customer needs the ability to coordinate calendars, addresses, and other information.

So this week we have been doing a roll-out of Leopard Server, including iCal Server, LDAP, Open Directory, mail, DNS, and everything else.

Last week we migrated our internal server over to Leopard Server as well. We have been slowly turning on services, as well as using it as a test bed for the rollout.

A couple of things learned:
1) Mail can be a complete pain. For some reason the server was rejecting all incoming mail traffic for no real reason.
2) DNS, all in all, was not too terribly difficult to set up.
3) An Airport Extreme Base station cannot do NAT without also doing DHCP.
4) Finding a PCI ethernet card that is Leopard compatible could be almost impossible these days.
5) iCal Server works. For the most part. One thing you quickly learn is that iCal the application and the group calendaring are two entirely different things. We eventually learned that you can subscribe to a group calendar from within iCal. In the "Accounts" pane of iCal's preferences, instead of relying on Auto for the Account URL, enter http://server.example.com:8008/principals/groups/groupname/. This will allow you to view and even edit the group calendar from within iCal. You end up with two calendars - your private calendar stored on the server, and your group calendar. Makes sense in the end, but confusing at first. We have not played around with the wiki server just yet.
6) LDAP works. The addition of the Directory Utility and the Directory.app application make this much nicer. One bug we have run into so far: phone number and email addresses, at least, will not show up in OS X's Address Book application (in the Directory group) if the contact was created on the server with the Directory application. Most other information, though, does get transferred over. A workaround is to create the contact in Address Book and drag it into Directory.app. I assume this is a bug in the contact creation portion of Directory.app. I did not have enough time to research what was going on.
7) SSL breaks mail. We have the web service working with SSL, but as soon as we turned it on on our test server, it immediately boots every IMAP connection off (expected) and then never lets them reconnect (unexpected). On the customer's machine, turning on SSL caused all incoming mail to cease.

More to come, but that is my experience with Leopard Server so far. So far a little easier to work with than Tiger Server, but definitely has its share of bugs.

So a while back I purchased a Buffalo LinkTheater PC-P3LWG/DVD, which is a UPnP media device. For any Mac-heads out there, think about it as a really cheap version of the Apple TV.

The device requires a UPnP server running on a computer to stream the media to the device. There are a few contenders under OS X - EyeConnect, from el gato (the makers of my DVR); MediaTomb, a GPL UPnP server; and TwonkyMedia, a commercial application from a company in Germany.

I originally tried EyeConnect since it should be the most integrated with EyeTV, the DVR software I use. Indeed, EyeConnect was the easiest to set up and worked fairly well. However, I was using my iMac - my primary machine, as my server, and noticed a speed hit when the server was running. A little research turned up the fact that the EteConnect software was regularly using between 450 and 600 MB of real memory on my machine. This was completely unacceptable.

I emailed el gato and got a prompt response:

Thank you for contacting Elgato Systems.

I think the behavior you've seen is typical for EyeConnect - similar readings were on my Mac here.

I can't say if it's incorrect, but I've passed on your comments to our engineers.

They can let me know if it's just how OS X is managing memory, or if it's something that we'll need to fix.

Hopefully I can get a report back in a few days.

Now, their EyeTV software, which is a pretty feature-filled DVR software? Uses between about 50 and 60 MB of real memory while running. A server daemon, running in the background, though, was using ten times that amount? Unacceptable.

Next on my list to try was MediaTomb. MediaTomb had the right price (free), but after three days I could never get it to see my MP4's as the correct mime type, so it was nixed. Configuration was completely unacceptable, as well.

Last night I finally broke down and purchased TwonkyMedia. A little bit of configuring and I had it serving up my recorded MPEG2 content, along with my ripped MPEG4 content. So far I have not gotten the hierarchy on the device where I want it, but at least I can enjoy the media.

Oh, and a point of comparison: MediaTomb was regularly using between 6 and 7 MB of real memory, and TwonkyMedia leads the way with between 3 and 4 MB of real memory used. That is right, 100 times less.

I sent off another email to el gato. I am curious to see if I get a response back. I will write more when I finally get TwonkyMedia set up correctly with my media hierarchy.

A little bit ago the Thunderbird/Eudora group, Penelope, released Eudora 8.0.0b1.

I downloaded it and was somewhat disappointed. Wait, scratch the word "somewhat" from that last sentence. I was out and out disappointed. Now, I realize this is the first public beta, and the new Eudora still has a long way to go, but... it still has a long way to go, and based on what I saw in the beta, that route will probably not take it to the mail client I am waiting for.

I have been using Eudora for 14 years now. I am now faced with a decision - do I wait for the new Eudora, which may not be what I want it to be, or do I start making the migration over to OS X's Mail.app? Do I go over to another third-party email app instead?

In other news, I finally installed the Safari 3.0 beta. I use Safari as my primary browser (with Camino used as a compatibility backup for sites that break under Safari). So far everything has gone well. I have only used it for an hour or so, but I have not seen any issues yet, and a couple of minor bugs I ran into with the older version seem to be gone.

In addition, I also finally installed iLife '08. I had resisted due to some of the setbacks I had seen in some of the programs I use the most, iMovie and iPhoto. With the new .1 releases of these programs, though, I think at least some of these issues have been resolved.

Besides, I definitely need to start working with these programs more, if for no other reason than I need to learn them for my job. iPhoto is still somewhat bothering me. I cannot quite put my finger on it, but... As someone with almost 17,000 photos stored in iPhoto, distributed among almost 500 events, I am glad to say that viewing events is pretty nice. I thought it would bog a bit on my machine (Core Duo iMac), but it is acceptably quick.

The DVR solution needs some serious work. More on that at a later time, though. In the meantime, know that I recently purchased a Buffalo LinkTheater PC-P3LWG/DVD (as one reviewer stated, "ask for it by name!"). I picked it up cheap, and while I am currently having some issues with it, it might be a part of a better solution.

Some of you know that for a while now I have been developing a web-based interface to eyeTV. The idea solution would allow me to not only schedule recordings from any machine but, more importantly, to also program in a "Season Pass"-like ability.

For those not in the TV-geek crowd, about the best way to get television listing data was in an XML format from zap2it.com. Zap2it.com offered these listings free of charge for hobbyist use such as the rinky-dink program I was developing.

I had gotten the coding done for retrieving the data and getting it into a format to allow me to start coding the "record this" and "Season Pass this" part of the project. A couple of weeks ago, though, zap2it.com announced that effective 1 Sept. 2007 they would no longer provide these listings free of charge.

Now I am faced with a decision - do I start paying whatever zap2it is going to charge for listings, do I try to recode the project using whatever free EPG data I can get online (including possibly figuring out how to get EPG XML data from titantv.com, a site I do have a free account with), or do I completely rethink the project, trying to use the data that the eyeTV software already has.

Anyway, there are no easy answers at this point. I just wanted to rant a bit.