davextreme: September 2005

I ran across this link today, featuring a PHP script that lets you download music videos from the iTunes Music Store. Cool. Apple’s put a lot of music videos up, and now I can download them onto my machine and watch them whenever I want.

But wait? Why the hell do I need to hack together a script to do this? It’s always bothered me with their Quicktime Movie Trailer repository. Here’s a page full of ads I’m willing to watch voluntarily, yet they¹ don’t let me download them. Letting me download movie previews would let me watch them whenever I want, and do so without using up Apple’s bandwidch, near-infinite though it may be. The same goes for music videos. They don’t really sell them, unless you count the occasional collection of a band’s entire videography. Are record labels worried that free, high-quality downloads of videos will put MTV out of business (as if they showed more than four hours of videos a day anyway)? It’s rare that people are willing to watch your ads on purpose. Music videos and movie trailers are lucky exceptions that the entertainment industry has somehow achieved. Seems that among the very long list of things that entertainment executives are too stupid² to understand, this is another.

I’m conflating Apple and the entertainment industry here a little bit. Either could be the culprit for not giving you the option to download the files. I’d be willing to bet that some idiot executive(s) and/or lawyer(s) stipulated that Apple would only be allowed to provide the content if they locked out downloading, but it’s also possible that Apple did it on purpose to promote their idiotic Quicktime Pro strategy. “Hey look, if you spend $30, we’ll unlock features that our product should have for free! Then you can download these files that are already cached on your machine!” ↩
Note that when I say “stupid” and “idiotic”, I mean that they’re being idiots to treat their customers like idiots. I’m sure it’s making them some money, but I think in the long run is the reason most people don’t have any moral qualms bootlegging CDs and DVDs. If the entertainment industry showed more thanks for our business, we might care a little bit more. ↩

Would You Play The Bait Shop?

Responses of a bunch of bands when asked if they’d play on The OC if asked.

NEWSARAMA - DUNST: VENOM & SANDMAN IN SPIDEY 3

Oh man Venom. Could be great, unlike how he actually is in most of the actual comics.

25 September 2005

A Bit Part I Never Played

My dad discovered that I apparently played the part of an intern on this week’s Lost. I’m guessing it’s this guy.

The CulturePulp Q&A: Joss Whedon

Long interview about Serenity and such.

23 September 2005

Make Your Own Kind of Music

I could probably come up with lots to say about the season premier of Lost, but I’ll hold off for a few episodes before going crazy about it. Watching it both allayed and heightened my fear that they aren’t going to be able to keep the quality of the show up. It’s a fallacy to assume that the longer something doesn’t happen, the more likely it is to happen, but I can’t see how they’re going to stay at this level. Fortunately, as Alias showed in seasons two and three, J. J. Abrams is entirely willing to make huge changes to his shows as soon as or even before the storytelling gets stale (though admittedly last season did disappoint a bit).

'Bride' Stripped Bare

‘Bride’ Stripped Bare

Neat. Corpse Bride was shot on Canon Digital SLRs and editing in Final Cut Pro.

Backpack: NEW FEATURE: Recurring reminders

Fantastic. Think I’ll set a reminder to put in birthday reminders…

Project Comet

If this is going to work like I think, I’ve been looking for it for a long time. Seems like a LJ-style “friends page” for non-LJ pages.

21 September 2005

Revolution Teaser Video

I think I’m buying the hype about their new controller. A good game-maker could do some clever things with this.

Harry Potter and the double helix

Scientists suggest that wizard family trees make a good way to teach genetics.

Dead Man's Float

Dead Man’s Float

Why are bodies in the water always facedown?

19 September 2005

Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy: Thoughts on the Revolution's new controller

Nintendo’s Genre Innovation Strategy: Thoughts on the Revolution’s new controller

Good observations here. Nintendo seems very willing to take risks, and I agree that’s important to keep gaming fresh.

16 September 2005

The Plague

So apparently in World of Warcraft there’s a plague spell that Hakkar, the boss of the new dungeon Zul’Gurub, casts on players. It does a reasonable amount of damage every 2 seconds, and spreads to nearby allies. Though it was obviously intended to just be a part to make the fight against Hakkar more challenging, a player managed to get our of the dungeon and inside a city while infected, and now the entire city is has the plague! NPCs are getting it and dying, but not before passing it to other NPCs. Low-level players who can’t survive it can’t even entire the town. Of course, Blizzard didn’t see it coming, so now they’re I’m guessing laughing really hard instead of trying to figure out a way to fix it.

[This, sadly, is not my screenshot. If it hits my server I will try to snap one.]

Update: they tried to fix it over the weekend but couldn’t:

It appears that the hotfix remedy concocted to combat the recent Azerothian outbreak has not yielded desired results. At this time, our medical staff is continuing to develop an effective cure. We look forward to ensuring the health and vitality of the citizens of Azeroth in the near future.

Revolution Controller Finally Revealed

Interesting.

14 September 2005

"Seperate but Equal" Education for Katrina Evacuees

I can see this creating horrible ghettos full of evacuees who aren’t getting good education and can’t make money to move away:

The Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will ask Congress to waive a federal law that bans educational segregation for homeless children. The Bush administration is arguing, along with states like Utah and Texas, that providing schooling for evacuees — who, in this case, are likened to homeless children — will be disruptive to public school systems, so they want to have sound legal backing for creating separate educational facilities for the 372,000 schoolchildren displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The State of Mississippi is opposed to waiving the Act because they argue the law helps evacuees enroll in schools without red tape. (Think Progress)

I’m sure if I had a better grasp on history I could point to very similar circumstances where this has gone awry in other countries. We’re lucky not to have major disasters as often, but I think we can do better.

The Greatest Games of All Time: Final Fantasy II

They’re right about the storytelling. This was one of the first games to do it right.

13 September 2005

TiVo 7.2 OS Adds Content Protection, Blocks Transfers, and Auto-Deletes Some Show

TiVo 7.2 OS adds content protection, blocks transfers, and auto-deletes some shows | PVRblog

Is calling this “heartbreaking” over the top? It really upsets me that they’re caving like this.

12 September 2005

UVA Computer Science: The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia

Kottke linked to this today. Guess I heard about it years ago in Charlottesville because I was connected by a small number of degrees to the programmer.

How My Life Became a Game

How my life became a game

Kevin Bacon on the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game.

On Redesigning Icons, Superman and Politics...

On redesigning icons, Superman and politics… (plasticbag.org)

The Ten Stupidest Utopias

It’s like they wrote an article just for me to enjoy.

DHTML Lemmings

Play Lemmings in your web browser.

08 September 2005

Cookies

Katherine and I got chinese food last night (the usual: chicken lo-mein and hunan bean curd). Our cookies both had the same fortune in it. I’m not sure quite what to make of that.

del.icio.us and TypePad

A few years ago I wrote an entry about how to merge two TypePad weblogs onto one page so that you can have a “sideblog” with links in it. That method should still work, as does a Links TypeList, but I’m using del.icio.us to do it nowadays.

As a Sideblog

If you’d like your links to appear on the sidebar of your site, use this option.

First, create a free del.icio.us account and post a few links.
Within TypePad, select the weblog you want to use, go to the Design section, and click on “Change Content Selections” to select items in your sidebar.
Under “Feeds”, click “Add a new feed”.
In the pop-up box, enter:
http://del.icio.us/username
where username is whatever you chose for del.icio.us.
Choose how many items you want in your sidebar, and press “Save”.

As Daily Posts

You can set del.icio.us to make a daily post with all the links from the last 24 hours.

Log into del.icio.us, and go to:
http://del.icio.us/settings/username/daily
where username is your del.icio.us account name.
Click “add a new thingy”.
Enter the following:
- jobname: any name you’d like. I used “typepad”.
- outname: the name of your weblog, as it appears in TypePad.
- outpass: your TypePad password.
- outurl: http://www.typepad.com/t/api
- outtime: the hour of day you’d like the links posted, in GMT. 0=midnight GMT, 23=11 PM GMT.
- outblogid: Your TypePad blog ID. If you go into TypePad and select your weblog, the URL will look like this:
  https://www.typepad.com/t/app/
  weblog/manage?blogid=somenumber
  Enter in the number at the end.
- outcatid: The ID of the category you’d like to publish into. I haven’t gotten this to work, but it works fine without it.
Press “Submit Query”.

You’ll have to wait until your out_time to see if it worked, but once it does it’ll post an entry every 24 hours containing all the new links you’ve entered into del.icio.us.

Pros and Cons

Both approachs have their virtues. Using a sideblog keeps links out of the main flow of your posts, which is nice if you want to seperate what you write from what you link to. It also keeps links out of your XML feed. Readers who want to read your links can subscribe to your del.icio.us feed, but people reading your TypePad feed will continue to just get “real posts” you’ve written.

Using digest posts is good if you’d prefer to keep everything in one column. The daily post method will put the links into your feed, so anyone reading your feed will get everything on your site. If you don’t post entries that often, but you post links every day, this’ll keep content flowing on your site, which might be a good thing. On the other hand, it may also mean that your page will be filled mostly with links to things instead of full posts, and some people don’t like to be reminded about how prolific they’re not.

iTunes 5 Look-and-Feel: What Do You Think?

iTunes 5 look-and-feel: what do you think?

Discussion about the new look of iTunes on Inessential. It may grow on me, but my first impression is a negative one.

05 September 2005

Sleepy Dexterity

I always put two pillowcases on my pillows, one facing one way, the other the other way, so that the zipper is never exposed, nor is any part of the real pillow. Having two cases on there makes me feel like the pillow is protected enough that the fact you can’t wash pillows isn’t a problem.

Saturday morning I woke up and my pillow only had one case on it. Somehow, during my sleep, I managed to pull off one of the pillowcases. The inner one. At some point in the night I was able to pull of only the inner pillow case but leave the outer one on. WTF?

02 September 2005

New Orleans / 2005 Hurricane Katrina

Before and after satellite images of New Orleans.

Rubik's Cube Solver

Rubik’s Cube Solver

Enter in your cube’s current setup and get the solution.

Gmail Notifier for Macs

gCount stopped working recently. Good to see this out.

01 September 2005

What We Can Learn From George Romero About Surviving Disasters

It’s as if the AP has never seen a zombie movie. (Here’s one of those news pieces from a source of the fifth kind.) Convention cleary has it that, in a disaster, you’re specifically allowed to break into:

Grocery stores, to get food,
Gun stores, to get weapons,
General stores, for other supplies and weapons,
Gas stations, to gas up your (possibly stolen) vehicle and get sweets to eat if you skipped number 1, and
Malls, for safe harbor and amusing montages where you’re watching large televisions, playing with sports equipment, and sleeping on very large beds.

Not a single horror movie to my knowledge has ever condemned people for such things. In disaster situations, society pretty much thinks it’s okay to break and enter for your own safety. Who’s going to argue with this?

Apparently the Associated Press. If you’re white, you “find” food in a grocery store. If you’re black, you “loot” it.

Interestingly, there’s lots of stuff in Night of the Living Dead and its sequels about race. Black characters are heroes and white people get eaten. The smartest zombie movies have lots to say about how civilized society breaks down in crises. The horrifying thing is to me is that there are times, like now in New Orleans, where stuff like this actually happens. Turns out you don’t need a plague of undeath. Just lots of rain.

Salon.com News |"Looting" or "finding"?

Salon.com News | “Looting” or “finding”?

Salon does a little bit of research on the issue.