Dave Winer points to an article by Cory Doctorow about how Apple broke the iPod Download plugin in the iTunes 4.7 release:
'Apple just devoted some expensive engineering hours to updating iTunes to version 4.7, with the "improvement" of breaking iPod Download. That's right — Apple's spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod. Thanks a whole lot, Apple.'
He also has provided some "pre-rebuttal", in anticipation of the responses that he thinks he will get. What he's failed to mention is that the iPod Download plugin most likely didn't adhere to the iTunes licence agreement, as well as that of the plugin SDK. As a result, Apple had the right to force sites to take down copies of the iPod Download plugin, and since that didn't work completely, to prevent it working with iTunes. It might also be important to consider the legal ramifications of allowing the plugin to continue to work with iTunes, since it effectively allows a user to (potentially) pirate thousands of songs, using Apple's own software.
Besides, is it that big a deal if you can't use iTunes to grab songs off an iPod? There's plenty of third party software that does the job (and more): iPodRip (disclaimer: I work for the company that makes iPodRip), PodWorks and iPod.iTunes. Apple has also made no attempts to stop them (and I doubt they will).
On a similar note, Michael over at the darkerside to rants suggests that Apple changed the format of the XML files used to store data on the iPods. I doubt this is the case, as iPodRip still works after using iTunes 4.7 with my iPod. (UPDATE: It is come to my attention that the iPod and iTunes database files are not stored as XML, but rather some other format.)
I saw an article printed on Lucy's fridge last night (it's a habit of her Mum's), entitled "Faith and Patriotism", which was published in the New York Times on the 22nd October, 2004. (It's mirrored at that Free Republic site, as the NYTimes forces you to pay for it…)
Continue reading 'Faith and Patriotism'
Here are some other opinions on the iPod Photo (and Video) from around the web…
Continue reading 'Some more on the iPod Photo (and Video)'
Subversion 1.1 has been out for over a month now, but svn 1.1.1 only just made it into Fink unstable the other day…
… and boy am I glad that it did (finally)! We've been having a couple of problems with the BerkeleyDB, in that it would sometimes just keel over, forcing me to try and recover it. Failing that, I'd have to restore from a backup or re-import the latest revisions. Ergh.
Subversion 1.1 brings a new storage filesystem, FSFS, which is supposed to be a lot less error-prone. Yay!
I found out how to convert the repositories from BDB to FSFS in a mailing list post, but here are the commands (to make it easier):
NOTE: This involves creating a brand new repository, so [NEW REPOSITORY] and [OLD REPOSITORY] cannot be the same.
svnadmin create --fs-type=fsfs [PATH]/[NEW REPOSITORY]
svnadmin dump [PATH]/[OLD REPOSITORY] > old.dmp
svnadmin load [PATH]/[NEW REPOSITORY] < old.dmp
mv [PATH]/[OLD REPOSITORY] [PATH]/[OLD REPOSITORY]-bdb
mv [PATH]/[NEW REPOSITORY] [PATH]/[OLD REPOSITORY]
That's it! (The last line move the old repository out of the way and the new one to the old position.)
Brent Simmons has an idea for an app to make it easy to share files between computers:
"If you're in an office or at a conference, making files available to other people can be a pain. Yes, you could use the built-in file-sharing or Apache, but there are too many steps for setting this up - and there are too many steps for people who want to download your files.
…
The problem here isn't that we lack file-sharing or web servers or networking: the problem is purely user interface. It's just plain too difficult to access machines that you don't access all the time.
…
So I imagine something very much like iChat's Rendezvous buddy list. It would list people - people with files you can download - who are available via Rendezvous. When you select a person, you see a list of files that they've made available. Double-click a file to download it to your desktop. (You might also have a file-centric view instead of a person-centric view. And a search field, of course.)"
This would be really handy… Although, it would be nice to have Bluetooth support in it as well. I don't know if Bluetooth supports anything like that, but it would be nice. (It's also easier if you're not connected to a WiFi network. It's also a pain to setup an ad-hoc WiFi network and get people around to connect to it.)
It would also be nice (although how feasible, I don't know) to have a Windows version of the app. Transferring files between my computer and my flatmate's Thinkpad is a chore. If I could just open up the app on his machine and copy the files over through a simple interface, it would be excellent.
Do I have the time currently to work on it? Not really. 
One commenter (rayg) posted a link to Liason, which provides an iTunes-like interface to it. It seems OK, but I imagined something that didn't take up as much space as that. (It also looks like it hasn't been updated in a while.)
"Bin Laden Issues Warning To U.S." - Aljazeera.net also has excerpts of an English translation of the video. While I don't agree with the methods that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have used (at all), I do think they have a right to be pissed off.
Someone has been comment spamming my blog for the past day or two, and so far there's been about 30 comments that have been posted. Thankfully, WP-Blacklist has automatically deleted every one of them, but it's still very, very annoying.
The IPs of the machines that are doing this are also quite different, so it looks like someone is taking advantage of some machines to do the spamming.
Argh.
(Thanks to Mat P. for the link) A LiveJournal user was recently paid a visit by the Secret Service after making a satirical post about George W. Bush. Apparently she was "dobbed in" by another LiveJournal user, which is pretty rude. You'd think someone could tell if they were being serious or not (or else theiy're just plain vindictive).
Paul Thurrott responds to Russell Beattie's post on why Steve Jobs is wrong about mobile video.
The Sydney Morning Herald and New York Times have articles on a new species of humanoids that has been found on an island near Australia.
