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Natalie and I use our 12" Apple Powerbook almost exclusively for home computing. The MP3 library that I brought to our relationship consists of about 36 gigabytes of music. We both have iPods, and wanted to sync them to a single library. Unfortunately, iTunes didn't support this out-of-the-box.

My UNIX experience told me that we could move the music files to a commonly-accessible directory and have each of our iTunes instances reference the files in that directory. That was cool, but it didn't address the problem of changing file contents. If I updated the name of a file, the change would not be reflected in Natalie's iTunes library. This sounded like a big inconvenience.

So, I settled on both of us having symbolic links to a single iTunes library. If one of the changed the name of a file, added new songs, etc., it would be reflected in the other's library. Perfect.

I found a couple of resources on the web that draw the same conclusion (http://captnswing.net/howto/itunes/). Hopefully others will have similar success!

Posted by Scott at 8:19 PM | Permalink

About 2 months ago, I purchased a new acoustic-electric guitar for use in the beginning-guitar class I'm taking at Monterey Peninsula College (MPC). I had asked Natalie's Dad for suggestions, and one of the guitar manufacturers he mentioned was Ovation. After doing some more research, I began to appreciate Ovation's interest in producing unorthodox, technologically-advanced guitar designs. I found a model I liked (Celebrity CC057) and bought the guitar and hardshell case online for about $380. I've been extremely pleased with the quality of workmanship and range of features. It's much more enjoyable to play and listen to than my old Yamaha dreadnought (need to sell it, ASAP). Here are a few photos I took yesterday of the beautiful finish on the Ovation guitar.

Posted by Scott at 8:43 AM | Permalink

I have used Gallery for hosting my photos on urlgrey.net in the past. However, it was a bit cumbersome to work with and didn't provide any interactive features for the rest of my website.

Enter Flickr, a wonderful, free (or subscription if you want more bandwidth) site for posting, commenting on, browsing, tagging and organizing photos. It has an enormous range of features that are unlike anything I've seen on any other commercial photo site.

I've included a Flickr photo bar on the side of my blog illustrating my most recent photos. This is something I could never have achieved with Gallery. But it only took a couple minutes with Flickr.

I highly recommend that anyone looking to post photos on the web consider using Flickr. And pay for the service, if you can. They certainly deserve it, in my opinion.

Posted by Scott at 3:58 PM | Permalink

I've been using iTunes for about 2 years now, since purchasing my third-generation iPod. I loved the fact that iTunes would update the ID3 meta-tags in media content automatically when modified through the GUI. This feature enabled me to introduce consistency into my ID3 tag values (artist, album, genre, etc).

However, I was long leary of letting iTunes manage the organization and name of media files on the file-system. I've got thousands of files that were meticulously organizing by hand over the years. I was terrified by the thought of letting a new and unknown application rearrange them. Once you've seen the ill-conceived devices that often lie behind metaphorical curtain, it's hard to bestow your trust to any magician who could easily wreck countless hours of effort. But things were getting out of hand, and I figured it might be worthwhile letting iTunes handle the least-pleasant aspect of maintaing any collection: content management.

Well, iTunes does a wonderful job of managing media files. So well, in fact, that I never even think to look through the directory containing my media files. I have no need to. This makes perfect sense in terms of application usability. I want to listen to a media file, and not be concerned with how it's stored on the file-system. The file-system is simply an artifact of how modern operating systems store content. I want to use content, not be bogged down with read, writing, moving, deleting files. This translates into a beautiful separation of concerns: the user focuses on using content, the application focuses on managing content in forms not pertinent to the user-experience.

Thanks, Apple, for doing it right! And with the ability to search and browse by ID3 meta-tag values, my media has much more dimension that it ever did through applications that relied on me to act as the bridge between application and file-system.

Posted by Scott at 3:35 PM | Permalink

I've been working on a project that has adopted a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. It's greatly affected the overall application architecture, largely for the better.

However, I have been occasionally perplexed by the problem of figuring out what protocol to use for inter-component communication. Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) are great for distributed native object interactions, but the Remote Method Invocation (RMI) protocol is not always network-friendly and has a bit of overhead. On the other hand, XML Web Services are very network-friendly, but don't provide the complex object interactions capable over RMI.

So, when do you use EJB and Web Services? I like both, but it irks me to have a heterogeneous architecture employing such different technologies. I have found a couple good resources throughout the process:
http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2004/05/soa_wilkes.html

Posted by Scott at 10:52 AM | Permalink

For months, I've been agonizing over the decision to buy a digital single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. I have a traditional film SLR which I've been pleased with for years. However, I've never the liked the variable image results and the expense film processing.

So, I'm hoping to purchase the Canon Digital Rebel 300d soon. It's not the latest consumer-level SLR from Canon, but provides all of the features I need. It accomodates all of the Canon EOS lens' (I have two) and can produce 6.3 mega-pixel images. I can't justify the extra $300 for the 2 mega-pixels of additional detail in the Canon Digital Rebel 350d.

Expect some more digital photos soon!

Posted by Scott at 9:11 AM | Permalink

I found a great tutorial for Movable Type while searching the web. I'm looking to customize the appearance of this blog as part of a site-wide overhaul.

Posted by Scott at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I occasionally read the 43 Folders website with the goal of finding new organizational gems. Today the gem came in the form of a link to another website when the author described their adaptations of the Hipster PDA.

First, they used a "pocket briefcase" for holding index cards. This seems like a great idea, and appears similar to how cell phone cases wrap the phone but still allow the user to interact with the device. I've been using a large paper clip to hold my index cards together. While it works well for the most part, occasionally the clip will slip off the cards and contribute to card chaos.

Second, they had all kinds of patterns printed on 3x5 cards using the standard printer configurations on their Mac. I recall seeing "3x5 card" as a paper layout on my Mac. I'll have to try printing out calendars or grid paper soon.

Posted by Scott at 1:10 PM | Permalink

On Monday we had Comcast Broadband Internet installed, along with cable television - hello 20th century. The downstream performance with cable internet is marketed as being 4.0 Mb/s. We saw about 3.1 Mb/s while the technician was performing the installation, which more than exceed my wants or expectations. Our old DSL line delivered a steady 1.5 Mb/s downstream, which was great.

But last night (Tuesday), web browsing performance ground to a halt. I haven't experienced such lag since dial-up. After performing some ping's and traceroute's, I figured that the delay originated in the hostname lookup. Hostname translation involves querying a Domain Name Service (DNS) server to obtain the Internet Address (IP) of the host in question. This operation occurs a lot during web browsing, since most popular websites include content served from multiple hosts. So why was hostname lookup taking so long (>100ms, or timeout)?

I googled the problem and learned that many Comcast users complained of similar problems. The Comcast DNS servers generally have horrible response times, particular during peak residential hours (5-10P during week). Most of those who responded remedied the problem by statically setting their DNS server IPs to other provider's DNS servers rather than using the Comcast DNS servers set during the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) client registration. I've been using the Verizon DNS servers, since they yield consistently better performance:

• 4.2.2.2


• 4.2.2.3

Comcast, what's the story? How could such horrible DNS performance be 'ok' with a residential broadband provider? Most of their customers use broadband strictly for web browsing. Browsing response times are critical to customer/user satisfaction. Hopefully they'll improve DNS performance soon.

Posted by Scott at 1:47 PM | Permalink

I have been a Quicken user since 2001, and have grown to appreciate its usefulness for aggregating and reporting on spending and investing activities. From 2001 to 2004, I used Microsoft Windows for most of my work at home. However, in the summer of 2004 I purchased an Apple Powerbook. I have gradually ported my information from the PC to my Powerbook, with the greatest problems being my MP3 collection and Quicken.

So, in February 2005 I purchased Quicken 2005 for Mac OS X. I had read reviews on Amazon, and they weren't very flattering. Nonetheless, I figured it was worth evaluating. My immediate reaction was that the reviews were correct: it sucked. I can't import data from most of the institutions supported on the PC version. The user interface is completely different. As are the standard reports.

Two months later, I'm still using Quicken on my Powerbook simply because I don't want to be inconvenienced with balancing my life between two operating systems. But I really miss Quicken on the PC. Hopefully the Mac product will improve in future releases. In meantime, I caution anyone looking to migrate from the PC version to the Mac version.

Posted by Scott at 8:28 PM | Permalink