We are living in interesting times. I like to call them iTimes because we are surrounded by iThings: iPods, iTunes, iPhones, iMacs, iLife and other iStuff.
I hope to use this space to talk about our collective journeys and experiences in this internet age. Things are changing rapidly and it has been somewhat magical to watch the advancement of technology into so many aspects of our lives. Who could think of living life without the many gadgets that have become a part of who we are? I know that I feel naked if I find myself without my iPod or my Palm. My children can barely imagine a life without home computers (our first computer arrived shortly before our first child), microwave ovens, calculators or VCRs. Now that the internet is into its teenage years, I wonder what the next generation will be taking for granted. All of these things were just being invented as I was growing up, but have always existed as far as my kids are concerned.
April 28, 2008
Because of a potential project at work, I have been doing some research on wikis to see how they compare to Knowledge bases and whether they may be applicable to what we want to accomplish. The first thing that surprised me is how old the wiki phenomenon is. Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki, which he called WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and published a web site using it in March of 1995. Wikipedia, which is probably the best known wiki, was created in 2001. Most of the top rated wiki software is open source and built on other open source technologies such as PHP and mySQL.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of a wiki is that it is easily maintained using only a web browser. Unlike Apple's Hypercard application which was one of the inspirations for WikiWikiWeb, creating links between pages is intuitive and almost completely automatic. A link is created simply by typing the target page's name in a particular fashion. You can even create the link first and the wiki software provides a simple mechanism to create the linked page. The exact syntax depends on the individual wiki's implementation. One of the simplest is Ward's original use of CamelCase.
In my travels I came across TiddlyWiki, which I think is the most clever, simple and elegant wiki implementation. It does not even require a web server, let alone a database. This wiki reduces the concept to the size of a single web page. Instead of a collection of linked web pages, a TiddlyWiki is a single page made up of individual "tiddlers" that can be shown, hidden and edited at will using only HTML, CSS and Javascript.
If you are the least bit curious about wikis and their potential, you really ought to try it out.
DustyMac
March 29, 2008
Yes, It's been a while since I wrote. There are two reasons for this:
- I was on vacation
- Nothing is going on in the tech world that has so inspired me to write about it (well, besides the release of Return to Dark Castle).
So I have decided to write about how I use smart playlists in iTunes to make my listening time more enjoyable and nearly automatic.
 iTunes' smart playlists are a feature that has gradually improved to the point that I wonder now how I ever lived without them. The screen shot to the left shows a subset of my current playlists. The addition of folders to organize your playlist has been wonderful as I can now hide away the playlists that I rarely use and not have to scroll through them (the iPod uses these folders the same way). One drawback of the way iTunes does playlists is that you cannot mix AND (all) and OR (any) conditions in a single playlist. You can, however make playlists dependent on each other and that allows you to work around the limitation. This is why I have the four Constructor Playlists you see in the list; they are used to build other playlists.
The first playlist I'll discuss is Exclusions. This playlist will hold all the stuff that I don't want to hear currently (like Christmas music the rest of the year). This then becomes a basis for the other constructors:
Each of the Unrecent playlists controls how frequently I hear songs of various ratings. This ensures that I hear songs I like a lot more often than song I like a little. The example above is for 5 Star Songs (My absolute favourites). The Main playlist then combines all of these playlists together along with new songs (which are characterized by the fact that they have not yet been rated):
This playlist is like my ultimate radio station. You've heard about the No Repeat Workday, right. Well this really is. I am guaranteed to hear only the songs I like and only as often as I like and all I have to do to change a song's playing frequency is to change its rating (which is easy as pie on the iPod).
The last playlist I'll discuss is one I use for controlling my Podcasts. The iPod is fabulous for listening to Podcasts, but I find locating podcasts to be a bit too much work for my lazy brain. My Podcasts playlist does all the hard word of thinking for me and presents all my unheard podcast in a logical order for easy consumption. Here it is:
Pretty simple, eh? The real key to this playlist is the sort order. If you look in the background, behind the Smart Playlist dialog, you'll see that the playlist is sorted by Release Date. In order to get this column to show up, go to View > View Options... in the menu to add or remove metadata columns. With this Sort order, the first podcast in the list is always the oldest unheard podcast. If I don't want to think, I'll just play the first entry in the list, which will disappear as soon as I finish listening to it. If I feel rebellious, I'll scroll down to find one that catches my fancy.
This is by no means an exhaustive discussion of the possibilities and I am certainly not the first one to write about this. In fact, this is based on an idea posted some time ago by another blogger who, I'm sorry to say, I'm too lazy to go looking for now. If it's you, let me know and I'll happily give you direct credit.
DustyMac
February 22, 2008
Having been a Mac user since 1986, one of the things that always excited me was the enthusiastic small developer community that rallied around this great machine. This spirit has somehow managed to weather the downtimes in the nineties when everyone was saying Apple was dead and the press couldn't seem to report on the company without preceeding the company name with the dreaded doom-word, "beleaguered" as in, "Popularity of New OS 8 Mac Software Gives Beleaguered Apple a Best Seller." This is the spirit that has brought such wonderful Mac-only applications such as Delicious Library, BBEdit and Transmit to name but a few. I have been experiencing a return to the giddy early days of the Mac thanks to my recent discovery of Uli's Moose. This application is a wonderfully faithful recreation of the original Talking Moose that has been developed with the blessing of the original creator, Dr. Steven Halls. This ground-breaking software made hilarious use of Apple's advanced text-to-speech engine. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article:
From the historical perspective of technology evolution, the version 1 Talking Moose in 1986 was the first animated-face talking agent on a system-wide basis for a personal computer. Version 2 in 1987 was the first animated-face talking agent with lip synchronization to its speech. It became the seed idea for future talking agents, such as Clippy the paperclip on Microsoft Windows, and Prody Parrot from Creative Soundblaster.
The moose has been happily telling me what time it is and spouting bits of geeky wisdom since I installed him just a few days ago. I like him so much that I still have him set to talk as frequently as his settings will allow. Do yourself a favour and download it now.
DustyMac
P.S. For those of you who haven't switched yet, there is a version for Windows XP.
February 10, 2008
Some of my favourite places (in no particular order):
Even though I've been using iPods for a few years, it was my wife, who just recently got an iPod, who turned me on to Podcasts. Now I'm spending almost as much time listening to them as to my music! Since I am the family grammar nazi, Grammar Girl's podcast has become one of my favourites. My other faves come from the institution that makes me love being a Canadian: CBC Radio. CBC's Radio 3 is a bit of an oxymoron in that it really isn't on the radio at all unless you count Sunday nights when it takes over Radio 2's airwaves. The best way to consume radio 3 content is via their great podcasts full of new, mostly independent, music. Radio 1 has some great podcasts too, including Search Engine, which is helping to fight for fair copyright law in Canada, and Spark, which covers tech trends.
DustyMac
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