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One thing which I’ve long wanted to do with my ipod was to easily keep it filled with a random selection of albums. Not songs. I don’t like listening to songs at random, likewise my squeezebox is most often used in “random mix album” mode (the only caveat being with albums fitting on two CDs – there’s an option to tell it to collapse multi-CDs albums in a single one, but while you want this for a concert spread on two CDs, it’s less useful on a boxed-set of 10).

So I wanted to have the same thing for my ipod, and the solution is simply a playlist which randomly selects albums. It’s actually very easy though not quite obvious.

As a digression, I was also looking for a way to automatically expire old mail in some folders under Mail.app. Again, no specific feature for this, but it’s very easily done with filtering rules. The common point in this is that a UI is kept simple by making some of its features powerful enough that they can serve other purposes, rather than adding more features which would be rarely used. It’s a hard balance to strike, though. 

• it could use a cut’n paste method (though I have no idea how it could be implemented, as far as UI goes)
• it doesn’t sync the known wifi networks with your mac – shame. Another overlook I wouldn’t be surprised Apple will fix in an upcoming firmware upgrade.
• the ipod side doesn’t seem to have a “random album” feature like my old ipod nano has, which is basically how I most often use it (i.e. “play a random record”)

So my iphone was finally activated on friday. First impression : it is cool. Just as damn cool as the demo videos show it to be. It feels like you’re in a Sci-Fi movie because of how amazingly well done it is.

There are a couple of lacks :

• notes are nice, but apparently there’s now way to access them outside of the phone. Well, that’s one thing even my first palm could do ten years ago . But it would be surprising that a future firmware upgrade wouldn’t provide a way to sync them with the notes on Mail (although this would mean a dependency on Leopard…).
• speaking of Mail, synchronising the todo’s would be good too. Again, for a future upgrade.
• in at least one case, it could use a clickwheel . More specifically, using the finger to navigate back and forth a video or a song is not very precise, if the item’s duration is above 10mn (quite common for podcasts).
• more generally, “old-fashioned” ipod navigation is still more practical while you’re in your car doing something else. But that’s a little drawback, really.

But ultimately this is, without contest, the best designed piece of hardware and software I’ve ever seen. Today I smiled when I first placed a call while listening to a podcast : just select the phone number, the podcast’s sound fades out, talk to whoever you’re calling, bla bla bla, hang up, the sound fades back in. I had seen it in the demos, but this is one of the things you actually marvel over when you experience it directly : “damn these guys are good”.

But what really marks the difference between any existing phone and the iphone is how you set up your voice mail : Enter your code. Confirm it. Record your message on the iphone (and not through it), listen and re-record as much as you need, press “ok”, and it sends the whole thing over to your provider. And that’s it. And you don’t have to meddle with one of those dreadful voice menus (“press 1 if you’re happy with your message, press 2 to record it…” *hurl*). Once I had done it, it just struck me : there’s nothing special here. That’s just how it should happen, and every other phone which forces you to go through a voice menu is retarded.

One last thing (pardon the pun) : following up on my previous post on the iphone’s potential as a universal remote, I confirm that driving my squeezebox with it works like a charm (just use the Nokia 770 skin until v7.0 of SlimServer – now renamed to SqueezeCenter is released, then you can install ipeng, a skin dedicated to the iphone, which depends on SqueezeCenter).

It’s not activated yet, there’s a 5 days delay to port my current phone number from SFR (my current provider) to Orange. Cédric had told me that he was sure I would not get one… Sorry, you were wrong .

Now on to some scripting to move my Treo contacts to my Macbook’s Addressbook.

OK, just quickly ranting about this :

KMail doesn’t have a spam filter, it’s supposed to integrate existing filters through its filtering system (there’s even an “antispam wizard” which automagically creates the right filtering rules). All these filters add a header to the message, therefore modifying it. Apply that to an IMAP inbox where the non-spam messages are kept in the inbox, and you get kmail re-uploading every single non-spam message after it’s been piped through the filter. And I can’t find a way to do it otherwise. Even worse, you have to create a “non-spam” folder to put the messages in, otherwise kmail refilters all messages every time you enter the inbox.

Now on top of that, there seems to be a funny bug that causes kmail to get stuck on a message, endlessly refiltering it, and re-uploading it to the “filtered” folder so by the time you cancel the filtering job (and, incidently, get kmail stuck in a state where it won’t display the content of any of your imap folders, forcing you to restart it) you find yourself with multiple copies of the same message in your “filtered” folder. Great.

This is already annoying enough – I’ve just (painfully, as usual) upgraded to Kubuntu 7.10, using KDE 3.5.8, and there’s no improvement of the situation – but since the bug happens only on large messages, I figured I could just add a filter rule on the message’s size. Oh, great, there’s one. Except it tests the message’s size in, wait for it… bytes. And you can’t change the unit, like to something a tad more useful like kb. Seriously, when was the last time you ever felt like you needed to filter your messages according to their size with a byte-level precision ? And good luck for Joe User who wants to filter between “large” and “normal” messages (pretty much what I want to do). Typically I want to let messages over 1Mb pass through. So I should enter a six digit number in that filter rule ? Now that’s convenient, counting zeroes. Love it.

But wait, it gets better. There are no less that 5 operators for that “size in bytes” rule. 5. “less that”, and “greater than”, of course, but also… “less than or equal”, “greater than or equal”, and of course… “equal”.

This is akin to sorting freight containers with a scale precise down to the gram. Not only some moronic coder actually thought it would be useful to have such a filter criteria available, this went undetected and has remained so for years.

Next time, a rant on the kubuntu upgrade, with a config script crashing silently causing me to do this at the command line level, and ending up with a partially functionning mouse (which used to work fine – now half of the buttons aren’t recognized, so no tilt wheel).

With the flurry of ground-shaking news rocking that darn old music industry which we all love to hate, predictions of impending doom abound.

I beg to differ.

Not that I think that Radiohead’s last stunt won’t have lasting consequences, no doubt it will, even more now as it seems they won their bet. But two things come to mind :

First, where have I already heard this story about an age-old Big Bad Industry being destroyed by the Good Guys ? Mmmh, lemme’ think… Proprietary Software vs. Free/Open Source software ? Or was it Big Media vs. bloggers ? In both previous cases, initial enthusiasm (bordering zealotery) eventually settled into a less glamourous but more realistic outcome : a mix of the old establishment and the new stuff.

In both cases too, a few high-profile successes (Linux, Apache, the Rathergate) were seen as the general case while they were in fact the exception. The vast majority of free software projects are redundant or useless or both, and the vast majority of news-oriented blogs are, well, embarassments. Let’s hope the signal/noise ratio in the Musicians vs. Music Industry battle rates higher.

Second, as it’s currently turning out, the situation of each band having its own online music outlet isn’t at all appealing. As Michael Parekh notes, the last thing you want is having to go to a different site for every band which album you want to get (said site will of course be hammered down at each new release, if the band is successful enough). I believe that’s the reason why Radiohead’s last album was still “illegally” downloaded so much. Parekh’s other comments on the hassle of managing mp3 (raise your hands those who regularly do backups of their music library, and who know exactly what to do to keep it when they’ll upgrade their machine) and legal music downloads in general echo my doubts on whether the CD will actually ever disappear. Files are volatile, and music fans need to have a tangible object to link them to their favorite stars, something with a logo on, basically .

In any case, it sure will be interesting to follow, hard to predict which new business model will make a big enough dent in the current one (or may be displace it as the main one). A little surprise there, as it’s been reported that Universal Music is examining the possibility of an ISP file sharing tax. That would more or less be akin to the “licence globale” which unfortunately failed here in France, mainly thanks to the lobbying of… Universal.

A while ago I looked into getting a universal remote. The plethoric choice can be broken down into two categories : cheap crap, or luxury items. There are a few models in between, but not many. And the luxury items, which almost look like tablet PCs seem to be the only “no hassle” choice (although various reviews indicate one needs to be cautious in his choice). However, I find these to be way too expensive for the service they give, but also to be potentially obsolete in the near future.

The reason I think so is that a growing number of home appliances have an embedded web UI. For geek gadgets like the Squeezebox, it’s a given. But with WiFi becoming more and more pervasive, I expect to see embedded web servers in TV sets and DVD players before too long (in mainstream models that is – I’m pretty sure it’s already there in some obscure ones). And once you have this, your universal remote is… your iphone or ipod touch (which are also expected to become common items). Makes sense, don’t you think ?

[edit - March 27th 2009 : 1.5 years later, John Biggs from the NY Times agrees with me. ]

I’ve been using Linux and contributing to the Free Software / Open Source community since 1995. Ever since Netscape opened the code of its (now dead) navigator back in 1998, thus giving much greater exposure to the concept of free software, pretty much every year has been touted as “the year Linux will get a foothold on the desktop. Although for a few years now, more people have started to notice the repeating trend.

I gave into that delusion myself back then, but should you ever come across someone who’s still buying into it, this should help sobering him up.

10 years gone by, and it’s barely ahead of Windows 98. Sheesh.

(that said, I still find coding for Rosegarden is fun ).

To follow up my previous post on svn/git : Linus has posted a pretty thorough explanation on why he thinks that decentralized SCMs work better than centralized ones. Contrary to his talk at google, this post actually convinced me of his point. Even though it doesn’t apply to all projects (not Rosegarden, for instance, since there aren’t enough developpers to justify this), I now understand what benefits a decentralized system brings in terms of flexibility, with almost no drawbacks indeed.

It really boils down to this : creating a branch and merging it anywhere (i.e. not just to the trunk) should be a trivial operation. Once you have this, branches become a much more useful and versatile tool, and you can start thinking your development from a different perspective.

Well, after months of wait and speculation, Canon finally announced the 40D. Specs look good, though I wish they’d look into a HDR sensor like the Fuji S5 Pro has. I don’t care about the full frame, my walk-around lens is the 17-55 f2.8 IS, for which there’s no equivalent in the EF line (not with IS). And given that Canon seems pretty committed to the EF-S lens line, it’s a safe bet the x0D line won’t be full frame anytime soon.

Aside of that, the real attractive feature is the WiFi grip. Along with the obvious file-transfer features, it also has gps connectivity and enables wireless shooting through http. Now that is geek-appealing .

Anyway, bottom line is, for me the upgrade is tempting, but not compelling. We’ll see.