Computers: December 2005 Archives

I've always liked the old cult classic gang movie, The Warriors. I also like the Grand Theft Auto III video games (incl. Vice City, San Andreas).

I rented the video game "The Warriors" for PS2 this week. It's from the maker of GTA (Rockstar). And it's very much like a cross between The Warriors and GTA, as if they took the movie, then took the GTA game and removed the driving and added a lot more hand-to-hand fighting.

Great stuff, for a weeklong rental.

I got a cool new DVD, "City of Champions: The Best of Boston Sports." Tons of clips of great Boston sports moments.

In one part, they show Boston players who left Boston, via trades or free agency. They showed Nomar Garciaparra, Ray Bourque, Carlton Fisk, Curtis Martin, Bill Parcells (not a player, but still), Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Babe Ruth, Drew Bledsoe, Lawyer Milloy, Pedro Martinez, Phil Esposito, and Sparky Lyle.

Apart from Nomar and Carlton (who both went to Chicago) and Ray (who is a completely different story than the rest), what do the others all have in common?

Every single one of them went to New York. (Not necessarily the city, of course.)

They also showed Johnny Damon talking about Nomar leaving, and now even he is in New York.

Logic is a music app, with an interface that is just terrible, in many ways. The graphical bits were mostly cleaned up by Apple for Logic Pro 7 (the first new version since they bought Logic), but many other bits are still just bizarre.

Consider this:

Automatic Text Selection

If a "*" is used as first character in the text, all marker text will automatically be selected when the Marker Text window is opened. This facility allows existing text to be overwritten immediately.

What is this, perl?

(I am reading the entire manual. Mostly, because the app is so hard to figure out, and has so many little special cases. The book is about Camel-sized too, over 700 pages. I imagine I'll skip some sections later on, for things I don't currently care about, like the Score Editor, and Perl 6. I'm on page 161.)

So I am watching the Futurama Christmas episodes, as I do every year. Xmas Story and A Tale of Two Santas.

But I was vaguely remembering another episode with Santa Claus. Something about Santa becoming good, except that it is a plot with the Robot Devil and President Nixon to do something nasty. I couldn't find it on my DVD collection, which is complete ... what am I thinking of?

Finally, it hit me. Futurama #6, from the comic book series.

D'oh!

(Speaking of which, I'll watch the Simpsons Christmas episodes on Christmas Eve as I wrap presents etc.)

My street apparently won Best Street by the homeowners association's annual Christmas decoration contest. IN YOUR FACE 259TH STREET NE!

The house across from ours won an award too, though I am not sure which one. Maybe the one for the most lights. He has a lighted Santa Claus that goes in and out of a lighted chimney.

Next year, I want to win. I am thinking about getting some X10 stuff to hook up to some MIDI processing code I have, and synchronize my lights to various Christmas carols. It really should be pretty easy, if I can control the lights quickly enough. I'll buy the USB controller and a couple of modules in the summer or so and do some testing.

Disk deframenting is not as important as it used to be on Mac OS X. But it is not unnecessary.

I was doing some periodic DiskWarrior maintenance on my computers today. My laptop has 10 GB of free space, out of 55 GB. DiskWarrior tells me, OK, it is ready to replace the directory, but it doesn't have 276 MB of contiguous free space to fo a "fail-safe" directory replacement. Yow.

I should really buy TechTool Pro, but it is so expensive. $100. I am checking out iDefrag and Disk Defrag.

I recorded an old Randy Stonehill song called "Through the Glass Darkly." I posted about it awhile ago, and noted that it comes from 1 Corinthians 13:12. Someone else noted that a movie is coming out (starring Keanu Reeves) based on Philip K. Dick book called "A Scanner Darkly."

I was watching "Ghost in the Shell," which provided much of the basis for The Matrix (also starring Keanu Reeves), and there's a line early in the movie: "What we see now, is like a dim image in a mirror; then, we shall see face to face." Same line.

I made some slight changes to logtokens (little tokens used for login purposes). Now your logtoken used for login sessions (i.e, the one in your cookie, also used for SOAP) is different from the one used for Atom/RSS feeds (e.g., your main index.pl feed, which allows you to have your homepage preferences reflected in your feed).

If you have problems with cookies, logtokens, authentication, etc., let me know.

Update: I had to "invalidate" all logtokens so they could not be used for logging in. They still work for Atom/RSS. This just means you need to re-log-in the next time you go to the web (and may need to also fix your logtoken or cookie for use with SOAP etc.).

I've not kept up with MP3::Info due to lack of time and desire. Dan Sully, who has provided many good patches to it, is now its maintainer. Thanks, Dan.

You can edit properties for tracks at once in iTunes, but not all of the properties are available in the UI. For my iPod shuffle, I like to have audiobooks and podcasts, some of which do not already have "Remember playback position" and "Skip when shuffling" set, as I'd like them to be. And I cannot see a way to modify those in the UI in bulk. Therefore, I select the files I want to edit, and:

use Mac::Glue;
my $itunes = new Mac::Glue 'iTunes';
my $sel = $itunes->prop('selection');
$sel->prop('bookmarka ble')->set(to => 1);
$sel->prop('shufflable')->set(to => 0);