So, the Stevenote for MWSF 2005 just started, and the Apple Store is dutifully displaying this:

This could be expensive... :-)

UPDATE: Yup. This is going to cost me about a grand... (by the time I pick up Bluetooth module, Airport card, 512MB RAM, 80GB drive, a DVI-Video adaptor so it can talk to my TV, and an EyeTV200 so I can Tivo stuff...)

Figure I'll pick up one of these eventually and slap it into my entertainment system at home... This is exactly what I was hoping for! DAMNThank you Steve!

Stephen Downes posts a link to an article by Simon Waldman on the importance of URL (and email address) permanence to a person's online identity.

It struck home with me a bit, since, well, my weblog is rather tied into the ucalgary.ca domain. That would make things rather difficult if the situation ever changed (no, Mike - I'm not planning anything :-) I'm just saying...)

Over the years, I've changed employers a couple of times (until returning to the U of C, where my old account was reactivated after a couple years of dormancy). I've also switched ISPs a few times, so ISP-provided addresses get invalidated rather frequently. I've got my .Mac account, but that's only valid as long as I decide to keep paying the ferryman.

I tried an experiment with my iPod running iPodLinux last night. I stopped by Wal*Mart and picked up a Cheap Ass AudioConferencing Headset 3000â„¢ (for a whopping $19.95), came home and rebooted my iPod into iPodLinux. I set the recording sample rate to 33KHz and tried recording a few things to test it out. Worked well enough. But don't try to playback the files under iPodLinux - it will crash.

Also, while recording, it seems to record the file to disk every 5 seconds, with an audio electronic feedback hum while it's doing it (it only lasts for about half a second, but it's quite annoying). I wound up recording about 45 minutes of nothing, just to see if it would crap out on a long recording. Turns out, since it's recording to disk every 5 seconds, that it isn't the bestest thing you can do to your iPod's battery... Although the linux side was showing full battery strength, when I rebooted back into the Apple iPod OS, the battery was showing almost no juice left. I wasn't too worried, since it often shows little juice, but "warms up" or calibrates or something over a few minutes to show the actual level.

Robin Good has put up a great overview of ethnoclassification/folksonomies - including a good list of strengths and limitations.

I think the limitations (primarily regarding ambiguity) would be largely mitigated through the use of two approaches:

1. Tag autocompletion at entry time
2. Rich and dynamic synonym matching at search/retrieval time

Tag autocompletion could use something like the Google Suggest XMLHTTP request to provide you with suggested keywords for what you are entering.

So, I bit the bullet and migrated my weblog from Wordpress 1.2.2 to Wordpress 1.5 Alpha (the nightly build from January 9, 2005). Woah. That sounds scary! Not really... The nightly alphas are surprisingly stable, and I tested stuff out on my laptop before making the jump on the server.

The main plugins I use work fine, so there should be no issues there. The only thing that should be visibly different is the lack of the second line of the cheesy subtitle in the header of the site. Wordpress 1.5 appears to not like html tags there, so the
tag was being displayed as source... Oh, well. Probably for the better anyway...

Links:

I just upgraded my OmniOutliner license to OmniOutliner Pro 3.0 - what an awesome upgrade. I just did a quick outline file to use as a "project dashboard" for the APOLLO project. This is something I had done in hand-rolled HTML on other projects, but here, I get a beautiful, dynamic, standards-compliant outline that I can edit as part of my regular workflow, so I'm much more likely to keep it up to date...

I just installed iPodLinux on my iPod, hoping to play around with it for recording podcasts. I was going to just use Audacity on my laptop, but the fan wouldn't turn off, so it was waaay too noisy to record in my office.

So, a quick run of an installer, and a quick search to figure out how to reboot into linux (reboot the iPod by holding down the "menu" and "play/pause" button until something happens, then hold down the "rewind" button until you see a penguin). It's pretty darned freaky to see a linux boot on an iPod.

Just got a reminder from Apple to enter the Dashboard widget authoring contest before January 5. I don't have time to play with Dashboard right now, but I followed a link to the page describing the winner of the last contest.

Holy. Crap. A wiki is just a keystroke away on any MacOSX 10.4 desktop. How's THAT for hitting the mainstream?

A wiki, built on the stuff in CoreData, rendered beautifully. Assembled completely from bits available to any application that runs on Tiger (CoreData for SQL database model, javascript for controller, html/css for view).

Thanks to a link from BoingBoing, I saw Kiddie Records Weekly. That's just awesome! They're taking a bunch of old vinyl albums of kid's shows from the 1940s and 50s and releasing 1 each week for the entire year 2005 - free for download.

I'd found Gerald McBoingBoing a while back from another source, and it's one of Evan's favorite tracks on my iPod (after D-O-G Spells Dog, by Mel Blanc - I even get to perform that one sometimes). Really looking forward to getting all of these classic shows!

Brian's XServe is acting up, and we're trying to figure out wtf went wrong, and trying to work with his IT folks that are managing the box for him.

In our quest for answers, I came across these resources (which have been dutifully bookmarked, delicioused, and added to my DevonThinkPE cache). I'm adding them here as well...

• MacOSXHints.com tips on troubleshooting
• Apple's official troubleshooting tips

They're trying to round up a hardware diagnostic CD to check RAM, motherboard, etc... Here's hoping for good backups...

Haven't tested it out, but the latest NetNewsWire beta now supports downloading enclosures (even automagically into iTunes). It didn't trigger on all of the old enclosures in my 300-odd feeds (I shudder to think about all of the bandwidth sucked up if I have to download all enclosures in all feeds...), and there haven't been any new ones today to test, but this looks promising!

There are a whole buncha updates in the latest beta, too. Feels much snappier (but that might be an optical delusion), and the UI has been cleaned up a bit (including a CSS Zen Garden-ish style sheet selector widget).