I was hoping to use GarageBand instead of Audacity as part of my recording suite, but the stars aren't aligned...

The only mic I have on my desktop G4 is my iSight camera, which sounds pretty good, but runs at 48KHz. GarageBand only likes 44.1KHz sources, so it doesn't work.

Doh. Looks like I'll be sticking with Audacity. There wasn't a real reason to switch, just that I like GarageBand a lot ;-)

Time for another brain dump. This time, I talk about the Pachyderm development process. listen in.

• Format of this podcast - not just barfing out links today - maybe next episode
• Pachyderm development
  • Josh was in town for the week
  • VNC + Projector + couple of extra keyboards on USB
  • Spent much time on:
    • generation process
    • apollo integration
    • interface implementation - d2w
  • XCode really needs a "collaboration" mode - someone sets their XCode to be a "server" and other developers connect to it, and edit code (something like SubEthaEdit), and share a single project file. This would be much more efficient than just Subversion or CVS to sync changes
  • BBEdit 8 is really nice - and don't forget to install the command line tools and set bbedit as the EDITOR so you can use it for Subversion or CVS commits instead of vi/emacs
• EduPodcast Aggregator - could do the same thing in Bloglines, but this is more edutech-oriented

Josh, King and myself went to see The Incredibles last night, after grabbing a bite and a pint at Kilkenny's Pub.

It's all been said about the movie already, but man does Pixar rock. The story was rich, deep and detailed. As were the characters. Many of the scenes could have been used as matte backgrounds in a Bond film. This was by far the best movie I've seen in a long, long time. It's kind of weird - after the movie starts, you just forget that it's animated. It fades away and doesn't get in the way. Not like another movie that kinda hits you over the head repeatedly with the "Hey, Look at the kewl animation we're doing! Isn't it realistic?" card...

Stephen Downes has been running his Edu_RSS educational blog aggregation service for a while now. I've used Edu_RSS to build conference blogging aggregators (for Merlot 2003, and NMC 2004). He has now put together a page that spits out all posts related to podcasting. Since he's semi-selected the feeds to be somewhat educational in nature, this becomes a feed about podcasts in education. Very cool.

Episode #4 of Links. I rant a bit about wiki spam, and babble about some of the more interesting items to come across my NetNewsWire subscriptions over the last couple of days. Full links to stuff I talked about today...

• Cognitive & Logical Rationales for e-Learning Objects
• Metadata Repositories Meet Semantics
• RSS Enclosures are a fish with legs
• Podcasting with Adam Curry
• 1000th Post - Weblog as Lego
• International Journal of Web Based Communities
• Blogs, Courseware and Control
• Wired for Sound by the Miracle of Wikiphonics (Radio Free WIKI)
• Audigone - History of Panic and Audion
• James Farmer on Podcasting
• Learning Objects: Toys or the Real Thing?
• Weblogs@UPEI
• Shaw Blocking Traffic?
• SIMILE Project
• John Dowdell on learning stuff on MP3 players
• CBC Radio: Quirks & Quarks (show archives)

First, they try to kill weblogs via comment spam, now they're trying to take over wikis to sell viagra and casinos and cheap electronics.

Someone please hit these spammers with a clue stick - WE DON'T WANT TO HAVE YOUR ADS ON OUR WEBSITES, AND WE WILL SPEND TIME AND ENERGY REMOVING IT! They are doing the equivalent of taking a crap on our front porch. We could ignore it, but that would be just plain nasty, and really wouldn't benefit anyone (except for the spammer, who has an insatiable urge to defile any and all public spaces).

The Links 2004-11-08 episode is now available. I added the Super Cheesy Intro, and tried recording using Audacity (after Snapz Pro X 2.0 refused to recognize my iSight camera/microphone). Levels are still messed up, and it's essie as heck, but I'm still working on the process ;-)

Here are the links from today's episode:

• John Dehlin on IRC
• Codebase: Lazy WOComponent Initialization
• Codebase: Programatic WODisplayGroup
• Edupodding
• New Map of North America
• Who owns metadata?
• James Farmer returns!
• The Tragedy of the Comments (signal vs. noise...)
• Some thoughts on metadata (and audioblogging)
• Internet as Distributed Cognition
• Internet as Extended Memory
• Steven Frank on QuickSilver
• MacOSXHints - Dismissing QT Registration Dialog Remotely
• Speech Assessment Tool
• W3C Workshop on Metadata for Content Adaptation

I just checked the webserver logs, and the first 2 podcasts have been downloaded a total of 237 times so far. Holy crap! I would have guessed maybe half a dozen times. Wow. I just did some basic math on that, and that's over a gigabyte of podcast downloady goodness! (thank goodness for campus bandwidth ;-) ) As Adam would say: "Boing!"

And I've gotten some interesting feedback as well. I found the podcasting experience strangely cathartic, so I plan to make a bit of time to keep experimenting with it. I spent a few minutes over the weekend messing around with GarageBand to make the requisite Cheesy Podcast Intro. It should be Just Cheesy Enough...

Lazy binding is the smarter way to initialize variables only once, and only when needed. David LeBer just posted a couple of articles showing how lazy binding is useful in WebObjects apps.

• Lazy WOComponent ivar initialization
• Programatically creating a WODisplayGroup

I just did another quick podcast recording, this time talking about one of my favorite online tools: Flickr. I babble on about the Tags interface, and some cool stuff that happened via Flickr.

Podcast is available here (or via the RSS feed for you podcatchers out there...)

Brian Lamb just posted a link to the Northern Voice Conference - it looks like it's like a BloggerConCanada, which should be very cool. It's insanely cheap ($20 for pre-registration, $30 for last minute registrations). It's a one day conference, and Textuality is listed as one of the sponsors (that's Tim Bray's non-day-job).

I just threw together a quick and dirty podcast using my iSight camera as a microphone, and a folder of flagged RSS posts as content. Talked for a few minutes about the links, and used Snapz Pro X 2.0 to record the works to disk. Extremely low production quality. Minimal content. Mostly done as an experiment to see if/how this all works. I may do more podcasts/audioblog entries (heck, it was kinda fun, once I stopped being so darned self conscious about my voice ;-) ). I'm sure the levels are goofy, and I'm sure I'm not close enough to the mic. Sorry in advance ;-)