Archive for July, 2005

no one here has goals like get a job, get married, have kids
the ambitions are wake up, breathe, keep breathing
no desire to get rich, become famous, move out
the ambitions are wake up, breathe, keep breathing

The Golden Palominos’Dead Inside is now available in the music store. Maybe it has been for a while and I simply just noticed it.

This is the most intense album out of my 2,500 or so album collection. Dark. Visual. Vicious. Beautiful.

When I’m in a particularly black mood, this is the album I listen to at a top volume at 3am with all the lights turned off.

Bill Laswell produces and contributes the bass line to an incredible band of musicians. Nicole Blackman provides biting vocal narratives on top of the mesmerizing beats.

CSS boogeyman defeated. Sane whitespace restored. Posted in / comments pushed to the bottom of the post.

Janis Joplin — our dog pictured at the left — offered a nice vertical photo to test the solution. Click through for the gnarly details.

CSS still sucks, but at least it is doing what I want.
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Apple has created a Syndictation-dev mailing list specifically for developers and content creators to discuss use of syndication technologies in conjunction with Apple’s technologies.

Ernie Prabhakar sent the following invitation to the community. Click the link after this excerpt to read the full invitation.

Syndication formats (e.g., RSS, RSS 2.0, Atom) provide a powerful, XML-based way to publish blogs, podcasts, and website summaries that can be read by Safari, iTunes, and many other products. This forum enables developers and content creators interested in using those technologies in conjunction with Apple’s platform or products to interact with each other and Apple engineers.

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Found this while wandering around Bean Hollow State Beach. I really like the sharp contrast between the rocks and the red/maroon of the seaweed.

If you look closely, there is a crab hiding in a crack.

OK — so now that you have a better-than-totally-tedious workflow for downloading and integrating live music into iTunes, how about some decent shows to download?

What follows are a random set of show I have found most enjoyable. For me, it isn’t just the band, but the recording quality has to be really good, too. I only grab soundboards or really high rated audience recordings unless the show is just so stunningly unique that I have to have it.

First, start at the Live Music Archive. Amazing resource.
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I have long downloaded live music from ETree and other sources of live recordings. I pretty much stick to soundboard quality recordings, though I’m perfectly happy listening to a good quality audience recording of an excellent performance.

I use Xact to decompress the shorten/FLAC recordings to WAV which are subsequently compressed using the Apple Lossless Encoder within iTunes.

The most painful part of the whole process was applying the metadata to the tracks. The album/artist information could be bulk applied, but individual tracks required copy/pasting the track name and remembering to update the track N of M count (or else the tracks would be alphabetized and restoring the order was terribly annoying).

Nothing a bit of AppleScript can’t fix. I wrote a little script that automates the process (there are two scripts in the zip — Enumerate Tracks does the trick).

The workflow is something like:

• Import WAV files into iTunes and select all imported tracks
• Apply universal metadata — band name, venue, year, # of discs, genre, etc…
• Select tracks on first disc
• Copy all the track names from the info file or the web site listing the tracks
• Run Enumerate Tracks

Each show is an album, for all intents and purposes. I have chosen a consistent naming scheme such that I can easily type one string to search for all live recordings, all live recordings in a particular year, etc… Basically, each album is titled Live; YYYY-MM-DD; Venue; City; State (or some variation of city/state for international shows).

If all goes well, Enumerate Tracks will apply the “track N of M tracks” metadata and the track names. Careful of those line endings!

We have a bunch of open positions within the Xcode team. If you or anyone you know is interested, has the skills, and wants to work at a truly awesome company (seriously — working at Apple is a blast), please send a resume/CV my way and apply for the job through the official channels which can be found by clicking the links below.

The list with very brief descriptions. Click through for more information.

2373705: Senior Embedded Systems Engineer Help to improve support for iPod development within the Xcode tool-chain.

2374115: Performance Analysis Tools Engineer Improve the integration and capabilities of the performance analysis tools included with Xcode.

2374098: Embedded Systems Performance Engineer Embedded systems (iPod) focused improvements to the performance analysis tools included with Xcode.

2375392: Distributed Build Engineer Help to improve the distributed build feature within Xcode.

2374092: Build Systems Engineer Focused on improving the build system within Xcode. This is not about building Xcode itself, but about refining the code that is run when a developer hits the Build button while running Xcode.

2371488: Xcode Engineer — Xcode UI The Xcode team is seeking an experienced engineer with excellent end user application human interface design skills to conceive, design and develop future enhancements to Xcode and its supporting tools.

The following isn’t with the Xcode team, but may be of interest to folks interest in contributing to development tools.

2371718: Interface Builder Engineer Help to improve and extend Interface Builder.

I wandered through my bathroom this evening only to be attacked by a moth. I would like think it was attracted to my shiny blond hair, but I suspect it was really after my reflective forehead.

In any case, after bouncing off my head a bit, it landed on the mirror. So, I grabbed the camera to see if I could grab another magnified bug picture.

I managed to grab a decent shot of the moth. And, accidentally, I ended up with an image I probably ought to submit to the Mirror Project.

The Mirror Project has been around for quite a while. Over 30,000 images have been submitted. There is also a Flickr Mirror Project Pool where you can find much higher resolution submissions (the MP site is limited to 30k submissions).

I find that the two images at the left make for very nice desktop images. Since I use exposé to get to files/folders on my desktop, I actually see desktop images every now and then these days.

I’m betting that the fly on fence image would look really good on a 30″ LCD. As can be seen in the image on the right, the fly is really sharp. I like the shadow of the wings.

The bark was found on a rock while hiking in Castle Rock State Park. I have also tagged a bunch of photos that were taken in that park. As we seem to be visiting Castle Rock quite regularly, I’m sure that tag will grow over time.

In my Flickr account, I added a desktop tag to the various images I like to use on my desktop.

This year my wife and I are celebrating our tenth anniversary. Woot.

We are planning on visiting Hawaii for a week or so later in the year.

Anyone have any recommendations of great places to stay that’ll take really good care of us? That is, we really want to go some place for a week and not lift a single brain cell.

We are currently considering Kona Village Resort on the big island as well as a resort on Kauai.