










50 cents per gigabyte seems to be the price of hard drives these days. In all cases, the only way to achieve 50 cents/gigabyte is to take advantage of rebates, so it isn’t the “I want to build a data library and need 2,000 200GB drives” price. DealMac has several deals listed and Fry’s has stacks of hard drives, several of which break down to 50 cents/gigabyte.

One year ago, the price was at least $1/GB and that was relatively slow drives. Now, 50 cents/GB buys you an 8MB cache on a 7,200 RPM drive with an 8 – 9 ms average seek time.

But the warranty period has been vastly reduced. Three to five years ago, drive warranties were typically 5 years. Then it dropped to 3. Now it is a 1 year warranty, but– at least with Western Digital– you can buy an additional 2 years for $15. Not sure I like that trend. Nope. Sure. Don’t like it.

I picked up a 160GB Western Digital to be used as the backing store for my encoded CD collection. The CDs will effectively act as a backup and I use the “Purchased Music” group in BackUp.app to back up the songs purchased from the music store.


How far we have come…


… an infinite # of miles to go.

I actually got off my ass and started riding my mountain bike this week. 1 mile on Tuesday, 2 miles on Thursday, 3.25 today. I used to ride all the time and was actually in really good shape. Somewhere along the line, my shape turned to “pear” and walking up a couple of flights of stairs became challenging exercise.

Pathetic. Hopefully not for much longer. I’m purposefully easing back into riding to avoid damaging myself severely due to my rather fragile current condition.

It isn’t without its geek centered aspects. I’m using a Magellan GPS to track distance, speed and to ensure that I get home in time to do whatever is next in the morning schedule. I would like to be able to download the tracks to my Mac. I figure I’ll solve the problem with the daily trivial rides such that when I’m actually doing interesting rides again, I don’t have to face the stupidity then.


I had Camarones Rellenos, thinking “Shrimp. Healthy Seafood. Not too heavy.”.

Ha! How wrong could I be?

Turns out that Dos Compadres’ Camarones Rellenos is Shrimp wrapped in bacon and deep fried until golden brown. Quite spectacular, actually. I would recommend it to anyone.

I found this recipe: With cheese (sounds good, but the cheese isn’t necessary though it does add a slight bit of extra heart stopping power). Honestly, you don’t need a recipe. Just wrap bacon around shrimp and fry with an extremely light batter.



Given our modern desktop environments, it seems kind of silly to limit EDITOR to just command line tools. It would be nice to be able to use TextEdit, Xcode, or BBEdit to edit files normally edited from EDITOR. Emacs or vi are perfectly capable editors, but they simply don’t have the level of integration with the system that a GUI level editor has (yes, there are .app implementations of Emacs, but it is still not exactly “user friendly” in the classic Mac OS application sense).

While open can be used to easily open any random file in any random GUI application, it doesn’t work in the context of EDITOR. When something like bzero, cvs, or subversion invokes the EDITOR, it expects the command to not exit until the editing is completed. open exits immediately after it has successfully passed the file off to the GUI app, long before editing has even started.

BBEdit provides a command line tool that does exactly that. With the –wait option, the command line tool will not exit until the associated editing window is closed in within the BBEdit application. Exactly what is needed.

If you happen to have BBEdit installed, you can install the command line tool by going to the “Tools” subsection of Preferences and click the Install “bbedit” tool.


Once installed, you can set EDITOR to bbedit –wait –resume and most things will work correctly. However, there are a handful of apps that don’t like it when EDITOR is set to something other than just an executable. As such, you’ll probably want to set EDITOR to point to a little shell script that invokes bbedit with the appropriate arguments. I created as script called bbeditwait with the following contents and shoved it in the bin directory within my home account:

bbedit --resume --wait $*



Ben Hines mentioned that this would make a good Mac OS X Hints submission. There is already such an entry in OS X Hints, but it was rather generic and the suggested shell script in the comments doesn’t quite work the way I wanted in that it only accepts single files.

This isn’t new. Under OpenStep, I patched TextEdit such that an accompanying command line tool could edit files in the same fashion as ‘bbedit –wait’. It also allowed one to edit files remotely. So, if I were logged into a Solaris or Linux dev box from my OS X Server / OpenStep machine, EDITOR based sessions would pop up on my local machine as a regular TextEdit document.


So, BoingBoing and others are already starting to criticize TiVO’s new TiVo to Go service because it uses a proprietary DRM technology to lock content to a particular computer/TiVo combination (or something like that), thereby eliminating the ability for the user to edit or archive the content. It isn’t really clear that archival is disabled, but flexible archival is certainly limited.

In any case, Cory says Not delivering the products your customers demand is not good business. It never has been. as a way of criticizing what TiVO is delivering as not being what the customer wants.

Cory seems to have missed the point. As a long time TiVo user, I can tell you exactly what I and most other TiVo users want.

I want to know that my TiVo will have the accurate scheduling information required to resolve scheduling conflicts such that the TiVo will record the content I desire without me having to constantly double check the TiVo’s schedule of recording events.

To do that requires accurate scheduling information delivered in a timely fashion (i.e. ahead of lineup changes) by the various content distribution agents. Given the vast and ever increasing number of cable providers (San Jose has at least 6, maybe 8, different cable lineups depending on your location) and the control with which the local cable company can now exert over the broadcast schedule, having access to accurate information in a timely fashion is paramount to the TiVo unit’s ability to record the rights shows at the right time.

Being able to play a show on my computer is a “nice to have”. Being able to edit and share that content with others would be even nicer.

But if editing and sharing the content threatens the ability for the TiVo to fulfill its primary function, then what would be the point?

Cory asks Where does this bizarre idea — that the dinosaur industry that’s being displaced gets to dictate terms to the mammals who are succeeding it — come from?

It seems abundantly clear that this “bizarre idea” comes directly from the fact that the newcomers are dependent upon the dinosaurs not deciding to crush them. The newcomers are dependent upon cooperation from the dinosaurs or else the newcomers will not survive.

The dinosaurs are not only TiVo’s eventual competition, but also TiVo’s only means of achieving success.

Historically, the original ISPs were in a very similar situation and were pretty much completely crushed when the telcos decided there was money to be me made. The telcos could undercut the ISPs by simply eliminating the cost of two local loops (you -> ISP, ISP -> [telco] -> Internet vs. you -> [telco] -> Internet). TiVo is in a similar situation in that the cable companies could decide to roll out their own PVR with a claim that their PVR’s scheduled recordings are much more accurate/reliable because they are directly integrated with the scheduling stupidity at the head end.

So, TiVo walks a fine line and has been doing so very well. Witness ReplayTV (who? Gone.). They threw the 30 second skip and content distribution in the face of the broadcasters and the end result was the complete lack of strategic partnerships and the eventual death [twice] of the platform.

Radio has effectively handed me a blank slate. It is as if I’m creating a weblog for the first time only this time I have 2+ years (**double take**) of weblogging experience at the start.

I could either batch move all the old “content” into the new client environment. To Radio’s credit, it makes doing so very easy.

The alternative is to cull through all the gunk posted over the last few years and use this as an opportunity to update a bunch of content.

You might notice a distinct lack of content here.

That is because my Radio UserLand installation exploded one time too many. I’m going through the pain of moving to something new.

At the moment, I’m using bzero. However, there is a bug that prevents it from working when bzero itself is installed on a different volume than your home account. I had to drop in an ugly little hacque in place to redirect the location of bzero’s per-user configuration

In looking for a replacement, one key feature is to continue to be PyCS compatible in that it must implement the xmlStorageSystem protocol.

I’m quite comfortable with continued hosting at PyCS. Phillip Pearson has been extremely generous and helpful– I’ll take this opportunity to publicly thank him for his efforts!

An old friend from our mutual NeXT days contacted me. He now works at Sleepycat and gave me a pointer to Syncato.

One of the reasons why I write a weblog is so that there is a google-indexed record of some thoughts/notes/tricks that I have had/taken/discovered over the years. It is more efficient and effective to find information via Google than it is to grep through a bunch of text files on my own system.

Through XSL and XQuery, Syncato offers a compelling set of features that might effectively address the need to find information and certainly offers a wide variety of interesting ways to cross cut the data.

With all that said, it is hard to beat the simplicity of bzero and bzero’s use of Python source as templates is particularly interesting.

In the comments, PyDS has been mentioned as a possible candidate. PyDS is a really cool collection of technologies, but it does not fulfill the desire to have a simple weblogging client that is compatible with Python/Radio Community Servers.

PyDS and Radio share a particular trait that is at the heart of a pet peeve of mine. In particular, why do I need a desktop web server to publish a weblog? Both tools are extremely complex, though in different ways. Radio is a closed, proprietary, pile of antiquated complexity that no longer behaves well on the modern Macintosh desktop. PyDS is an open, well behaved, desktop server infrastructure with a boatload of dependencies on other open source projects. If it were a choice between the two, I would be posting from PyDS right now.

But both platforms are eliminated by the complexity factor. In their own right and for different reasons, each are fragile, hard to manage, and complete overkill for solving the relatively basic problem of publishing a WebLog.

The Syncato solution mentioned above is also relatively complex and hard to install (compared to something like bzero or your basic Blogger client [NetNewsWire again]), but it offers a lot of direct benefit for that complexity in the form of a powerful/flexible database containing your content. In other words, the complexity is focused on solving one problem and not solving a bunch of different problems in a loosely connected desktop server. I’m just not sure I care — I’m not sure that Syncato offers enough value over the knowledge that Google is going to index what I publish sufficiently for my needs. Maybe if I wanted to have a personal log of private notes. For that,I use Note Taker and SBook.








Excellent, excellent stuff.



So Apple’s new music store sells songs for 99¢ per track. That sounds suspiciously like a micropayment (or at least a “minipayment”) system to me. Lots of excellent insite into CC based payment systems deleted — seriously, go read the article! [rentzsch.com: Tales from the Red Shed]

I had been wondering the same thing since Apple launched the store– how did the work out a reasonable mini/micropayment system. Having actually purchased a couple of items now, I have noted a significant delay– upwards of 10 hours– between purchase and arrival of the email “for your records” receipt.

That delay may simply be due to the overwhelming purchase traffic through the store (let us all hope so!) or it may be because of some of the purchasing scenarios described in the aforementioned article. I have no idea.

In the Fortune article it is mentioned that the record company takes an average of 65 cents per track sold. That leaves an average of 34 cents per track to cover expenses and make some money. Likely, a big expense is bandwidth and one of the best ways to eliminate rampant consumption of bandwidth is to limit the customer to one-download-per-purchased-item (as they currently do). However a 34 cent/song margin is large — large enough to support a big chunk o’ transaction charge being shipped off to the CC company.

However, there is a another reasonable scenario under which Apple may be operating to support a micro/mini-payment based store.

In particular, the credit card companies have long recognized that micro/mini-payments are a potentially huge market. Not only does the customer desire the convenience of being able to use a CC to make small goods/services purchases, but micropayments often lead to the customer decoupling the act of making a purcahse from the act of paying the bill. This has long been a powerful marketing ploy — if you can successfully get the consumer to stop considering consuming your goods/services with paying a quantitative amount of money, there is less hesitation to consume.

The credit card companies have been investing billions of dollars in building huge networks that can handle potentially 10s of billions+ transactions/day where every transaction must be cleared in a matter of seconds. (There was a really interesting article on all of this in a recent Forbes, but I can’t find an URL.)

Clearly, it would have been in Apple’s best interests to have approached the credit card clearing companies with a proposal to work out a deal that would support the implementation of a micropayment based purchase/payment model. Any reduction in the extremely high transaction costs that are the tradition– the very same costs that are designed to discourage people from making lots of small transactions– would contribute greatly to Apple’s profit margin on goods sold through the music store.

Similarly, the launch of the Apple Music Store has the unique characteristics of making a really huge amount of media noise while being accessible only to a niche market [Macintosh owners with a US billing address]. At least initially. This provides an excellent opportunity for the companies involved to gauge the public’s reaction without actually having to commit to a stupendously large potential market.

If the reaction to the Mac specific store is good [and it seems to be], then the entrance into the much larger Windows (and others) markets can be done with the confidence that the micropayment model– something that is very attractive, yet very scary, to the conservative consumer credit industry– has been proven both from an implementation and a public-relations standpoint.

I have no doubt that rolling out a Windows version of the Apple Music Store is rife with technical uncertainties that are way more difficult to deal with than on the Mac side, but that does not out weigh the potential business advantages to doing so. As well, choosing– consciously or by circumstance– not to address the insanely difficult/complex/political issues associated with distribution of music-by-wire into non-US markets has significant potential business advantages, as well.

If the Apple Music Store is successful in its focused initial incarnation, it will provide a tremendous source of negotiating leverage when it comes time to open up new markets. Obviously, the Windows market in the US was already announced “before the end of the year” and is on the path to release.

However, there are certainly still some legal & technical issues to be resolved. Will Apple continue to use their own DRM or will they integrate tightly with Microsoft’s DRM APIs and policies? If they choose to go with the Microsoft based DRM, how much can they affect the provided rights prior to release?

If the Mac/U.S. store is a rip-roaring success, said negotiations can be carried out with a result much more in Apple’s favor.

Likewise, solving the overseas distribution problem will be far easier if the interested parties– media, religious, and political– can see that profit is just a matter of implementation and not a question of whether or not anyone will buy the product.

It will be very interesting to see how the Apple Music Store evolves. It is amazing that Apple was able to negotiate all of the different distribution rights and payment rights that must have been required for even the 200,000 songs that are in the store now. Of those albums for which only partial downloads are available or for which a number of songs can be bought only with the full album, I wonder how much of that decision was actually dictated by the rights/distribution deals that had been worked out?

Slight digression: In particular, every unique performance of a song is an individual sound recording that may carry its own intellectual property characteristics that can be different than the other songs on the album. Every time a song is performed at a live show, that performance of that song is a new sound recording. Given guest musicians, union rules and venue, the set of property rights associated with a particular sound recording may be quite complex to resolve and achieving the rights to distribute might be prohibitively expensive. The ℗ symbol means “sound recording copyright” and implies that the particular performance of the particular song carries its own set of intellectual property rules that may be different than any other performance of that song. To further complicate matters, the song’s lyrics and score may have different copyrights that affect the sound recording copyright. Playing live ain’t all about jamming on stage with your closes friends– if some random person hops on stage from the audience to play two notes on a harmonica and you suddenly might find yourself without the ability to actually sell a recording of that portion of the performance. (Yes, I did spend some time in the distribution end of the recording industry).

Apple has certainly solved a bunch of problems that no other company had solved in a single package (a number of other products exist in this space– and some have seen some success… it is way too early to tell how Apple’s track record might compare). However, a lot has not been said. Historically, it will be interesting to see how the store contributes to the corporate balance sheet– to see how successful the Music Store really is. Looking ahead, it will be fascinating to see how the success of the store is leveraged by Apple into more opportunities and used to open new markets.

Of course, Apple is not the first to make a foray into a digital delivery based media market. Nor will they be the last. How other companies leverage Apple’s success– be it fiscal or purely technical, in the end– will make for some very interesting markets and business models in the coming years.