Utah Open Source Planet

Well, I've finally given in, and am now on Twitter. You can find me as _ spr _ (hm. that's _spr_. python-markdown has a bug).

I presented at UTOSC this year, presenting a series of tips and best practices that I've learned from Oggify. Entitled Things I've Learned From Oggify, the slides are available on the conference site. There are a few files I used in the presentation which I have put in a tar and uploaded. Enjoy!

I've been reading various responses to the iPhone 3G activation issues. These range from "my phone is a brick," "the store won't sell any that aren't activated," to "the line barely moves." I had a different experience yesterday morning out here in California.

I went to the smaller local Apple store in the Stanford Shopping Center. The line started at 5 AM (mall rules) and my friend and I got there at 7 AM. We were around the 100th in line. Around 9 AM the Apple employees started to alert people that if they had a business discount on their phone they needed to call AT&T and get it removed. So I called and in 5 minutes I got the PLU number removed from my account. I got into the store at 9:45 AM, and quickly bought my 8 GB. The employee helping me told me that the activation system was having problems so they'd send me home with my phone to try there.

It didn't fully work at home, though I did manage to get the phone activated, but not syncing. So I had a working phone with no personal data on it for the day. Once I got home from work around 6:30 PM I tried again and it worked with no delays.

The store line was moving slowly, but the employees here managed it well. They also dealt with the activation issues a lot better than many other stories I've heard. I will say that I didn't expect to wait quite that long in line, and I'm surprised about the PLU issue. The AT&T website certainly wasn't clear about that fact, but I'll just re-associate the number Monday at work.

I don't think I've really mentioned my hosting provider, Slicehost on here before, but they deserve a bit of mention for providing great service. Be warned, the rest of this message might be construed as a shameless promotion.

They provide a Xen based VPS solution. I've been using them for about a year and a half now. I originally moved to them due to the excellent price to RAM/HD/Processor ratio. Since then they've added a host of handy features (not all features listed are new):

• DNS hosting (with a zone editor that doesn't suck)
• AJAX based web console to system
• Cheap, automatic, backups
• Great statistics/monitoring
• An excellent wiki, blog, and articles*
• Constant updates on service issues from their blog or twitter
• I'm told 24/7 problem resolution (but I haven't had any)
• Two data-centers

I've been extremely happy with their quality, and the improvements they're constantly making. If you're looking for a VPS provider, in the 256 - 4 GB RAM range, I'd say you should look into Slicehost.

* They also have a forum and podcast

(via) The Nerd Handbook, a guide for your significant other. I always find it weird to read something and feel like I'm looking in the mirror. My only question is: why haven't I been reading this blog till now?

So this and the previous posts were typed up on the iPhone while at the airport. The iPhone doesn't take well to the text making the text field scroll, nor does it make for good editing with markdown. There's a broken link I'll be fixing later tonight.

While I was in college breaks like thanksgiving and Christmas were time for me to work on personal projects. Now with this upcoming holiday season I'm faced with free time and no active projects.

Oggify has a single bug in the queue but is feature complete. Oggify will be feature update free until some other projects make progress.

I'm working on an abstraction library for mutagen so you can edit all formats of tags with one API. But it won't take too much time to finish.

My eventual goal I writing a good general audio file tagger is blocked on some more design work on the underlying structure. That and design work on the GUI.

My goal for this weekend is to actually have something posted for my tag wrapper, and maybe a nice write-up on Django that I've been thinking of doing for a while.

(via) Shiny. I want in.

One of my favorite comics is one called Bone. It's a nice fantasy tale, and the art is excellent. The author is currently redoing it in color, but the original black and white is excellent. He makes great use of the contrast to make for excellent scenes.

In any case, I was reminded of it because of a post on Neil Gaiman's blog. He's noticed something that I did we I last re-read it. The first time the series really does seem to make a drastic shift in tone, but when you read the second time you discover that it was clearly planned from the beginning. I highly recommend picking it up.

So a while back I upgraded my mythtv installation, and suddenly mythweb was returning a blank page.

It turns out the problem was a PHP upgrade that changed the php.ini to disable sessions. I just needed to copy over the php.ini.pacnew and enable the extensions I'd need (mysql.so) and restart httpd. Then my copy of mythweb was back up and running.

For years I've been an avid Mutt user. I have a highly tweaked .muttrc with a lot of customizations (I'll post it soon, I swear). HTML mail gets dumped through lynx or w3c (I can't remember which). GPG and SMIME signing. Referencing additional files to allow easy migration between systems. Custom colors.

Then I got to work, and the amount of HTML mail I got made Mutt unattractive. Dumping through lynx or w3c works, but it is rarely readable. Delta and Southwest itineraries often were hard to follow. Messages that otherwise should be easy to read were line wrapped in odd ways, and just not practical. I figured with Outlook being the standard at HP I'd use something close so I could deal well with both formats. I picked Thunderbird. I've been really happy with it at work, it doesn't have great key-bindings, but got the job done.

Then I decided I was tired of managing my spam filters after DSpam broke again (6th times the charm, right?), and had SpamAssassin running. Some people spoke highly of Google Apps. Unfortunately there was no free way to transfer my old mail save it was bouncing it over. Or read it elsewhere without POP. Then they opened up IMAP. So now scottr.org mail is using a Google Apps. Gmail has good key-bindings, and I can use any other Mail client.

So why has mutt left? I discovered I don't need the rabid efficiency anymore. I only read two mailing lists, and I prefer to look comfortably at my Mail. So at work I use the Gmail interface (they block IMAP), and at home I use Apple Mail. I'll be reviewing Apple Mail in the next few days for those interested.

Update: No longer works with firmware 1.1.1

So with the announcement of non-hacked ringtone support, I set out to get me a ringtone. The problem: I don't have much purchased iTunes music. Most of my music I've ripped myself to FLAC and converted to MP3 with Oggify. So iTunes won't let me make ringtones from those. A bummer, because their editor looked pretty slick.

Instead I've come up with my own method for making ringtones, taking advantage of Open Sources apps.

1. Use Audactiy to trim out 30 seconds from a FLAC file. Add space at the end if desired.
2. Export out to WAVE.
3. Use afconvert (in /Developer/Examples/CoreAudio/Services/AudioFileTools, you'll need to build it yourself).
4. afconvert -f m4af -d 'aac ' -b 192000 [file-name]
5. Edit the tags as needed.
6. Use MakeiPhoneRingtone to load it into iTunes.
7. Sync with iPhone.

At some point I'll probably make something that does steps 3 through 6 easier, no time soon though.

I got an iPhone about a month ago, and have been incredibly happy with it. It really is just fun to use, and no longer do I feel like I'm forced to jump through hoops to do basic tasks on my phone. I'll quickly mention my top favorite features, and the things that are missing or that I want.

Cool Features:

1. Independent volumes. The iPhone has 5 independent volumes: ringer, iPod playback w/ headphone, iPod playback w/ speaker, phone w/ headset, phone w/ speaker.
2. Integration with current car adapters. The recent update (1.1) added support for my car adapter (a Belkin cigarette lighter power w/ line out). Nice to see them adding things that weren't working. Now if I could only take calls through the car stereo...
3. Great screen. It is visible in all sorts of lighting, and glare is easily dealt with by just slightly shifting the iPhone. The size of the screen is excellent as well. I quickly was engrossed in the movies I was watching while on the plane.
4. Fun. So many little fun things, like seeing my friend's pictures when they call, or being able to listen to music and seamlessly take phone calls. All these enhance the experience.
5. Alarms. Finally I can set new alarms or turn them on and off without going through some sort of suffering. I'm even using my iPhone as a kitchen timer.

Annoyances:

1. Copy and paste. I keep needing this and really wish it was there.
2. Yahoo! apps integration. The UI (user interface) changes with these apps, and it really bugs me.
3. No threads in mail. I can only blame them so much, it's be hard to add threads without cluttering up the interface, and having to keep more messages on the phone. I can avoid this issue by just not reading my mailing lists on it.

A word of caution. Use the provided cloth (and similar ones) to clean. I used some liquid cleaning wipes on mine and introduced a few tiny (I can't see them expect when the screen is off and in the correct lighting) scratches.