GlitchNYC

A few months back, I gave up linux after a 3.5 year love hate relationship, and went back to windows for a while.

It wasn’t horrible, but there were lots of things I missed. I missed the fact that I had a solid unix system underneath. I missed having SSH, SFTP, and VNC built in for remote access. I missed the ease of installing things with yum and all my beautiful, free applications.

I also had to relearn to think in terms of “this machine is vulnerable” and was careful with every file I downloaded and opened.

I have to admit, I loved the fact that dual-screen just worked. I loved that our printer at home finally functioned as it should. I loved sharing files easily with the click of a mouse.

After seeing Noel and some of the Ruby Guys at BarCampNYC2 work their magic on their macs, I started to realized that Mac combined the power of unix with a slick interface that generally just works. I could run apache, php, ruby, and mysql all locally and have a beautiful interface and my periphrasis work without endless .conf file hacking. And, watching these Mac experts fly around on their machine really piqued my interest. I’ve got the windows side of things pretty well mastered, but even still, it can be clunky to find your away around once you’ve got more than a few windows open.

So, last week, Kelly graciously accompanied me to the Mac store so I could take advantage of her student discount, and I came home with a shiny new MacBook Pro.

I haven’t been a fan of every little piece along the way (where’s the delete - not backspace - key? Where are home and end?) but I have found that most of my complaints can be tweaked and configured away, or are combination keystrokes to keep the keyboard big and simple. The more I play on this machine, the more I’m starting to love it. I’m starting to get the hang of the key commands and hot keys. I’m especially loving quicksilver, and the fact that I can almost instantly start a new application or trigger an event.

My one biggest complaint so far was the lack of an included OS X manual. If I hadn’t already known to drop an application into the applications folder to install it, where would I have learned that?

Tonight, Sara pointed me to the great documentation at apple.com/support , and I’ve been reading along and just soaking up the info. I’ve already got a few new tricks up my sleeve, and I’m especially looking forward to mastering iMovieHD and GarageBand.

I’m going to do my best to keep some notes of the things that I’ve learned and how windows and linux/unix users can make the most of their new mac, but for now, I’m just enjoying the experience.

One final question for any mac guru’s out there. I’m desperately missing my multimedia keyboard’s “play/pause” button when listening to music at work. Is there a way to set a global hotkey for itunes that works even when iTunes is hidden or behind the active window?

UPDATE: Quicksilver comes through again. I set a trigger key for “play/pause” and I can start and stop the track from any application. Just hitting the quicksilver hotkey and typing itunes->TAB->next jumps to the next song, and tons of other commands can be triggered that way. Brilliant.

(A replica of Hermione’s time-turner from the Harry Potter 3. )

Why is it that all the events I want to attend here in NYC happen on the same Wednesday evening?

Tonight, I’ll be heading to the Video 2.0 event, but that means I’ll not only be missing yet another NYC podcasters meetup, but I’m also going to miss a NYLUG (New York Linux Users Group) presentation with Ajai Khattri talking about Gentoo Linux.

If these events were Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I’d love to be at all three!

While I’m wishing for the magic ability to be everywhere at once, I’m bummed that I’m going to have to miss MarCamp - the ad-hoc, barcamp style marketing conference on Sept. 26th. If you’re out on the west coast and involved in podcasting, blogging, or any type of marketing, I’d really suggest making it to this event. I know a bunch of people are heading out that way a bit early for the Portable Media Expo, and it would make a great first stop!

Speaking of the PME, I’ll be skipping that as well, instead pouring all my energy into Podcamp in Boston on Sept 9th-10th and BarCampNYCII here in the city Sept 30-Oct 1st.

Phew! That’s a lot of events, and a lot of links! Wish me luck, it’s going to be a fun month!

Vista Screenshot
Originally uploaded by Glitch010101.

It is done.

I just couldn’t take it anymore. 3.5 years of running desktop linux at home and I never stopped fixing it. There was always something that needed tweaking, something that was broken today.

I need an OS that vendors write working drivers for. I need it to do what I need in a hurry, without worry of having to go “i know you can do that under linux, I just have to figure out how.”

You know, simple things… like printing. And my display.

I can’t explain what a joy it was to install my OS and have 2 displays up and running at the right res within a few minutes, and know that they’re 3D enabled and accelerated.

Of course, this is going to make some of the other things that I took for granted (like NFS filesharing between my main machine and my MythTV box and SSH access) readily apparent, but i’m sure I can work around those losses.

I’m ready to do more work WITH my pc and less work ON it.

Songbird Screenshot
Originally uploaded by Glitch010101.

If you listen to music on your PC, you’ve got to give SongBird a try. It’s an extremely solid music player, and because it’s built on top of Firefox, it’s also got a wonderful web browser built in that allows you to flip through tons of music services and other fun stuff while still listening to your tunes.

It complies and runs on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. Very cool stuff.

Well, I don’t know if it was the fact that I was laid up for a good portion of the past week or just that my brain was rested and ready to churn out something creative, but last night I was struck by inspiration, and couldn’t stop coding for hours.

I’ll release the results here in the next day or two under the GPL (I’m working out some final bugs right now), but basically I’ve written an open source myspace friend adder in Perl. At first I was wary of all the steps involved but I’ve done some web automation before and the WWW::Mechanize library is amazing. It really makes jobs like this easy. I went from concept to working code in about 4 hours.

The script literally logs in as you, goes to the pages you specify in a simple comma separated CSV file, and then adds all of the friend IDs that are on those pages. It’s been working amazingly, as there are a lot of great bands that we’ve played on the GlitchCast. The theory is that if they like the music they’re “friends” with, they might also like our show and the other music we feature.

Part of me feels a little grey about the spammy nature of these invites, but I’m not just sending this to users at random, these are people I think genuinely might be interested in our show.

Myspace makes you enter a “captcha” after every few friends you add, so I’ve added a simple “pause” mechanism to the code, prompting you to go and add a friend by hand so it can continue on it’s merry way.

Adding friend 1468183…captcha detected. Go add a friend manually.
Here’s the current page:
http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=invite.addfriend_verify&friendID=1468183
Hit enter to continue.

If I had any doubts as to whether this was worth the effort, they’ve already been put to rest. Four bands have written me just this afternoon, asking to be included in the GlitchCast.

Outstanding.

At the moment, I’m getting hit with the captchas pretty frequently, so I’ll have to tweak the “sleep” time between adding friends a bit and see if that helps. I’ve also got 33 pages of pending friend requests, so that might have me in a higher “penalty bracket” or some such.

It’s been fun to play with myspace and hand-craft some of the tools I need. Being that I run on Linux here at home and didn’t really want to run this stuff on the work PCs, there were no commercial options available for me anyway.

Once I get this properly cleaned up and released, I’m going to start working on some ways to stay in contact with those on my friends list. It should be fairly easy to modify this script to log in and message those on our friends pages and do things like “thanks for the add” and “Check out the next show, it features Edie Carey” to all the Edie fans that have friended us.

Now, there’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you found this page through google looking for a free and open source myspace friend adder. The perl code will be available here soon (either tonight, 2005-01-03, or tomorrow). In the meantime, check out the podcast that got me excited enough to put in all this effort just to promote it: The GlitchCast - bringing great independent and under-appreciated music to the Podsafe Music Network

Click to see the fullscreen screenshot in it’s 1680 x 1050 glory

Just a quick screenshot to show how drop shadows look in Linux. The eyecandy, ahem, I mean, useful visual cues that Mac OSX and Windows Vista tout are now easy to enable in KDE. I just installed Kubuntu, added a line or two to my xorg.conf, and turned shadows on in the GUI. Very slick.

I’ve got a little 1ghz computer and a very old ATI card. The screen refresh rate when sliding a window around is a little slow, but tolerable. I’m debating keeping it turned on for good. I like being able to clearly see what’s on top of what, and you know what? Drop shadows are just sexy.

To turn the shadows on in Kubuntu after install:

For an ATI card (nvidia’s are slightly different)

• Add these lines to your device section:

Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
Option “backingstore” “true”

• Add this extension section:

Section "Extensions"
Option “Composite” “Enable”
EndSection

• Right click on any titlebar and choose “Change window behavior”
• Set your translucency and shadow options.
• Reboot
  • You could just restart X, but I didn’t see the change actually happen till a full reboot, since I’m using KDM and killing X just seemed to drop down to KDM.