PurplePaste

People speak about how applications have been moving from the desktop to the web. Web-based email and calendaring have seen huge improvements over the past couple of years, Google Docs and Microsoft Office Live are bringing very capable office suites to the web, and even image editors are appearing online. Flickr recently added an image editor to their arsenal, powered by Picnik.

I like this progression. Data portability is important, and application portability is going to become equally important as handheld devices provide more and more functionality. I like being able to check my Gmail account from my Mac at work, my Macbook, my phone, and my girlfriend's Windows machine, without dealing with installing and configuring applications or syncing data.

But there is one problem with running so many of my applications in the web browser - when web browsers crash (and they do, especially when you have 80 tabs open), everything grinds to a halt, and data and information is lost (at least temporarily).

Fluid is a free, Leopard application that provides an interesting solution - stick your important web apps into a desktop app. As a separate application (using WebKit, so it works just as well as Safari), the application is siloed off from your other apps, so when Firefox or Safari crashes, your Fluid apps are still there, unaffected. You can even launch the web app from the dock, and the ability to use the favicon as the icon is a nice touch.

It's similar to the Mozilla Prism project, which the developer of fluid credits for his inspiration. You can download Fluid from fluidapp.com.

This just arrived in my inbox, via the local Freecycle list...

From: XXXXXXX@yahoo.com
To: freecycleLowellMA@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:38:33 -0000
Subject: [Freecycle Lowell] OFFER: 10.2 GB Hard Drive (Lowell)

Model:IBM DPTA-371020. Part #07N3339. ATA-IDE. No Idea whats on it.

"No idea what's on it." I've got a bunch of hard drives kicking around my apartment that fit that description too. I sure wouldn't hand off them to a stranger, though. I like my credit score just the way it is, thanks.

Sounds like an identity thief's wet dream. No dumpster diving necessary, just an old hard drive, probably long since forgotten (it's a 10GB drive, after all). Could be full of personal information about somebody, maybe even some old tax returns or bank statements?

Freecycle should adopt some guidelines, or at least some recommendations, about this sort of thing. Maybe they already have, but it's not on their FAQ.

Yesterday I purchased a new Santa Rosa Macbook, and it's been an extremely positive experience so far. The machine is fantastic, and I'm overall pretty impressed with Leopard. Nothing mind-blowing, but it just feels like a more mature OS than Tiger. The pre-release chatter about "lots of little features" is spot on... so far there's no one killer app for me, but plenty of small improvements.

One thing that really stands out for me is the improved Terminal.app. For several years, one of my first installs on a new Mac has been iTerm, a great, free, open-source terminal replacement for OSX. iTerm is very customizable and makes use of a tabbed interface that is a necessity for developers like myself who spend most of the day logged into shells on multiple machines.

With Leopard, Apple has introduced into Terminal the little bits of the functionality that have had me using iTerm for so long. Terminal now supports tabs, and comes with a set of customizable themes -- my old standby of green text on black is now a preset option that I can tweak and save as the default setting.

The only thing I find difficult to adjust to are the keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs. I am used to using command-left and command-right to change tabs, but by default, the Leopard Terminal uses command-shift-{ and command-shift-}. It's an awkward shortcut, especially for one that I use hundreds of times a day.

My solution was to modify the keyboard shortcut for Terminal.app. This can be done manually, under System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, but here's an Applescript that will achieve the same effect:

tell application "Terminal" to quit
do shell script ¬
  "defaults write com.apple.Terminal NSUserKeyEquivalents " & ¬
  "-dict-add 'Select Next Tab' '@\\UF703' " & ¬
  "'Select Previous Tab' '@\\UF702';"
delay 1
tell application "Terminal" to launch


I just made my first real purchase from an online music download store.

I've had an iPod for five years. I use iTunes on a daily basis, as a media player and to manage my music collection. Nearly every (physical) album I own has been ripped to MP3. I subscribe to over two dozen podcasts.

I've even downloaded music from the iTunes Music Store, on the few occasions that I've been credited with free downloads in some sort of promotion for purchasing concert tickets. And I found the iTunes experience to be a positive one -- except for the restrictive DRM (Digital Rights Management) on the audio files.

Now I know there are ways around the iTunes DRM. I can burn audio CDs and re-rip them to MP3. But I'm a bit of a purist and I hate the idea that I'd be sacrificing sound quality, even if I might not hear the difference. And I'm aware that Apple is starting to offer DRM-free downloads, though this option is never available for the tracks I want to buy.

Plus, it's the principle of the thing -- I don't want to support DRM, a system that is designed to restrict the rights of the consumer. But if I can purchase my media legally, easily, and without being treated like a criminal, then I will.

So today, when I heard that Amazon.com had opened their online music store and was selling high-quality, DRM-free MP3 files -- real MP3 files that will play on any media player -- I ponied up a few bucks to test the waters, and found the experience to be easy and quite satisfying.

I purchased a copy of El-P's "I'll Sleep When You're Dead" for $7.99. I've been waiting patiently for this album to be available in a DRM-free format on iTunes for months now, especially as it is on Def Jux, and independent record label. But no dice, it's still not on iTunes without DRM, and so I made the plunge and bought it from Amazon.

The one annoying aspect of the new AmazonMP3 store is the downloader application. While I was happy to see that there was a Mac version of the app, I am less than thrilled that it is required to purchase full albums. However, the application itself is simple and unobtrusive, and didn't require an admin password for installation, which at least makes me slightly less paranoid about running it. The downloader displayed a progress bar for each of the MP3 files, which downloaded quickly and were automatically added to my iTunes library.

The audio quality is quite respectable, Lame-encoded VBR files in the 230kbps range. Overall, I was very impressed by the experience -- from searching for the album, installing the downloader, making the purchase, and downloading the files, the whole process took less than five minutes. Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I'm hoping this shakes things up a bit and persuades more retailers to dump DRM.

One Christmas, when I was about seven years old, I received this fantastic book as a gift from my aunt and uncle. As I recall, it's pretty short on detail, but full of incredible full-page photos featuring robotic arms, glowing amber CRTs, and fiber-optic cables, all lit with a healthy dose of neon light and Tron-inspired backdrops (it was the eighties, after all). This book pre-dated the arrival of our first home PC (a Tandy 1000) by several years, but it did cement the idea in my mind that computers, however foreign and complex they appeared to be at the time, were pretty intriguing.

I have high hopes that I might find this book again, buried under piles of useless crap that I haven't touched in years, in what used to be my old closet at my parents' house. If not, I may shell out the penny (plus $3.99 shipping) for a used copy on Amazon. I think I could find a not too ironic spot for it on my bookshelf at work, right between Mastering Regular Expressions and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.