Month: April 2005

This week’s 20 random songs

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 10 tracks, no matter what (following Thomas Hawk’s lead, I expanded the list to 20 tracks). This week’s list is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in italics):

  1. Fool to Think, Dave Matthews, Everyday
  2. You Got My Letter, Boz Scaggs, Some Change
  3. Hungry Heart, Bruce Springsteen, The River Disc 1
  4. Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart, The Coasters, Elemental R&B (compilation)
  5. Sullivan Street, Counting Crows, Across A Wire: Live in New York City
  6. Listening to Old Voices, John Hiatt, Stolen Moments
  7. Teenage Warrior, Little Feat, Representing the Mambo
  8. Jack Straw, The Grateful Dead, Live at Kezar Stadium 26-May-1973
  9. Hanky Panky, k.d. lang, A Truly Western Experience
  10. How Much I’ve Lied, Gram Parsons, G.P./Grievous Angel
  11. The Wicked Messenger, Bob Dylan, Live in Brussels 12-Nov-2003
  12. If I Could Put Them All Together (I’d Have You), Elvis Costello, Almost Blue (Expanded, Disc 2)
  13. Doly, Les Quatre Etoiles, Sangonini
  14. Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, Van Morrison and Junior Wells, A Night in San Francisco, Disc 1
  15. Claudette, Roy Orbison and Friends, Black and White Night
  16. Deacon Blues, Steely Dan, Citizen Steely Dan Disc 4
  17. Funkytano, Will and Lobo, Siete
  18. Angel Dance, Los Lobos, The Neighborhood
  19. Blue Moon of Kentucky, John Fogerty, Big Mon: Songs of Bill Monroe
  20. 2000 Miles, The Pretenders, The Singles

Why does this list make me think of that great line from the waitress at Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blue Brothers? “We’ve got both kinds of music here: Country and Western!”

(Special bonus track: 21. Black Snake Blues, Clifton Chenier, 60 Minutes with the King of Zydeco)

Press release or review?

I’m not the only one who’s noticed the mainstream press falling over each other to declare their unbridled love for Tiger. At Columbia Journalism Review‘s CJR Daily, Brian Montopoli asks Which of These Things Is Not Like The Other?

It’s Friday, so let’s play a game. It’s called “Press Release or News Story?” The rules are simple: We print two pieces of writing, and you tell us which one is the press release and which the news story. The topic is the new Mac operating system, “Tiger.”

Montopoli turns his critical eye on the Associated Press and concludes that the AP “review” of Tiger is a “fluff job” and “an absolute love letter, apparently written by an Apple aficionado….”

It’s not impossible to write a fair review that’s still positive. According to Montopoli, David Pogue of the New York Times did exactly that in his coverage of Tiger:

Read that piece, which is really a review, and you realize the AP could have said a number of things about the new product, both positive and negative. Instead it gave Apple a valentine: a piece of nearly uncritical PR the company didn’t even have to pay for. The company must be thrilled.

Troll repellent: Pogue’s piece is highly positive about Tiger, and he takes his fair share of deserved dings at Windows. But he knows the difference between well-deserved praise and gushing. If you write reviews of technology products, take note – this is how a pro does it.

Tip of the day: Create custom keyboard shortcuts

It’s annoying to have to hunt around on the desktop or drill through cascading menus to find the programs you use every day. Why not assign keyboard shortcuts to those programs? As long as you follow the rules, these shortcuts can be effective.

This technique works only with Windows shortcuts, which can point to a program, a document file, or a Web address – you can’t assign a shortcut directly to an executable file or a document file. In addition, the shortcut must be stored on the desktop or in the All Programs menu – Windows ignores your instructions completely if the shortcut is stored anywhere else. Finally, the shortcut key combination must consist of a letter or number plus at least two of the following three keys: Ctrl, Alt, Shift.

To assign a keyboard shortcut, right-click the shortcut icon and choose Properties. On the General tab, click in the Shortcut key box and press the key combination you want to use (if you press only a letter or number, Windows adds Ctrl+Alt to the key assignment). Click OK to save your change. In the example below, I’ve assigned the key combination Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C to the Windows Calculator; now, from anywhere within Windows, all I have to do is press those keys to pop up the calculator instantly.

Shortcut_key_calc

Holiday update

Next Tuesday I leave for nearly three weeks of much-needed vacation in Italy. Although I’ll have a computer with me, I won’t be online much, and I’ll be thinking more about 16th Century Italian art and the best Brunello di Montalcino than Windows or Longhorn.

I plan to load up the site with a new tip that will get posted automatically every day, and maybe I’ll post a picture or two along the way.

Huzzah for Eliot Spitzer!

The Attorney General of the State of New York filed a lawsuit against a notorious distributor of crapware (press release, full complaint).

The best part of the complaint is the demand to fully disclose all records of its activities, including an accounting of all revenues. That would lead to a revealing “follow the money” list that would no doubt snag other offenders.

This Electronic Frontier Foundation editorial explains why the strategy is the right one.

A Longhorn smackfest!

Chris Pirillo thinks Longhorn is lame:

Even as I’m watching the 2005 WinHEC keynote right now (which I downloaded from a fan site, FWIW), I’m screaming at my screen! The demonstration was faaaaaar from impressive, and left me NOT wanting more – but wanting to walk away altogether. Instead of watching with awe and wonder, I’m watching with a very confused look on my face. My brow is furrowed, and my fingers are slamming against the keys of my keyboard at this very moment… I’m growing increasingly impatient.

Andre Da Costa thinks Pirillo is lame:

Chris should be using his time more wisely and start dedicating it to Mac OS X and Linux, Lord knows the Windows community would not miss him one bit. His babble about Power Users does not make an iota of sense, its just garbage, garbage and more garbage. Probably Chris was expecting Longhorn Build 5048 to make him break fast in bed or get his old job back at Tech-TV, but surprisingly it didn’t happen with Shannen or Arvinds preview presentation.

Popcorn, anyone?

Update: Chris says he is not lame! More popcorn!

Walt Mossberg reviews Tiger

Just finished reading Walt’s review of Apple’s new OS upgrade in the Wall Street Journal. It’s filled with cool features, according to Walt, who says it’s “the best and most advanced personal computer operating system on the market, despite a few drawbacks. It leaves Windows XP in the dust.” A few drawbacks, he said? I was struck by this:

The only significant problem I noticed was that the computers seemed to run into slight, but greater-than-normal, delays from time to time. Certain functions, like Spotlight searches and the updated Safari Web browser, were very fast. But with other tasks, I noticed more spinning beach-ball icons, Apple’s symbol for delays, than I had with the prior Panther version of the Mac operating system.

In particular, the built-in e-mail program, Apple Mail, was slower. There was a perceptible lag in opening a new e-mail form, beginning a reply, and displaying the drop-down contact list that appears when you begin typing in an e-mail address.

Apple acknowledges it will need to tweak Tiger to eliminate the delays, and it promises to address the problem within a few months.

I don’t get it. This is shipping software. It costs $129. This problem occurred on all three computers that Walt tested Tiger on. Repeated delays in everyday use of the operating system would drive me nuts (you too, I bet). How would you feel if there was a “noticeable lag” in every single operation of your e-mail program? And this will be fixed within a few months???

I just wonder what the same review would have looked like it this operating system update had been released by a company that was located further north?

More on Steve Jobs and Stalin

Turns out I’m not the only one who thinks that “the Apple way” is right out of the old Soviet playbook. In fact, I’m in some fairly distinguished company.

Lawrence Lessig, 1999: “Apple’s response to free speech would make Stalin proud”:

[O]n an Apple-hosted forum … an Apple employee posted a schoolmarmish missive: Apple never promised upgradeability, the employee astutely observed, warning that “additional posts to the thread will be removed, and since the entire thread is off-topic, it will most likely be removed as well.” True to the threat, Apple then deleted the unhappy messages — airbrushing the discontent away with an ease that the Soviets would have envied. …

I do find this corporate response to criticism interesting. We live in a “free-speech” world; our national identity is tied to the ideals of the First Amendment. And yet we treat it as obvious that in corporate space, the Bolsheviks rule. We trust free speech where it doesn’t really matter (politics); we banish it where money is the bottom line (business).

Rodney O. Lain, Mac Observer, 2000:

Machiavelli had the right idea: the business world is governed by force, not by virtue. … This is the principle that Apple has always lived by, and kept us coming back for more, in a sick, twisted way. (Think I’m exaggerating? Raise your hand if you love the Mac. Keep your hand raised if you love Apple. I arrest my case.).

I think it was Stalin who stood in front of his men with a live chicken. He then plucked the feathers off that chicken, one by excruciatingly one. When he finished, he then began walking away from the chicken. The dazed chicken amazingly followed Stalin, and even worse, ate out of Stalin’s hands. …

Mark my words. The more successful Apple gets, the crazier Steve will get. It’s a truism. You’ve heard the stories about how an Apple employee can get in the elevator with Steve and find himself fired by the time he reaches ground floor. I’m sure that was when Apple was at its zenith, in all its glory. Also, the converse is true: when Apple reached its nadir, I’m sure Steve was humble, congenial, downright human.

Sam Beckwith, Prague TV, 2005, reviews an exhibit of Soviet art:

The second section, With Lenin For Ever, looks at communism as a pseudo-religion, which means lots of posters of Lenin and Stalin … There’s also an “inspirational” quote from Pravda:

“Should you ever run into difficulties at work, or suddenly doubt your abilities, think of him – of Stalin – and you’ll find the necessary self-confidence. Should you feel tired at a time when a man should not be tired, think of him – of Stalin – and work will become easier. Should you be at a loss as to how you should act, think of him – of Stalin – and your decision will be the right one.”

I intend to apply this to my own life, but substituting Steve Jobs for Stalin.

Heh.

What do you get when you cross a hard disk with a flash drive?

I spent 90 minutes in the Windows Hardware pavilion at WinHEC last night and saw some cool stuff. Most noteworthy was a hybrid disk drive that incorporates non-volatile flash memory into a conventional hard disk drive. The impact on performance is pretty huge, as you can imagine. This technology is still pretty early, but it should be commercially available when Longhorn ships.

I also got a chance to look more closely at the “Metro” technology. It looks like there will still be room in the world for PDF files. The real impact is to replace the old Enhanced Metafile (EMF) format with a new, smarter native format for printed output. There’s a big overlap with PDF files, but it’s not as direct a competitor as early reports, including mine, might suggest.