mjharper.de is now live!
17/Jun/08 09:46 Filed in: Site
Info
On Sunday I registered a domain on
macbay, and I’ve just
uploaded the blog to the new site. Uploading was at least twice as fast,
taking just over 20 minutes for 800+ files, where it used to take
about an hour on .mac; loading times on the page itself also seemed
considerably faster. And I now have php, as well as a full domain
at http://www.mjharper.de/, which at the moment redirects
to http://blog.mjharper.de/.
Anyway, this site—the.mac/.me site—will remain available until the end of Spetember, when my account expires. I won’t be updating it again, though; as of today, I will only be keeping the new blog up-to-date.
All the other sites will be gradually transfered over the next couple of months.
Anyway, this site—the.mac/.me site—will remain available until the end of Spetember, when my account expires. I won’t be updating it again, though; as of today, I will only be keeping the new blog up-to-date.
All the other sites will be gradually transfered over the next couple of months.
|
So long, and thanks for all the… ghoti
The deed is as good as done.
It’s almost certain that I will be cancelling my .mac subscription, or at least not renewing it when it expires in September. I’ve been with .mac from the start—since it was iTools and free, in fact—and I’m sorry to have reached this point.
One contributing factor was my decision to upgrade from a single user to a family license a couple of years ago. That doubled the cost of subscription for me, but the sub-accounts went mostly un-used by the family. I thought it would make a nice gift, but in the end it was mostly just an extra expense. And there is no convenient way to downgrade back to a single account, meaning I’m stuck with it.
But it’s the repackaging as MobileMe that has really been the decisive factor. Most of the ‘new’ services only really benefit people with multiple devices in multiple locations—a desktop, a laptop, an iPhone, maybe a PC at work—and for me, the fabulous new push service will be virtually indistinguishable from the old method of checking my email. The cloud of web-apps announced at the recent Stevenote will also be of negligible use: the last time I used .mac online mail (nice though the interface is) was when I was in hospital and could only access the internet via a browser.
The new name makes it clear that the new focus is on ‘mobility’, and for me that means next to nothing. However, it also marks a shift away from the Mac, both in content and in approach, and that does affect me. Ultimately, MobileMe will result in an improvement in service for Windows users with iPhones more than it will for the average Mac user.
The re-branding is also degrading, quite frankly. MobileMe is a ridiculous name; the logo is awful; and the thought of being YOUR_USER_NAME@me.com should be enough to send a chill up the spine of anyone with a modicum of taste. I have used my .mac email for professional purposes for years; but I’d be embarrassed to give out my address as mjharper@me.com. It sounds childish, like the teenage habit of drawing little circles or smilies over an ‘i’. In a nutshell, the new name is smacks of dumbing down, which is odd considering that the site is now being billed as ‘Exchange for the rest of us’. It’s meant to feel more professional, but its moniker contradicts that.
(To be fair, I wouldn’t have to change my email—yet. And apparently, all webpages will be redirected. But I can’t see that lasting for long, or Apple allowing you to publish new sites under the .mac address, even if you are able leave old ones intact. How that will work with sites which need constant updates—like blogs—remains to be seen.)
Still, this isn’t what is driving me away. Shifting the focus of .mac would be fine, if the things that are currently broken would be fixed in the process. But they’re not. All of the things which won’t work on .mac still won’t work with MobileMe. I don’t care about being able to access my iDisk through a browser on a Windows machine and having drag-and-drop functionality. I do care about finally getting php and MySQL, and being able to have a fully functional dynamic website.
In summary, I hate the new name; I will hardly use the new features; and the older features which I already use won’t be improved or fixed, to my increasing consternation. Couple that with the expense (which is in part my own fault), and it’s time to grit my teeth and look elsewhere.
It’s almost certain that I will be cancelling my .mac subscription, or at least not renewing it when it expires in September. I’ve been with .mac from the start—since it was iTools and free, in fact—and I’m sorry to have reached this point.
One contributing factor was my decision to upgrade from a single user to a family license a couple of years ago. That doubled the cost of subscription for me, but the sub-accounts went mostly un-used by the family. I thought it would make a nice gift, but in the end it was mostly just an extra expense. And there is no convenient way to downgrade back to a single account, meaning I’m stuck with it.
But it’s the repackaging as MobileMe that has really been the decisive factor. Most of the ‘new’ services only really benefit people with multiple devices in multiple locations—a desktop, a laptop, an iPhone, maybe a PC at work—and for me, the fabulous new push service will be virtually indistinguishable from the old method of checking my email. The cloud of web-apps announced at the recent Stevenote will also be of negligible use: the last time I used .mac online mail (nice though the interface is) was when I was in hospital and could only access the internet via a browser.
The new name makes it clear that the new focus is on ‘mobility’, and for me that means next to nothing. However, it also marks a shift away from the Mac, both in content and in approach, and that does affect me. Ultimately, MobileMe will result in an improvement in service for Windows users with iPhones more than it will for the average Mac user.
The re-branding is also degrading, quite frankly. MobileMe is a ridiculous name; the logo is awful; and the thought of being YOUR_USER_NAME@me.com should be enough to send a chill up the spine of anyone with a modicum of taste. I have used my .mac email for professional purposes for years; but I’d be embarrassed to give out my address as mjharper@me.com. It sounds childish, like the teenage habit of drawing little circles or smilies over an ‘i’. In a nutshell, the new name is smacks of dumbing down, which is odd considering that the site is now being billed as ‘Exchange for the rest of us’. It’s meant to feel more professional, but its moniker contradicts that.
(To be fair, I wouldn’t have to change my email—yet. And apparently, all webpages will be redirected. But I can’t see that lasting for long, or Apple allowing you to publish new sites under the .mac address, even if you are able leave old ones intact. How that will work with sites which need constant updates—like blogs—remains to be seen.)
Still, this isn’t what is driving me away. Shifting the focus of .mac would be fine, if the things that are currently broken would be fixed in the process. But they’re not. All of the things which won’t work on .mac still won’t work with MobileMe. I don’t care about being able to access my iDisk through a browser on a Windows machine and having drag-and-drop functionality. I do care about finally getting php and MySQL, and being able to have a fully functional dynamic website.
In summary, I hate the new name; I will hardly use the new features; and the older features which I already use won’t be improved or fixed, to my increasing consternation. Couple that with the expense (which is in part my own fault), and it’s time to grit my teeth and look elsewhere.
Somehow, a depressing day
10/Jun/08 21:39 Filed in: General
Nonsense
The tyrannical web gallery
08/Jun/08 13:19 Filed in: Site
Info | Photography
This is something I’ve been
meaning to write for a while—since the website took its current
form, in fact. I think it rambles a bit, especially at the end, but
I’ll tidy it up later ;-)
The photography on this site—as anyone with a clicky finger will already know or can easily find out—is completely integrated into the blog. To be sure, there’s an index page available in the menu, but that’s just a nice way of presenting the main groupings and only leads back to blog entries or categories anyway. All of this is quite intentional, an here’s why.
The first version of this site, built just after I bought my first digital camera, was made using the templates available on .Mac Homepage. Frankly, it looked awful, but that’s beside the point. The templates for web design followed the usual pattern: pages for text, pages for movies, pages for photos. This is still the most common way of organising online media, and it’s perfectly understandable. How would you combine an essay, a web gallery, and a movie presentation on the same page? With difficulty, and the obvious solution is to divide these elements up by type. That was how my first website worked; it’s how most websites still work, and it’s certainly how most website development applications work.
However, this division of media lends itself to the kind of webpage which merely imitates a ‘real-world’ counterpart, rather than taking embracing of the possibilities of the internet and re-inventing itself accordingly. The familiarity of the ‘physical’ arrangement is actually a restriction, not just of the use of space, but of the conception itself (Brent Simmons (of NetNewsWire) wrote something similar recently, with regard to websites which imitate a ‘page-in-a-page’ layout).
Some of the restrictions inherent in the online gallery:
The rise of the blog was, for me, a liberating event. Instead of creating a site of static essays, a site could now be a series of loosely connected thoughts and musings. Being able to post a couple of lines—or even just a couple of words—is what keeps this site alive. Certainly, sometimes I want to post a longer, more carefully constructed piece, but most of the blog consists of brief spur-of-the moment rants. Basically, the blog allows me to write a I think; and that’s exactly the sort of thing I want for my photography.
It’s the combination of blog and Lightbox that make the photography work the way I want. Lightbox (I actually use a combination of Slimbox and Suckerfish HoverLightbox Redux) is the effect you can see when you click on a photo—the background dims, bringing a photograph to the fore. It’s a nice effect which makes browsing much nicer—the whole of the browser window is dedicated to highlighting the photograph, clearing the clutter away. However, this isn’t actually the important thing about using Lightbox: the essential thing which liberates the photography is the ability to tag the photos.
Imagine you have 40 photos on a page, and 25 are to do with your holiday in Spain. Tagging those images with “Spain” will mean that, regardless of what other pictures you have on the source page, when you enter Lighbox mode, those 25 photos will be grouped together, allowing you to navigate through them by clicking on ‘Next’ or ‘Previous’. The tagging makes a virtual gallery: if you want to add another of the 40 photos to the Spain group, all you need do is change the tag, and Lightbox will update the grouping next time someone browses the photos.
Now, Lightbox only allows you to have one tag for each photo, whereas multiple categories can be assigned to each post in a blog. So I use the blog categories to organise the galleries. Every picture is given a neutral tag (“photo”); each post is given several categories. If you visit a particular post, and click on a photo to enter Lighbox mode, you’ll be should only the photos directly relating to that post. Once you select a category, on the other hand, several posts and their associated photos will be grouped together on a page, and the Lightbox gallery will be expanded accordingly.
In other words, a gallery is now constructed by adding a category (or tag) to a blog post. In the example I gave above of the single photo I took in the park one morning, it either stands alone in the original post, is grouped under Jena, or is part of the complete Photography category. I could easily add a category for ‘trees’ as well, and Lightbox would do the rest.
Of course, this method isn’t perfect, because a blog post might contain 30 photos, which will then all be grouped under each category they belong to. In general, that’s fine by me; but in any case, it could be solved by splitting the post up. And the point remains: the same post, the same photos, can be organised under as many categories as I wish, leading to the creation of ‘live’ virtual galleries using Lightbox.
Liberation from tyranny.
Tyranny
The photography on this site—as anyone with a clicky finger will already know or can easily find out—is completely integrated into the blog. To be sure, there’s an index page available in the menu, but that’s just a nice way of presenting the main groupings and only leads back to blog entries or categories anyway. All of this is quite intentional, an here’s why.
The first version of this site, built just after I bought my first digital camera, was made using the templates available on .Mac Homepage. Frankly, it looked awful, but that’s beside the point. The templates for web design followed the usual pattern: pages for text, pages for movies, pages for photos. This is still the most common way of organising online media, and it’s perfectly understandable. How would you combine an essay, a web gallery, and a movie presentation on the same page? With difficulty, and the obvious solution is to divide these elements up by type. That was how my first website worked; it’s how most websites still work, and it’s certainly how most website development applications work.
However, this division of media lends itself to the kind of webpage which merely imitates a ‘real-world’ counterpart, rather than taking embracing of the possibilities of the internet and re-inventing itself accordingly. The familiarity of the ‘physical’ arrangement is actually a restriction, not just of the use of space, but of the conception itself (Brent Simmons (of NetNewsWire) wrote something similar recently, with regard to websites which imitate a ‘page-in-a-page’ layout).
Some of the restrictions inherent in the online gallery:
- The page title and/or concept. Sometimes, of course, the page title is nothing more than the name of the event: Phil’s birthday, Holiday in Barcelona, and so on. But what about those miscellaneous photos that get taken? Amid all the photos of architecture, you take a picture of your feet cooling a fountain; so you take it out of the gallery, because it doesn’t fit the concept. At one point I took several photos of glass—reflections, distorted images, and so on—which didn’t really belong anywhere. I had the vague idea that I should make a gallery of glass (after the Carl Zeiss factory) but it never got posted because…
- Two photos don’t make a gallery. If you’re going to make a ‘page’ dedicated to a particular event or concept, you need a minimum number of photos—I’d guess six. Less than that, and it doesn’t really constitute a gallery. What do you do with that photo you took when out walking one morning? It doesn’t warrant a page to itself. And so it languishes on your hard-drive, waiting for company…
- Rows and columns. A standard web gallery template has rows of three or four thumbnails. What if you have 19 photos? Either the page will look ugly, because of the lack of symmetry, or you’ll end up trying to select one (or more) for deletion—and not because you don’t like the photo, but because the layout of the page demands it. Multiples of three or four, and anything else is a problem…
Liberation
The rise of the blog was, for me, a liberating event. Instead of creating a site of static essays, a site could now be a series of loosely connected thoughts and musings. Being able to post a couple of lines—or even just a couple of words—is what keeps this site alive. Certainly, sometimes I want to post a longer, more carefully constructed piece, but most of the blog consists of brief spur-of-the moment rants. Basically, the blog allows me to write a I think; and that’s exactly the sort of thing I want for my photography.
It’s the combination of blog and Lightbox that make the photography work the way I want. Lightbox (I actually use a combination of Slimbox and Suckerfish HoverLightbox Redux) is the effect you can see when you click on a photo—the background dims, bringing a photograph to the fore. It’s a nice effect which makes browsing much nicer—the whole of the browser window is dedicated to highlighting the photograph, clearing the clutter away. However, this isn’t actually the important thing about using Lightbox: the essential thing which liberates the photography is the ability to tag the photos.
Imagine you have 40 photos on a page, and 25 are to do with your holiday in Spain. Tagging those images with “Spain” will mean that, regardless of what other pictures you have on the source page, when you enter Lighbox mode, those 25 photos will be grouped together, allowing you to navigate through them by clicking on ‘Next’ or ‘Previous’. The tagging makes a virtual gallery: if you want to add another of the 40 photos to the Spain group, all you need do is change the tag, and Lightbox will update the grouping next time someone browses the photos.
Now, Lightbox only allows you to have one tag for each photo, whereas multiple categories can be assigned to each post in a blog. So I use the blog categories to organise the galleries. Every picture is given a neutral tag (“photo”); each post is given several categories. If you visit a particular post, and click on a photo to enter Lighbox mode, you’ll be should only the photos directly relating to that post. Once you select a category, on the other hand, several posts and their associated photos will be grouped together on a page, and the Lightbox gallery will be expanded accordingly.
In other words, a gallery is now constructed by adding a category (or tag) to a blog post. In the example I gave above of the single photo I took in the park one morning, it either stands alone in the original post, is grouped under Jena, or is part of the complete Photography category. I could easily add a category for ‘trees’ as well, and Lightbox would do the rest.
Of course, this method isn’t perfect, because a blog post might contain 30 photos, which will then all be grouped under each category they belong to. In general, that’s fine by me; but in any case, it could be solved by splitting the post up. And the point remains: the same post, the same photos, can be organised under as many categories as I wish, leading to the creation of ‘live’ virtual galleries using Lightbox.
Liberation from tyranny.
Krautrock and Einstürzende Neubauten
07/Jun/08 11:01 Filed in: Music
The debate, over at rym.
Maybe it expands the concept too much, but I’ve felt for a long while that Einstürzende Neubauten were Krautrock—or rather, that Krautrock is wide enough to include them.
Maybe it expands the concept too much, but I’ve felt for a long while that Einstürzende Neubauten were Krautrock—or rather, that Krautrock is wide enough to include them.
On the cards?
04/Jun/08 16:20 Filed in: Jena
02/Jun/08 21:54 Filed in: Stray Ranting
So how typical is that? I decide to
take the plunge and make a proper attempt to get to grips with
Twitter and
micro-blogging—notice the brand spanking new ‘Twitter Updates’
section of the sidebar—and they immediately cut the number of API
requests from 70 an hour to 30. Usefulness cut in half… (or
worse).
Mac Tips of the Week
A couple of cool things I’ve stumbled
across in the last few days.
- Spaces has now been fixed! After installing the 10.5.3 update, and de-selecting the new option ‘When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application’, you can now have different windows of one application open in different spaces. In other words, Spaces in allows task-based organisation, rather than only application-based organisation. In other other words, it’s now usuable. Read more at Daring Fireball.
- Add a stack of ‘Recent Applications’ (or documents or volumes or servers or…) to your Leopard dock. Sure, it’s still butt-ugly, but at least here function might trump form… More at macosxhints.
A rose by any other name
30/May/08 23:28 Filed in: Stray Ranting
| Mac
Joe Kissell of TidBITs on the rumoured
change from
.Mac to Mobile Me:
Personally, I think “Mobile Me” is in a whole different ball game of silly. I’d be embarresed to log on to it, let alone speak about it in public. I dread to imagine the following, and I’m sure you can think of more:My feelings about this matter are as follows: I've always thought that ".Mac" was a silly name, and would be glad to see it replaced with almost anything else. "Mobile Me" is only very slightly less silly, and it reminds me worryingly of Windows Me.
- Open the Mobile Me preferences.
- Please enter your Mobile Me password.
- Mobile Me Mail.
- Send we your Mobile Me testimonies!
There's one born every day…
And this time it’s me.
A little over three weeks ago, I got a telephone call informing me that a neighbour had left a message for me on nachbarschaftspost.com. Sometimes, it has to be said, people do invite me to community websites, and I trundle along, create an account, see that the site wants all my attention, and rarely go back. So it was with Facebook.
This time I went along and created an account, with the “One message for you!” icon flickering all the while, but was unable to actually get at that message. I tried several browsers, but to no avail. Fed up with the stupid site, I had a look for a way to cancel the account, but couldn’t find one. So I gave up altogether, and promptly forgot about it.
Yesterday I received an email informing me in no uncertain terms that I now owed the company €54. Apparently, the first two weeks were a free trial period, and having not cancelled with that fortnight, I am now bound to a 2-year contract at €9 a month, to be paid in four 6-monthly installments. This information is supposedly contained—read: burried—within the AGB. I haven’t checked because I’m not going back to the site.
It transpires that the whole thing is a fairly well-documented scam, and I was probably the last person in Germany to fall into the trap. The advice, in such cases of hidden cost, is not to pay anything, even if you start to receive letters from lawyers.
Chalk that one up to experience.
And thanks to Adelheid for putting up with my stress.
A little over three weeks ago, I got a telephone call informing me that a neighbour had left a message for me on nachbarschaftspost.com. Sometimes, it has to be said, people do invite me to community websites, and I trundle along, create an account, see that the site wants all my attention, and rarely go back. So it was with Facebook.
This time I went along and created an account, with the “One message for you!” icon flickering all the while, but was unable to actually get at that message. I tried several browsers, but to no avail. Fed up with the stupid site, I had a look for a way to cancel the account, but couldn’t find one. So I gave up altogether, and promptly forgot about it.
Yesterday I received an email informing me in no uncertain terms that I now owed the company €54. Apparently, the first two weeks were a free trial period, and having not cancelled with that fortnight, I am now bound to a 2-year contract at €9 a month, to be paid in four 6-monthly installments. This information is supposedly contained—read: burried—within the AGB. I haven’t checked because I’m not going back to the site.
It transpires that the whole thing is a fairly well-documented scam, and I was probably the last person in Germany to fall into the trap. The advice, in such cases of hidden cost, is not to pay anything, even if you start to receive letters from lawyers.
Chalk that one up to experience.
And thanks to Adelheid for putting up with my stress.
Strange Bunny, May/June 2008
26/May/08 18:37 Filed in: Music | Strange Bunny
Just putting the finishing touches to
the next couple of Strange Bunnies, a two-part reconstruction of
the live version of The Resident's Wormwood. I saw the
concert in Jena back in 1999, and as I've said elsewhere, it was absolutely
incredible. And there isn't a single release that I've been able to
find which actually has the entire concert on it. The DVD release
has all of Mr Skull's speeches, but misses off several songs, and
sounds a little thin; the Wormwood Live version (which you
can get hold of on iTunes) contains all the songs, but not the
speeches, and sounds somewhat muddy; and then Kettles of Fish
on the Outskirts of Town contains a few of the songs which
sound better than on the other releases. At the concert I also
bought the In Between Screams CD, which contains the music
played during the intermission. So my plan was to try and put
together a 'definitive' record of the concert, at least as far as
possible using what resources I have.
Preparing these broadcasts was quite different from the process I usually go through. The track listing was predetermined, for a start, and sometimes I had three recordings to choose from, while at other times there was only one I could use. I ended up using all the pieces from Kettles of Fish, simply because the sound was so much better, so that made life a little easier. But on many tracks I'd have to listen to two versions carefully, and work out which was the best, or whether I could use elements from each, stitched together to form a better whole. And finally, in an attempt to have some kind of consistency in the sound, I ran everything through a bunch of plug-ins.
Now I've finished, I can't actually remember which versions I used where. But there were definitely a couple of Frankenstein tracks. The opening sequence, for instance, uses parts of three different recordings, the epilogue uses parts of two, and on Hanging By His Hair and God's Magic Finger I even overlaid two versions in certain sections, hoping to achieve the best effect. Oddly enough, most of the echo that can be heard is part of the original…
The plan was never to use the intermission music in its entirety (to be honest, it isn't particularly good anyway) but I did use it to play out the first part (about four minutes) and I used about a minute to play in the second part. Not that it will make much sense if the two parts are broadcast a month apart, but should OK-Jena ever play them back-to-back, it should actually work quite well. And I even enlisted the help of Alex (the built-in voice in Leopard) to do a brief intro and outro to each part. First spoken bits in absolutely ages. Well, written bits ;-)
Darkly fascinating and weirdly wonderful. I just hope that the broadcasts capture some of what I saw that evening. It was at least an interesting experience putting them together.
Preparing these broadcasts was quite different from the process I usually go through. The track listing was predetermined, for a start, and sometimes I had three recordings to choose from, while at other times there was only one I could use. I ended up using all the pieces from Kettles of Fish, simply because the sound was so much better, so that made life a little easier. But on many tracks I'd have to listen to two versions carefully, and work out which was the best, or whether I could use elements from each, stitched together to form a better whole. And finally, in an attempt to have some kind of consistency in the sound, I ran everything through a bunch of plug-ins.
Now I've finished, I can't actually remember which versions I used where. But there were definitely a couple of Frankenstein tracks. The opening sequence, for instance, uses parts of three different recordings, the epilogue uses parts of two, and on Hanging By His Hair and God's Magic Finger I even overlaid two versions in certain sections, hoping to achieve the best effect. Oddly enough, most of the echo that can be heard is part of the original…
The plan was never to use the intermission music in its entirety (to be honest, it isn't particularly good anyway) but I did use it to play out the first part (about four minutes) and I used about a minute to play in the second part. Not that it will make much sense if the two parts are broadcast a month apart, but should OK-Jena ever play them back-to-back, it should actually work quite well. And I even enlisted the help of Alex (the built-in voice in Leopard) to do a brief intro and outro to each part. First spoken bits in absolutely ages. Well, written bits ;-)
Darkly fascinating and weirdly wonderful. I just hope that the broadcasts capture some of what I saw that evening. It was at least an interesting experience putting them together.
Russian farce
25/May/08 01:00 Filed in: Music | Stray Ranting
So, Russia just 'won' the Eurovision
Song Contest. Can anyone else spell "politics"?
And does anyone else out there think that the verse of the 'winning' song was a total rip-off of Wide World by Cat Stevens?
Why do I watch the Eurovision Song Contest? Because neither the songs nor the voting have anything to do with music. And that's hilarious.
And does anyone else out there think that the verse of the 'winning' song was a total rip-off of Wide World by Cat Stevens?
Why do I watch the Eurovision Song Contest? Because neither the songs nor the voting have anything to do with music. And that's hilarious.
Catholicism is officially dead
That's
what it says here.
Okay, I'm exaggerating, but what's left when the Catholic Church backs down from its condemnation of Galileo, organises symposia celebrating the birth of Darwin, speculates that there might be alien life on Mars and elsewhere in the universe, and that some of those aliens might even be free of original sin? It might not be dead, but it's certainly cowering in the corner pleading for someone to throw in the towel.
Okay, I'm exaggerating, but what's left when the Catholic Church backs down from its condemnation of Galileo, organises symposia celebrating the birth of Darwin, speculates that there might be alien life on Mars and elsewhere in the universe, and that some of those aliens might even be free of original sin? It might not be dead, but it's certainly cowering in the corner pleading for someone to throw in the towel.