.Mac downtime January 22 and 23

January 17, 2005

dot_mac.png Apple Computer sent a note this week that there will be an eight hour downtime for .Mac next weekend. The email (pictured) seems to leave a few things to wonder about. First of all, the message says New iChat sessions will be temporarily unavailable, what does this mean. Does it mean that if you use AIM and have iChat as your client you won't be able to start a new IM session, or just not log in?

OK so it seems the answer would be to go to the support page suggested. Of course it says nothing about the outage and does not answer the questions.

Does the outage have anything to do with the release of the new iLife next Friday? Are they preparing for an influx of sharing or something else? It seems pretty drastic to take a commercial service offline for eight hours, even if they are generally the least intrusive eight contiguous hours of a week. It also hints that they are "enhancing" their service. Does this mean we'll see new features next week?

iPod Shuffle an opportunity for Podcasters

January 17, 2005

Michael Singer's article on the iPod Shuffle demonstrates the bias that a handful of programmers would like to present. The article Apple's iPod Shuffle Stifles Podcasting quotes pundit Doc Searls, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, citing problems moving around inside a podcast. His take is that it is a problem on the regular iPod and instead of fixing the problem Apple eliminated the functionality.

Hopefully the people have tried to set the record straight about the incorrect stories in the tech press, will not ignore this issue because they are on the other side. Here is a bit of the reality for those who stop by. Many are a reprise from my earlier article on what Podcatchers (podcast listeners) want.

Drupal 4.5.2 Upgrade

January 17, 2005

Drupal is out with its 4.5.2 upgrade. It is a very simple upgrade and I had zero problems. Checking the changelog reveals Drupal is now four years and two days old (based on the 1.0 date of January 15, 2001). Happy birthday Drupal! Those of us using it are looking forward to several more great years.

Later today I will likely write a little more about Ranchero Software's Mars Edit which I've been using the last couple of days. Great software. Drupal users have to tell it to use Movable Type settings to get all the extras to work.

Update Looking at a post on the Drupal site it seems tracker isn't working. The tracker module has two changes of significance. Lines 70 and 73 have added 'AND c.status = 0' to the SQL statement. Removing that statement restores previous tracker behavior. What does it break?

iPod Shuffle and audiobooks

January 16, 2005

Apple has posted a tech tip about playing audio books on the iPod Shuffle. Three cheers for a superb implementation. Put it in shuffle mode and it knows to skip the audiobooks. The only minor thing that would have been nice is a way to tell Autofill to include books but putting them on manually is a minor inconvenience.

AppleMatter has a first impression of the iPod Shuffle and iRiver's CEO proves they still don't get it.

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