A while ago I found both the pinout and the protocol for communicating with an ipod. I wanted to put together a program that would allow me to control my ipod from my computer using the dock cable. But I couldn’t figure out how to get a dock connector to serial adapter. Nobody makes one that I could find. I thought about buying a cheap power charger and cutting it up, but I didn’t want to drop $15 just to find out that they didn’t fully populate the connector (since they only need about 4 pins, it would make sense…).

All this changed this week when I found a page where you can buy blank ipod dock connectors. It is a guy in Australia, and he is going to ship me 6 of them. Total cost: $16 (And change). All I need to do is solder on some wires and hook it up to a serial port plug (can get at radio shack) and I have my cable.

The next step is to just write the code to communicate with the ipod. The protocol looks to be a simple serial protocol. I’m thinking of doing it in Java using the javax.comm packages to do the serial port communications. I would build it as two projects, a communications library and then the actual application. I’ll keep you guys informed on my progress….

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No sooner had I blogged requesting Audible .com to use podcasting technology, then they announce that they will start doing it! Should I request Apple to start randomly giving me stock next? How about free Tivo’s for everyone?

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I’ve talked about Podcasting before, but there was a new version of Ipodder released this week, Steve Jobs announced that the next version of Itunes would support podcasts, so I thought it was time for a recap.

Quick recap: Podcasts are like homemade radio shows that you can download (or subscribe to) and can get automatically put on your ipod. (with the help of software programs like Ipodder.

I can’t make up my mind about podcasting. When I first heard about it, I thought it was pretty cool and tried it out. Then I got tired of it. Then I got into it again. And now I’m tired of it again. I think my problem with it is that I don’t have that much time to listen to them. I really only listen to them when I’m driving because they are too distracting to listen to while working (since they are mainly talk). And even then, they have to compete with the music on my Ipod and my XM Radio. But even if it is not my bag, it is very exciting in other ways.

Just like the World Wide Web allowed anyone who can write HTML (and these days anyone with a word processor) to publish whatever they want. Web pages competed with other forms of print publishing like newspapers, magazines, and books. Blogs are yet another step in the self-publishing print phenomenon. Podcasting is taking this self-publishing phenomenon to a new level with things that can compete with radio. Now anyone can (with very little equipment) broadcast their own radio station. And that is powerful…

Podcasting is also exciting in the way it uses and fosters new technology. When the first podcasts were being done, there was no subscription mechanism. That technology had to be developed. And the technology is so damn simple that it can’t be inflexible. There are a lot of possibilities for non-podcasting audio sources to re-use this technology.

And some people are. I just found out this week that IT Conversations (which records technical talks at conferences and things for free download) uses this RSS Enclosure technology to syndicate your “queue” of talks. This means that I can queue things up at work, and it is ready and waiting for me to sync with my Ipod when I get home.

This same idea could be used with audio feeds from NPR and BBC. Both of these radio networks have streaming audio (which I have on occasion converted to MP3) that you can listen to on your computer. But like I mentioned, I really want to listen to them in my car. All they would have to do is implements some kind of queue thing like
IT Conversations has for their content.

To be fair, Audible has weekly (and even daily) audio news programs and has had proprietary software to do this subscription model for quite some time. But now we have an open standard that can be used to implement the same thing. I would love to see Audible switch to an open technology (but am doubtful that it would happen). When companies use open technology, everyone involved (both the company in question and everyone else who uses it) benefits by having so many eyes look at the problems.

All this just goes to show that you can’t predict in what innovative ways new technology will be used and employed.

Oh Yeah, the new version of Ipodder in amazing. I must have been using a really old version, because this version is slick and very feature rich. New features that I noticed are the ability to manage your subscriptions through a remote OPML feed (so all your RSS feeds are managed in one place). With this feature you could subscribe to a new Podcast from your office and have it ready for you when you get home. The individual feed management is also much improved. You can set a window so only to most recent 14 days worth of shows is available (I used to do this by hand).

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AFI has just released their Top 100 Movie Quotes.

So here’s what I want you to do:

1. Go and print out the list (I’ll wait).
2. Find a willing partner.
3. Cut the list in half at 50, and give one half to each person.
4. Recite the quote to them and have them guess what movie it came from. Feel free to embellish with accents, props, etc. to help the figure it out.
5. Earn a point for each movie title you get correct, and a bonus point if you also get the year!

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As the subject says, the Beach Boys were on the 60’s on Six all day today, in celebration of the first day of Summer 2005. This is something that I really like about XM Radio. They can take the time out to run cool specials like this. You would never hear a FM station do something like this. In some markets, you can’t get an FM station to play oldies….

As much as I like XM Radio for running fun specials like that, I found out about today’s special on my way home to pick up Margaret at 5PM. Not a whole lot of time to enjoy it. It would be really nice if there was some way for XM Radio to let its listeners know about upcoming specials. I know they have a newsletter, but my understanding is that it doesn’t cover enough and isn’t timely. I’m also subscribed to a list that sends my the XM show schedules each week, but it suffers from the opposite problem: too much detail!

What would be idea is a XM Radio RSS feed that would be updated to let the listeners know about upcoming special events… Are you listening XM?

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Today is the first day of our Summer Fresh Vegestable Season. For the past 2 years Margaret and I have been part of a Farm Cooperative that delivers us fresh veggies every week of the summer. The basic idea is that you purchase a share at the beginning of the year. They use that money to purchase all the stuff it takes to make a farm run. When harvest time comes around in the summer, you get a bag of veggies each week.

We are currenlty with the Potomac Vegetable Farm Coop in Virginia. They are nice enough to deliver the veggies to my wife’s office, so all she has to do is bring them home (easy for me to say, I don’t have to carry a 12 pound bag of smelly veggies home on the Metro each week!). Then we wash them and store them for use during the week. We’ve been able to try out some new vegestables that we would never have been otherwise exposed to. PVF call’s themselves an “Ecoganic” farm, which is basically an organic farm without having to do all the paperwork to be certified organic. So not only do we get a lot of fresh veggies every week, they are good quality veggies as well.

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I’ve been using Newsgator for almost 2 years now. I liked it so much when I tried it out, that I dropped the $30 to purchase it. Newsgator gave me the ability to pull down all my blogs and RSS feeds into Outlook, so it looked pretty much just like mail. Then I learned about their on-line service and how their two products sync together, and I was very happy. I could read using Outlook at work, through the web on the weekends. And it worked great, for a while.

The sync only every kinda worked. If you talk to Newsgator, they will say that it works as advertised. I content that it doesn’t work like it should. If the Outlook version already pulled down a post, it doesn’t appear on-line. It didn’t help me much.

They also changed their pricing model to a subscription service. They promised some way of making existing customers happy with their new model, but I don’t think they could have sated me. Just what I need, another subscription service…

I also started having problems when I found my self reading (scanning) 25+ blogs. I had a hard time finding my new content from all the content I had already read. I looked (in vain) for some way of making it only show new content, but was unsuccessful.

So I moved all my reading to BlogLines today, and I’m not looking back. While I gave up some nice things like being able to easily forward things to my coworkers, I got a bunch of nice new features. I now only view feeds that actually have new content. The folder system is a real nice way of combining related feeds so they are read as one. And it is all web based, so it is always in sync with itself (including on my cell phone). Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that it is free?

Check out BlogLines today!

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I took my first trip on the newest discount airline carrier this weekend: Independence Air. My wife and I were heading out to Chicago this weekend to catch a Cubs game with some friends. We were on a scheduled 9:15 PM departure on a Thursday night. As usual, we hit some traffic getting out to Dulles (leaving during rush hour will do that to you), but while listening to XM, we heard that there were 2 hour departure delays due to weather. So we weren’t in that much of a hurry.

We got to the airport with plenty of time to spare to our original departure time to find out that our place is schedule to leave only 20 minutes late! Great news! Oddly enough, our flight is scheduled to leave about 10 minutes before the 5:30 PM flight was (remember: our original flight time was 9:15 PM!).

There were a lot of delays on the east coast due to weather. I overheard some people that had been there since 1 PM and still hadn’t gotten on a flight. So we kept getting pushed back as well. At about 45 minutes late, our equipment had arrived, but our flight crew was still not here. And this is where I started to get frustrated with Independence. I can understand that the equipment was late because of weather, but I started to get a bit frustrated by the fact that we had to wait around for the crew to get in from another location. Southwest doesn’t have this problem as the crew and equipment pretty much stay together throughout the day…

We ended up leaving only about 1 1/2 hours late. Not to bad at all. But we made a mistake in our seat selection on the plane. Don’t sit in the back of the plane! We spent most of the flight out holding our breath because the toilet STANK! It was barely noticeable with the lavatory door closed, and it almost knocked you out with the door open.

There are many things that Independnce does to reduce cost. They don’t hire a ground crew to clean the plane in between trips, and instead ask you to take your trash off with you (and it seems to work so far, as the plane was clean). They also don’t really have many gate personnel. All your check-in is done electronically. If you are having problems, you pick up the phone nearby and it will connect you to someone at a call center who can help you (I added my frequent flyer information to my trip this way).

Our return flight was a lot less eventful. It left on time and we were sitting in the front. The food service was pretty good (they could be a little stingy on the drinks, ie. they didn’t always leave the can) and the cookies they served were much better than any snack I’ve gotten on any other airline. The Stewardess on the way back was entertaining, and it seems like Independence goes out of their way to be entertaining (even hiring a comedian to deliver the safety instructions). But I was warm the entire flight. And it just got worse once we landed and they shut off the air conditioning for the entire time we taxied.

In short, I would fly them again. They had the lowest fare for our trip, but even with some fresh coats of paint, they are still a discount airline and they cut cost everywhere they can.

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The big computer news this week was announced earlier by Steve Jobs at WWDC (The worldwide Developers Conference). Jobs announced that Apple Computers will be moving the Macintosh line of computers to use Intel Processors (Pentium Inside!) instead of the PowerPC chips they have been using more recenlty. This announcement brought on a lengthy discussion across the Internet on whether this is a good move or not for Apple. With the exception of a few insightful people, most people have got this completely wrong (IMHO).

What many people think this means is that OSX will run on their newly purchase Dell computer. Apples has for quite a long time been very strict with what hardware their software will run on. This is one of the reasons that Macintosh systems have been so stable. If you now exactly what platform your stuff will run on, you can test the hell out of it to make sure there are no problems. Windows can run on any crappy hardware you run on it. You el-cheapo IDE controller may cause the machine to crash every once in a while, but the computer was really cheap to get.

I don’t see Apple changing this policy any time soon. I am sure their engineers are working around the clock making sure that the Intel version of OSX will NOT run no your white-box PC. And I’m sure that when it comes out, there will be hackers working around the clock trying to get OSX to run on a generic Intel PC. Really, I just think Apple will be looking for any way to not support non-Apple branded hardware.

I’ve also read complaints that putting OSX on Intel will hurt the Open Source Movement, and more specially Linux. To that, I say Bollocks! See my above point. Since people are going to have to shell out money for the nice Apple Hardware, the Mac will still remain more of a premium product. This means less people using it, and therefore less people hacking on it. It is hard to compete with the “Free” cost of Linux to attract people on a budget.

How about existing Mac developers? Won’t they have a really hard time porting all their applications to the new platform? No, they won’t. Most application developers program to the APIs that Apple provides for doing things like disk access, networking, graphics, etc. These APIs have nothing at all to do with what processor things are running on. As long as Apple keeps the same APIs (which they have promised that they will), it should just require a recompile with the new toolchain. The exception is anyone who has done some in-line assembly in their application, which will have to be re-written in x86 assembly (I feel sorry for anyone who has to do this, as x86 assembly sucks!). But in truth, that doesn’t happen that much for application developers. That is more for driver writers and the Operating Systems people themselves.

How will all this effect the end user? I don’t think they will even notice a difference, except for a small drop in price of systems, and maybe a speed improvement.

Why do I say a small drop in price? This is really getting to the heart of this post, which is why this is a good deal for Apple. Volume. Intel sells a metric buttload of Pentium processors each year. IBM (which provided the PowerPC processors today’s Macs run with) doesn’t sell as many each year. So they should be cheaper to obtain.

If I were Apple, I would go out and talk to Dell. I would have Dell OEM the Apple Hardware (to Apple’s Specifications) and have them install OSX and ship it. Focus on your core competencies. Dell knows how to make X86 PCs, and ship them as ordered. Apple knows how to design funky looking computers and really easy to use software. Concentrate on what you are good at, and let other people do what they are good at. But don’t let Dell do your customer support. I’ve had to call Apple for support a few times and they are the best customer support people I’ve ever worked with.

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So I guess I’ve been doing this blogging thing for about 6 months now and I feel it is time for a little bit of a change. The first (and most noticeable) change I will be making is to the site layout. The look of this site is just a (slightly) customized version of one of the default blogger templates. As a result, it is pretty simple, but also very generic. Contrast the feel of this site to say, Margaret’s Blog where both Margaret and I worked hard to create a specific feel that Margaret came up with.

In short, I want my blog to look as nice as Margaret’s! So I’m going to spend some time thinking about what I want my blog to contain, how people are going to navigate it, and generally how I want the blog to look. Then I will work with Margaret to make things look nice by picking nice colors, using nice logos, and choosing nice fonts. I can’t do that stuff by myself, so I’m hoping that she will help.

I’ve also been thinking about moving to a new piece of blogging software. So the service offered (for free!) by Blogger.com are great, but there are a few things it is lacking that other blogging software provides. Things like sending and receiving trackbacks, automatic ping sending to services you configure, and also technorati.com tag handling. Now most of these feature I’ve been able to hack into blogger, but the trackback stuff was more than I wanted to mess around with.

So I looked at two of the most popular packages, Wordpress and Moveable Type. I’ve got debug installations of both of these packages going and played around with them for a bit to see which I liked better. As for general feature sets, they are pretty much exact matches. Anything one comes up with, the other adds as well. Price-wise, both are the same cost for my personal use (Wordpress is always free, MT is free for a single, personal blog and costs for more). Performance-wise, MT should beat out Wordpress (I haven’t done any formal testing) since MT creates static pages that you can serve, while Wordpress runs php on every page load. As for install difficulty, since I use Debian, it was a piece of cake to install Wordpress (apt-get install wordpress). MT had a few more steps, and most of it was manual. Right now I’m leaning towards wordpress.

So all this excitement should be happening over the next couple weeks. Stay tuned for more details!

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