This is pretty dern cool. Now that I’ve moved my Mac life into 10.4 (aka Tiger), I can really appreciate its low-key but powerful advantages. Here’s one: Automator. Think shell scripting on steroids, for newbies. Scripting, eh? Big whoop. Then I saw this:

Author and photographer Jim Heid has come up with this very cool Automator script that takes a bunch of photos from iPhoto and makes a ginormous photo from them – which you can then order and have printed directly from iPhoto. I am so going to do this. Fantastic cool. Three cheers for Jim!

This one’s making the rounds. While it’s probably a hoax, making up social commentary is left as an exercise for the reader.

Here’s something I’ve known for quite a while. Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans.

Duh.

Back during Napster’s heyday, my CD-buying habit (already an addiction) went into high gear. I’d sample a song or two via Napster, and if I liked it enough, I’d go to my local A&B Sound or Zulu Records and pick up a “real” copy. Napster cost me a lot of money. This goes against “conventional” wisdom, which says that P2P users are only interested in getting things for free. While there is that element of hoarding free music just because you can, it was different for me and many other real music fans. We liked the music, and it was more convenient to buy it on a CD, but only if we knew we’d like it.

The question became “Is this good enough to buy?”. Before Napster, I bought some really shocking stuff, based on recommendations or the strength of past releases, or any number of other “good” reasons. Eventually, I ended up buying less because I wasn’t sure what I was getting. I probably missed out on some really good stuff. With Napster, I could be more sure of my purchases, and therefore buy more. There ya go.

“The research clearly shows that music fans who break piracy laws are highly valuable customers,” said Paul Brindley, director of The Leading Question.

Ironically, it seems that the ones who care enough to steal are the same ones who will buy more music for themselves, and tell their friends. It’s the old “geeks-vs-normal-people” argument that’s been happening in technology for a while. Music geeks are not normal people. We have massive music collections and, while some of us may steal music, the music that we don’t steal is still more than your normal person’s.

Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives, the report said.

The record industry needs to realise that one cannot un-invent something. P2P is here to stay. How can they use it to their advantage and still make money? Having lived through the dot-com mania, I hesitate to use the words “paradigm shift”, but something akin to that needs to happen to the music industry. The little guys get it, by and large. It’s the big ones that are still trying to un-invent technology.

I just read an excellent interview with the founder of Delicious Monster, who is also one of the founders of Omni Group, two MacOS development houses that I have great respect for. They cover everything from being asked to leave a company one has started oneself, to programming for MacOS X to “extreme gardening”. It’s long, but worth every minute you spend reading it.

I learnt today that SkyTrain is going to hire people to report on the quality of its service. They’re going to do this by actually riding the train. Woah.

(For my Australian readership, SkyTrain is the name of Vancouver’s much-maligned mass transit system. It’s a bit of a misnomer, because while it is a train, it doesn’t spend much time in the sky).

I just have one question for SkyTrain management, gentle reader, and that is this:

Why don’t you commute with the damn thing yourselves, you lazy overpaid car-driving bureaucrats? Get rid of the parking lot at SkyTrain HQ and see how fast service improves.

There’s more geek in this site than ever, with this new discovery. I’ve been wrestling with the problem of how to get rid of all these NT machines at work. The plan (so far so good) is to replace them with a Linux-based terminal server, based on the excellent work of the people over at the Linux Terminal Server Project. That part is working fantastically. I’ve got machines kickstarting themselves from boot-ROM, grabbing a kernel over TFTP, starting up, and connecting to a KDE terminal server. Fantastic!

There’s only one problem: Microsoft Access.

For perfectly valid reasons (at the time), my users have a lot of entrenched data in Access. While there are some interesting options, none are really mature enough yet that I want to trust them to my users. What can I say? I’m protective of the cute little buggers.

So the problem remains. Access. I’ve looked at Wine and Access is one of the few mainstream programs that still has problems. There are people who say they’ve got it running, but those stories are still wrapped in myth, innuendo and legend. In short, I couldn’t get it to work. Not quite, anyway.

What about running rdesktop and Windows terminal services? I’ve got a plenty good little XP Pro machine, and it does a kind of desktop sharing thing. Hmm. So I spent a little time looking around and found a way to log into the XP machine from Linux. That worked okay, but I could only ever get one user logged in at a time. Not good. Then, I found the patch that made my day and the reason I’m writing this. Applying this simple patch and making sure that:

1. XP machine is not in a domain, and
2. “Fast User Switching” is enabled (not quite the same thing as MacOS X), of course)

And lots and lots of people can be logged in at once. I’m currently testing this, but early results are very encouraging. Another piece of my grand plan has clicked into place. Cheers, sala.pri.ee, whoever you are.

I’ve been bashing my head on this one for a while now. Even though I’d explicitly said ”-apache2” in my USE flags, portage still wants to install Apache 2. I don’t want Apache 2. I’m sure it’s very nice, but the PHP people are still recommending 1.3, so that’s what I’m staying with. So there.

Anyway, after months of searching and careful emerges, I’ve finally found the answer. Just add this line to /etc/portage/package.mask:

>=net-www/apache-2.0.0

It will be as if Apache2 never existed. Just remember to take out that line if you want to upgrade.

I love how eBay calls it “winning”, but the winner still has to pay for the thing. Well, I did it. I bought a newish PowerBook off eBay. It ought to last me about two years, when I’ll trade it in for a second-generation Apple Intel PowerBook (or whatever they’re going to call them). I’ll be throwing an extra 512mb RAM into this thing, but aside from that, it’s what I’ve been looking for. 15.2” widescreen, 1.33GHz G4, 80gb HD, Superdrive. I’ll most likely be getting it Wednesday afternoon. I’m really looking forward to this!

I hear you, gentle reader. You’re saying “it’s been nearly a week without any silly Schapelle news!” Well, wait no longer. Jurgen dot ca is here to fulfil your silly Schapelle news needs.

I’m giving the star of our story a bit of a break this time, and looking at good old Hotman, her lawyer. He was on the ABC’s 7:30 Report and spoke with the ABC’s reporter, plus Schapelle’s car, Mercedes. In addition to the standard interview questions, they tried a bit of Abbott & Costello with this lively interchange:

HOTMAN PARIS HUTAPEA: I say ‘yes’.
MERCEDES CORBY: He says ‘yes’.
HOTMAN PARIS HUTAPEA: You say ‘yes’ because I say ‘yes’.
MERCEDES CORBY: I say what you say.
HOTMAN PARIS HUTAPEA: Ok, I say yes.

Brilliant minds at work, no doubt. To top it off, Our Favourite Hotman finishes up the interview with a comment sure to charm the pants off his colleagues worldwide:

“There is no lawyer in the world is clean. All the lawyer usually hypocrisy help and I try to reduce my hypocrisy a little bit. If you keep saying Australian lawyer, American lawyer they are all clean, that’s totally bullshit.”

Keep it rolling, this is better than reality.

Hey.

I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader, and I don’t live in an igloo or eat blubber, or own a dog sled, and I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada, although I’m certain they’re really, really nice.

I have a Prime Minister, not a President. I speak English and French, not American, and I pronounce it ‘about’, not ‘a boot’.

I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack. I believe in peacekeeping, not policing; diversity, not assimilation; and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal.

A touque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch, and it is pronounced zed: not zee � zed!!

Canada is the second largest land mass! The first nation of hockey! And the best part of North America!

My name is Jurgen! And I am Dot CA!

... Thank you.

And Happy Canada Day, from a reserved Canadian patriot, currently living overseas.