August 19th, 2010
iTunes Genre Bug
Recently I’ve been having a weird issue with iTunes where genre’s periodically get converted to numbers in parentheses, such as “(19)”. After wading through some Apple support forums and going through a few different Google searches I stumbled across a post by Doug Adams that described the issue. It wasn’t till I e-mailed him that I found he also had a solution.
So if you’re having problems with iTunes like I was, the short answer is to download it again from Apple. I’m not sure why they didn’t push out the newer build, but my guess is they have another version forthcoming and didn’t want to release them too close to each other.
August 19th, 2010
The Reality of Media Temple
Everybody’s beloved Media Temple recently announced they would no longer be sending out e-mail notifications for scheduled or emergency maintenance:
Based on customer feedback, (mt) Media Temple will no longer send email notifications regarding scheduled maintenance or emergency maintenance actions. Instead, we will use our System Status Blog and Twitter to share important maintenance-related information with you. This change will go into effect on August 14th, 2010.
Translation: “Dear customers we’re too lazy to also offer e-mail updates, and we just assume everyone uses and loves Twitter like we do.”
It’s not like Twitter is ever down, and self-hosted blog isn’t likely to be affected by maintenance or even collapse under heavy traffic. It sounds like a great plan, except a few hours later this came:
…we began hearing from lots of customers who very much liked the emails and who found value in the notifications. As a result, we have decided to create an opt-in system that will allow us to send notifications to users who desire the email they are accustomed to.
Translation: “Dear Customers, we don’t know what we are doing…”
I’ve always found Media Temple to be more about image than practicality. They cost far more then the competition and first hand, their “(gs) Grid Service” is awful. I constantly get error notifications about the MySQL database going on vacation in the middle of a query, or the disk suddenly becoming unwritable.
April 7th, 2010
Migrating Your Blog from Blogger to WordPress
How to convert your blog from Blogger to WordPress:
1. Make sure that your blog is in the “new” Blogger format and is not hosted on your own FTP server. To do this, first make sure that Blogger is publishing to a domain at blogspot.com and that you are using one of the new templates. If you can use the new templates or widgets, you are running the new Blogger.
Go to Tools, then Import to grab data from your other blog.
2. Install WordPress on your host, and go to Tools, then Import. Choose Blogger from the list, give WordPress permission to grab your posts, and sit back. WordPress will soon have all your posts, tags, and comments. After importing the XML the button changes to allow you to map Blogger authors to WordPress authors. Remember that if you were publishing on your own FTP with Blogger, it may have put images in a different folder than WordPress does. Feel free to reconfigure WordPress, and move Blogger’s folder of images to where it needs to be on your host.
3. To preserve links, go to Settings, then Permalinks. Here you can choose a format for posts, categories, and tags to be used when WordPress generates links. Select Custom Structure and add the path /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html. This will ensure that you can preserve your traffic when you move over to WordPress, so users who have bookmarked the old posts won’t get lost. WordPress might not be able to edit the .htaccess file for you after saving the permalink changes. If this happens it will produce the necessary code at the bottom of the page, which is easy to overlook.
Edit the path settings to reflect your desired URL format.
4. FOR ADVANCED USERS: The last step is to go into the default WordPress theme folder (wp-content/themes/default) and edit style.css and the pieces of the PHP template (header, footer, sidebar, etc.) to match what you had before. Be advised that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can really screw up your template this way, but this is where you want to be if you have a very customized layout.
… and voila, now you should have a working WordPress blog with all your Blogger content safely inside. Hope this helps you make the transition.
April 5th, 2010
Migration to WordPress
Pardon the appearance, but we’re currently moving the blog over from the Blogger to the WordPress platform. This is all happening because Blogger is discontinuing it’s Remote FTP Publishing. We’ll post again when this is all done with detailed steps on how we did it and why we chose WordPress over others like MovableType.
Oh and sorry for not making any posts since August, we’ve been busy I guess.
August 18th, 2009
August 18th, 2009
The Pig(Log)
I have few reasons to like Twitter, especially given how disjointed its Ruby On Rails underpinnings seem to be. With that said, it conceptually works for the terse musings that makeup The Pig‘s day.
Hopefully he can build a legion of followers and rise up as the benevolent dictator we all envision him to be, or showered with offerings of cold-cuts.
August 4th, 2009
Snow Leopard Pre-Order
If you’re planning on pre-ordering Snow Leopard from Amazon, then use this little banner so we make some referral money.
Thanks.
July 12th, 2009
Recent Apple Store Layoff?
Early last week (June, 6th) I was trying to make a Genius Bar appointment at the 5th Ave. Apple Store. Normally I cannot make one any sooner then a day away, but this time I couldn’t make an appointment at all, for any day. Instead I was prompted to check availability at other Apple Stores. The only available slot was at West 14th St. for some time Friday night, which I was not ready to sacrifice. This implied virtually no availability at any of the Manhattan Apple Stores for the next three days, aside from that one inconvenient slot. Only a few weeks prior I was able to make an appointment with selection of times to choose from, without even having to consider other stores.
While I found this odd, I assumed it must be related to the 4th of July weekend that had just passed. I tried again on Tuesday morning and didn’t find any open slots. It prompted me to check stores outside of the city. A second attempt was made that evening with the similar results. Not until Wednesday was I able to make an appointment in one of only two available times-slots, across all 3 Manhattan stores.
When I went in for my appointment I offhandedly asked if this was an issue of staff on vacation. I was instead told this was the result of a significant reduction in the number of Geniuses. This came as a surprise given the recent release of the iPhone 3G S and the large queue of people downstairs waiting to buy one. I speculate that this is recent and the stores have done their best to keep things quiet, though this could be a continuation or result of announced layoffs a few months back.
While I don’t suspect this will impact the overall quality of service, it does make it more difficult to get it in a timely manner and throws out any possibility of walk-ins. The whole concept of the Apple Genius as a manner for accepting repairs and troubleshooting is nothing short of a luxury when compared to the mail-in alternative. Hopefully this is just a short term cost saving tactic for the summer and not a sign for things to come.
June 28th, 2009
AIM Push Notification and Multiple Sessions, Who Wins?
A question was recently posed by a friend. He noticed that as long as his AIM client was signed in on the iPhone, actively or just for Push Notification, that messages would no longer be sent to his desktop client anymore. This sort of behavior could render the “always signed in” Push Notification useless if the desktop client can no longer receive messages while the iPhone application is considered to be signed in.
It turns out that AOL uses a precedence order in deciding which client should get the message, or in some cases both. Here is the precedence order:
Available (1)
Away (0)
Idle (-1)
Invisible (*)
AIM clients with the same precedence “score,” the number in parenthesis, will get the same message. If one client has a higher score, no other clients will get the message. Idle time will subtract one from the score. Available + Idle is the same thing as Away + Active.
For example if both clients are Available and not Idle, both will get the message. If one is Available and the other Away, the Available client will only get the message. Here is where things get interesting, if a client is Available and Idle, and the other is Away but Active both get the message.
The most effective way to use both the iPhone AIM client and a desktop client like Adium, iChat, or AIM, you need to have the desktop client set to Available and the iPhone client set to Away. The desktop client shouldn’t be set to artificially Idle, or both will get the message.
This is a little annoying because I tend to set Adium to Away all the time. Going forward to utilize AIM for the iPhone I’ll have to keep available and not idle, otherwise messages are going to start appearing on my phone. I guess this promotes some additional honesty about my actual status.
I hope this solves the mystery for someone. I couldn’t find anything too definitive elsewhere on the web.
*Note: Setting Invisible in one client changes your status in all logged in clients. It’s not possible to be Away in one, and invisible in another. I was hoping I could leverage this somehow by setting the iPhone to invisible so that it would only get messages if the desktop client went offline.
June 25th, 2009
Now with Fancy
A quick post just to point out the obvious, the blog has a new look. More on this later, but Kenta is to thank for the design.
Enjoy.