Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

As much as I love to hear everyone’s GarageBand compositions (and I’m not being sarcastic—I do), I am getting a little weary of clicking on links to AAC files, only to have Safari dutifully display 4 MB of incomprehensible binary data because the web server isn’t savvy to the AAC MIME type. So, as a public service, here are instructions that will help at least some people prevent that from happening to their listeners:

1. Make sure your web host allows you to use .htaccess files (which they probably won’t unless they’re running Apache).
2. In the root directory of your site (not the root directory of your shell account, mind you—we’re talking about the one that contains the main page someone sees when they come to your site), create a file called “.htaccess”. If one already exists, simply open it.
3. In this file, add a line like the following:

AddType audio/mp4 .m4a

4. There is no step 4. Safari should now correctly recognize AAC files served from your site as audio.

I forgot to mention that Saturday marked the one year anniversary of my weblog. When I made my first tentative (and rather embarrassingly angry-sounding) post, I wasn’t sure if weblogging was going to be something I could stick with (having already abandoned Sci-Fi Hi-Fi Mark 1). In fact, my old friend Josh used to taunt me no end for my nerdish leanings (“Why don’t you write that in your journal,” he would say), and I did (and still do) often question my reasons for writing.

Nonetheless, here it is a year later, and I’m still going. Not only that, but Josh himself (after discovering that several writers he admires have weblogs) has made noises about jumping on the bandwagon (and he really should, because he’s a great writer). While the business of keeping the site updated has consumed an awful lot of my time, I consider it to have been extremely rewarding, since it has left me with a record of a milestone year in my life, and has connected me to a great many interesting people I never would have known otherwise (one of these days I really need to try out Tantek Çelik’s fancy new XFN idea and start a blogroll).

Thanks to everyone who has stuck with me over the last year—your readership means a lot to me. I promise to stop with the vacation photos and get back to posting semi-useful information soon.

In the meantime, here are my favorite 15 posts so far (in chronological order):

• Apple Must Develop a Digicam: I still believe this.
• F*** the Mainstream: Shareware is dead, long live shareware.
• Anti-Americanism Up Close: An innocent abroad.
• Blizzard!: My last winter in Colorado was one to remember.
• You Say You Want a Revolution: The evolutionary iTunes music store.
• Two Hit Singles and…: The death of the album format, and why you shouldn’t care.
• Driving in Europe: Chronicles one of the worst things to happen to me in 2003.
• Cupertino Bound: New job, new state.
• Vanishing Point: Interstate 80 is a harsh mistress.
• California Adventure: A day on Highway 1.
• NSString+Templating: One of the more useful ideas I’ve had in awhile.
• Winter in the Bay Area: How I learned to love California.
• 2003: Ripped, Mixed & Burned: My favorite music of the year.
• Happy New Year: Or, how the Grinch stole Hogmanay.
• 100 Megatons in Your Pocket: Somebody set British Airways up the bomb!

The recent controversy about Atom and XML well-formedness has piqued my curiosity about the nascent syndication format, so this evening I installed Rael Dornfest’s Atomfeed plugin for Blosxom, and can now claim to be the owner of a valid Atom feed. If you use an aggregator that can read it, enjoy!

For what it’s worth, although I’m by no means an expert on XML or syndication or anything of the sort, my take on the well-formedness question tends toward sympathy for the XML “hardliners.” There’s little I can say on the subject that hasn’t already been said by people who (unlike me) eat, sleep, and breathe XML, but to me it seems rather silly to recapitulate one of RSS’s biggest liabilities by requiring developers of Atom aggregators to essentially build custom parsers rather than allowing them to rely on standard XML infrastructure.

I’m well aware of Postel’s Law, and I understand its importance to the Internet, but (and I fear I’m going to have to throw in with Dave Winer here) it seems to me that if you really want to “be liberal in what you accept,” XML (a standard with validity requirements at its core) might not be suited to your purposes. Why pretend something is XML when, for all practical purposes (that is, for all purposes where XML is particularly advantageous), it isn’t?

So, there you have it—it’s nothing terribly earth shattering or original, but now my opinion’s on record. Feel free to educate me about why I’m wrong :-)…

(Update: Under a lot of pressure, and wanting to get back to being a software developer instead of a politician, Brent has relented. Meanwhile, David Hyatt, who knows a thing or two about markup parsing, has weighed in on the side of well-formedness.)

A month or so ago, Eric Albert and I were discussing our reading habits, and I mentioned that, while I was an English minor in college, nowadays my time constraints prevent me from reading much fiction. I am still an avid reader of magazines, however, and I mused that I would probably read more fiction if today’s writers would parcel out their work out in serial form the way Charles Dickens did.

To my amazement, a few days later, Eric sent me a link to Stanford’s “Discovering Dickens” project, which this year is publishing a free series of facsimiles replicating the weekly serial through which A Tale of Two Cities was published. I signed up and got my first issue the other day. While the print is a little difficult to read, I definitely look forward to fulfilling my New Year’s resolution to read more fiction by experiencing Dickens the old fashioned way.

I’m not usually one to rave about television commercials, and I know it may sound a bit corny of me to say this, and I’m well aware I run the risk of being branded a corporate tool, but I find those new Hewlett Packard commercials featuring The Cure’s “Pictures of You” highly affecting. Between that $300 million campaign and the stunning iPod deal, it would appear that everyone’s favorite group of slide-rule toting engineers is making a bold bid to (re)invent itself. The amazing thing is, given their recent moves, I can actually start to imagine them pulling it off (although, as much as I like the commercials, I would have to warn the HP execs that The Cure is probably not the ideal band for courting the youth demographic nowadays)!

As promised, a few notes on latter half of my recent UK trip (warning: lots of photos)…

On our way out of Edinburgh, we decided to pay a visit to Roslin, birthplace of Dolly the Sheep, to check out the mysterious Rosslyn Chapel. As an enthusiast (though not a serious one, mind you) for esoterica of all sorts, I just had to see this 15th century church, which was built by a Knight Templar, boasts strong associations with Freemasonry, contains hundreds of carvings of the pagan Green Man, and has variously been said to contain the Holy Grail, the mummified head of Christ, the heart of Robert the Bruce, a lost Gospel or two, and the true Stone of Destiny!

I don’t put stock in any of that, of course, but the chapel was still well worth a visit for a look at its incredibly elaborate masonry.

Glasgow was a bit of a disappointment, mainly because we arrived too late to see much after visiting Roslin. There were a few museums I wanted to visit, but they were all closed by 5:00 PM. I’ve been a big fan of Charles Rennie Mackintosh ever since a college design class, and they supposedly have some good club nights, so we dropped by the Glasgow School of Art—but it was closed too. We also tried to visit some record stores—until, of course, they all closed. Unfortunately, we didn’t know where Belle & Sebastian hang out, so we called it an early night.

London was cool, as usual—although, this being my fifth visit (and, amazingly, my second of 2003), I hope I won’t sound too pretentious if I say it’s getting to be slightly old hat. I personally was rather pleased at what a seasoned Underground user I’ve become. I think the only times we actually had to look up the station for a destination were to find Woody’s (a club with mind-bogglingly expensive drinks and an enjoyable night of “minimal electro, spaced-out disco and NY punk-funk”) and the fantastic Clapham Kebab House.

In addition to a lot of the usual sights and museums, we finally got to do some record shopping, visiting both the Rough Trade shop off Portobello Road and the numerous shops on Berwick Street in Soho. I have to say, though: it may be the seemingly dormant British music scene, or incipient iTunes-ism, or my new, grown-up sense of fiscal responsibility, but this time I didn’t leave the UK with a fifth of the CDs that I usually do.

Photography afficionado that I am, I also really enjoyed visiting the exhibition for the Schweppes Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. I even got to snap a quick, paparazzi-style photo of Mary Archer and her disgraced husband Jeffrey admiring her portrait in the exhibition! I was amused to see that the gallery also has a permanent portrait of Apple’s own Jonathan Ive—on the screen of an iMac no less.

All in all, the latter half of the trip was OK, but not great. I’ve gotten savvier about traveling in the UK every time I’ve visited, and this trip was no exception. The big lesson this time: do not visit London in early January, since the weather’s less than desirable and there is very little of interest going on.

I plan to post about the rest of my trip to the UK later, when my readjustment to Pacific Time isn’t weighing quite so heavily on me, but for now I just have to relate an amusing anecdote about the return flight. You see, those who have traveled with me know that I am fated to lose at least one expensive, electronic device every time I travel (I once left a MiniDisc player on the streets of Paris and a digital camera in an Edinburgh taxi), and this time was no exception. As I was getting ready for bed on my first night back home, I suddenly realized, to my horror, that I had misplaced my beloved iPod!

I knew the only place I could have left it was in the pocket of the seat in front of me on my flight home, so I spent the next day calling British Airways at SFO every hour on the hour, hoping that one of the flight attendants had found it and turned it in. Since no one at the BA Baggage Office answers the phone, however, it quickly became apparent that I would have to head up there in person.

When I actually visited the baggage office this afternoon, I was all prepared to explain to the clerk what an iPod looks like, so it really took me by surprise when, upon hearing the mere word “iPod,” the guy looked at me curiously and said “Oh, you’re the iPod guy.” He informed me that they had placed my iPod in the safe upstairs, and that I should go to the ticket desk to collect it.

Thrilled that I was going to be getting my iPod back, I sprinted back up to the departures area and waited patiently to talk to a BA representative. When one of the women finally acknowledged me, she had almost the same reaction as the guy downstairs: “Oh, yes, we’ve all heard all about the iPod!”

She finally directed me to her supervisor, the only person who could open the safe. The supervisor brought me the iPod, but asked an unusual number of questions before handing it back to me (What does it do? How does it work?), which I took to be genuine (if somewhat odd) curiosity about the technology.

It wasn’t until I had a chance to actually examine my iPod’s case that I began to understand the BA staff’s curious behaviour. The iPod was still perfectly functional, but the metal back no longer fit snugly onto the white plastic front on the left side, as if someone had attempted to pry the enclosure open with a knife. At first I wondered if some electronically curious airport employee had decided to dissect the thing, but then it hit me: in the wake of terrorist threats that delayed a Washinton-bound BA flight for five days, some flight attendant must have caused an incident by mistaking my iPod for a bomb! I guess I’m probably just lucky that the poor thing didn’t meet its end in a controlled explosion!

I think Boromir summed the situation up perfectly in Fellowship of the Ring: “It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.” I guess that’s life in the post 9/11 era…

I hope everyone had a good time last night. Unfortunately, my evening didn’t go quite as planned, since the authorities in Edinburgh made the surprise decision to cancel the Hogmanay festivities at the eleventh hour (the first time it hasn’t gone on in its twelve year history).

The increasingly insistent voice over the loudspeakers asking the huge crowd on Princes Street to disperse blamed the problem on “inclement weather,” though, in my estimation, things weren’t that bad. It had been very windy earlier in the evening, but by the time 11:00 rolled around, it had quieted down a lot (and believe me, I would be the first to complain about the wind here!). I suppose it was the only responsible thing to do, since the winds posed some safety problems for fireworks and the (evidently rather shoddily constructed) main stage, but it left many out-of-town visitors like myself more than a little nonplussed. We had a few hot donuts, hung around with the rest of the crowd until midnight, and then shuffled home.

Fortunately, unlike the most of the overseas visitors present, I had a fantastic (and extremely funny) group of Scots to hang out with afterward, which made the whole debacle a lot less disappointing. After profuse apologies from Jamie’s friends on behalf of their city, some curry, and my introduction to the Scotch and Irn-Bru cocktail, I was back in a festive mood.

Here are a few more photos for those who are interested…

The Fun Fair on Princes Street.

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