Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Today I officially decided I’m going to Austin for South by Southwest 2005—although only for the music festival. It was tempting to join the web elite at the interactive conference this year, since now I actually know some of them (unlike when I went in 2001 and spent most of my time feeling thoroughly out of the loop), but I just couldn’t get that much time off.

Anyone else out there planning to attend? If so, what shows are you planning to see?

Update: Here’s who I’m thinking about seeing (hopefully the final schedule won’t force any difficult choices):

• The Album Leaf
• Ash
• Lou Barlow
• Bloc Party
• Calexico
• Graham Coxon
• The Dears
• Doves
• Grand National
• Kasabian
• Keren Ann
• Kings of Convenience
• Stephen Malkmus
• The National
• Son Volt

A long time ago, Jochen Wolters emailed me to ask if I, having made noises about being a “foodie,” had any restaurant recommendations for San Francisco. I intended to help him out by writing a post about my favorite SF restaurants, but unfortunately his visit to MacWorld came and went and I never got around to it.

Recognizing that I’m probably never going to have time to write extensive restaurant reviews for this site, but still wanting to share my favorite finds, I’ve decided to start posting micro reviews of recommended restaurants to my del.icio.us account.

I think this (name appropriate) application of del.icio.us nicely demonstrates how simple but powerful the tagging concept can be. By tagging my restaurant links with the words “sanfrancisco,” “restaurant,” and “recommended,” I am essentially creating an ad-hoc restaurant guide, with its own unique URL and RSS feed.

There are already some excellent finds in there, and I eat out a lot, so keep it in mind if you’re looking for great places to eat in SF. I’m even thinking of having little “Recommended by Buzz’s del.icio.us Links” stickers printed for restaurants to put in their windows next to the Zagat signs. On second thought, maybe not…

So, it would seem the dates for Apple’s 2005 Worldwide Developer’s Conference have been announced. As those of you who came to my WWDC dinner last year may recall, this year I’m hell bent on beating O’Reilly (and everyone else in the world, it seems) to reserving the Thirsty Bear.

Since the number of people attending will have a lot of influence on the specific arrangements I make, I’d like to take a quick, non-binding straw poll of how many people out there would be interested in attending. Last year we had a pretty healthy turnout (over 30 people), but I honestly have no idea what to expect this year so I’d like to get a better idea what scale of event I’m dealing with before I make the call.

Superbowl Sunday probably wasn’t the best day to do it, since most people were clearly preoccupied, but on Sunday I finally released Cocoalicious 1.0b31. This release took what seemed like forever, mainly because we were trying to get a very involved feature ready for prime time: full text indexing and search of bookmarked pages.

Andrew Wooster, our little project’s Minister of Search, put a great deal of his spare time into developing and debugging the new search code, negotiating, among other things, the complexities of the SearchKit API and the tricky nature of [NSURL hash] (it turns out, non-obviously, that the hostname portion of the URL is ignored in producing the hash, so any NSURL without a path component beyond the initial slash—e.g. “http://www.google.com/” or “http://www.apple.com/”—hashes to exactly the same thing). Fortunately, he stuck with it, and while the feature may still have some rough edges, Cocoalicious can now boast something close to that “private Google” experience I was raving about!

To try it out, download b31 and choose “Index All Posts” from the “File” menu. Wait until the little progress indicator shows the indexing has finished, choose “Full Text,” and search away.

Fraser Speirs also contributed an extremely useful feature that made it into Cocoalicious b31: tag completion. Now pressing F5 after typing a partial tag into the new post form will cause a list of possible completions to appear. I also added some code to provide the option of automatic completion, after a user-specified delay.

Thanks again to all of our contributors, and sincere apologies to the people who have sent patches I haven’t looked at yet—I’ve been extremely preoccupied lately, and I promise to get back to you soon.

Some friends and I were sitting around admiring my shiny new iPod shuffle last night, and gradually the conversation turned to the daring, minimalistic design of the tiny music player. Musing on the device’s lack of screen, I wondered aloud just how far Apple could go in stripping the iPod down, and the idea of the “iPod monlith” was born.

The monolith is, quite simply, a triumph of minimalism. It has no unsightly buttons, switches or indicators of any kind to confuse you. Rather, it is a seamless, enigmatic white slab. You can’t actually control the monolith, or even turn it off for that matter. It simply plays what it wants, constantly, and you merely tune into the stream (perhaps via a Bluetooth headset?).

What do you think—should I make an appointment with the ID team?

I just came to a sad, iTMS-induced realization today: L.L. Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” may not be quite the brilliant song I remember from junior high school. The same appears to be true of Bel Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” and Bobby Brown’s “On Our Own.” I guess it’s true what they say: you can’t go home again.

In keeping with last year’s precedent, I’ve been working hard on my response to Rich’s “End of the Year Mix CD Challenge” for over a month now. I think I’ve finally managed to get the sequencing and song selection just right, although I did have to completely leave out one of 2004’s most significant releases: Brian Wilson’s “Smile” (it has too many songs the flow into one another, and didn’t really match the rest of the material well enough).

Interestingly, this year all but 4 of my selections are available on the US iTunes Music Store, so I also decided to make the playlist available as an iMix (if you’re able to use the UK iTMS, I would bet that you’ll also be able to get three of the four remaining songs as well).

See below for a track listing and notes.

(more…)