Watch Videos Online? I Download Later When the Tubes are Clear

I’m a web worker. My work is online, and it all slows to a snail’s pace if I’m streaming or downloading a video.

I have “High-Speed Xtreme-I” which promises “up to” a-lot, but the metered download rate is much, much lower than advertised, about 1.5-2Mb/s up and 0.75Mb/s. Fire up a video download and I’m in slowmo.

I want my favorite online video content delivered to me. Some of it is available on iTunes. Others like WordPress.tv is available on Miro.

Currently, I download a batch at the end of the day, but for my family the web is no fun if I’m downloading video podcasts in iTunes.

Is there a way to self-throttle or meter specific streams, downloads or applications on Mac OS X?

Unfortunately, there is a lot of content that isn’t even available for downloading. Mostly, I imagine because the content is supported by web page ads. I’d pay for that content, why is there no Audible.com for video podcasts? Or is there?

Even if available on iTunes or Miro, there is not even a link back to the online discussion, let alone comments, inline comments and tags (Viddler), and other resources. I would like it all to be pulled into my video player, except for YouTube comments ;-)

Am I alone? Any help fellow web workers? Any help from NewTeeVee pros?

BC 2009, No Election In My Riding, Swan Lake

Advanced voting started today in the BC Provincial Election. I hope to get my vote in tomorrow. There is no contest in my riding Swan Lake. NDP candidate Rob Fleming’s election will be a land slide!

Liberal candidate Jesse McClinton, like party leader Gordon Campbell, appears to lack integrity.

McClinton admitted Friday he was the person behind the wheel in the 2006 case and was charged with driving while impaired, driving while over the legal blood alcohol limit and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle.

He was not convicted on those charges but instead pleaded guilty to driving without reasonable consideration and was fined $200 and given a one-month driving probation.

“I was a scared, you know, young 26-year-old, and perhaps if I had more money or … I would have taken the case a little bit farther,” McClinton told CBC News Friday.

McClinton said he has had a clean driving record since and will not quit the race over his youthful indiscretion.

Not surprising this isn’t one of the 24 “too close” ridings at the Election Prediction Project.

It’s unfortunate incumbent Rob Fleming doesn’t have opposition, so we could focus on the issues and who can best represent our area.

Regardless of the expected outcome, vote and make it happen.

Mozilla SEO & Firefox Tips & Tricks Web Page Bugs

Update Thurs, May 7th (2 days later): Mozilla is working on the issue for Mozilla.com “Bug 491985 – Title tag changes for select product pages on Mozilla.com to help SEO rank “. To clarify, the improvement is more search engine clicks than ranking.

I provided some feedback to Mozilla just over a month ago about the Mozilla Firefox Start Page tip of handy tips & tricks (how meta):

“Get the most out of your Firefox! Improve your skills with some handy tips & tricks.”

I’m sure web browser developers share my passion for these web page details, but nothing has changed yet.

As I often see other sites with similar issues, I might as well share this web development tip & trick ;-) and other suggestions.

<Title> Tags

First, the <title> field is bad SEO. Says
<title>Mozilla Products | Tips &amp; Tricks</title>
instead of including “Firefox”:
<title>Firefox Tips &amp; Tricks | Mozilla Products </title>

Actually, all the product pages are likely in need of switching the “Mozilla Products” to the end.

This made a big difference for WordPress.com search traffic way back when.

I work with many of our WordPress.com VIP new customers on this issue. Their instinct is to always have their brand or blog name first. But think of which search result you would be more likely to click on? In fact, WordPress historically made it to easy to get this wrong, so in version 2.5 a 3rd parameter ’seplocation’ was added to wp_title() to make it easier to do it correctly.

So http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/ title would become

<title>Firefox Web Browser &amp; Thunderbird Email Client | Mozilla Products</title>
(Plus title case for the win.)

I suggested they give it try and see what happens ;-) I’d be surprised if it does not squeeze a little more juice out.

Wow, there are lousy <title> tags all over their sites ;-)

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ title is just <title>Featured Projects</title> Hopefully, David Boswell will have a chance to coax out of someone some work here during the current redesign ;-)

Firefox Tips & Tricks

The Manage Your Downloads is an advanced tip? Say what?

“Find it a Flash” intermediate tip reads:

The Find As You Type feature is another handy timesaver. Rather than
using the “find” bar to search for a word on page, just click anywhere
on that page and start typing the word you want. Your cursor will
immediately jump to the first instance of that term.

“You can use it for links, too. For example, instead of moving your
mouse across the page to a “learn more” link, just start typing the
word and when the cursor finds it, press enter.

It does not say that this is disabled by default, and can be enabled at Advanced > Accessibility or any other hint or tip ;-) Also, the phrase “on page” feels awkward, maybe “on a page”.

PS. I would not recommend enabling this, because it breaks some web apps that have click to edit.

BC Elections 2009, the Political Dance Is Over, the Political Circus Begins

British Columbia, the Canadian province where I live, is in the final weeks of elections. The general election is May 12th.

Everyone can vote in advance on their own schedule — which is pretty cool — from May 6th through 9th.

There is a referendum on what voting system to use as part of this election.

This week the campaigns will go into full gear with huge media blitz.

It’s each person’s duty to vote, so it’s time to decide what issues are important to you, and how you will use your vote.

I’m tuning into http://www.cbc.ca/bc/ for my news, and http://en.wordpress.com/tag/bc-politics/ and http://en.search.wordpress.com/?q=bc+elections to get personal views.

What issues are important to you? Where do you get your information?

An Earth Day 2008, April 22

Today, Wednesday, April 22nd is an Earth day. (The United Nations celebrates Earth day later in the year on the March equinox).

The weather has been gorgeous these last few days. Although, bike to work week isn’t till May 11–17, it’s awesome to see so many people biking to work. I do chuckle a little at the awkward commuter cyclist in their business attire and inappropriate shoes, but good on ‘em!

Now, when I think of Earth Day, I think of my son, and my son’s future children. I get an anxious energy to do my part for Earth every day.

I regularly think of child Canadian Severn Cullis-Suzuki in 1992 addressing the UN Earth Summit 1992:

“If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it. … You grownups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, make your actions reflect your words”

Daniel Jalkut, WordPress Hero!

Daniel Jalkut, the proprietor of Red Sweater Software, is the developer of the excellent Mac desktop blog editor MarsEdit. He is also a code contributor to WordPress.

I became acquainted with him about two years ago when he started submitting detailed bug tickets (often with patches!) to WordPress.

I’m the developer of MarsEdit, a Mac desktop blogging application that works with WordPress. When my customers have trouble with the “upload image” functionality, the error responses from WordPress are lackluster. I tracked this down to a simple failure case in xmlrpc.php where the verbose error returned by wp_upload_bits is not being propagated out to the response text.

I’m attaching a proposed diff which addresses this. The diff is against /trunk/ as of today, but I would really love to see this integrated into the 2.1.x branch, because it will have a major impact on my customers’ ability to debug MarsEdit interoperability with their WordPress blog.

Daniel Jalkut
Red Sweater Software

That’s the description of ticket #3981: “Patch: Improve error propagation from newMediaObject failure in xmlrpc.php”.

Starting with #3981 he has participated in 50+ bug reports and fixes in the XML-RPC and ATOMPub areas. He has literally participating every month for the last two year! He collaborates regularly with Joseph Scott and the other members of the WordPress XML-RPC and AtomPub community.

As I have been navigating around the edges of the Mac development communities lately, I’ve learned what a well regarded, active participant Daniel is the indie Mac developer community. I highly recommend his and Manton Reece’s podcast Core Intuition if you are interested in Mac development.

Daniel comes across as a pragmatic, thoughtful, eloquent person. As the bug above suggests, it’s in the interest of giving his customers fantastic service that he participates in WordPress development. And WordPress is much better software thanks to his participation!

He also regularly recommends the WordPress.com service or the WordPress.org software depending in his customers’s needs and tech savviness.

Daniel Jalkut is a WordPress developer and advocate. He is a WordPress Hero!

I Wonder If I’m Growing

In celebration of my son’s recent birthday and also my and my wife’s own personal growth, here is Raffi and Ken Whiteley’s “I Wonder If I’m Growing”

Trying a little Objective C – Cocoa – Mac OS X

As well as surely-but-slowly working on a little web project, I’m trying to learn a little Objective C – Cocoa – Mac OS X.

My motivation is two folds:

  • Create some small (open source) Mac Apps to solve my own itches.
  • Exploration of what makes Mac special; the Mac tools and communities, and new insights into the Mac experience.

Apple “Tax”, Being Able to Get Things Done

Is buying computers a strange game of screen size and hardware numbers? Or is it about looking for a solution in hardware and software that helps you get things done?

I’ve given up waiting for the next Vista update to finally fix the long pauses on my Dell desktop. I’ve given up flushing away my time on it. These days it’s always booted up in Ubuntu, where it works very well.

I’ve recently had to help a friend downgrade from Vista to Windows XP, so their laptop would “work again”. He was about to buy a new laptop instead!

Another friend just bought a gorgeous Lenovo laptop. Vista is painfully slow to start up! So, he hasn’t even been using it — instead I find him on his old XP desktop. I’ll soon have to help him install XP on the laptop, or it wil continue to be an expensive paper weight.

I’m praying that Windows 7 is good. In the meantime, Microsoft’s Lauren campaign is a great conversation starter to help people solve their computing problems by considering the costs of their frustration, and what their time is worth.

I think most people will be trashing a Windows with their next computer purchase.

Attack of the Case Sensitive Filesystem

Case sensitive file systems should be retired.

They allow us to do stupid things, mostly in error, but sometimes because we are too smart for our own good. There is no good reason for their (continued) existence.

I imagine that in the ancient days of computing it came about something like:

“Long file names will take up too much space”

“I know, we can make the file system case sensitive.”

“Great, now instead of ‘work-notes.txt’ and ‘notes-about-homebuilding.txt’, I’ll just name the files ‘notes’ and ‘Notes”.

Software developers are known for our passion for backward compatibility, and so today the popular file systems of Linux and Unix (except Mac) are still case sensitive.

Gross!

What has gotten me worked up about this (again)?

The cause this time is a customer checked into subversion two copies of a file just with different case. From the commit log, it seems likely that they meant to rename the file.

When I tried to update (or check out) the repository on Mac OS X (10.5.6), a case preserving, but case-insensitive file system (doing the right thing), it fails with a cryptic message:

svn: In directory 'images/author_header'
svn: Can't copy 'images/author_header/.svn/tmp/text-base/belief.jpg.svn-base' to 'images/author_header/.svn/tmp/belief.jpg.tmp.tmp': No such file or directory

using the pre-packaged svn 1.4.4 (r25188 – built Nov 25 2007). Out of interest, I used macports to upgrade to 1.5.5 (r34862) and the error is different but equally cryptic:

svn: In directory 'images/author_header'
svn: Can't open file 'images/author_header/.svn/tmp/text-base/belief.jpg.svn-base': No such file or directory

At this point, I had not identified the cause of the problem, so I was quite frustrated. Thankfully, I had a Linux box to check out the repository on and from there the issue looked obvious.

Solutions?

Save us from our selves.

When working on developing the next great file system, make it so amazing that you can slip in case preserving, case insensitivity like Mac OS X’s HFS+ (Mac OS Extended).

When developing tools like the next great revision control system make it ot allow files of the same name but different case — the default configuration anyway.  Failing that have good error messages. 

It’s not too late for Subversion either to fix the long rotten issue 667: handle file name case sensitivity edge cases (issue 2010: case sensitivity problem with checkout )