Oren’s Weblog

I spent a couple of hours last night playing with Apple’s Garage Band. The results are here.

I didn’t try anything too complex – just using Apple’s provided loops to assemble (seems like a more appropriate word than “write”, much less than “compose”) a piece. I used seven tracks, and the G4 Powerbook (1.25 GHz, 512 MB RAM) seemed to hold up fine, although I noticed that near the end the visual display wasn’t quite keeping up with the audio.

There are some things I was used to in Sonic Foundry’s Acid software for Windows that I didn’t find in Garage Band so far – the ability to fade tracks in and out individually within a piece, and a the ability to have “one-offs” in addition to loops – for those points in time where you just want to add a single sound, such as a cymbal crash or a whack.

And does anybody know what the rules are for redistributing product based on Garage Band loops? I assume they’re freely redistributable, but it would be nice to know that for a fact.

I look forward to playing more with Garage Band, especially trying plugging real instruments into it and playing along, though I don’t imagine it will replace playing real music with real friends – at least, I hope not!

David Coursey, from the ZD Anchor Desk, discourses here on problems with Windows XP.

I am continuing to be seduced by the incredibly easy to use integration in Apple’s iLife applications.

I originally signed up for a .Mac account as an easy way to keep my Mac address book synchronized across multiple machines, but I’m starting to figure out that it has other great uses (well, duh!).

Last night Michele asked me to put some pictures of our kitchen remodel up on the web. It was trivially easy to accomplish this, using iPhoto and .Mac – import the photos from the camera, do some really minor editing (just rotating photos for the proper orientation), select the photos, and click the Web Page icon. From there it’s select a theme, enter some titles and captions, and click publish. Poof – that’s it! For those interested (either in the process or the kitchen), the results are here.

And I have just started playing with Garage Band. As someone who spent a lot of time a few years back immersed in Sonic Foundry’s Acid (now owned by Sony), Garage Band is a lot less revolutionary than the hype would have it. But so far, I’m impressed with the sound and the bundled loops, and the price of entry (part of the $50 upgrade to iLife 04, which ends up being something like $25 for those of us who can get academic pricing) is unbelievable. It is definitely a hardware and memory hungry devil though – so be prepared. I’ll post some results when I have some that aren’t too laughable.

Ever since Liz wrote about it back in January I’ve been playing with del.icio.us, which is a “social bookmarking” service, which allows you to save bookmarks, see who else has saved the same bookmarks, what else they’re linking to, and feed your bookmarks out as a rss feed.

One of the things that makes it easy and addictive to use is the bookmarklet for posting. A bookmarklet, as I understand it, is a small program (in Javascript) that can be referred to by a bookmark (for instance on the toolbar of your browser), and then clicked on to invoke. In this case, the post-to-del.icio.us bookmarklet allows you to post whatever web page your currently browsing to your del.icio.us list with two clicks and no typing or cutting/pasting of URLs. Very slick and simple, and a great way just to keep saving my list of interesting web things that I mean to look at, as well as sharing them. I find I use it a lot, because it’s just so darned easy and convenient.

If anyone is using the RSS feed of this blog, you might want to know that I’ve updated to a new RSS 2.0 version. The new version, at http://staff.washington.edu/oren/weblog/index.xml features working links and the full text of all of the postings.

I wish I could remember where I found the Movable Type template that I’m now using, because I’d like to give my thanks and credit. Ah well – the wonders of open source and the web!

And btw, as long as I’m rambling about RSS, I heartily recommend Bloglines as a web-based RSS reader. It just keeps getting better and better. If you’re trying to read multiple weblogs or online news sources regularly, you owe it to yourself to at least give it a try!

Now that I have the Squeezebox I want to be able to stream all those groovy tunes I’ve purchased from the Apple iTunes Music Store from my computer to the stereo.

While the Squeezebox can stream AAC format music files, it can’t decode Apple’s Digital Rights Management technology (while not wanting to get into a rant here on that subject, I have to believe, or at least hope, that eventually DRM on content will go the way of copy-protected software disks).

But I am happy to report that the iTunes LAME encoder can read files with Apple’s DRM and stream them to the Squeezebox, or transcode them into regular mp3 files, at the bit-rate of your choosing. It’s not fast, but it’s certainly easier (and less wasteful of plastic) than burning the tunes to CD and ripping them again.

As promised, my sad saga of spending my President’s day wrestling my Windows XP box…and why I am increasingly happy with having switched most of my computing to OS X after twenty years of being a Microsoft OS user.

When I discovered that the Slimserver software wouldn’t run on my two-year-old Dell at home (though it ran on both of the other XP machines I tried it on) I decided that it was time to try to heal Windows on that box. There had been other signs of advancing decrepitude that happens on Windows over time – applications had run increasing sluggishly, and the view of files in the Windows Explorer now longer refreshed themselves when I renamed files or created new folders.

I decided my first task should be to see if there were problems with the Windows registry. I downloaded a copy of Registry First Aid, which I had seen glowingly mentioned in Preston Gralla‘s weblog on O’Reilly (heaven forbid that Microsoft should actually provide a tool to clean their own operating system).

Running Registry First Aid told me that there were something like 500 (!) errors in my Registry, mostly due to references to files that no longer existed. The free version of RFA only fixes up to fifteen problems at a time, so I gladly parted with the $21 it takes to get a fully registered copy, and told RFA to go off and fix the problems.

Sensibly enough, the software suggested strongly that I either set a recovery point or do a backup of my data and settings before allowing it to mess with the registry. Being a paranoid sort of fellow, I decided to do both. RFA helped me set the recovery point for Windows’ restore utility with no problem, and then offered to call the Windows Backup utility to backup my files.

There’s not a ton of data on that machine that I really need to protect, but the stuff that is there is critical – Michele’s files from her consulting, her non-work email, our growing digital photo collection, and our financial records. All of my previous backups have been accomplished by me manually copying the folders I want to CDs, which works just fine. But in this case I figured I might as well try out the Windows backup utility.

Backup started off by asking me what directories I wanted to backup, so I told it all of Documents and Settings, and off it went… only I soon noticed that for every second it ran, it was adding 3 or 4 seconds to the estimated elapsed time of the operation. When it got to the point that the estimated time for the backup exceeded 24 hours, I told it to cancel the operation … only it wouldn’t stop.

Finally, after waiting about fifteen minutes to see if it would cease and desist on its own, I invoked the Task Manager and cancelled the Backup process. Then I decided to reboot and try again… but Windows told me that there was a file open that needed to be closed before it could shut down. Of course I had no way to close a file (or even see which file was opened by which process), so I yanked the plug (can you share my frustration now?).

After starting up again, I reran RFA, and this time told Windows Backup just to backup a few critical files. This time Backup hung entirely, leading to a repeat of the same scenario up to pulling the plug.

Upon the third restart of the machine, I decided to make a copy of my files the old fashioned way, and then let RFA fix the registry entries, which it did promptly.

The end result is that the machine seems to be performing much better, feeling snappier. There have been a few odd moments since (like last night Internet Explorer kept crashing on me when I tried to view the All Music Guide, though it worked just fine with FireFox).

But I have to think that there’s better ways to build operating systems than by having a central Registry where software registers itself but that doesn’t police itself when software is removed or modified. My repeated experience of Microsoft’s software, whether system software or applications, is that they build incredibly complex systems (wayyyy more complex than I need or want) that work really well about 70% of the time.

It’s too bad – I remember the clean performance of the original version of Word for Windows, before it became the incredibly bloated beast it is now. And I loved the first couple of versions of Visual Basic, which was a wonderful, lightweight, visual programming environment – now look at Visual Studio – sheesh.

The Mac isn’t a perfect environment, but it sure feels a lot simpler and more reliable than my current experience of Windows.