Zack Rippy

As a huge fan of the space program, the sight of two shuttles out on the launch pads at the same time is just awesome.

Here are Atlantis and Endeavour on the pad simultaneously. Endeavour and her four person standby crew will serve as a rescue ship in the unlikely event that it becomes necessary. Atlantis is on more risky mission to repair the Hubble telescope in which seeking refuge at the International Space Station is not an option.

Thanks to the internet, I just listened to music I have not heard in over twenty years.

What was it?

Sandi Patti and Russ Taff.

That Sandi Patti album was literally out when I was three years old. Hearing it was like going back in time.

Thanks Mom and Dad for giving me memories of music that actually means something.

Oh, and speaking of Mom and Dad, yes, I know that I had a crush on Sandi Patti when I was three years old.

Figured I’d go on and head that one off right now.

Nothing further.

Apple released iTunes 8 to the public on Tuesday. As a major iTunes user, I was more curious about this than the new iPods, the details of which we have known for a while. While iTunes 8 is certainly not a major update, there are some interesting new features.

First of all, the much-touted Genius functionality. Genius is a feature that analyzes your iTunes library and the uploads that information into a shared repository maintained by Apple. The information is supposedly anonymous, etc, but we’re talking music genres, artists, ratings and play count information, so I’m not all the concerned either way. Anyways, once enabled, it allows you to select a track and generate a playlist based on that particular song. I have created several “Genius Playlists” and with the exception of an odd track or two, it has worked remarkably well and has created some very enjoyable playlists. The other aspect is that it can recommend songs to you based on songs in your library. These songs can then be purchased from the iTunes Store. I may use it to discover new music, but I don’t typically buy from iTunes. I despise restrictive DRM and even their non-DRM’ed tracks are in Apple’s m4a format. I buy my digital music from Amazon’s excellent MP3 service.

There is one major problem with Genius right now though: The Beatles. Well, not exclusively The Beatles, but they are the most glaring example. The Genius feature apparently employs some data from the iTunes store, even when simply creating playlists from your own library. As such, artists that are not present in the iTunes Store do not work with the Genius feature. For example, I can not use the song Hey Jude as a source for a Genius playlist because The Beatles are not available from the iTunes Store. This is true for other artists as well. This is poor design and Apple should address it. The Genius feature should be “genius” enough to build playlists based on artists not on the iTunes Store using data from my own library and that of the libraries of others out in “the cloud.” A big thumbs down for this glaring omission. Genius is a great feature overall, but Apple needs to fix it.

Apple has also added a new Grid View for viewing your library by album cover. This is a nice looking view, but it is something other players have had for a while and is a feature I’ll rarely use. Still, it does look very pretty. Check it out here.

iTunes has a new, “improved” visualization now. While it is certainly interesting-looking, visualizations never interested me much back in 1998 with Winamp and not much has changed. I guess it could look cool on a big screen TV or something at a party, but I really don’t care much for visualizations and I can’t imagine too many other people care either.

Another welcome addition to iTunes 8 is the ability to set much more specific preferences for podcast downloads. Bravo! It’s about time!

iTunes is a large, cumbersome, resource-intensive application, but the actual resource utilization in this version does not seem to have increased, which is a good thing. In addition, the application itself seems a good bit more responsive. Moving around within it seems to be much smoother, with fewer pauses or hesitations. Many people complain about the impact iTunes has on a system. It is certainly not lightweight. However, for managing my music library (which is hundreds of GB), iTunes does exactly what I need and want it to do and I don’t plan to replace it anytime soon (though I am keeping a sharp eye on Songbird).

Generally speaking, iTunes 8 is a worthy upgrade. The Genius feature is something I’ll use (but they need to correct its glaring flaw), podcast configuration is much improved and resource impact is about the same. If you are a heavy iTunes user, I’d recommend this latest version.

The 2008 Election just got a lot more interesting.

This is terribly sad news.

The current front page of www.davematthewsband.com:

08/19/2008

We are deeply saddened that LeRoi Moore, saxophonist and founding member of Dave Matthews Band, died unexpectedly Tuesday afternoon, August 19, 2008, at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles from sudden complications stemming from his June ATV accident on his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. LeRoi had recently returned to his Los Angeles home to begin an intensive physical rehabilitation program.

One of many great Roi solos here.

In case you live under a rock, the RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America.

If you didn’t know, they like to sue people. A lot. In fact, that seems to be their favorite pastime these days.

Don’t get me wrong – I am a fan of copyright protections. I know they protect artists and the revenue allows them to create more music, etc. I understand that. I buy music that I really like. In fact, I just bought a CD from this band that is local to Baltimore called The Bridge. I highly recommend checking them out.

Anyways, back to the RIAA and their seemingly limitless ability to be completely lame and attack all things awesome.

Their latest victim is a great little site called muxtape.com. Muxtape.com allows(ed?) you to upload several mp3′s and then it would stream them back to visitors of your site. Nobody could download the files you uploaded, but it was a great way to create random mixes to share with friends. We all made mixtapes back in the day and muxtape.com is a sort of Web 2.0 (I hate that term) equivalent.

The RIAA apparently had a problem with the site. I don’t know what it is. Their page simply reads:

Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.

I assume the RIAA‘s problem is something along the lines of: “People are enjoying music and we are not directly profiting nor did we give permission.”

See, the interesting thing is this – I found The Bridge through someone else’s Muxtape page. I bought their CD. I have recommended them to at least five different people since I bought their CD Saturday and I know for a fact that two of those people have also bought their latest CD. That is three CD sales as a direct result of muxtape.

You see, RIAA lawyers, your attacks on harmless sites like muxtape do nothing but prevent people from discovering new music or frustrate them into turning to piracy. Seriously.

I’d never recommend people illegally download music, but people do. All the time. Perhaps the RIAA should spend more time developing new and innovative ways of getting their music into the hands of music lovers and less time standing in the way of technological advances and suing people for finding creative ways to listen.

Music lovers will buy good music. Just don’t prevent us from enjoying it.

One of my favorite new features of Firefox 3 is the Smart Location Bar, which allows users to recall not only their typed URL history, but also their bookmarks and page titles. The behavior of the bar can be tweaked to suit your needs. First of all, let me say that one of the features I have heard requested the by more than one person is the ability to prevent the Smart Location Bar from searching Page Titles altogether, while retaining the rest of its functionality. While you can disable the Smart Location Bar completely, version 3.0.1 does not allow you to eliminate Page Titles alone from the search results. However, the newly-released alpha build of Firefox 3.1 does allow you to do this, so watch for that soon. Now, on to the tweaks.

All of these settings are accessed by going up to your Smart Location Bar and typing about:config. Tell it that “I’ll be careful, I promise!” and continue. Here are a few settings to play with:

• browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped – Changing this from false to true will cause the bar to only search URLs you have actually typed in – it will no longer search your bookmarks or links you have clicked.
• set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults – This defines the maximum number of search results the Smart Location Bar will display. The default is 12. Setting it to 0 will effectively disable the bar altogether.
• places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus – Setting this to 0 will exclude bookmarks you have not visited.
• places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus – Setting this to 0 will exclude bookmarks that you have visited. Setting this and the above option both to 0 effectively removes bookmarks from the search.
• places.frecency.unvisitedTypedBonus – This setting has three possible values and will greatly modify the search results. A value of 0 will give you results based on what you type being present anywhere in a URL, bookmark or history item to be searched, assuming you have not narrowed what is seatched using one of the above tweaks. A value of 1 will result with what you typed being displayed anywhere in a URL, bookmark or history item, followed by results that begin with what you typed. Finally, a value of 2 will show only results where what you have typed is present in the beginning of a URL, bookmark or history item.

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 gives you many more options for tweaking the Smart Location Bar. If you want to check it out, you can get it here. Keep in mind it is an alpha build and is technically intended only for developers. I’ve had it installed for a couple days now though with no problems. You can see a list and examples of changes to the Smart Location Bar here.

The Smart Location Bar (Awesome Bar) is a fantastic new component to a terrific browser. If you aren’t a fan though or just want to change its behavior, hopefully this will help get you started.

Perhaps you are not aware, but people like pepperoni pizza.I know I do. As awesome as double banana pepper, bbq pork chicken probably is, people still like pepperoni.

Please consider occasionally having it on your buffet.

Seriously, how hard would it be?

Thank You.

Zack Rippy

One of my favorite songs is “You Never Know” by Dave Matthews Band. A verse in the song reads:

Funny when you’re small,
The moon follows the car.
Does no one but me see?
Hey, the moon is chasing me!

On the way home last night in the car, Taylor was staring at the crescent moon in the sky. After a few minutes, he very hesitantly said, “Daddy, I think the moon is following us.” As we turned into our neighborhood, he noticed it again and excitedly hollered, “Daddy, the moon is chasing our car!

Gotta love a glimpse into the mind of a child.

I thought about trying to explain it to him, but why spoil the fun? We proceeded to try to beat the moon to our house.

We lost.