If you pop open your system preferences, open up Keyboard & Mouse, you can set “Full Keyboard Access” to “All Controls. This is massively handy, as you can tab through alert boxes and dialogue boxes, then hit the space bar to activate the selected button.

iTunes, in all dialogue boxes I can test, does not follow the rules here. I seem to have to pick up the mouse in order to get around in the application. At least with respect to alert and dialogue boxes.

You can file your own reports and track them as well. This has been filed as bug #4282397.

The music industry is going to drive their industry into the ground, they only have themselves to blame. There have been two articles out in as many days, where the logic of record executives just throws me for a total mindfuck.

Lets start with “Bronfman Fires Back at Apple“.

“There’s no content that I know of that does not have variable pricing,” said Mr. Bronfman at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia investor conference. “Not all songs are created equal—not all time periods are created equal. We want, and will insist upon having, variable pricing.”

“To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer,” said Mr. Bronfman. “Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past.”

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These god damned RIAA and MPAA people are really getting under my skin. There are shows on TV, I hear about them after that are aired, leaving me no way to watch them. Pretty much every descent TV torrent site out there is dead.

What’s the deal, I mean, how in the hell can it hurt the networks to let me watch a show on my terms? It’s a torrent, so it costs them nothing in bandwidth. These executives are seriously retarded.

Working titles:
Keep your politics out of my punk rock.
The best worst show I ever saw.

September 25th 2005, SBC park in San Francisco, I had the mostly pleasurable experience of seeing Green Day play with Jimmy Eat World and Flogging Molly. It was a good show, I may even venture to say it was a great show, it’s just been my experience that all Green Day shows are pretty great.

The main difference about this show was the sheer number of people there, 42,000 to be precise. Seeing as how Billy Joe made a few references to being a punk rock band, I might as well tell you what was going on that was in no way punk.

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I am not going to do software reviews here, and while this sort of will serve as one, it is in no way a trend.

About a year ago, perhaps a little more, I heard about this new keyboard that was being made, the Matias tactilepro keyboard. It is a pricey keyboard, but I was all over it. At least, once the backorder log was filled, I managed to get my hands on it, and so the saga began.

I am really picky about my interface with the computer. For something I spend fourteen or more hours a day on, I want my chair, mouse, display, and keyboard to be perfect. I will spare no cost to achieve this. To me, it is just insane to sit on a bar-stool, with a dodgy one button mouse, a 12″ CRT, and a mushy ass keyboard all day long. If I was a casual user, sure, but I am not, I do this for a living, and the three ways, four if you include the chair, need to be just right or I am constantly fighting my brain to give my work full attention.

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As I have mentioned before, the purpose of this blog is not to rehash the same old topics every other blog is talking about. I do my best, the lack of traffic is probably an indication that I may want to reconsider. For the time being, I am sticking to my guns.

However, if there is one bandwagon you will see me jump on, it is the HIG. HIG is an acronym and stands for Human Interface Guidelines. Almost every software company has them, most developers try to adhere to them. It goes without saying, Apple has a set as well.

I may argue, it is the strong adherence to a very well thought out set of HIG’s that put Apple where it is today. In large part, the cult following Apple enjoys is due to the HIG. At least up until OS X was released.

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Bill Maher Season 6 Episode 3

I thought I would take a stab at real time commenting on Real Time with Bill Maher, below is my take on his show as I watch it. I pause occasionally since I can, Tivo, ya know. This is done pretty quick, and off the coff, so there are bound to be mistakes. I am putting no effort into proofreading, this is just how it comes out. If it is not too much trouble, I will do one per episode this season.

The usual intro, about the only thing I like is the ticking clock thing that I am sure the graphics department is very proud of, as it is pretty much a theme to the entire show.

Bill Maher intro with jokes and whatnot. Complaining about how Bush took four days to get to deal with hurricane Katrina, even though it is the Mayor who really dropped the ball on this one. Not to mention, these stubborn asshats who insist on staying in their homes. Assuming Bush were to develop a plan, these people still would not leave, so what the hell is the point.

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Dan Wood just got me on a roll with his report an Apple bug Friday. Trouble is, it is not Friday, but I keep running into things that need to be addressed.

Today’s bug is a Safari one, at least as far as I can tell. Within the html title tags of a web page is the data that is shown at the top of your Safari Window. Safari also uses this title tag data to name the file if you drag and drop the url into your filesytem. They call them .webloc files.

If you view source on a html page, you will see something like this:

<title>Formulate Affinity</title>

The trouble comes in when the developer has made the title extremely long. After a certain point, you can not longer save that url as a webloc file. You can still bookmark it but there are those times when I do not want to clutter up my bookmarks and just want to toss the .webloc in a folder. If the title is too long, you are locked out, nothing happens, no alerts, no errors, just nada.

You can file your own reports and track them as well. This has been files as bug #4248374.

Mac OS X 10.4 brought significant changes to the command line tools it ships with. Once such change, was the switch from pico to nano. For those of you that are not aware, pico and nano are both text editors that are used from a shell/command line.

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Try to move a folder into an area in the Finder that has a file with the same name as the folder and you get the below dialogue box alert:

The funny thing is, if you do it the other way around, where you move a file into an area where this a folder of the same name, you get a more descriptive error:

Filed with Apple as bug 4246833

On December 19, 2004 I saw The Aviator. Good movie, were it not for the damned rattling of a overhead fan that distracted me the entire time. I have been back to the theater, the rattle still persists, and a new blown upper right speaker is now my new source of aggravation.

As I chewed this problem over in my head, I felt it time to write a letter in and express my displeasure for most of my movie-going experiences. I ended up sending in a rather long winded report of viewing issues to my local theater, I CC’d it to the corporate division, as well as the MPAA, RIAA, and THX Ltd. To date, I have not received a reply of any form.

I am going to recap my letter in hopes that it gathers enough readers attention to inspire them to do the same. It is unacceptable that consumers pay around ten dollars to see a movie to only have that experience lessened by a management that does not care.

Below is a copy of the letter, slightly modified, with some new comments added in now that I have had more time to chew on the issue. Feel free to forward copies of it to your local theater, the MPAA, RIAA, and/or THX Ltd.

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Ever hear the expression “having your cake and eating it too”? Here is how you can have you cake, eat it, and then fully forget what in the hell cake is, let alone whether or not you ate any.

I have a somewhat tattered past with just outside the definition of light drug use. I have been the model of sobriety for years now. That does not mean that every six months or so it is not fun to totally get looped.

Kaiser, if you are so unfortunate to have to pay for every month, or so fortunate to have their services based on a work plan, is where it all starts. It masquerades under the name of EasyFill™, I call it EasyFun™.

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Apple has been officially making the Xserve for some time now, the first G4 based systems being released in the middle of 2002. Many may not entirely be aware, but Apple even had a host of server based hardware from the days of old as well. Interestingly, some of them ran AIX, which is a UNIX variant from IBM. The specs are paltry by todays comparisons, but damn, would I love to have one of those to use as a night stand.

There was a time, when I sat behind a 9600 baud modem, spending most of my days dialing into networks. You did what you could, phone bills pissed the parents off, all made worth while to get real time chat working over an arcane modem protocol. Eventually you found MUD’s and it was all over. What I do recall, once stepping up to a slightly faster modem, is that many, if not most of the servers I was connecting to were Apple branded.

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Captcha is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”. If Ticketmaster had a clue, the may consider using it.

I saw a short little piece on television tonight about how scalpers have built automated applications that can get into the Ticketmaster system and buy batches with little to no effort. This sucks in a few ways.

First, it takes away from the fans getting a chance to see the bands they want to see for a fair price. Second, it makes the scalper a good deal of money at the expense of the fans. But perhaps the largest reason is sucks, is it floods the Ticketmaster site with requests and you end up sitting in a holding pattern in order to get a ticket.

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