njr 3.0

Doc Searls has been pointing to lots of articles about the insane Net radio fees, but this is the first article I've seen in the mainstream media that presents a balanced view. Most of them were incredibly one-sided, as was the treatment on NPR's Weekend Edition I heard of KPIG shutting down their streams. Everything was of the form “hey, we can't afford this”, and the RIAA saying “well, that's your problem, you're stealing music”, rather than discussing the completely bizarre manner in which the fees were “negotiated” in the first place.

I did some hacking on the Subversion code today and was very impressed: it's well-written and -commented, and the folks on #svn continue to be amazingly patient and understanding with my issues. Subversion 1.0 will kick ass.

7:03 PM | Radio
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“Pre-alpha” is definitely right: in the first few minutes of testing remote access, I ran into a problem with Subversion. It doesn't handle spaces in files at all well.

% svn co http://svn.sabi.net/repos Development
A  Development/Cocoa
A  Development/Cocoa/F-Script Anywhere
 
svn_error: #21097 : 
  PROPFIND of /repos/!svn/bc/2/Cocoa/F-Script Anywhere: 404 Not Found

Luckily this issue has had plenty of attention recently and should be fixed real soon now.

2:44 AM | Radio
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I spent most of Sunday (8+ hours) trying to compile and install Subversion. Apparently my experience is extremely atypical, but everything finally works now. You can browse my Subversion server in the minimalist Subversion web interface here. Greg Stein's ViewCVS will turn into a ViewSVN at some point, which will provide a much richer interface—given Greg is the lead developer for Subversion…

Major thanks go to Eric Gillespie, who was extremely patient with me as I blundered through build problem after build problem with Apache 2, Neon (a WebDAV client library), and Subversion. Also thanks to Sander Striker, who works on Subversion and the Apache Portable Runtime, which both Subversion and Apache make use of.

1:01 AM | Radio
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Robb Beal is up in arms about Apple competing with third parties (Watson with Sherlock 3, PIM vendors with Address Book 2 and iCal).

One question I've got, which likely motivated iCal/Address Book: why is it so hard to find decent PIM software for the Mac? I've tried Palm Desktop (fine, as far as it goes, but a shadow of the Windows version), Now Up-to-Date and Contact (stagnant, expensive, hard to use, extremely flaky Palm sync), Entourage (nicely designed but feature-poor), and Personal/Group Organizer (weird interface). I use Palm Desktop now (previously I used Claris Organizer, from which it descended), and wish it included calendar sharing features. If iCal does, I'm switching. If the Now products were any good, I'd use them.

So, for me, it's a question of quality, not just price. iTunes is the best MP3 player I've found for my purposes, so I use it. iPhoto is poorly designed, and thankfully iView MediaPro is there to fill the void. I won't use iChat when it comes out because it only supports AIM: instead I use Proteus, a beautifully designed multiprotocol chat client.

Sherlock 3 is the first example I've seen in which Apple has just outright copied a third-party app, down to the interface details. While Sherlock 3 offers features Watson doesn't (maps) and Watson has more tools (recipes, etc.), and more extensibility, most people will likely not bother with Watson after Jaguar ships. This is annoying, but an open-source Watson would have presented a similar challenge: in fact, many open-source products are clones of commercial ones. Watson is a great tool, I use it every day, and will keep using it, and paying for upgrades, if it keeps getting better.

1:32 AM | Radio
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Aaron Swartz has a short commentary on the Macworld keynote. “I wanted the Backup software and Anti-Virus but they turned out to be badly-done Cocoa shims over some UNIX tools (tar, gzip and cp in the case of Backup).” That's really a shame: Apple should do better.

1:25 AM | Radio
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