Last year I attempted the RPM challenge for the first time. This is simply the mad pursuit of recording an entire album of music entirely within the month of February. RPM purists would go so far as to say that you should ideally write as well as record the material. The RPM definitiion of an album is 10 songs or 35 minutes of music, so there is some leeway for including one long instrumental jam as part of your album.

When I attemped this last year, it was fully my intention to write an album of proper songs...i.e. with vocals and lyrics. However, I spent so long on writing and recording the music that I had no time left to write — let alone record — the vocals. So it ended up as an instrumental album (a concept album no less). Given the time pressure, I was pleased with the music that I recorded. 

So this year I am trying again, and having learnt from the challenges of last time, I am this time trying a different approach. Rather than work on lots of different songs at once, I'm trying to tackle one song at a time, and allow myself 3 days per song. February is a leap year this year, so we get an extra day but I still can only spend 2 days on my last song.

Writing at such speed is not easy for me. I've never been a great lyricist — and my lyrics are probably better than my singing! — it's the one aspect of song writing that I really struggle with. I'm happy to come up with chord structures and melodies and play around adding musical textures in GarageBand, but writing lyrics? Urgh.

However, I'm taking the approach that a song with terrible, banal, lyrics is still better than no song at all. So may I present to you the first efforts of my RPM 2012 challenge so far. Song number 1 is called 'Sarah Jane'. On the 1st February, I wrote the main chords for the verse, came up with the melody and some lyrics. On 2nd February, I came up with a chorus structure and some more lyrics. Today (3rd February), I finished off the — admittedly terrible lyrics — and recorded about a dozen tracks in GarageBand. It is only my acoustic guitar and vocals that are live. Everything else is done using instruments in GarageBand played with my tiny (1 octave) USB keyboard.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the final result. It's rough, poorly mixed, and could do with a lot more polish...but there is no time for any of this right now. Tomorrow I start on song 2!

Sarah_Jane.m4a Listen on Posterous

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I tried opening a Perl script today using LaunchBar. As I have many code editors installed, it prompted me with a list of all available editors that are capable of handling *.pl files (Perl scripts). I was surprised to see that iBooks Author was now included:

I had read that iBooks Author supports Javascript (in addition to HTML) and initially I was excited that you might be able to embed Perl scripts in this new iBooks format. But alas no:

So I'm not sure why *.pl scripts are being associated with iBooks Author if it can't open them. You don't see this association of Perl scripts with Pages or Keynote, so there must be something in iBooks Author which is making the Finder associate *.pl scripts with the application.

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Bitcasa is the latest offline storage technology that is starting to make waves in the tech media. It's being advertised using the strapline 'Infinite storage on your desktop'. Yes, infinite storage. Think Dropbox on steroids.

The service, currently in beta, allows you to mount folders from their online servers and make them appear like local folders. There is a web interface that gives you access to your files along with hints that iOS/Android access will be available at some point too.

Of course, you can't store everything locally, so you do have to download/upload files as needed but you can set a quite large cache (up to 14 GB) to essentially keep your most used files local.

The technology is based on FUSE (thanks to @modernscientist for pointing this out), but it blurs the lines between what is local and what is remote. However, because all of your 'cloudified' folders (to borrow from Bitcasa's terminology) are each mounted as a network drive, this does create the following problem (on Macs anyway).

 Once you cloudify any folder, the file permissions of everything in that folder are all turned on. I.e. any user who has access to your computer can read and write to the files in that folder.

I created a test folder with some basic text files and I added this to Bitcasa. This is how the local permissions of that folder looked to me:

drwxrwxrwx@ 6 keith staff 204 Jan 16 08:59:02 2012 Test/

In the terminal, I then switched to a backup user account (Steve) that I have on my Mac. To that user, the permissions of the same folder look like this:

drwxrwxrwx@ 6 steve staff 204 Jan 16 08:59 Test/

I then tried deleting the folder while logged in as Steve:

$ rm -rf Test/
rm: Test/: Resource busy

It can't delete the folder, but it does delete all the files inside it. This has huge security implications if you share a computer with someone else (with a different account), or if you have an account on a networked machine. If so, then any user — intentionally or otherwise — can read and delete the contents of any folder that you add to Bitcasa.

This is, of course, no different to what happens if you leave a USB drive plugged in to your Mac, but I'm guessing that the average Bitcasa user might not realize this.

Updates

Updated 1/16/12 1:33 pm to clarify that it is based on FUSE technology rather than appearing to be FUSE-like

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iTunes in the Cloud is a great way of making the songs in your iTunes library available to all of your iOS devices, but it is not without various wrinkles (which will hopefully be ironed out in a later update). Here are some examples of what I mean. I believe that these are only problems when you are also using iTunes Match.

Each of these folders contains different combinations of my playlists (with some overlap).

But on my iPhone, if I try accessing this playlist, the 100 item limit is ignored:

I'm hapy to wait while 100 songs download over WiFi, but I'm going to wait for over 6,000 songs to download.

4) You can't include podcasts in synced playlists

I have mentioned this before, and this is something that already has driven me to use the excellent Downcast app. If you place any podcasts in a playlist then see a warning icon appear next to the playlist name. If you click on this, you'll see the following warning:

These four issues are not problems if you don't use iTunes Match; they all work as expected if you are syncing playlists in the traditional manner of using iTunes to choose which specific playlists will be copied to your iOS device. I really hope that at least some of these problems get addressed in the near future.

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Despite living in Davis for several years, we had never visited this fantastic wildlife area which is right on our doorstep. Yesterday we remedied this situation and took a few photos while walking around one of the many little walking loops that can be found.

This area is over 16,000 acres and is a (temporary) home to many migratory birds. It is easy to lose yourself in the wild tranquility of the place and forget forget that Davis is just a few minutes drive away.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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The recent changes to Twitter's web and mobile interaces have not pleased everyone. John Gruber – as always – hits the nail on the head with the many user interface (UI) problems that have arisen in the new interface on mobile clients. The #NewNewTwitter app on my iPhone has also caused me to look elsewhere, and I'm currently trying out Tweetbot which I mostly like. Using a new mobile version of twitter has also caused me to reevaluate my desktop version of twitter which for a long while has been the official version from Twitter (which built on the excellent Tweetie app).

Twitterrific from The Iconfactory is a paid app which has very good reviews. It's normally $9.99 but is currently on sale at half price so I thought I'd give it a try. The must have feature that I need in any twitter client is the ability to support multiple accounts (I have seven accounts, many of which I use for various work-related projects). Apart from that, I like clients which have clean, attractive UIs and which have support for many keyboard shortcuts. So in these regards, how did I find twitterriffic? In a word...'unusable'. Here's why:

2) You can press the left arrow key when a tweet is selected to display a new pop-up window. If your selected tweet is part of a conversation, the pop-up window shows the tweets in that conversation. If your tweet wasn't part of a conversation, you see recent tweets that mention the account of the tweet that you selected. But you have to use the escape key to close this window, no other key will make it disappear (you can also click elsewhere with a mouse). It would make sense to me to maybe make the window disappear by using the left arrow again, so you don't have to move your fingers. I don't like having to reach for the escape key (which requires a little bit of a stretch on most keyboards).

5) If you receive a new mention or direct message it is not always clear that this has happened. You can turn on Growl notifications, which helps, but otherwise you may just notice that the twitterriffic menu bar icon has turned blue. This indicates that something is new, but what? The menu bar icon does not have a menu to reveal what the new item is (e.g. a mention vs a direct message) or which account they have appeared in. If you turn on the sidebar (see previous item), you might hope that the 'Mentions' or 'Messages' sections would display in a different color to draw your attention to what is new. But alas, this doesn't happen. So for someone like me with many accounts, I have to search through each account in turn, checking to find out what is new.

6) You can 'jump' to your next twitter account using the Cmd + J keyboard shortcut, but unlike other twitter apps, you can only navigate forwards. So again, if you have many different twitter accounts you need to use this shortcut several times if you just want to to go to the previous account. There is a toolbar icon that allows you to switch to different accounts, but that requires using the mouse.

9) When you mouse over any tweet, two small icons appear in the bottom right. The first is an arrow which, if clicked, gives access to retweeting, replying to, or direct messaging the author of the tweet. The second 'gears' icon gives you various options, including favoriting the tweet. I'm surprised that favoriting a tweet doesn't merit it's own star icon in the tweet itself, rather than adding this as a buried function of the generic gears icon.

10) Twitterriffic uses color to distinguish between different types of tweet. If you use the 'light' color scheme then you may see the following colors: 

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Being the political junkie that I am, I was quite excited to see a new 'Election 2012' app from the New York Times. However, I quickly noticed that most links that you may care to click on this app are accompanied by a little padlock icon. Clicking on these links takes you to a 'Subscribe' page where you are prompted to pay at least $14.99 per month for a NYTimes.com subscription. There are just six links that let you freely view NYTimes.com articles within the app. There are another fifty-four which link to content where you need a subscription. They do provide free links to an 'All Sources' section which just links to news articles from other providers (Washington Post, CNN etc.).

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Together again!

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In the light of the events of November 18th at UC Davis, many have called for Chancellor Katehi's resignation. A much smaller minority have called for her not to resign. I presume that many others – myself included – are reserving judgement until the various investigations have been completed.

I get the feeling that many believe that as the Chancellor ordered the police on to the quad, she should resign irrespective as to what specific instructions the police were given. Others may feel that the nature of her instructions might be a critical element in assigning guilt. 

I'm hopeful that the ongoing investigations will answer the following questions, all of which may influence people's perception of the Chancellors role in these events. Ideally these questions will be answered with verifiable evidence which doesn't rest on the sole testimony of any one individual. I.e. it is not enough for the Chancellor simply to say that she instructed the police not to use force, there must – somewhere – be evidence to corroborate this.

Unanswered questions

1. Did the Chancellor act alone in ordering the police on to the quad? 
   1. If not, then who else advised her and what advice did they give? 
   2. Did she receive any advice to not send in police?
2. At the time that any order was given what information did the Chancellor (and advisors) have about the state of events on the quad (number of tents and/or protestors)?
3. What were the specific instructions to Police Chief Spicuzza regarding the removal of students and/or tents?
4. Did the Chancellor know that the police had, and were liable to use, pepper spray?
5. Was the Chancellor aware of the UC Police Department's guidelines on using force?
6. What specific instructions did Police Chief Spicuzza give to her officers?
7. What specific instructions were given to Lt. Pike – and to the second (as yet unamed) police officer who also used pepper spray?
8. Lt. Pike can be seen in some videos giving and receiving instructions via his radio mic. What were those instructions?
9. After finding out about what happened on Friday afternoon, what was the Chancellors immediate response before her first email to the campus community that was sent late on Friday?
10. Was the Chancellor solely responsible for this first email (i.e. did she draft it or just approve it)?
    1. Did she receive any advice not to send the email, or to change the text?
    2. When this email was sent, what information had the Chancellor received about the events of that afternoon?

I think questions 3, 6, and 7 are the most pertinent, but I also think that the initial email which was sent did a lot to make the whole situation even worse.

Please feel free to suggest other unanswered questions in the comments. Alternatively, if you know of answers to any of them, please let me know (citing evidence rather than just opinion) and I'll update the blog post.

Update 1: 11/30 - It seems that a majority of the Graduate Student Association have also called for the Chancellor not to resign 

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Ten questions to solve. All answers can be formed from the letters in the word 'Thanskgiving', and you can only use those letters. So there are 2 x G, 2 x N, 1 x T etc. Clues are somewhat cryptic and all but one answers involve two words. For each question, I also reveal how many letters are in each word of the answer. 

If you are confused, I'll give you three examples to begin with:

Example 1: I just rescued one of King Arthur's minions from danger (6, 6)

King Arthur's minions would be the knights of the round table, and if you are rescuing someone then you might be 'saving' them, so the answer is saving knight.

Example 2: I have a list of 7 things:  lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride. If you had to remove one of those things from the list, what would you be doing? (6, 3)

The list contains the seven deadly sins. So if you removed one, you would be taking sin. 

Example 3: An unforgettable singer without any Cole? (3, 4)

To which the answer would just be Nat King.

Now you know the format, we'll move on to the quiz. Answers are included below. Best score at our Thanksgiving dinner was 9/10.

1) People who have this are easily insulted, and are also very easy to give injections to (4, 4)

2) As soon as we get a lot of snow, I'm going to Lake Tahoe and I expect I'll suffer from too much exposure to the sun. What will I be getting? (3, 3)

3) Someone has just acquired another possession (5, 5)

4) About a thousand years ago, a gentleman from Scandinavia may have worn this on his head (6, 3)

5) Someone is contemplating about getting older (6, 5)

6) I get very nervous and agitated about the prospect of going on long walks in the countryside (6, 5)

7) I'm in possession of a rather noxious odor (6, 5)

8) What might you call nitrous oxide if – in addition to making you laugh – it made you contemplate and consider the mysteries of life? (8, 3)

9) One thousand grams has just disappeared (9, 2)

10) If an actor from the film Apollo 13 started making an alcoholic beverage using juniper berries, what might he put on the bottle? (1, 5, 3) – this one requires two punctuation characters in the answer!

Good luck!

Answers

1) Thin skin

2) Ski tan

3) Gains thing

4) Viking hat

5) Thinks aging

6) Hiking angst

7) Having stink

8) Thinking gas

9) Vanishing KG

10) T. Hanks' Gin

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One of the demands of the Occupy UC Davis movement appears to include a demand to remove all police from the UC Davis campus. Consider the following map which shows most of the UC Davis campus and some of the wider city of Davis. 

Location 'A' is the current home of the City of Davis Police Department. Location 'B' is the home of the UC Davis Police Department. If people don't want cops on campus, would they want them 'next to' campus, or do they want them to come from the City of Davis Police Department which is a 10 minute drive across town? 

In the USA there have been 20 shooting incidents on college campuses in the last five years alone, resulting in 60 deaths. It's hard to say whether having police on campus helped play a role in reducing yet more fatalities in these tragic events, but personally speaking, I'm glad that we have a police force on campus.

I think the issue of whether police should carry arms at all times, and the much more significant issue over the involvement of police during peaceful protests, are completely separate from whether we should even have police on campuses at all.

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There are some estimates that there were maybe 5,000 people on the UC Davis Quad today. I was there from about 10:30 and tried – as best I could – to provide some coverage of events via my twitter account.

When I arrived, there was hardly anyone there at all. Apart from the news crews you wouldn't notice anything to make you think that one of the largest gatherings in UC Davis history was about to take place. The speeches began at 12:00 and were led off by many vicitims of the pepper spray. These speeches were all articulate, powerful, and moving...a credit to UC Davis. 

After several speeches the UC Davis Chancellor, Linda Katehi, spoke briefly. She was emotional and started out by apologizing for the events of the previous Friday. Here are a few photos from the day. I am glad that I was there and was extremely happy to be part of such a large, peaceful, gathering.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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The crowd were clearly waiting to hear from the Chancellor and they made this clear:

Let_her_speak_2_-_Broadband.m4v Watch on Posterous

A short while after this, the Chancellor addressed everyone with a short speech, her voice quivering at times. She started out with a direct apology, this video only shows the second part of her speech.

Khatehi_speaks_-_Broadband.m4v Watch on Posterous

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I was at last work last Friday and was very curious as to what would happen as the hours counted down to the 3:00 pm deadline; the time by which protestors had been asked to remove the tents from the UC Davis Quad.

I was tempted to go along to see what would unfold, but opted to stay at work. Physical separation, however, is no real barrier to being present at events these days. As the UC Davis police moved on to the Quad, there was semi-live coverage through the twitter accounts of Justin Cox (@DavisCAPatch), the Davis Enterprise (and @Cory_Golden in particular), and The California Aggie (@CaliforniaAggie). The former twitter account offered a link to a live video stream. I was able to listen to this but couldn't get a stable enough stream to watch. Here are some notable tweets that occurred on Friday afternoon, all of which I retweeted : 

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I am writing to tell you about events that occurred Friday afternoon at UC Davis relating to a group of protestors who chose to set up an encampment on the quad Thursday as part of a week of peaceful demonstrations on our campus that coincided with many other occupy movements at universities throughout the country.

The group did not respond to requests from administration and campus police to comply with campus rules that exist to protect the health and safety of our campus community. The group was informed in writing this morning that the encampment violated regulations designed to protect the health and safety of students, staff and faculty. The group was further informed that if they did not dismantle the encampment, it would have to be removed.

Following our requests, several of the group chose to dismantle their tents this afternoon and we are grateful for their actions. However a number of protestors refused our warning, offering us no option but to ask the police to assist in their removal. We are saddened to report that during this activity, 10 protestors were arrested and pepper spray was used. We will be reviewing the details of the incident.

We appreciate and strongly defend the rights of all our students, faculty and staff to robust and respectful dialogue as a fundamental tenet of our great academic institution. At the same time, we have a responsibility to our entire campus community, including the parents who have entrusted their students to us, to ensure that all can live, learn and work in a safe and secure environment. We were aware that some of those involved in the recent demonstrations on campus were not members of the UC Davis community and this required us to be even more vigilant about the safety of our students, faculty and staff. We take this responsibility very seriously.

While we have appreciated the peaceful and respectful tone of the demonstrations during the week, the encampment raised serious health and safety concerns, and the resources required to supervise this encampment could not be sustained, especially in these very tight economic times when our resources must support our core academic mission.

We deeply regret that many of the protestors today chose not to work with our campus staff and police to remove the encampment as requested. We are even more saddened by the events that subsequently transpired to facilitate their removal.

We appreciate the substantive dialogue the students have begun here on campus as part of this week.s activities, and we want to offer appropriate opportunities to express opinions, advance the discussion and suggest solutions as part of the time-honored university tradition. We invite our entire campus community to consider the topics related to the occupy movement you would like to discuss and we pledge to work with you to develop a series of discussion forums throughout our campus.

I ask all members of the campus community for their support in ensuring a safe environment for all members of our campus community. We hope you will actively support us in accomplishing this objective.

Linda P.B. Katehi
Chancellor

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The initial stage of matching my music to what is already in iTunes was quite quick. About 2,250 of my songs (~17%) are not present in the iTunes Store and so they have to be uploaded. This process took quite a while, but if I was using the cloud music players from either Amazon or Google, I'd have to upload all 13,000 songs. I went to bed with these songs still uploading and by the time I woke up the next day, the whole process had been completed…

This is apart from 26 songs which have an iCloud status which says 'Error', and 4 songs which are 'Ineligible' (due to having too low a bitrate). Essentially, all my music is now available to my iOS devices and any other Macs I want to use. I'm curious as to whether Apple will ever allow you to access your iCloud music via a web browser (probably not, as this removes the obligation to buy/use a hardware product made by Apple), but for now I'm happy just to centralize all of my music in one place (the cloud).

Importantly, for me anyway, iTunes Match keeps all of your track metadata in place. Even if you ugprade a 128 Kbps song to a 256 Kbps song from the iTunes Store, you'll keep all of your important metadata (play count, ID3 tags etc). If this didn't happen, a lot of my smart playlists would become broken, so thank you Apple for thinking this one through!

One of the other bonuses for using iTunes Match is that if any of your songs are encoded at less than 256 Kbps, you can delete your local copy and then download a 256 Kbps version from iTunes. Several years ago I was ripping CDs at 128 Kbps, before increasing this to 192 and then to 256, so I have a lot of my music encoded at a lower quality. Although I could go back and re-rip these CDs to obtain higher quality versions, I'm happier to let iTunes do it (more so, when it is low quality SXSW downloads that I can now upgrade). However, this would currently require about 33 GB of extra disk space! Another benefit of iTunes Match is that – if you trust Apple to look after your data – it gives you an additional backup of all your music (though I'm not suggesting you ever make this your only backup).

So am I stumping up $24.99 a year for this service just to get higher quality versions and have an online backup? Not quite. My iTunes library currently contains over 60 GB of music; this will be close to 100 GB if I upgrade the quality of all songs to 256 Kbps. Next year, I plan to purchase a MacBook Air and this means that I almost certainly won't be able to store all of my music on that device (assuming I want to keep other files on the computer). I could keep music on a network drive at home and access it that way, but I like the simplicity of accessing the data via iCloud and just downloading the songs that I'm going to be listening to on any particular day, week, or month.

The one grumble I have since moving to iTunes Match is that playlists will no longer sync to iOS devices if they contain podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts and have a playlist that I frequently sync to my iPhones and iPods that contains a selection of podcasts. The podcasts themselves will still sync to my iOS devices – they remain available in the 'Podcasts' section of the Music app – but you can no longer play those as part of a playlist. Turning on iTunes Match on an iOS device effectively wipes the local music content and replaces it with what's in iCloud. It's a bit more subtle that this. Existing synced playlists remain on the iOS device (except if they contain podcasts) but all other playlists become available to browse. The music in those non-synced playlists has to be downloaded on demand via iCloud. Another advantage of using iCloud, is that any changes that you make to your playlists (on your Mac or iOS device) are immediately synced between devices (this includes playcount information). 

The lack of playlist support for Podcasts meant that I quickly turned my attention to the iOS app store. I'm now using the excellent Downcast app that fulfills all my podcasting needs (and greatly exceeds the previous capabilities of what I was able to do with the default Music app).

So overall, I'm happy with iTunes Match and with accessing my music via iCloud. The real test will be in a year or so when I may need to do more music management on my desired Macbook Air.

If you're looking for some iTunes Match tips and tricks, try out these great resources:

ars technica – iTunes Match: your questions answered

M3 blog – Notes on iTunes Match

Macworld – Hand on with iTunes Match

Macworld – Check your music's iCloud Status

Macworld – How to upgrade tracks to iTunes Match, fast

Macworld - iTunes Match: What you need to know

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I find this behavior strange. If you use the Mac keyboard shortcut to reveal a hidden dock (Cmd + Option + D), the appearance of the dock will 'push' any windows out of the way that are in the area where the dock appears.

Typing the keyboard shortcut again to hide the dock does not move the window back. This video hopefully demonstrates what I mean:

dock_bump.mov Watch on Posterous

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