A response from Coralie Mercier at the W3C and my response. I’m hoping they’ll point to the actual RSS 2.0 spec instead of hosting a hacked version of the spec. You can’t ethically take the copyright notice off someone else’s work and pass it off as your own. It happens all the time on the web, but the W3C can’t be one of those places. We’re talking about the integrity of the web and its history. RSS 2.0 is a big milestone. What an awful way to try to show support for a standard, esp one created by independent developers and the news industry. #
11 Dec
Scripting News Annex 
Posted by Tommy on December 11, 2006 at 8:30 am
This comment is actually about a problem with the scripting.com site itself. The “Previous/Next” links at the top don’t go exactly where you might expect. They both go backward in time, just different amounts.
Here’s the scenario — I wanted to see if there were any comments entered for your iPod problem on December 10th, but of course the “comment on today’s scripting news” link takes you to TODAY’s wordpress page, and I thought I would shortcut its navigation using the Scripting.com navigation.
UNFORTUNATELY the “Previous” link at the top of the page takes you back to November 30th, and then when you get to 11/30 the Next link takes you to November 29th, whereas the 11/30 page’s previous link takes you back to November 27th.
So now that I’ve documented the bug (I presume it’s a bug!) I’ll click through the WordPress navigation to look for the November 10th comments, if any!
Posted by Tommy on December 11, 2006 at 8:31 am
I mean DECEMBER 10th. I must be confused now!
Posted by Bryan Schappel on December 11, 2006 at 9:28 am
Dave you can use a product called “SuperDuper” to backup your iPod. Download the product from here:
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
Run the app and clone the iPod to a Disk Image. You can then clone this image back to the iPod when needed.
The free version of SuperDuper will do this.
Posted by Bryan Schappel on December 11, 2006 at 10:21 am
Actually there is file system level access to the files on the iPod. You just need to enable “Show invisible items”. This is not a simple switch like Windows but it can be easily turned on with TinkerTool.
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html
You can access the files directly from the command line if you want.
cd /Volumes/”Name of iPod”
Posted by Jake on December 11, 2006 at 10:25 am
Pretty much any PC can be backed up – people still don’t do it.
What are you going to back up that 2-4-8-20-30-60-80GB iPod to? Your PC? A network storage server? A stack of CDs? A stack of DVDs?
I think many people believe that their iPod is backed up by the computer that they sync with.
I guess when your Podcast player comes out, we will see the light of what you mean.
Posted by Dave Nanian on December 11, 2006 at 12:22 pm
(Sent this via mail, but just noticed that there was a way to comment — sorry about that.)
Anyway, we don’t claim to be able to back up iPods, as far as I know.
But if the iPod is stored as a regular, plain old HFS+ volume (as it seems to be), we’re happy to back it up, of course — as Bryan said, above. But the result is just a copy of the original, as-is… just like it would be if you were to back up any other volume.
(In general, iPod-specific support didn’t seem to make much sense, because iPod content comes from the Mac in the first place, and thus can be restored simply by re-syncing with iTunes.)
Hope that helps: let me know if you have any questions.
Posted by Dave Winer on December 11, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Sorry, one of my readers claimed you did backups of iPods.
Also, I don’t use synching because I plug my iPod into more than one Mac. I still need to back up my iPod as I would any other computer with data on it that’s valuable to me.
And I’m pretty sure synching doesn’t preserve metadata.
Posted by Tim Merritt on December 11, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Use one of the scripts in the freeware CLIX from Rixstep: http://rixstep.com/1/20061209,00.shtml
You can backup the entire iPod and do several other Unix commands, several Mac OS X-specific, from a convenient GUI.
I’m a satisfied user.
Posted by Dave Nanian on December 11, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Fair enough, Dave. We will back it up as a drive, and can restore it, at least right now, because it’s (currently) a straight up HFS+ volume. We’re even happy to Smart Update that backup so subsequent backups are fine.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that Apple will continue to keep the iPod in HFS+ format. But, while they do, we’re happy to handle it like any other drive.
As far as iTunes Sync goes, I think the files are copied to the iPod as-is, so metadata is preserved, but I could be wrong. Of course, “reverse” sync only brings back play count, time and rating (last time I looked)… and when you’re talking about > 1 Mac all bets are off, unfortunately. 🙂
Posted by Raines Cohen on December 11, 2006 at 8:40 pm
Not directly related to today’s episode, but surprised you haven’t blogged it yet:
http://xml.house.gov/
(found on a Daily Kos thread in which a Speaker Pelosi staffer is asking for feedback about bringing transparency and accountability to the sausage-making process):
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/11/182844/48
Posted by Bryan Schappel on December 11, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by backing up an iPod. But SuperDuper will make a snapshot of everything on the iPod to a disk image on your Mac hard drive. This snapshot would include all MP3’s, all metadata, and other files on the iPod. This image file can be copied back to an iPod to restore the iPod to a known good state.
The iPod is really nothing more than a hard disk. The music and metadata are stored in a hidden folder. A quick Google search for “iTunesDB” will yield many sites that have reverse engineered the iTunesDB file. This file tells the iPod where the song file is on the iPod. I believe that the rest of the metadata for a song is stored in the ID3 tags.
I you want programs that can copy songs from the iPod back to a Mac I can recommend these:
Senuti – http://www.fadingred.org/senuti/
iPod.iTunes – http://www.crispsofties.com/
Search VersionTracker.com for “iPod” to find many other programs to sync iPod’s back to iTunes.
Posted by Jim Armstrong on December 11, 2006 at 10:35 pm
I use senuti (iTunes backwards) myself and it works quite well. In addition I use File Buddy from Skytag software for examining and copying the contents of iPods.
http://www.skytag.com/filebuddy/
Jim
Posted by vanni on December 12, 2006 at 12:05 am
frozen ipod?? try this from apple :
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61705
Posted by Diego on December 12, 2006 at 10:08 pm
You’re right, Dave. Not all good domain names have been taken. crymearivercrunch.com and crybabycrunch.com are still there. 😉
BTW I am not having a dig (or is that two gs?) at you. Just referring to the melodrama which is crunchnotes.com.
Posted by Max on December 18, 2006 at 5:28 pm
I noticed you shut down the NY Times river today. I’m very bummed, as I used it almost daily. Whenever I had a free moment, I’d fire up the mobile browser and read a story or two. Any chance it will return? Any other similar sites you can recommend? I need my mobile news fix.
Posted by Max on December 24, 2006 at 6:15 am
Not sure why my previous comment disappeared. I’m still wondering about nytimesriver.com. I really liked the site, used it a lot, and am wondering why you decided to scrap it… Are there any other similar sites – with a general news focus – that can be recommended? Google News hasn’t done the trick for me because its stories aren’t mobile friendly…