Scripting News for 1/30/2007

Matt Mullenweg on Snap: “I think this is one feature where what the masses want and what geeks prefer diverges pretty heavily.” 

MacNN: Apple pays $700,000 for bloggers’ legal fees. 

Fake Steve Jobs: “Well my friggin lawyers are advising me that I will have to shut down this scandalous old blog.” 

Freedom to Tinker: “Having long argued that customers can’t be trusted with MP3s, the industry will have to ask the same customers to use MP3s responsibly.” 

Denon’s NetAudio 

This morning I explored the NetAudio feature of my new Denon receiver, and found more new interesting ideas, fully implemented. Had Apple done this first, we would all have raved about how they were reinventing home audio, what Denon is doing is that good, with the usual caveat that the user interface is at best workable and at worst — slow and ugly. But it works, and that amazes me.

The first thing I did was visit the central website, radiodenon.com, enter the MAC address of the receiver, which I got from the attached devices page of my Netgear router. It needs to know the address because once a day the receiver checks with this website to see if I’ve updated my favorites, and the ID it uses is the MAC address. Then I browse through the directory, by geography, by format or by language, and added my usual favorites, WBUR, WNYC, KCRW, WJCT. And a few new ones, including Virgin Radio and the DNA Lounge. Now I’m going to wait 24 hours and come back and see if my receiver knows about it.

In the meantime, I found that there’s a minimal directory available through the fractional horsepower HTTP server in the receiver itself. I navigated through its menus, and chose WBUR, my favorite Boston radio station. Now I feel like I’m at Berkman, living in Newton, and getting ready to dig some snow!

Dear Ted 

Your geeks are taking both of us for a ride.

I was subscribing to your feed, generally reading all your updates, and now I see the feed moved.

I was going to post a note saying that it would be better if you redirected to the new feed, but then I saw that your new feed isn’t RSS, to which I ask — why??

Do you want to lose subscribers?

Because that’s what happened. I can’t read your feed anymore Ted. I’ll survive, but I will miss your posts.

You and I both have gray beards, and we knew each other when we were young lads. And that wasn’t so long ago!

Isn’t life too short to keep breaking things that work?

Your pal, Dave

Very nice integration 

I am working on a contract, so I’m sending back and forth lots of DOC format files, and this morning I noticed something nice, that works really well. I’m a Gmail user, and now there’s a link when you’re looking at an attachment that allows you to open it in their browser-based word processor. It’s by far the most convenient of the three links, esp since I don’t have a desktop word processor that reliably opens Word files. Since I’m so often critical of Google I thought it was important to say “Good job” when they do something that’s nice for users.