Three Bugs with iTunes

There are three bugs in the current release of iTunes, they are so glaring I wonder how they got through QA. Maybe Apple has been working hard on the next release so has thrown a junior at the current release.

So here are the three bugs I am running into:

1. It no longer automatically synchronizes with my AppleTV when new video podcasts are downloaded, or movies or TV shows for that matter, I always seem to have to sync manually.
2. I have podcasts set up so that audio podcasts are placed on my iPod and video podcasts are placed on my AppleTV. iTunes provides a powerful set of controls which allow me to set that up, and it worked for a while, and then something happened. For some reason the podcasts now get automatically deselected from sync after I remove the last episode in it, and I have to manually re-enable sync when new episodes arrive.
3. Finally syncing my iPod manually almost always results in either it crashing or iTunes locking up.

I have done a complete reinstall of iTunes, having deleted all preference files, etc… but to no avail.

Apple, what gives??

Same Cute Turtle

I have posted a picture of this turtle before but decided to post another because he was pretty impressive.

As I mentioned in my original post, I spent about 5 minutes watching it eating on either side of the coral head. What was impressive is that while he (or she, hard to tell) knew that I was there he just carried on eating, and checking me out from time to time.

Turtles are pretty tame if you don’t threaten them, but they will swim away very fast if you annoy them (I know because once a dive master grabbed one to show it off and it swam like hell as soon as he let go, needless to say I did not dive with that dive master again).

A recent article in the NY Times, “Turtles Are Casualties of Warming in Costa Rica”, is well worth reading, the title says it all, and there is a slideshow to go along with it.

I see turtles on most of my dives but I never tire if it, and all divers I have known never tire of seeing them either, they are truly special.

Chromulated Thoughts

So a friend and I have been batting a few emails back and forth about ChromeOS after I downloaded a disc image and played around with it for about 30 minutes. I also listened to some of Paul Thurrott’s thoughts on it on Windows Weekly and went back to play with it a little more. Generally I found it to be pretty good if a little slow, but this was running on a virtual machine and it is a year away from release.

So here are some chromulated thoughts about why this is a big deal:

1. This will open up new competition around the OS at the netbook end of the market. The first netbooks shipped with various versions of linux but Microsoft sensed that this was an issue and made sure that Windows XP and then Windows 7 became the dominant OS on those machines by bringing down licensing costs for netbook vendors. ChromeOS will re-open that conversation because it is free and it has Google’s backing. One possible outcome is that Windows will become free on netbooks.
2. This is one of those rare moments when Microsoft is up against a competitor (Google) that is as motivated and has deep pockets as it does. Motivation and money will enable Google to keep developing and pushing ChromeOS past the point where other might give up. Microsoft is not a stranger to this strategy having been well served by it in the past where products did not hit their stride until the third or fourth version.
3. Google is being very careful to present ChromeOS as something a user might run on a secondary computer, thereby avoiding directly challenging Microsoft (we all know what happened to the last company who did that!)
4. Apple will probably not be affected by this since it is not (yet) present at that end of the market. An Apple notebook is not something people looking to buy a netbook will consider.

Circumvallation

I am have been reading Steve Arnold’s weblog on search, I have known Steve for over ten years now and he likes to challenge the status-quo and pushing people to see beyond the status-quo.

So it was very interesting to read his post about how Google is challenging Reed Elsevier and Thomson by indexing legal texts:

Google has added the full text of US federal cases and state cases. The coverage of the federal cases, district and appellate, is from 1924 to the present. US state cases cover 1950 to the present. Additional content will be added; for example, I have one source that suggested that the Commonwealth of Virginia Supreme Court will provide Google with CD ROMs of cases back to 1924. Google, according to this source, is talking with other sources of US legal information and may provide access to additional legal information as well.

His thesis is that the incumbents are like Vercingetorix stuck in Alesia (1) and that Google is like Ceasar who built two sets of wall around Alesia, one to keep the Gauls in, and the other to keep any relieving force out.

I like the analogy though it is not quite there, Google is not exactly laying siege and they don’t have to defend themselves. On the other hand the incumbents probably feel very much like the Gauls stuck in Alesia.

I was catching up with a long time friend earlier this week (a much smarter person than me), we were talking about lots of thing and one of those things was how particular species will move fluidly from one niche to another as they evolve. My feeling was that sometimes this happens in a fluid fashion without much struggle, but sometimes it can be quite violent resulting in the decimation of one or the other species (2). I wonder if this is closer to what is happening here. Google in moving in on an established market, though not in an explicitly deliberate fashion, and causing discomfort to the incumbents.

Now that a good portion of the data these incumbents charge for is available for free (it always was available for free, but access was difficult), it will likely force them to change their business model if they are to stay relevant. Steve makes that point very explicitly at he end of his post, for example:

Finally, what will be vulnerable to Google disruption will be difficult to use, expensive, and incomplete services. Maybe Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer should merge. That will give the present crop of senior managers time to cash out. I don’t see an easy, quick, inexpensive, or painless way to prevent the lessons of Alesia being writ large in tomorrow’s digital headlines.

1 – I learned all about the siege of Alesia at when I was at school.

2 – For example, the introduction of Lionfish in the Caribbean is resulting in major population reduction in some indigenous species on the reefs.

Short Battery Life on the Magic Mouse

I got a new Apple Magic Mouse on November 5th, and had to change the batteries in it today, after only 22 days of use.

The Shark Swam Right Over Me

This pictures was not taken by me but by one of the crew on the boat I was on. I was taking pictures of some Nurse Sharks and some Caribbean Reef Sharks which had decided to come and check out the ‘attractor’ we had put out for them.

Interestingly the nurse sharks were the most aggressive ones with the ‘attractor’ trying to suck out the fish skin that was in there. Three nurse sharks had showed up, two smaller ones and a larger pregnant female. Somewhere along the dive I have gotten very close it as it was laying down next to a coral head. But in this part of the dive it was checking out the ‘attractor’.

I tend to get pretty close to sharks (much to the concerns of some) and this was no exception. The larger nurse shark turned away from the ‘attractor’ and swam right over me which was very cool. Unfortunately the picture is a little dark.

There are two other pictures worth checking out, here and here, there are both wide angle shots so the sharks actually look further away from me than they actually are.

While you are at it, you might want to check out my good friend JenFu’s underwater photographs, he recently took a trip to the Galapagos and to Cozumel.

New Magic Mouse

So I got the new Apple Magic Mouse and I am finding it to be very nice. I also liked the previous Mighty Mouse a lot too, but I think I must have been one of the very few. I have small hands, have RSI and some arthritis, and for some reason the smaller mouse worked best for me.

The Magic Mouse works pretty well for me, though one could feel that the software is half finished and that the multi-touch surface could do a lot more than it actually does.

For some reason I could only use the wired version of the Mighty Mouse, I experienced a lot of lag and ‘float’ with the bluetooth version for some reason. The Magic Mouse has really tight tracking and no ‘float’ which is very nice. It has been a while since I used a wireless mouse that works this well in this respect.

Finally there is the small matter of power consumption, I bought mine on November 5th, it is now the 12th and the batteries are down to 70% already. That is 30% over a period of 7 days, which suggests that they will be dead in a month. These are the included batteries so presumably they were new.

I will post a follow-up on December 5th with more information as to battery consumption.

Apple Subscription Plan

Apparently Apple is shopping a $30 month subscription plan to the media networks for content (1, 2).

I think this is a good idea.

Most of the content on the iTunes Movie store is buy-only which is not an attractive proposition since I suspect that most of it will only get watched once (or twice, maybe). The high cost of buying programs is what puts me off buying anything on the store. For example if I want to catch up on the Family Guy on the iTunes Movie store, I would need to buy all the seasons which would cost me between $10 and $30 a season, a show-stopper for me. For that kind of money I am better off going to Netflix but then I have to wait for 2 days. I know you can rent movies and I do once in a while but the selection is pretty thin.

So if I was able to have access to the content on the iTunes Movie store for $30/month and pay per movie rented, that would be an attractive proposition for me.

Attractive in the way cable wasn’t because I would get 70 channels for a basic cable subscription (67 of which I did not watch), and I would need to get premium subscriptions for better quality content, which is why I killed off my cable 4 years ago.

The interesting thing about this plan though is that it moves close to the a-la-carte programming that cable companies fought tooth and nail against time and time again.

Sharks

This is a small Nurse Shark resting on some sand. Nurse Shark feed at night and rest during the day, and have a set of teeth which are used for grinding because they typically feed off the bottom looking for shellfish and crustaceans. They are not aggressive towards divers and are in fact rather curious. Some of them came very close to me.

Last week I said that I would give an update on the sorry state of the shark population, so here are some stats.

Officially 38 million sharks are fished from the ocean, mostly for their fins (the finless shark is dumped back in the water to drown) and some as by-catch (I don’t have any numbers on the ratios.) The real number is most likely between 70 and 100 million because most of the shark fishing is not reported.

In the past 20 years the global shark population has been reduced by 50%, at this rate sharks will be gone by 2030.

Some shark populations have crashed completely, 95% of the Mako sharks off the east coast of the USA are gone.

Each year about 10 people are killed by sharks.

What is really obvious is that sharks are not cuddly or cute, like polar bears or whales for example, which is a real problem for any conservation campaign, and I am still at a loss as to how this can be remedied. A lot of people think sharks are dangerous and in fact the statistics show quite the opposite. As one of the top predators in the oceans, sharks have a vital place in the ecosystem, take them away and there will be major disruptions to that ecosystem. We are already seeing that with an increase in the number of stingrays off the east coast of the US.

I hope that we are more enlightened now than we were when we hunted whales close to extinction, but I am not sure given the lack of response I have seen on this issue.

Lionfish

When I was in the Turks and Caicos a couple of months ago, we saw Lionfish on pretty much every dive we did, if not all the dives. This fish is a native of the Pacific Ocean so had no business being in the Atlantic. It would like seeing a polar bear in the middle of the jungle.

In fact it is a voracious predator consuming very large quantities of small fish, threatening reef ecosystems.

The Economist has a very interesting article about the issue and steps which are being taken to control their population:

Mr Dimin’s company works with fishermen who practise sustainable fisheries management, and helps them get their catches into the sort of high-class restaurants frequented by wealthy conservationists. Mr Dimin got his idea from the appearance in some resorts of “lionfish rodeos”, in which holidaymaking divers round the fish up, and which are usually followed by lionfish cook-ups on the beach. He learned from these that the fish, suitably de-spined, are delicious (they taste like snapper). That got him wondering if consumer demand might be a force powerful enough to halt even an invasive species as successful as the lionfish.

Next week I will post an update about the sorry state of shark populations.