Joped.com

Stephanie introduced me to Pandora Radio on the iPhone.  This application allows you to search for music you like, then recommends music based on your vote of the music.  The voting is a very simple thumbs up or thumbs down.  However, pay attention to the information of why you are being asked to vote on that track.  Remember, its tring to figure out what music is fitting you.

The great thing is this application has a channel model.  It allows you to create multiple channels for whichever mood you are in that day.  This is great because I am into a large range of music.  Everything from The Doors, to Aerosmith, Type O Negative, Robert Miles, Led Zep, Disturbted, Guns N Roses, etc.  For those that don’t know, I absoultly hate country music.  The very thought makes my ears bleed.

Yet, I also suck at categorizing music.  Robert Miles is very sweet coding music, he has pulled me through some complex coding headaches.  The problem comes down to, I have been in a “club” a total of 3 times in my life.  Each time more uncomfortable then the other.  I don’t dance, so I will never attempt to.  Trust me, the world is better off if I don’t.

Pandora allows me to find new music that I like and didn’t know existed.

Its not limited to the iPhone, they also have the same service on their website.  I have not played around to see if there are any “syncing” features.  NetNewsWire has an excellent syncing feature that syncs my RSS feeds on the desktop to my iPhone.  I subscribe to a large number of RSS feeds, some of which are critical for my job.

I can pretty much guarantee I will be using it at work.  My limited music collection is starting to get a bit tired.

I realized it was time to do some mild playing around with client side development on the Mac. Cocoa is the framework that runs the show on Mac (Carbon is on the way out). It requires the use of Objective-C.

For the most part, the languages I know are C style syntax. This makes it very easy to pick up new languages. When I switch from Perl to PHP, I picked things up very fast. I enjoy the look of PHP, which makes it my primary language.

Objective-C on the other hand is dead ugly. Function calls with []’s and class definitions with a plus sign.

C++
obj.method(value);

Objective-C
[obj method param1:value];

I find it very strange to have the left [ outside of object name. Its really going to take some getting used to. A few people have told me that once you get used to it you will love it. Well, we will have to see.

I have almost completed my first functional application. When I get better, I am going to rewrite it with a few more features and create a tool out of it. I will post more details in the future.

I have been using Leopard for about 4 seeds now (Legally). Time Machine used to work over any AFP (including Airport Base Station), NFS and even SMB. When the end of October hit and Leopard was finally released, for unknown reasons Apple removed most of those features.

Now, in order for Time Machine to work your only options either direct drive connected or AFP to another Leopard client or server.

Although connection to another Leopard box via AFP isn’t bad, its doesn’t work for me. I own 2 Macbook Pros and a Linux server. I had originally planned on using the Linux box as my server for Time Machine. Since I already had AFP running, it would be easy to drop in a new volume for it.

The reasons for Apple doing this is quite unknown and really drives me nuts. Now, I am forced to do one of the following work arounds. None of them are very appealing, and none I have gotten to work yet.

1. Find work around for backing up over SMB or AFP. Although I would love this one to happen, I have yet to see any progress. AFP isn’t being actively developed, so there is an even less chance then SMB. The strange thing is, you can’t even mount a Tiger AFP mount which doesn’t make any sense. I wonder what they changed in the protocol.
2. Find a work around for Airport Extreme Base stations or a fix from Apple. There is a small work around for getting Timemachine to backup to it. However, the Time Machine interface doesn’t work with it and its unstable. I could put together some simple scripts to make sure my mount point is valid at all times I am connected to my LAN.
3. Install Leopard in VMWare. (I am not interested in talking about the EULA. I purchased a Family Pack and I disagree that Apple has the right to limit what machine you can install it on. Its like aftermarket parts) I have been working on trying to figure this one out. I can’t get the image to boot, been trying for a week now. I have posted on a few message boards, this is feeling like a dead end. To top things off, my Linux server is SSE2.
4. Similar to #3, I was thinking that I could purchasing an ultra cheap bare bones system to run it. It doesn’t have to be powerful, just needs to handle Time Machine and serve iTunes to my AppleTV.
5. The AppleTV is another cheap system I might be able to install it to. I don’t think it has SSE3, so it might be a serious problem. I have heard of getting Tiger to run on it.
6. Find very cheap G4 on craigslist, I haven’t been able to find much under $300. I am trying to do it for no more then $250. I haven’t had much luck with eBay either. Not to mention, I don’t know much about older Macs.

There is also the big issue of I can restore from Time Machine after these work arounds are put in place. Once I find a working idea, I am going to test it. My plan is to install Leopard to an external drive and backup to the network mount. From that point, I am going to delete my test partition. Will all my test data be there ?

I will try and post my progress.