Logographer

A friend yesterday pointed me to Stanford on iTunes, a very interesting site accessible through iTunes offering an extensive collection of audio and video files from Stanford, including some lectures from faculty and visiting scholars. I downloaded a talk by Larry Diamond, author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq. I heard Diamond present this lecture at San Jose State University and am glad to have a copy on my iPod now. (Regrettably, I have not yet read the book.)

Damien Barrett points out that “Stanford on iTunes” forms the basis for Apple’s iTunes U, a program to create similar sites for other colleges and universities. There is currently no access restriction on the Stanford site, which means you can access it even if you are not associated with the university. I don’t know if that will continue forever, or whether it is the model for other university sites. I hope to see my own undergraduate alma mater online before long, but as long as it’s free, I’ll check Stanford’s offerings occasionally.

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Sam Ruby takes a look at the use and abuse of internet standards in the “photocasting” feature introduced in Apple’s iLife ‘06, and wonders whether there isn’t more heat than light here. Be sure to read the comments section, where Mark Pilgrim continues the debate that he and Dave Weiner started. (Found through 0xDECAFBAD.)

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A few days ago my father sent me a digital copy of an 8 mm home movie from 1940. He transferred the film to VHS tape several years ago, and recently copied that to DVD with a VHS-to-DVD recorder.

This two-and-a-half-minute video shows my father at age 10, along with his 15-year-old brother, his three sisters and their husbands, his maternal grandfather, some aunts and uncles and cousins. My grandfather appears in the movie with hat and tie, which seems to be de rigueur for men at a picnic 65 years ago. Both my grandmother and grandfather were my age at the time, in their late forties. I can remember my grandmother playing softball when I was a kid in the 1960s, and in 1940 she was even more agile and athletic. Her uniform was a dress and leather shoes with a small heel.

It’s fun to get a glimpse of the past in this home movie, so I thought I’d put it on my iPod—then I could carry it around like an old snapshot, getting a view of it wherever I am and showing it to friends once in a while. Since the movie wasn’t encrypted, getting it from the DVD to my iPod was easy. I simply pointed Forty-TwoDVD-VXPlus at the DVD, selected the iPod icon in the conversion panel, and chose the “Best for iPod” conversion option in order to get the compression benefits of H.264 encoding. You could accomplish the same thing with iSquint, a great (and free) piece of software from Tyler Loch.

After adding the converted movie file to iTunes, I can sync it to the iPod and I’m ready to go, taking a piece of the past into the future.

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A program called Lostify has come in handy.

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To feed my video iPod, I might have to take a look at Forty-Two DVDVX Plus. (Now I’m feeling even more pinched for disk space on my Powerbook.)

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Anil has some good responses to comments from David Lazarus, who expressed skepticism that Apple’s shift to the Intel processor is compelling for consumers.

To Anil’s list I would add that Apple’s switch to Intel chips opens up new opportunities for Apple, just as the switch to Unix did six years ago. When Apple switched to Unix, developers could suddenly take almost any piece of open source code and compile it for the Mac. Now with the switch to Intel, consider the possibility of running code compiled for Intel BSD machines, without having to recompile. Apple could even make it possible to run Intel Linux binaries on Mac OS X, without recompiling. But to paraphrase Lazarus, most consumers won’t care about any of this, but developers and system administrators could very well benefit from it.

Or consider the possibility of getting the Cocoa framework for Windows (the so-called Red Box run-time). I’m not convinced that Apple will announce Red Box this summer at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference, and perhaps they never will announce it. But there is a chance of it seeing the light of day. Although it wouldn’t affect many consumers directly, at least not right away, it could make cross-platform development significantly simpler for developers.

What I still don’t understand, though, is why Anil would buy a computer from Apple and install Linux on it. I know people at work who might do that too, but I don’t understand it. The Mac already runs Unix, but it also runs applications from Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and scores of other companies that produce applications for both Mac and Windows. As a server, the Mac supports the AFP network file system, allowing other Macs to easily share files without losing the benefits of the HFS+ disk-based filesystem. All of this is lost when you switch from Mac OS X to Linux. This is one reason why I don’t use Solaris any more. It’s a great development system, but if you want to run something besides Oracle and a compiler, you’re out of luck.

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Can I link to this article on the drawbacks of programming language zealotry and still explain why I think C++ is “teh suck”? I’ll try later.

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During my week off from work between Christmas and the new year, I read Colby Buzzell’s book My War. Buzzell provides an interesting glimpse into the Iraq war from the point of view of a private soldier. He enlisted in the army to break the monotony of his unremarkable life, and he got the change he sought. His writing, familiar to those who read his war-time blog, is informal, honest, and vivid.

After that I read Truman Capote’s short story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’ve seen the movie once or twice, and wanted to read the original to get a taste of Capote’s acclaimed prose. I couldn’t help but think of the movie while reading the book. Both are good.

Now I’m one chapter into the Dante Club, Matthew Pearl’s murder-mystery set in 1860’s Boston. It’s a real page-turner. I’ve also started reading Romanization in the Time of Augustus by Ramsay MacMullen, which looks like a good short overview of what it meant (and means) to be “Roman,” and how the Roman way of life spread throughout the Mediterranean.

I’d like to read Sir Ronald Syme’s Sallust, but I’m not sure I’ll have time for it before getting into my thesis work. I read the forward by Ronald Mellor, giving me a glimpse of Syme’s life and his approach to writing history. The Roman Revolution is one of my favorite books, as it undoubtedly is for many others, but I had never read much about Syme himself. Mellor points out that Syme was not a theoretician and had little patience for abstract theoretical trends in academia, which may be one reason why I almost always enjoy reading a paper by the late Oxford don. Syme was also interested, like Ernst Kantorowicz and others of his generation, in writing narrative history so as to spark the reader’s imagination. It is that kind of writing that drew me to history in the first place.

This all belies my recently acquired addiction to High Definition TV. If I get control over that, I’ll have more time to read, to look for a better job, and to finish my thesis.

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I’ve just updated this site to the 2.0 version of WordPress. In the process, I ended up with another blog page over at WordPress’s site itself. Maybe I’ll use that site for technical stuff. Not sure yet.

In the meantime, this here blog will be as lively as ever.

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