Ranting and Roaring

BlogMatrix Sparks! 1.7.17-beta for Windows is available. Here’s what’s new/fixed:

Features:

• #364 Subscribing from OPML should select new subscription afterwards
• #366 New entries should be bold
  This makes a huge difference in usability
• #370 Clicking in Location Bar should select whole thing
• #373 Context Menu for Location Area
  Try right clicking in the Location Area above the browser, particularly if you’re reading a blog or a blgo entry.
• #365 Better indicate current download or recording
  The current download is now indicated with red text.

Bug Fixes:

• #367 When synchronizing, podcasts are being added to My Weblogs
• #374 Ensure “Automatically Download” is turned off
  This shouldn’t affect most people but if you’re finding everything is downloading, this will help. Also try typing command:AutoDownloadClear in the search field.
• #375 “Discovered” attachments should never be automatically downloaed
  Sparks! not only recognizes “enclosure” attachments, it also looks for any media objects embedded in the text of the Podcast. This can only be explicitly downloaded with a right-click action.

Andrew Sullivan:

BETTER THAN EXPECTED: Well, by my own pre-election measuring stick, the security has been far better than feared. Too soon to measure turn-out accurately, but anecdotal signs are good. All excellent and encouraging news – not to get too excitable or anything.

There’s another option. Maybe the the “Iraqi” “Insurgency” is much much weaker than we’ve been lead to believe, despite AP, Reuters, the National Post and so forth passing off what turns out to be press releases as news.

So how many hardcore people are in the “Iraqi” “Insurgency” anyway. Three or four dozen?

September 11, 2001 — January 30, 2005. Neither the start nor the finish, but pivotal defining events.

I’m almost too happy to blog. In a conversation on Friday, I remarked that this was the test for the Iraq war. If the vote failed to materialized, the project was almost certainly doomed; if it suceeded, successes would compound. Well, on a scale of 1 to 10, this is about a 9.5.

Conventional wisdom is eating sh*t today.

BlogMatrix Sparks! 1.7.16.1-beta for Mac OS 10.3 is available. It has all of the features and bug fixes of the Windows version plus it includes an embedded Safari browser control.

I think it’s great that Canada makes space on the bench for mentally handicapped judges.

Here’s a screenshot of 1.7.16.1-beta running on the Macintosh — we hope to have this out for you later today. Note Safari running as the browser there. This makes the Mac version of Sparks as powerful as the Windows version.

There’s was a serious hack required to get Safari embedded; this hack won’t be needed in the next few weeks. The result of this hack is that the Safari window won’t be displayed when Sparks! doesn’t have focus — hopefully this will not be too much of a problem for you.

The Mac version previously had crashing problems associated with the old HTML control we were using. This should go away now.

We uplodaed the 1.7.16 release but forgot to update the beta release.

Now it’s there. Sorry!

BlogMatrix Sparks! 1.7.16-beta for Windows is available. Here’s what’s new/fixed:

• Forward and Back buttons are available for the browser
• Bug #355. Long multi-part radio recordings don’t work
• Bug #356. OPML directory “language” displays as a language code
• Bug #357. Podcaster directory does not include sub-”opml” directories
• Bug #358. In “My Radio” and “My Podcasts”, “Category” should become “Playlist”
• Bug #362. Display “application/opml+xml” directory items correctly
• Bug #363. Radio Attachments showing the wrong size

Description:

Each time I record a long show (1 hr or more), the attachment size shown in Sparks is not the attachment size as it is on disk. For example, a 3 hour recording I made last night shows up as 31.2 MB in Sparks, but is ~83.1 MB on disk

Update: fixed for next release

Description:

When recording long programs segmented into multiple parts, only the first part records correctly.

We’re going to fix this today and issue a new release.

The Belmont Club:

But when we ourselves have supplied the rationale for our own condemnation then listening to the indictments of the enemy is a waste of time. To the question ‘why does Bin Laden hate us’, there are those who unhelpfully suggest that we ask Bin Laden.

I don’t think it can be overstressed how plain spoken civilization’s enemies have always been. Mein Kampf, anyone? For some reason though, we prefer the pleasant voice of the apologist in the three piece suit explaining how reasonable the other side is, if only we would admit our sins. (Remains of the Day captures this beautifully).

We had a major breakthrough on the Mac — we now have the Safari browser embedded in the application (as opposed to the lousy pseudo-browser that comes with wxPython). There’s a few issues and it’s not quite seamless (it’s 95% though) but we hope to get this all ironed out.

Screenshots later today.

The next version of Sparks! will have “Go back one page” and “Go forward one page” buttons.

BBC Radio: It looks like BBC did a major set of changes to their radio feeds. We’ll do some research and get back to you later today.

Podcast Directory: there’s information, such as pointers to other OPML directories, that are missing from our directory. We’re going to try to get this back in.

Joe writes:

Over at LGF – American citizens who are Muslims may be subject to fingerprinting upon return from the Mecca pilgrimage. Of course, at LGF they do not see a problem with this (after all these Americans are Muslims), however, at a fundamental level, you cannot have two classes of citizens. If these were non-Americans coming from Saudi Arabia, there is no problem with fingerprinting. A state owes its obligations to its citizens; non-citizens get privileges.

Thus, if the US were to decide that all Americans who visit certain countries will be subject to fingerprinting or subject to random fingerprinting, I doubt that there is much reason to complain. In the same manner, if the Americans in question are on a legal watch list, then fingerprint away. However, picking out the Arabs and treating them as a different class of citizen does not even pass the smell test.

Here’s the relevant part from LGF:

But when the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, part of the Homeland Security Department, demanded fingerprints from about three dozen Muslim-Americans returning from Toronto, photographing some as well, it set off alarm bells throughout the Muslim community. Officials said the additional screening was intended to prevent terrorists from entering the country.

With an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 American Muslims having gone on the hajj this year, and with many returning this week, a lot of the pilgrims fear they will face the same treatment before being allowed to re-enter the United States.

Muslim-Americans say it would be another case of their rights being trampled on, more collateral damage in the war on terrorism. Specifically, many contend that their constitutional rights to free exercise of religion and assembly, due process and security from unreasonable searches and seizures have been violated.

This very much seems like “Thus, if the US were to decide that all Americans who visit certain countries will be subject to fingerprinting or subject to random fingerprinting, I doubt that there is much reason to complain”. There’s nothing in the Chicago Tribune article quoted to suggested that non-Muslims are being given a pass. Only 0.32% of the Saudi Arabian travellers have been fingerprinted; we know that no Jews will be in the sample (since I believe they’re not allowed in Saudi Arabia) and we can assume that other non-Muslim travel is roughly the same as it is every other month of the year and that Muslim travel during the Hajj is disporpotionately large.

I agree with LT’s general point; the issue in this case is we’re talking about 36 individuals out of a pool of thousands with a very heavily weighted demographic profile.

Right now in front of me, Sparks! 1.7.16 is running on Windows, Linux and Mac. We’ve made a number of changes to improve and make more reliable the Linux and Mac versions, but there’s a still a fair distance to go before we’re totally happy. This is what’s in the works:

• We want to release the Linux version as a “turnkey”; that is, you install and run. No more dealing with installing various subpackages — there’s just too many incompatible versions of wxPython out there.
• We’re compiling wxMozilla for Linux right now.
• There’s almost an wxPython-embedable version of Safari for the Mac. Almost. Stay tuned.
• Until the browsers are working on the Mac and on Linux, we’re not going to stress the blog reading cabilities of Sparks!

I’m listening to Marc Weisblott of Toronto’s Better Living Centre right now from last night’s CFRB Mark Elliott show.

Here’s the MP3 (he starts immediately after the news); you can record any streaming radio show yourself (plus get podcasts and read blogs) using BlogMatrix Sparks!.

Needless to say I didn’t call in. At 11:00 PM I’ve usually been asleep for the last 2 hours!

Removed by request

Mike Campbell has the scoop over on Switching to Glide. This is really really really funny and is worth the minute to check out.

BlogMatrix Sparks! 1.7.15-beta for Windows is available. Here’s what’s new

• OPML Synchronization, as described here is implemented. Briefly, not only can you add the blogs from an OPML file on the Internet but Sparks! will also track future changes to that directory, offering you the option of deleting or adding files
• Better recognition of enclosures, as described here.
• Numerous tiny bug fixes and performance enhancements
• Sparks now correctly recognizes the Windows shut down messages and saves it state accordingly. This usually worked, but not always.

A variant was originally posted to the Podcasters Yahoo group. It will be in the next version of Sparks!

One theme that I’ve noticed this list comes back to over and over is “how do I add the tags to my RSS feeds/how do I get podcatchers to automatically download my podcasts/what’s the correct X for the element”. A number of podcasters (34, to my count) have gone with using FeedBurner to automatically create the enclosure elements for them.

I’ve also looked at a number of video blogger (the strange parallel world to podcasting where they’re sending out _videos_ rather than _audio_ files. Strange, eh?) feeds and many, maybe most, are not doing anything to facilitate automatic download of their data. I had decided to (in Sparks!) to allow the user the option of automatically recognizing all linked attachments in RSS entries — that is, find all the <a href=”…”>, decide whether they are “podcatchable” and converting them into attachments.

This will work fine if the attachments end in a friendly extension (“.mp3″, “.mov”, et al) but really isn’t ideal since there may be a reason that the HTTP file is not so nicely named. Perhaps the solution then is to allow the podcaster to _explicitly note that this is an attachment_. That is, instead of posting:

<a href=”http://example.com/blog/MyPodcast.mp3″>

then would slightly modified to

<a rel=”enclosure” href=”http://example.com/blog/MyPodcast.mp3″>

and that’s that. News followers will note that Google is using the “rel” tag in an attempt to stop comment spam; this is also perfectly valid HTML.

This method slays several birds with one stone:

• it defines multiple enclosures per entry
• it’s trivial for podcasters to add to their RSS feeds
• it’s fairly easy to implement on the client side
• it’s very close to what users are doing now (i.e. often they are linking to the attachment in the HTML text of their RSS anyway!)

Here’s a screenshot of Steve Garfield’s video blog with attachments automatically identified (and selectively downloaded):

Notes:

• enclosure element definition

We can receive e-mail today but for some unfathomable reason, we cannot send it. Hopefully we’ll get this fixed this morning.

Update: fixed.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog and don’t have a del.icio.us account, consider getting one. We hope to be do tighter integration to this online service post 1.8.

Once you get an account, please drop us an e-mail if you want to find out more.

The 1.8 version of Sparks! will be the non-beta version. Here’s what left to be done before we’re out of beta (excluding bug fixes, which are always on the list):

• Smart downloads: the Sparks! application will download all the supporting files and applications (mplayer, lame, many DLLs) it needs from the BlogMatrix server if the user doesn’t have them. If the user is using a modern Pentium chip, the appropriate version will be downloaded (rather than the generic version that will work on all platforms)
• Multiple attachments/enclosures per entry: currently Sparks! only supports one enclosure per entry. This what the RSS spec requires, but many users find this inadequate
• Improved subscribe dialog: this will make it clear whether the item being added is going in My Radio, My Podcasters or My Weblogs; and also give the user the option of doing something else (treating the URL as a OPML file, for example). This will make drag and drop a lot sweeter
• BitTorrent support: enough said
• OPML export: for sharing your blogroll. Expect a lot more to come here.
• Some usability tweaks for the Podcast/iTunes/Windows Media Player code
• Integrated documentation (Updated 2005.01.24)

We hope with the 1.8 release we’ll have very stable Linux and Macintosh releases also. With Linux, we especially hope that we can make a version that doesn’t require the user to download a half-dozen support packages.