Author: alternateorg

So part of the deal I’ve got with a new client includes my working down in their office. Their first strike is that they’re in the Tech Center. Their second strike is that I was supposed to use NT of all OSes, and the third strike comes in the form of fucking Freehand 9.

Jesus christ. I almost shoved a fork in my eye just so I’d have a decent excuse to not do the work. But as it turns out, there was a G4 450 in the corner being used as a print server. So I suffered through a hockey-puck mouse and Illustrator 7. A lesser of two evils, I’m sure. Tomorrow, I’m bringing in my pro mouse, at the very least.

And now I know the answer to that age-old question: If offered an otherwise perfect job but you had to use Windows, would you take it? My answer is ‘Yes, but I’d make them need me first and then whine until I get a Mac.’

…And I know we’ve talked about Apple a lot lately, but god-damn if I just didn’t fall in love with whoever put together Darwin Streaming Server. Jesus christ on a stick.

After puttering around with Shoutcast, Icecast and some streaming servers written in PHP for a client, I came across the mother of free streaming server technologies: DSS4.

First off, this is totally dorky tech-talk but you don’t have to be a dork to understand the implications of what I’m trying to do, which is put together an internet radio station for Milehighhouse. Pretty cool, and totally useful. Anyway, it’s not a secret that I develop on MacOS X, and so I try to get anything I’m going to use live working first on my development machine. Duh. So I download the official MacOS X port of Shoutcast. And there is one. I install it, get the server running…. and look online to see what else I need.. and you need WinAMP. A MacOS X version of which there is not. Cool. So they ported the server but not the required client to get the stream working.

Then comes Icecast, which is actually worse… Their versions wouldn’t even compile on Darwin and required libraries I couldn’t even find.

Then comes the almighty Darwin Streaming Server. Which (due to my download of QuicktimeSS requiring OSX Server) I installed on Linux. What did I have to do? Type “./Install”. That’s it. The rest was web-adminstered, with a web interface to fucking die for. My client will be able to drag and drop from a list of files on the server to a playlist pane, click save, click play and voila. Another MP3 stream. Why has this technology not gotten more press? Apple simply blows anything out of the water in this arena, and it’s running on a platform other than theirs, to boot.

How come no ‘insider’ info on this one? Heh.

“Mac… has a level of simplicity and transparency in operation that allows it to get out of the way and just let me work. That’s something Windows never does.”

It took this guy this long to figure that out? Haven’t we all known that for years? Link via submission.

Apple released MacOS X 10.1.4 today. Use the Software Update feature in your system preferences.