BuyMusic Problems

alternateorg on July 30, 2003

It’s the user, stupid. For those of you who haven’t used the iTunes Music Store, let’s just say that Apple’s user experience far exceeds that described above. She had to click every single song she downloaded.. including ones purchased as albums. On iTMS, they just download automatically. It works transparently. You can even go and play other music in your Library.. don’t worry about finding your new tracks when they’re done: they’re automatically downlaoded to and sorted in the filesystem by your iTunes preferences, and also automatically added to a Smart Playlist called “Purchased Music.” Also, she talks about multiple types of licenses, including a “secondary license” that doesn’t allow her to burn her new music to a CD, which her husband’s computer was limited to because it was a secondary machine, and her primary machine crashed when using the Roxio plugin that’s apparently required to burn BM’s purchased musoc. iTMS has no such alternative licensing; every song has the same priveliges on every authenticated machine, Despite BuyMusic’s purported $0.79/song, most of them are $0.99, with a bunch as high as $1.29. Oh and don’t forget the identical commercials. Sounds like we have another Microsoft on our hands, in terms of copying Apple.

Read this awful message hidden inside a privacy policy: “we may disclose, sell, trade, or rent your Personally Identifiable Information to others without your consent”

Fuck that. Glad I own a Mac.

Grab URL Script Redeux

alternateorg on July 22, 2003

John Gruber has posted a “Grab URL” script for BBEdit, handy when working in BBEdit and you’d like to grab an existing page’s code. His script, however, requires you to enter in your own URL by hand or by copy/paste. I thought it’d be neat if it auto-magically grabbed Safari’s top-most URL instead. This could easily be written for Camino, I’m sure. Anyhoo, if you want it, get it here and drop it in your /Applications/BBEdit/BBEdit Support/Scripts folder. It’ll show up in the “Scripts” menu un BBEdit, strangely enough.

Now, this does a little bit of checking to see if Safari is actually running. If it’s not running, it just gives you the empty text field as before. This will only work correctly if Safari is somewhere (anywhere) within your /Applications directory. It was the quickest way I could think of to do it. I gotta say, I like AppleScript’s string search capability much more than the traditional Regular Expression baloney you have to wade through in PHP or JavaScript, even when you’re just doing a simple search.

The UPDATED source is below:

-- originally written by John Gruber
-- at daringfireball.net to just be an
-- empty text field
-- edited by kevin conboy at alternate.org
--to automatically take the top-most URL in safari
-- DOES NOT WORK WITH SAFARI'S TABS
-- I'm sure someone can get it to work with
-- GUI Scripting beta, though

tell application "System Events"
	set proclist to creator type of every process
	if proclist contains "sfri" then
		tell application "Safari"
			set safari_url to URL of document 1
		end tell
	else
		set safari_url to ""
	end if
end tell


tell application "BBEdit"
	set my_result to display dialog ¬
		"URL:" default answer safari_url ¬
		buttons {"Cancel", "With Headers", "Grab Source"}¬
default button 3
	set my_url to the text returned of my_result

	if button returned of my_result is "With Headers" then
		set my_text to do shell script ("curl -i " & my_url)
	else
		set my_text to do shell script ("curl " & my_url)
	end if

	make new text window with properties {contents:my_text,¬
name:my_url}
	select insertion point before character 1 of text window 1
end tell

Mix-A-Lot on Bush

alternateorg on July 18, 2003

Sir Mix-A-Lot on GW:

I didn’t like when George W. Bush got on TV and said “Axis Of Evil.” I knew that was going to create problems, that kind of arrogant shit. What I was trying to say with “National Anthem” was that before we go and brag and say “God Bless America”—I hate that term, because it insinuates that God blesses no place else but us—before we say that, let’s get our own house in order. That’s always been a problem with America. I didn’t realize until I went to Europe how people perceive us as bullies. They look at us as someone who’s always up in somebody else’s business. The more you look at it, the more you realize it’s true.

Protest is Patriotism

alternateorg on July 10, 2003

Keeps getting better and better…

“Here we are in June of 2003. Show me the weapons; where are they? What evidence did this administration have to spend $63 billion in taxpayers’ money? What evidence did this administration have to put the lives of American servicewomen and men on the line?”

-U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, June 5, 2003