Scripting News

Two TwitterGram reviews

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 02:28:19 GMT

Rafe Needleman: "Twittergram is a lot of fun."

Brian Heys: "TwitterGram could do for podcasting what Twitter did for blogging."

And a Daring Fireball review of nytimesriver.

Thanks!

Which iPod is better?

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 20:23:10 GMT

There's no doubt, for someone who knows how to use an iPod, the previous generation iPod is much easier to use, both when loading it at home, and when using it on the road.

The music-playing function in the iPhone is flashy and colorful, but confusing. It's as if Apple hired a movie studio to design the user interface. They don't respect the mundane aspects of making a tool work for the user, and getting out of the our way. When you're on a walk, t's ridiculous to have to stop for 1/2 minute to move to the next song or podcast. The user interface of the new iPod, like the UI of the iPhone browser, puts the burden on the user to make up for deficiencies in the product design.

The previous generation of the iPod is not flashy, but it works.

DaveD says that there are three different iPods, the video iPod, the Shuffle, and iPhone, each good for different things. Maybe so, but that's a lot of money for most people. He's right that the iPhone plays movies well enough to carry it with you in place of a laptop. And get this, there's no need to do a special rip, as you had to do with iPods. The same movie you play on your desktop or laptop will play on an iPhone. How's the battery life when watching a movie? Not sure yet. One thing the laptop has that the iPhone doesn't -- a replaceable battery.

Apache question revisited

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 21:34:34 GMT

In June I outlined a problem I was having with the content system for Scripting News. Writing to a folder served by Apache for Windows was a problem, every few saves it would fail, leaving the site unusable until I manually restarted Apache.

A bunch of people suggested the problem would go away if I moved the static site to a different server from the content system. So I tried that a few days ago, but the problem followed.

Then yesterday I tried switching my transfer method from file-writing to FTP, and voila, the problem is gone. Every save (knock wood) seems to make it to the static folder without error. I guess the key is that the FTP server, since it was written by Microsoft, comes into the file system at such a low level that it can always write a file no matter what other apps think about it. I don't know and don't really care, as long as it works, which it does. Whew.

Good morning everybody

Nothing earth-shaking going on over here today.