Newton’s Lore

Macintouch reports the existence of CenterStage, an open source media centre. Sadly for us non-Seppos using the US spelling of ‘centre’.

Why your iPod hard drive might die if pressurised to lower than the air pressure at 10,000 feet above sea level. Or might not. Or everyone on the plane might die. Because it’s not like anyone uses iPods in planes or anything.

I’m not sure what Apple says about using the iPod with snakes aboard though.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a link to video of Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement speech.

Other cool looking speeches on the Stanford iTunes store include Douglas Hofstadter on “Analogy as the Core of Cognition”, and the Dalai Lama Meditation and Teaching, The Heart of Nonviolence, and “Craving, Suffering and Choice: Spiritual and Scientific Explorations of Human Experience” part I and part II.

If you’re looking for old Apple ads, a great place to try would be the The Mac Mothership.

Apple have released Aperture 1.5, a free download for existing Aperture owners. New features include:

• Now runs on all macs (not sure how to install 1.5 on machines that won’t run 1.0 though)
• More RAW camera formats supported
• You can store your images anywhere
• iLife integration
• Automatic Metadata export
• Better colour controls
• Edge sharpen
• Presets for metadata inserting
• An onscreen loupe
• Adjustment presets

So, you’ve got a MySQL database on your machine, and you want it backed up regularly. This little script can be put into your Mac’s /etc/periodic/daily/ or /etc/periodic/weekly directory. You probably then want to do a “chmod a+x” on it.

#!/bin/tcsh
set YESTERDAY=`/bin/date +%Y-%m-%d`;/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump -c -v --all-databases -uroot -pyourmysqlpassword --single-transaction --all | bzip2 | uuencode "your-mysql-backup-$YESTERDAY.sql.bz2" | mail -s"your-mysql-backup-$YESTERDAY.sql.bz2" youraddress@gmail.com

Substituting the appropriate passwords and e-mail address, of course.
The script uses mysqldump to create a text dump of the contents of all databases, uses bzip2 compression on this, then uuencodes the file so that it can be safely e-mailed (at a slight size overhead).
Best to do a test backup first and work out how much space your backup will take if you’re worried about exceeding the 3Gb limit or having the message rejected as too big for Google’s mail server, as I’ve just had happen with one of my databases. I obviously need to write a script that segments the file before sending
Of course, if you don’t want Google to read your database and feed it to the US Government or our New AI Masters (whom I, for one, welcome), you should probably add some encryption into the script, probably after the compression unless you wish to push entropy uphill.

So we got the spiel today from the Apple Reps. IIRC:

• 3 billion podcasts are downloaded weekly. One suspects many probably because the users don’t realise it’s happening
• 35,000 podcast episodes were on the iTunes Store last month. 60,000 this month.
• 53 million Google searches on ‘Podcast’ last month

There are ads for ‘Freelance Mac Operators’ in Marketing and 2xPublishing by Asphar and Associates here.

An amusing observation: While writing out a movie file during compression, Discreet’s Cleaner 6.5 keeps writing and deleting a 10Mb “DiscreetTest” file to the directory in which the output file resides, in the same time period as it writes about 0.1Mb to the output file. I guess it’s testing to make sure there’s 10Mb of space left on the drive, but it must also make the drive do a lot more work.

Still no response from Discreet as to why they don’t have a Discreet support forum, or whether the product’s going to be End-Of-Lifed. But I suspect it’s doomed and is unlikely to make the transition to MacIntel.

There’s an article on the Australian Mac Users Group forum that indicates that many teachers have difficulties getting Apple laptops under educational laptop purchasing agreements with the Department of Education and Training.