Today, as I was hauling yet another “Shopper Stopper” (a junk-snail-mail newspaper in Madison, WI) to the recycle bin, I decided to take a look at and see if there was a way to stop their delivery. None was listed, so I turned to Google…

To stop delivery, just call Madison Newspapers’ customer service number at 608-252-6363, select option 5, and ask them to stop it. Should stop in 1-2 weeks. Thanks Google…

In the news this week is that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion. If this deal goes through, two things will happen. 1. It totally won’t matter. 2. Microsoft will have just bought their own defeat to Google in the “online wars” (for the sake of the argument, please just pretend there is an online war). Here’s the bare-bones story…

Yahoo limps along and stays afloat because they have folks over there making pretty good decisions on what to do. They have their bases covered: search; mail; chat; news; calendar; groups; etc…. Yahoo’s problem is they totally suck at execution. Everything they’ve built or revamped in the last few years has sucked big time. They are fragile and teetering on their own demise.

Now along comes Microsoft with their secret-bunkers full of cash, looking to buy themselves some online big-boy pants. Luckily (and by luckily, I mean unfortunately), they suck at both decisions and execution, and they have proven they understand the internets about as well as George Bush understands… well… seemingly anything. Slightly long story, slightly longer… when Microsoft starts making and executing decisions for Yahoo, Yahoo will die.

Of course everyone gets it… this deal makes a TON of sense for Microsoft, especially if they were competent. Which they are not. So while we’ll have a ton of marginally interesting stories, detailing the changes (and ensuing failures) Microsoft will be making to Yahoo. And allowing folks the opportunity to pick apart each decision ad nauseum. We will all yawn and click for the sports page.

Final score, Google: Win; Microsoft: Not-Win.

Bluegrass is known for it’s hot pickers, playing faster than ears can hear. It can make learning tunes a bit difficult. Luckily, we no longer have to ruin our records and needles, or stretch out our cassette tapes with endless rewinds. If you have iTunes on your computer, then you already have a great tool for slowing down music… AND video! It’s a little known fact… but Apple’s free QuickTime Player (installed along with iTunes) is great for slowing down your favorite audio and/or video clips. It even allows you to change the pitch so you don’t have to retune your instrument! Here’s how to do it:

1. Choose an audio or video file and open it in QuickTime Player (mp3s, wav, aif, mov, mp4, etc…)
2. In QuickTime, choose cmd-k (Mac) or ctrl-k (PC) to open the A/V Controls (or from the Windows menu)
3. Adjust the speed and/or pitch to your liking

If you don’t already have QuickTime, you can download it for free for your Mac or PC from Apple’s website. In addition, QuickTime Pro ($30 upgrade) allows you to easily set in and out points, loop edit files and more.

Also, if you have Windows Media files, download and install the free Flip4Mac’s WMP Plugin for QuickTime which then allows QuickTime to playback and slow down WMP files.

It’s been a year since I have gone shopping for a new website host. I found a lot of new ones and some good tools that helped in the search. I also got a chance to preview some of the different tools used by different hosts and wanted to share my experiences.

These are the three most popular tools used by hosting companies to manage their users and servers. Although they are not all the same, they do offer much of the same services. They are also what you, the user, can use to administer your site and it’s services. In addition, these apps are used to setup user accounts on the server itself and each has there own styles and security measures. Here’s a quick rundown…
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AppleScript is a scripting language for Mac users that allows you to automate actions and applications. It is similar to other scripting languages like Perl and PHP but currently only runs on the Mac OS. What makes Applescript especially interesting is it’s ability to control many of the Mac’s applications that include support for AppleScript (eg. PhotoShop, QuickTime, The Finder, etc…). In addition, OS X has introduced Applescript Studio which is an IDE for Applescript and allows one to build fantastic Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) using another Apple development tool called Interface Builder. Together, these tools allow you to build complete stand-alone applications quickly and easily.

The bad news about AppleScript is that it’s syntax is rather confusing. It was written to read like spoken English and although this may help new users, it can be very difficult to adjust to for a programmer coming from another language. Most other scripting languages have many syntax similarities and are usually based upon C but this is not the case with AppleScript. Using the classic Apple mantra of “think different”, the writers of AppleScript decided to create a completely different syntax that is very arguably easier to learn.

For this reason, I will attempt to draw comparisons to Applescript from the viewpoint of a PHP developer. These comparisons should also be useful to developers using other languages (eg. Perl, Python) but I use PHP here because it is most familiar to me.
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I’ve been working on some object oriented PHP code and since this is a very confusing topic, I thought I would share a quick overview about PHP, OOP and classes…
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What is streaming?

Streaming is one of those buzz words that many use but few understand. Plainly, it is the “live” or “just in time” delivery of data over a network (internet/web) and is mostly associated with audio and video media. The confusion comes from people misunderstanding the difference between “downloading” a file and “streaming” a file. Let’s see if I can help clarify…
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