Notes

If you need to see WMV files on Mac OS X, until recently you had to use the Windows Media for Mac. If you knew that and used it, you know that it wasn't that good. Recently, there where some mentions about Flip4Mac on Mac OS X Hints, and this week, Microsoft said that it would stop developing the Media Player, and made and agreement with Flip4Mac to distribute their WMV Quicktime plugin and standalone player software for free.

One of the tools I miss in my day-to-day work is a good project management tool for Mac OS X. There are some attempts out there, but never I saw a application that integrates with the rest of the system. This might be about to change. Project X (I just hate flash intros…) seems to fit the bill quite well, but at $199 is a bit more that the usual software I purchase.

Saft is a plugin for Safari. Some days it seems the other way around. Safari is an Saft extension because Saft adds more useful features to Safari than the other way around. I was wondering what feature I find the most useful, the most "I can't live without this". Its not the way it allows you to reorder tabs, and not even the type-ahed search (similar to the Firefox incremental search).

The Flickr group of the day is this: Stick Figures in Peril. Amazing stuff. For example: Already joined. You should do to. Technorati Tags: flickr

Some months ago, I bought a external firewire DVD burner to use with my Mac. Today, I was browsing for something in System Profiler, and I discover this: _NEC DVD_RW ND-3520A: Firmware Revision: 1.04 Interconnect: FireWire Burn Support: Yes (Vendor Supported) Profile Path: VendorSupport.drprofile Cache: 2048 KB Reads DVD: Yes CD-Write: -R, -RW DVD-Write: -R, -RW, +R, +RW, +R *DL* Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes Burn Underrun Protection DVD: Yes Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO Media: No Notice the DL under DVD-Write.

I've moved MT to a new site, shared with other people, and took cleaned up some settings on my blog. Everything seems to be working, but if you notice something strange, please complain to me via SMTP or XMPP (prefered). BTW, I'm also moving to Lighttpd in the next couple of days. I'll try to be gentle.

Ok, I lied, two reasons: Griffin TuneCenter: a very cool-looking dock for the iPod (found it via TUAW);my iPod 2G cannot play Harry Potter books from iTMS.Yeah, lousy excuses, how low can you get to mentally justify a new toy. Technorati Tags: apple, ipod

I usually do a regular full backup once a week (it will be today, in fact), but this time I've also decided to burn a DVD with all my iTMS purchases. It weighs in at 3.77Gb, so it still fits a single DVD. I followed this article: Backing up your music in iTunes 4. The only modification I did was ignoring Audible files. With those, my backup would jump to 8.

I don't have time right now to write all I want to write about yesterday Apple keynote, but I'll just leave you with two items, the ones that had for me the Wow! factor: in 2006, 40% of all cars shipped in the US will have iPod integration: it's not iPod exclusive integration, but even then, it's an impressive feat, and probably one that will last for some years. Getting this bite of a market as important as that one in the US, is an almost sure guarantee of success (if you needed another one) for the iPod family;the Apple/Intel commercial.

The server-to-server port of the google.com domain is now open via XMPP. You should be able to talk to all your friends working at Google. Gmail server is still not open. If we assume that they are using the same code at google.com and gmail.com, it should be safe to assume that this is a external interop test, to prepare the full opening. Cool. Update: thanks to Rusty Shackleford (see his comment below) for pointing out that GTalk is now open.