Drag is waste. Reduce it.

2007-08-08

Don’t tell Blogger, but…

I’m now up-and-running with Movable Type. You won’t be seeing any of that here, obviously, which is why I am happy to announce that DR will be moving to a new home in the not-too-distant future. I haven't yet decided if I'm going to port all of the existing content over to the new site, but either way: I hate broken links as much as the next guy, so everything that is currently here on Blogspot will stay here indefinitely. With regard to the new URL and whatnot, stay tuned.

With regard to the installation of Movable Type, on the other hand, I have this to say: UGHH. I have installed it on two systems at this point: the first install took probably two days of fiddling, cursing, and hair-tearing; the second took literally 10 minutes. The take-home point is that while Movable Type is actually wicked easy to install if you know what you’re doing, the available install documentation is nearly useless if you don’t. It’s mostly readable to me now that I have a clue, but that didn’t do a me a whole lot of frickin’ good last week, did it?

So yeah, you should expect that my first post to the new DR will be a Movable Type install tutorial of some sort, because it sure as hell would have made my life a lot easier.

2007-08-03

Music is meant to be heard… except when it’s not

Macworld's editors have been posting their iPhone “wish lists” over at iPhone Central this week. They’ve had some good points and some bad ones, but it makes for interesting reading. This morning's list was with regard iPhone's iPod features, and one of their qualms struck a chord with me:

Silent mode should mute speaker output (3): If you flip the iPhone's Ring/Silent switch to Silent, you would expect the phone to be, well, silent. Yet if you play media (purposely or accidentally) without any headphones connected, the audio still plays back through the iPhone's speaker. A friend of mine discovered this the hard way when she let her nephew play with her new iPhone--in Silent mode--during a church service. "SexyBack" wasn't on the program that day, but it was heard.

Cute story, huh? Actually though, I too have been bitten by this particular issue. I was working at my desk while listening to music via the headphones, and a call came in. iPhone automatically faded then paused the music, and I unplugged the headphones to take the call (I know that this is not necessary, but I feel weird talking into my headphones). When finished, I ended the call and set iPhone aside for a moment. Much to my dismay, my music then faded back in and played out loud via the external speakers. Oops. I scrambled to make iPhone be quiet, while looking around sheepishly at my office-mates. Thanks, Apple.

Update: a full list of the wish lists is now available.

Description

  • Purpose: user-interface critique (ranting), among other things.
  • Justification: I use things; I have opinions; I have a blog.