• Knowledge base: Localization on Mac OS X
  (tags: Mac programming)

On November 28, 2007, the Oakland Park City Commission unanimously voted to name the city’s new downtown park after Jaco Pastorius, The World’s Greatest Bass Player. Jaco’s hometown celebrates its most famous artist with a tremendous honor: a living memorial with a focus on the arts. The 2 1/2 year grassroots effort has come to fruition. Now south Florida residents and Jaco fans worldwide will have a place to reflect upon and enjoy the legacy of a music giant. There are also plans to incorporate Jaco’s name and story into the City’s various performing arts events.

The park is located in downtown Oakland Park, Florida, at the intersection of Dixie Highway and NE 38th Street. It is between Dixie Highway and the Florida East Coast Railroad. (via Grass Roots Project page)

Jaco went to Northeast High School, which is right up the street from me.

I’ve uploaded a few feed widgets I created for my various sites. All of them are now available on my Widget page. The widgets are for this site’s feed, MacMegasite, my rarely updated WorldBeatPlanet podcast, and my shared clippings from NetNewsWire.

Today was my last day in Vancouver. I’m leaving early tomorrow morning, so I’m already packed & ready.

I had my best (and cheapest) meal of the trip tonight at Hon’s on Robson street. They give huge portions and almost everything is less than $10. Most of the time I was here we had lots of rain, but today the weather was clear. I did some shopping and lots of walking around downtown. Unfortunately the high Canadian dollar made it a lot more expensive this trip than it was in the past.

My musical discovery for this trip was the Red Elvises. I had seen them in the movie Six-String Samurai, but this is the first time I’ve heard any of their music. They play surf music with a Russian flavor. Charlie’s Music City had a few of their CDs.

I just got an email from OLPC welcoming me to the community and letting me know that my XO Laptop is on the way.

Thank you for being one of the first to participate
in Give One Get One.

All of us at One Laptop per Child were inspired by the number of people who joined our Give One Get One program on its very first day! Your participation makes you part of the growing community of people working to give children all over the world new opportunities to grow, explore, learn and express themselves.

Your XO laptop is on the way.

Your donated XO laptop will soon be delivered into the hands of a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. In one of our recipient children’s own words, “I want to thank you people because you had given us the laptop and I love it so much.” Your generosity will make a world of difference in these children’s lives, and in the future of their respective countries.

Thanks to your early action, your XO laptop is scheduled to be delivered between December 14 and December 24. Our “first day” donors are our highest priority and we are making every effort to deliver your XO laptop(s) as soon as possible. We will send you an update upon shipment.

Share and play with friends.

Once you receive your XO laptop, you will begin to discover all the features that make it so remarkable. One of the most ingenious features of the XO laptop is its ability to create a “mesh” network. The little green antennae “ears” serve to automatically connect the XO with other XO laptops in the vicinity. What this means is that if your child has friends nearby that also have XO laptops, the children can chat, play and share information freely and safely, with or without an internet connection. If you would like to let other parents know about the XO laptop and Give One Get One, you can not only greatly increase your child’s enjoyment of the XO laptop, but also help us further our mission.

You are part of something big.

As a participant in Give One Get One, you have become a member of an international educational movement. Our goal is to create a web-based learning environment built around the XO laptop that will allow children in the U.S. and Canada to use their XOs to learn about the lives and experiences of children using XOs in the developing world, and vice versa. We also hope to bring together the world’s educators and software developers into a volunteer, global community that will provide essential feedback about how to improve the XO, as well as help create dynamic, open-source educational content that will engage and inspire children all over the world.

We will be creating an OLPC Community section on our website that will provide more information. We hope to see you there!

Once again, from all of us at One Laptop per Child, thank you for helping us bring education and connection to children in even the most remote regions of the globe.

• Windows Software Linux Software
  Linux equivalents of common Windows applications
  (tags: linux windows software)

I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday, but I had an unusually pleasant and uneventful trip. Sunday after US Thanksgiving is supposed to be the worst travel day, but in this case it wasn’t.

I got to the airport at 5AM for a 7AM flight, which meant I had to be up almost 3AM EST. There was no line at the ticket counter and I breezed through security in no time. My first flight to PHX left on time and even arrived early. My connecting flight to Vancouver left on time and also arrived slightly early. It took only a few minutes to get through Canadian customs and the baggage claim went quickly.

The only delay was getting to the hotel from the airport, since there was a parade tying up traffic downtown.

Via Mashable!:

It seems that if you’re a band, and you can get your song in an Apple iPod commercial, you can expect a surprising amount of success.

The most striking example of this is when Nick Haley, an 18-year old university student in England, made an amateur commercial for the iPod Touch. He paired his images with a song named “Music is My Hot, Hot Sex” by a Brazilian band called CSS (short for Cansei de Ser Sexy which translates to “tired of being sexy”). The commercial impressed Apple and they brought Mr. Haley to Los Angeles to to professionally make his commercial and they kept the same song.

Since the ad debuted, the critically acclaimed band, which had no commercial success in the USA, has climbed the charts, selling thousands of albums. Feist has also seen similar success with their song “1234″ being used recently in ads for the iPod Nano, and has since sold tens of thousands of albums and landed a spot on Saturday Night Live.

I fell in love with a few bands, including The Fratellis, Jet, and Ozomatli after hearing their songs in iPod commercials. Ozomatli even returned the favor to Apple by giving an awesome free show at this year’s World Wide Developers Conference.

I’m leaving early tomorrow morning for Vancouver. This will be my third trip up there this year. I’ve loaded my iPhone and 80G iPod with lots of podcasts I have to catch up with on my flight. I have EDGE roaming turned off with the latest iPhone software, so hopefully I won’t get a huge bill like I did the last time I was in Vancouver. I’ll only be there until Friday and I’ll be spending all day in the office, but I’ll try to meet up with a few people in the evenings.

I’ve uploaded the changes to the live my2unz.com site and updated the database. All of the original content is still intact. I disabled playlist import, however, since that feature hasn’t been thoroughly tested.

I’m now using standard CCK fields & standard views, along with the content template module for track, album, artist, and playlist forms rather than defining those content types in my iTunes module. I now only use one custom table, which links tracks to a playlist and includes playlist specific info for that track such as rating & play count, since it was easier & cleaner than using one of the node relationship modules.

As soon as I have the iTunes playlist import cleaned up and a fast, clean way to create playlists from scratch without importing, I plan to open the site publicly. The other major feature I plan to add is linking albums & tracks to Amazon & iTunes Music Store, and providing audio for tracks, most likely from last.fm.

I received a pingback in my Akismet moderation queue a little while ago that led me to a splog that’s stealing content from this and many other blogs. It simply reposts blog entries verbatim and inserts google ads in each post. It grabbed my previous post just a few minutes after I posted it. I won’t post a link to it here to give them any more traffic, but I did report it to Fight Splog.

I also notice an increase in comment spam over the last few days, with about one or two a day being held for moderation instead of being immediately marked as spam.

I was up late last night working on some programming changes to my2unz.com.

I’ve removed the content & view related functions from my iTunes module where the same functionality could be implemented using standard CCK & Views features such as nodereference fields. I still need to get iTunes XML import working the same way again and link tracks to a playlist. I hope to bring these updates to the live site this weekend before I leave for Vancouver.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Uploaded with Skitch!

Taylor McNeil interviewed me for his new podcast, Tech Bucket. We discussed a few Mac related stories and I talked about LoJack for Laptops.

Taylor is a local 16 year old podcaster & blogger. Until a few months ago, he lived in my condo community. Taylor’s family was one of the few Prius owners in here.

• How to Shoot in Direct Sunlight
  Shooting in direct sunlight can lead to images that have high contrast, blown out highlights, lens flare and colors that might even look overly saturated. If you’re shooting portraits they can also lead to the ’squint factor’.
  (tags: photography HOWTO tips)
• Top 15 Leopard Hints at Appletell

Things have been pretty quiet with my2unz.com lately, but I have some big programming changes planned. I finally got a chance to do some work on it over the weekend.

The site uses a custom Drupal module for iTunes integration. In addition to importing iTunes playlist or library XML files, it also defines several content types for tracks, albums, artists, and playlists. I use a few custom tables to link artists, albums, and tracks. The module also defines the forms & views for those content types.

I’m eliminating those content types from the module and converting them to standard content types using CCK node reference fields and standard views. The itunes module will simply act as a helper and will still handle importing iTunes data. Hopefully I’ll be able to preserve the existing site content.

I would like to open it to the public before the end of the year. I was originally planning to wait for Drupal 6, but it’s still far from ready and most of the modules I use aren’t compatible.

• CSS Dock Menu
  A nice looking CSS & Javascript Mac-style dock for websites
  (tags: css javascript design)

• Software components – OLPCWiki
  Information about the XO laptop’s software environment.
  (tags: OLPC laptop linux software)

No, I didn’t get my OLPC yet, but I found a Sugar emulator that runs under Ubuntu (which I’m running under VMware on my MacBook Pro). When I run it, I can see other OLPC users on the internet.

Here are a few screenshots.

Uploaded with Skitch!

A Python programming environment

Uploaded with Skitch!

Turtle graphics to teach kids programming

Uploaded with Skitch!

My Neighborhood, showing other OLPC users on the internet

Uploaded with Skitch!

The home screen

I got an email update on the status of my OLPC “Give 1 Get 1″ order:

Thank you for participating in the One Laptop per Child “Give One Get One” program. Your donation of $399.00 will bring education and enlightenment to children of the developing world. $200 of each $399 “Give One Get One” Donation is tax-deductible (your donation minus the fair market value of each laptop you receive).

As a “Give One Get One” donor, you will receive one of the first XO laptops to be distributed in North America. Laptops will be delivered on a first come, first served basis. While early purchasers have the best chance of receiving their XO laptops in time for the holidays, quantities are limited and we cannot guarantee timing. We will provide you with regular email updates.

T-Mobile USA is proud to offer you one-year complimentary access to T-Mobile HotSpot in recognition of your support to the One Laptop per Child “Give One Get One” program. As you help children in developing countries stay connected, educated and enlightened, T-Mobile is supporting you! You will receive an email message close to the time that your laptop ships containing instructions on how to begin your complimentary year of T-Mobile HotSpot service. Please refer to http://hotspot.t-mobile.com for additional information on T-Mobile HotSpot Wireless broadband Internet service.

• Drupal Modules as of 10/9/07
  Extensive table of currently available Drupal modules, arranged by category.
  (tags: drupal development)