AppleTV shipping? 

Apple has been pushing updates of iTunes with features that tease about AppleTV, but today they came right out with a fairly complete pitch for the imminent product, which some think will ship later this week, perhaps as early as tomorrow.

I just got an email from Ole Eichorn saying he got a notice from Apple that they've shipped his Apple TV. So that's it, whatever it is, it's shipping.

I feel like I've done my homework, not sure if I'm going to get an AppleTV, it depends on how heavy the DRM is. I suspect it will be pretty heavy. I've had an iPod since they came out, but I've never bought a song at the iTunes music store, because of the DRM. I also have a Mac Mini on my TV, acting as my Internet-based DVR. I pay Comcast $115 a month for subscriptions to all the services I use.

In a rational world, we'd be building apps off this site as we're building on Twitter. It's really rich, but we're too scared of Hollywood to work together on this. Or at least I'm too scared. But I admire what they're doing, esp since they just added excellent RSS support. I may go ahead and design some software that automates BitTorrent for a friend (who will remain nameless) who is a Gilmore Girls fan who thinks its silly that she has to remember to download the program every week. I know Azureus has RSS support, but as it's implemented it's way too technical for even me to configure properly, and it's hopeless to try to explain to a person who knows how to use a TiVO, which is all the technical expertise that should be required. The UI should allow a user to express their desire the way my friend expressed it -- every time there's a new episode of the Gilmore Girls, get it for me. Not 204 copies of last week's show produced by different people. Just the one I always get. With EZTV doing quality control, the problem is close to solved for TV shows. And for movies there's Axxo. Don't know who he is? It's worth learning.

The point is this -- the open DRM-less world is tantalizingly close to delivering the nirvana we seek, entirely as a labor of love. If we somehow could get clearance from Hollywood to go ahead (unlikely) we could take the last few steps to make it user friendly. Compare that against what Apple will offer us in the next few days. Maybe Apple will challenge Hollywood, the open letter from Steve Jobs offers a sliver of hope. We'll be watching, very carefully.

Blog Hits for Jesus 

This is Today's Links with a cute name.

Anti-Hillary ripoff of Apple's famous 1984 commercial.

TechCrunch compares Twitter, Dodgeball and Facebook.

The Mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson, calls for the impeachment of President Bush. SLC is the capital of Utah, which is one of the most conservative states in the US.

NY Times: "John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82."

Scoble notes that geek productivity is up 200% today.

Airport Extreme, day 2 

Following up on yesterday's post on configuring the my MacBook Pro to work with the new Airport Extreme, I installed the software from the CD, but found that unless I plugged all the computers into the same router, they couldn't "see" each other. This created a problem, because the router I was using had five Ethernet jacks, and the Extreme only has three. I was able to juggle things around, which involved reconfiguring two routers, but eventually was able to get the four machines I wanted to connect to see each other, all through the Extreme.

That set up the moment of truth, when I'd find out how much faster the Extreme is for the crucial job of moving media files between a server and a laptop. The answer: it's quite a bit faster.

I find numbers fairly meaningless, so I took a movie of my MacBook Pro, in the kitchen, copying a movie from the Mac Mini in the den.;

Movie: Demo of performance of Airport Extreme router.

Now I have another problem. I need the Denon receiver to have a local IP address so I can control it via Firefox. With the Netgear router I looked it up on Attached Devices, and entered its address in the browser, and it just worked. The Airport Utility app doesn't seem to have a way to find the address of attached devices.

Poor Scoble 

I can't believe how surprised MSM people are at Scoble saying that Microsoft's advertising sucks. That's how people talk, and one of the principles of blogging is, imho, Come As You Are. (See also: Dogma 2000.)

Personally, I think they're feigning suprise, pretending they're shocked, when they use language like that too. What do they think about Microsoft's Internet strategy. When was the last time they created some software that made you think they liked software?

Postscript: I've received a few comments saying the reporter was justified in quoting Scoble saying something he didn't say; and even if the headline was wrong, it isn't the reporter's responsibility. This is of course nonsense.

Fresh Fish Flesh 

I had a great time with Ponzi, who came to visit this weekend. We mostly acted like kids and made up a few new slogans, including the title of this post.

Try saying Fresh Fish Flesh five times fast.

Then add a "y" to the end of each word.

Some very strange sounds end up coming out of your mouth!

nytimesriver.com 

Since I had to restart the NY Times river robot to make the Twitter feed work, it was a small matter to restart the HTML page, the one that works so nicely on mobile devices like a Blackberry.

http://nytimesriver.com/

When people say it's worth paying money for the service, that's nice, but it doesn't help, for a few reasons. 1. It's not the kind of thing people pay for, and I'm not going to try to change the way people think about websites. As a user I myself wouldn't pay for it (although of course as a developer, I am). 2. It could be a nice place to put ads for mobile products, and there doesn't appear to be a good place to put ads to reach mobile users. 3. I would be willing, myself, to pay to run ads for the river in the NY Times, to help build a user base, but without an agreement, it would be a foolish investment.

Anyway, as long as the program is running, it's a small matter to generate the HTML. But I'm not committing to running it indefinitely. Just for now.