I’m on a business trip for a couple of days, staying at a Hyatt. They offer wireless internet via a T-Mobile HotSpot ($10 for 24 hours). Alas, they block my ability to send email via my own server. As a security and spam-prevention measure, many of these hot spots (not just T-Mobile) will block you from connecting to any mail server other than their own. If you don’t have a web-based mail interface (say, .Mac or Yahoo), or a company-provided VPN solution, you’re screwed.

When will these companies learn that they’re not enhancing security or stopping SPAM. In fact, all they’re really doing is pissing off their customers. I know I will never join T-Mobile’s HotSpot network outside of any company-paid hotel connectivity requirements.

For the techies reading this, I ran a portscan against my personal server to confirm it was reachable and responding. I have all the important ports open, including port 25 for SMTP. When I telnet to port 25, I get redirected to T-Mobile’s own server at svcstatl07.hotspot.t-mobile.com. Oddly, I can seemingly hand-craft an outgoing email there, but the mail, despite being “accepted for delivery” appears to be dropped, as it never gets delivered.

Port Scan has started …

Port Scanning host: 71.143.110.185

Open TCP Port: 22
Open TCP Port: 25
Open TCP Port: 80
Open TCP Port: 106
Open TCP Port: 143
Open TCP Port: 311
Open TCP Port: 427
Open TCP Port: 548
Open TCP Port: 625
Open TCP Port: 687
Port Scan has completed …

I mentioned before that I love You Don’t Know Jack, and that I play just about every day. Tonight, I did something I aspire to.

Actually, I did two things:

First, I got all seven questions right. Not an impossibility, but my pop-trivia knowledge ain’t what it used to be.

More importantly, though, I’m number one on the scoreboard! Whoo hoo! Since this is likely to change in the not distant future (only 13 others have played as of this writing), here’s a screenshot:

Tonight’s game asked which characters were from Grease, The Muppets, or both. Who knew my near-obsession with Pink Ladies, T-Birds and furry creatures with hands up their asses would come in handy?

Wired.com just rolled out a new design, and in doing so, broke URLs that worked just a few hours earlier. Their Bruce Lee Lives On article which originally appeared at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,73022-0.html now returns a “Content Not Found”. The new URL is at http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2007/03/bruce_lee0323.

How does a major website do a redesign and break URLs? That’s so 1998. It’s not like they don’t know the URLs are about to change.

Shame on you, Wired.

Some ten or so years ago, I was playing You Don’t Know Jack on my Mac. It was great. Snarky, funny, just a bit naughty, it was a party game that made trivia fun and sitting around a computer a wee bit less geeky.

A few months ago, the folks who make YDKJ (Jellyvision) started releasing daily Dis or Dats, one of YDKJ’s best stand-alone games. Seven fast-paced, generally topical questions asking you to decide, for example, if Goldenrod and Beaver are Crayola colors or Porno movies. (I won’t spoil it: go play that game yourself.) I’ve been playing almost daily.

A couple weeks ago, the fine folks at Jellyvision did the coolest thing: they started producing full episodes of You Don’t Know Jack, filled with random trivia and innuendo. While not as thrilling as playing with friends around a crowded keyboard, it’s been fantastic to revisit the snark in its fullness. And best of all, each episode ends with the Jack Attack, one of the greatest which-two-things-go-together games.

I admit: I’d been jonesing a bit for YDKJ. I don’t remember why I thought about it all those months ago when I went looking for the game, but I was ecstatic that the website and games existed. Not so much that they don’t have Mac games anymore though.

After I found them and played a few of their games, I wrote them a brief email asking them to bring their games back to the Mac (they’re available for Windows XP only):

Please please please make Mac games

Please.
Please.

Please.

I’ll pay you.

Lots.

At least $40 a game.

Really.

And, uh, I’ll be your friend for life.

Jason.

They quickly wrote back.

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. We actually already have a version of YDKJ made for [insert name of system]! All we need now is for [insert name of company that makes (insert name of system)] to pay us a bunch of money, and we will give it to them. But only after a [insert amount of time it would take for us to make a game for {insert name of company}'s (insert name of system)] grace period. So, as soon as all that happens, we’ll let you know. Register for news updates on our site, or, even better, go to (insert name of company that makes the [insert name of system]).com and tell them what a great idea you just had. Just don’t tell them this automated message sent you.

How do you not love that?

Shortly after, I got another response:

Hi there Jason,

Make it $40,000 a game, and then maybe we’ll talk!

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, all of the games we sell in our store are compatible with Windows XP only. At the time that we re-made the old games, there wasn’t enough demand for the on Macs to warrant making them.

But, as I’m sure you noticed, the things on www.ydkj.com are Flash-based, so they do run on Macs. And a most of the web content that we put up in the future will be Flash-based as well. So the future of YDKJ is looking a little brighter for you Mac users.

In the meantime, if you really want to purchase something from our store, I promise that our t-shirts do not discriminate between operating systems. Go buy some!

You friend for life,
Jellyvision

Awesome. I mean, just absolutely awesome. No, I don’t get what I wanted, but they let me down in such a great way, I don’t even care.

The minute Jellyvision releases a new game for Mac, PS2 or Wii, I’m there.

In the mean time, I’m off to play Dis or Dat and buy a t-shirt.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Games, Jack Attack, Jellyvision, Dis or Dat, YDKJ, You Don’t Know Jack

You may have noticed my Netflix queue on the right-most column (under Netflix @ Home). As the name implies, it’s the movies I currently have sitting next to my eight-year-old standard-definition TV (or on their way here).

In that queue is The Brown Bunny. I have absolutely no interest in the movie qua movie, but rather to see the much-discussed scene where a supposedly mainstream actress (Chloe Sevigny) performs on-screen oral sex on a supposedly mainstream actor (Vincent Gallo).

(”Mainstream” in this case meaning “not a porn star”.)

I’d heard terrible things about this movie. Complaints included long stretches of Gallo driving his van, with no dialog and little music. I decided that I’d just fast-forward through the movie until I reached the infamous BJ scene.

Even in fast forward the movie stunk.

For minutes on end there’d be a shot of Gallo in his van, and even at 4X speed it took forever to get to a new scene. On the unfortunate occasions when my finger slipped from the FF button, I found the movie was even worse than I imagined.

It was interminable.

And then we got to the blowjob.

The most interesting parts of the scene were

1. figuring out why Sevigny would choose to give an on-screen blowjob; and

2. deciding if Sevigny actually swallowed Gallo’s wine (as it were).

I’m sure if I’d watched the movie at regular speed, this climactic (ahem) scene would have naturally completed the emotional journey of Gallo’s character, bringing appropriate closure to a perpetually pained psyche.

Nah, it would have just as dull.

When even a gratuitous and explicit sex scene can’t save your “movie”, you’re a bad, bad filmmaker.

I never thought I’d bother to do this, but my natural paranoia has led me to put password protection on some of my posts. Thank goodness Wordpress makes this easy. For the (very, very) occasional posts I would rather the entire public not see, you’ll have to enter a password to view the entry. If you know who I am, then you know (one of) my personal email addresses. If you email me there (and we’ve spent more than five minutes together), I’ll send you the password. Or, just ask the next time we’re together.

Everyone else, if you don’t know me, then these protected posts won’t really interest you anyway. Seriously. Hell, even if you do know me, they probably don’t interest you. There are like, six people who care. I’m one. My girlfriend is another. And I’m not sure about her.

Jason.

I’ve long said that iTunes is the worst application Apple has. It’s buggy, slow, and lacking features. It’s a shame that it’s the only application I can use to manage my iPod automatically, otherwise I’d switch to a competitor faster than Sonic the Hedgehog on a Speed Break.

iTunes has some great features, of course. Uh, there’s CoverFlow (oh, wait, that’s a third-party app they bought).

There’s music streaming to my Airport Express (when it’s not dropping out).

Oh! There’s that iPod management thing I mentioned before. That’s neat.

This rant was originally directed at the guys from MacBreak Weekly, a podcast for Mac geeks. I was going to complain that they should use a standard Artist instead of the list of varying hosts they have week, since it made my iTunes CoverFlow and Album view look like crap. Here’s what my CoverFlow view looks like sorted by Artist:

Seven different album covers because each episode has a different set of Artists and iTunes, seeing different Artists, considers them different Albums.

Except!

Except it’s not just MacBreak Weekly, and it’s not just the Artist field being different.

No. It’s because iTunes’ sorting mechanism—and particularly its sorting mechanism for podcasts—is brain-dead.

If you use iTunes to manage podcasts, you already know how awful it is. All the podcasts are mixed up in one big list, there are no per-podcast preferences, and if you don’t sync your iPod up often enough, iTunes stops updating your podcasts.

But as I said, you already know how awful it is.

It’s made more awful because iTunes doesn’t recognize podcast episodes with the same Album, Artist and other editable information, as being related. This screenshot is of the Get Info windows of three MacBreak Weekly episodes; two of them appear as one album cover, the third as a separate album cover. Can you guess which one is the stand-out?

Turns out that despite MBW-15 (in the middle) having different metadata from the other two, iTunes considers MBW-14 (on the left) one album, and MBW-15 and MBW-20 as a second album.

Odder still is that MBW-29 and MBW-30, below, have very different metadata, and yet are grouped together as a single album!

I know what you’re thinking: Surely there must be some clear difference somewhere! If there is, I haven’t found it yet.

It’s not file types. I looked the files in the Finder. MBW-14 is an m4a file; MBW-15 is an mp3 file. But wait… MB-20 is an m4a file. And, it sorts with MB-21, which is an mp3 file, and has different metadata.

Sigh.

I simply can’t find any logic to how iTunes sorts episodes into albums.

It gets better.

iTunes has an “Album view”, which is a handy way of browsing my collection.

In this view, I can show only items that match a search term. I enter “macbreak” and I get the 32 episodes of MBW, grouped into three albums when sorted by Album: episodes 1-14 in group one; 15-32 in group two; and in group three is episode 32 by itself.

Aside: There is a hidden feature in iTunes where you can sort by Album, Album by Artist, and Album by Year. You switch among the three states by clicking the Album header in any listing. I don’t know why there isn’t a menu item for this. Cool feature, completely hidden. Shocking.

If I sort using “Album by Artist” or “Album by Year”, I get two albums (the same episodes either way). MB-14 is in one group, MB-15 and MB-20 in the other group. Other than that, the episodes that make up each group has no logic I can discern: “by Artist” has a mix of artists; and “by Year” has episodes from 2006 and 2007 in the same group.

Out of desperation, I even decided to change the metadata some more (I’d been changing it several times in an effort to bring things together, unsuccessfully, clearly).

I sorted the show by Album (three groupings), and selected all of them. I selected all 32 items, did a Get Info on them, and changed the Album name to “MBW”.

I had the same three-album split, as before.

If there were different Artists listed, I moved the listed Artist to Album Artist, and changed Artist to “MacBreak Weekly”. Again, three albums, but a different grouping this time. Now, one album was episodes 30 and 31; the second was 1-14 and 32; and the third 15-29.

I changed the Composer for all to “Pixel Corps”. No change.

I changed the Grouping for all to “TWIT”. No change.

Just about everything that could be changed to something standard was. I eventually just gave up and reset every field to something new.

And still no luck. iTunes simply refuses to sort my podcasts by any discernible logic. It must be using some extra metadata that isn’t exposed for editing.

Which is why iTunes is Apple’s Worst. Application. Ever.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes

I love taking pictures.

I don’t usually think of them as pictures. More photographs. Timeless portraits and expansive landscapes that reach into your soul and stir emotions previously inaccessible.

If you’re wondering why I don’t have links to any of these photographs it’s because I don’t have any. I have thousands of pictures, though. To become a photograph I have to open the image in Photoshop, Aperture or at least iPhoto, do some cropping, color enhancement, maybe convert to black and white.

Doing this generally requires a powerful computer, expensive software and some skill.

Recently I stumbled across Picnik, which virtually eliminates your need for all three. On it, you can do the kind of basic photo editing that you’d usually do in iPhoto or Photoshop Elements. Mere words cannot do this site justice. You need to play with it for a few minutes to experience its awesomeness directly (they provide a couple of images for this purpose).

That you can upload an image to a website and manipulate it isn’t new. Sites like Shutterfly have long allowed you to add borders or make an image black and white. What’s interesting to me is the amount of power, control and interactivity Picnik offers. Its buttons, sliders and other controls feel as smooth, and respond as quickly, as local application (in some cases more so!).

Even in a “beta,” unfinished product, the polish and finesse are unmistakable.

What’s particularly interesting about Picnik is it uses other websites to do stuff it doesn’t want to do. While iPhoto lets you to manage your photo collection, Picnik leaves the photo management to others. They integrate with Flickr as your organizer, for example, which means Picnik can focus on just the image manipulation piece.

It’s brilliant.

The promise of web-based applications has been a long time coming, but with the ubiquitousness of Adobe Flash and the ascendence of AJAX-style functionality, I think we’ve finally crossed the threshold for real, functional, we-based applications that look, feel and work just like a desktop application.

Picnik is one of the more recent ones I’ve come across. Another example is Apple’s .Mac Webmail, which, if you weren’t paying extremely close attention, you’d easily mistake for a local application. You can drag and drop messages between folders, start typing recipients and have it display matches as you type, the spell checker displays popups of possible word replacements, and windows come and everything just feels like a desktop app. (If you haven’t tried it, sign up for a free trial and play with it for a while.)

Some applications are trying hard but haven’t quite made it to the “feels real” stage. For example, even though both Kiko’s and Google’s calendars let you move appointments by dragging, neither feels particularly smooth and intuitive, and for some reason Google thinks every click on the calendar means you want to create an appointment. No doubt both will be improved over time, and it show how far web applications have come that I’m complaining about the level to which they feel like desktop applications.

It will be interesting to watch what kind of applications find themselves at home on the web, and if they’ll replace desktop applications for primary use.

Security and privacy issues not withstanding of course. But that’s for another entry.

A few days ago a 34 year old middle school teacher sent a text message to her pot dealer to score some weed, except she fat-fingered the number and accidentally sent it to a cop instead.

First, how unlucky do you have to be to have your pot dealer’s number be close to a cop’s number?

Second, why is a 34 year old still smoking pot? Shouldn’t she have graduated to something more potent? Everyone knows mary-jane is a gateway drug.

But the best part is the police spokesman, who said

She learned her lesson. Program your dealers into your phone.

That clearly is the take-away from this story: if you’re going to break the law, use the technology you have to your advantage.