Over at SiliconBeat, the San Jose Mercury News tech business weblog, Matt Marshall writes:

Apple’s technology makes it really difficult to play music on its iPod if it comes from sources other than its iTunes online store.

This is lazy and bad reporting. I have thousands of tracks in my iTunes library, of which perhaps 10 came from the Apple music store. The rest are MP3s that I ripped from CDs, or obtained elsewhere (mostly legitimately — I won’t apologize for that bootleg of Coldplay doing the Hank Williams classic “Lost Highway” at a concert).

So Apple in fact does support the formats that nearly everybody prefers — open formats. They don’t support other proprietary, “protected” formats. It’s an important difference. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that the dominant music player doesn’t support a myriad of crappy DRM formats is wonderful. Now we just need to get them to get rid of their own crappy DRM.

Yesterday I moved my iTunes library to my MacBook Pro to my desktop PC. Moving the audio files is really easy, but I didn’t want to lose my ratings, play counts, and playlists, and I had been conditioned to think that this was going to be really difficult. I had run into problems moving the files from one PC to another, but now I know that I just wasn’t doing it right. Here’s how you do it.

First, open iTunes on your destination computer (the computer you’re moving the library to). Open the Preferences, go to Advanced, and check “Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized.” This puts iTunes in charge of keeping track of the names and locations of your files. Also take note of the location of where the iTunes library is stored on this PC. Quit iTunes.

Next go to the computer where your iTunes library is. Go to the Preferences, Advanced, and set iTunes to keep files organized there as well. If you didn’t already have iTunes set up this way, it may take some time to shuffle all your files around into its own structure.

Now copy all of the files in the library on the old computer into the location of the iTunes library on the destination computer, keeping the file structure intact. You can do this using a network share, copying them to removable media, or even Zipping them up and emailing them (not recommended if you have 11 gigs of music). Just make sure you preserve the directory structure and put the files wherever iTunes expects them to be stored on the destination computer.

The last step is to copy over the file with all of the metadata. It’s called “iTunes Library” on a Mac, and “iTunes Library.itl” on a PC. Copy the file from the old computer onto the destination computer. By default on my Mac, it goes in ~/Music/iTunes. There will already be an existing version of this file — just find it and overwrite it. If you’re moving from a PC to a Mac you’ll need to remove the extension. If you’re moving from a Mac to a PC, you must add it.

At that point, you should be able to reopen iTunes on the destination PC and see all of your old playlists, a list of your old files, and so forth. If you try to play a file and iTunes asks you to tell it where the file is located, you need to make sure you’ve put all of your audio files in the right directory.

Declan McCullagh reports that network hardware makers are opposed to Net neutrality legislation, but fails to explain why. Telcos are going to need to buy a lot of network hardware in order to implement their plans for segmented services — the current hardware isn’t going to cut it. Greed, as usual, is the answer.

One question I constantly puzzle over and have not come up with a good answer for is the extent to which a person should pay attention to macroeconomics. To a certain degree, macroeconomic trends are important input into the decisions we make in our day to day lives. Should you take a risky job at a startup with high potential upside, or a safe job that may not pay as well but is almost certain to be stable for the next five or ten years. Should you buy a house today before interest rates get much higher or should you wait for the housing bubble to burst and buy on the cheap tomorrow? Is overseas competition going to eliminate your programming job here in the United States? What skills should you learn to keep that from happening? Is rising demand for petroleum in the developing world going to lead to a peak oil scenario where fuel prices only go up? Does that mean you should strongly consider moving somewhere urban so that your day to day life is less reliant on fossil fuels?

You can drive yourself crazy worrying about this stuff. Even if there’s a housing bubble nationwide, there may not be one in your state, and the housing market can vary widely as it becomes more specific. The housing market nationwide is different than the North Carolina housing market, which is different than the Raleigh housing market, which is different than the downtown Raleigh housing market. For any individual, personal goals and personal finances are a lot more important than macroeconomic trends in making these decisions. Even if economically speaking, now is the best time to sell your house and rent a place, that doesn’t mean doing so would be the right thing for any particular person.

How much do you worry about this stuff? I’m coming to believe that making decisions to hedge against macroeconomic trends is almost always a big mistake. That said, people in Midland, Texas who didn’t foresee the oil bust in the eighties would probably disagree. What I know for sure is that I pride myself on paying attention to the economy and I didn’t foresee how the dot com bust would affect me, and affect me it did. I may as well not have paid attention at all.

Update: Billmon has an interesting post on the macroeconomic picture but I don’t even know how to interpret it with regard to how the average consumer should respond.

I gave my presentations earlier this week. The first presentation I gave did not go particularly well. I had written out the entire presentation by hand and practiced it many times, but then I actually brought the printout to the presentation and became a little bit too fixated on giving the presentation as written. Then the moderator turned out the lights in the room so people could see the projected slides and a I wound up having a very hard time following my written copy. I knew the presentation well enough to give it without the text, but not being able to see my printout caused me to be rather anxious. I don’t have a recording but at the end I had the sense that it did not go well.

For the second presentation I didn’t have time to write everything out. I wrote a detailed outline instead, and then just used my slides (which were very spartan) for the top level bits of the outline. For the details of what I was supposed to talk about with each slide, I used the notes feature of Keynote. That presentation went a lot more smoothly, and I was quite happy with it in the end.

The next time I give a presentation, I’ll write the whole thing out first. I like composing things by writing, and writing out a presentation gives you a very good idea how long your presentation will turn out to be. I was exactly where I wanted to be in terms of time with both of them. I used very simple slides, but I think they were effective. (I used “Lessig style” slides, but I wouldn’t say I gave my presentations in that fashion.)

Another thing I learned from watching other people is that presentations where you take a more informal tone and let your personality show through are better than presentations where you focus on getting the material out there efficiently. I think that comes from confidence more than anything, though, and I’d do better next time in that regard.

The toughest thing about these presentations is that I had no idea who I’d be presenting them to, other than that they would be attended by people who work in information technology. That made setting the technical level for the presentations complete guesswork, and I think that the actual presentations didn’t do as much as they could have for the audience because they weren’t necessarily given at the right level. I don’t consider that a personal failing, though, since I was in a position of having to guess.

If you are looking for presentation advice, I’d strongly encourage you to read the comments on my previous post about giving presentations. There’s some great advice in there.

I’m pretty sure that I exhibit one of the failings common to experienced developers trying to learn a new thing. That failing is an unwillingness to just hack out code.

I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails for a few months, but not as much as I’d like, mainly because I have many duties beyond just typing code into a text editor. That’s unfortunate, because I enjoy coding. I have lots of experience with many other languages, so Ruby on Rails was easy to pick up. If you know Java and Perl, you can pick up enough Ruby to get things done in hours.

Unfortunately, as an experienced developer I feel like it’s not enough to write Ruby. I need to write idiomatic Ruby. I need to write Ruby code that looks like it was written by someone who really knows Ruby, and who has worked with other Ruby developers. I want my code to be clean and readable and maintainable. I don’t want people who look at my code to say, “That dude is obviously a Java developer who dabbles in Ruby.”

The thing is, there’s no way to get to that point without just hacking. You can read all the books you can find. You can search the Rails wiki for examples. You can search mailing list archives. But when you’re starting out, if you want to get things done you have to do the best you can and put the aesthetics on the back burner. The beauty of refactoring is that you can just make your code work at first and worry about making it elegant later.

I keep forgetting this lesson, and just had to re-teach it to myself again last night.

The other day I was reading a web page about Jane Jacobs’ theories of cities. There was something on it that made me think about immigration:

Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions. One of the great advantages of this point of view, in fact, is that we become aware of the backward regions in the First World, and realize that they follow the same dynamics as the Third World. These days they may be comfortable enough due to transfer payments from richer regions, but they are economically passive nonetheless.

In this country, we allow people to migrate freely from one part of the country to another. If you are born in a fading town in Kansas and want to move to Chicago to seek employment, there are no barriers to doing so. If you want to move from a state with poor schools and a low level of social services to one with excellent schools and more generous policies, you are free to do so. By the same token, someone who’s made millions of dollars in Hollywood can move to Montana and live on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. No states have collapsed economically or threatened to secede as a result.

The obvious question to me, is, shouldn’t this be our goal on a global basis as well? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if it were practical to let people live wherever they like? I’m not saying that every nation should just open its borders tomorrow, but I think that it would make sense to pursue policies that get us closer to this ideal, both in terms of immigration and in terms of economic policy.

The European Union has not collapsed in spite of opening up its immigration laws so that citizens of any EU country can work in any other. What would it take to enable us to have open borders with Canada and Mexico, for starters?

I realize that there is a large group of people who think that there’s something special about nationhood, and that the idea of relegating national borders to a status more like that of state borders, county borders, and city lines is utter insanity, but I find their position absurd.

Tom Coates has posted about how he wants to stop wanting to play World of Warcraft. The game is fun, but it’s a huge time sink. The time I spend playing could be spent reading books I’m interested in, or watching movies, or working on any number of projects I have on the back burner. I’ve seen a huge percentage of the content in the game, most everything but the stuff that requires 20 or more people to do. Why keep playing?

Especially because once you hit level 60, the goals are time consuming to accomplish, and the time required is predictable and depressing. For example, let’s say you want a certain suit of armor. You can look up which creatures you have to kill to get each piece of armor, the percentage of the time they drop each piece, how long it takes to get to the monsters and kill them, abd calculate the amount of time it will probably take you to get that armor. The numbers are often alarming.

Some things are even easier to quantify. Let’s say you want the “epic” items from the Alterac Valley battleground. This is a PVP arena that up to 40 people can participate in. On my server, the wait to get in is usually about an hour and a half, assuming there are enough people to start the battle. In order to buy these items, your reputation with the denizens of Alterac Valley must be Exalted. To get from Neutral reputation to Exalted requires 42,000 reputation. You earn maybe an average of 1000 reputation if you play a full battle, less if your side loses. That means you have to play at least 42 battles, which run from one to four hours each. Let’s say the average is two hours, which is optimistic. In essence, getting the reputation you need requires at least 146 hours spent in Alterac Valley, much of it just waiting to get in.

I won’t even get into the amount of time required to progress in what’s called the “raiding” game, where you and 39 of your friends go take on the toughest battles in the game. Each of the raid areas takes so many hours to complete initially that the raid instances reset weekly. That way you can spread your progress over two or three nights. What that means, practically speaking, is that to be successful in this aspect of the game requires you to commit, along with 39 other people, to be at the same place at the same time several times a week. It’s not a pretty picture. The guild I’m a member of is about to expand its raiding schedule from two nights a week to three. I generally do not raid at all, and don’t see that changing anytime soon.

You have to ask yourself, what’s the point? I think I enjoy my time spent in the game, but it’s hard to see where enjoyment stops and compulsion starts. In the game you can work on improving your equipment, improving your standing in the PVP game, improving your reputation with any number of groups, improving your skill level in various professions, making money, oh, and making friends and just running around and having fun. I’m pretty sure that the kinds of incentives that exist inside games affect my brain chemistry, and keep me coming back. Greater self-discipline is probably indicated.

I’ve been carrying a Tide To Go instant stain remover in my bag for months, and I finally got a chance to break it in today after a run-in with a drippy hamburger. Tide To Go works. Buy yourself a Tide To Go. On a related note, Red Robin is mediocre at best.

I already linked to this article over at Of Interest, but I think it deserves wider exposure. The Boston Globe has a lengthy report on President Bush’s use of so-called <a href= http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/04/30/bush_challenges_hundreds_of_laws/?page=full”>signing statements, wherein the administration notes how it plans to treat laws that the President signs. If you can read this story and not feel utter revulsion for the state of your nation, you should probably find a dictatorship with a climate you enjoy and relocate there. Here’s how signing statements are used:

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ”signing statements” — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills — sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.

”He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises — and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened,” said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.

Once again, President Bush and his administration love torturing people:

In October 2004, five months after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq came to light, Congress passed a series of new rules and regulations for military prisons. Bush signed the provisions into law, then said he could ignore them all. One provision made clear that military lawyers can give their commanders independent advice on such issues as what would constitute torture. But Bush declared that military lawyers could not contradict his administration’s lawyers.

Other provisions required the Pentagon to retrain military prison guards on the requirements for humane treatment of detainees under the Geneva Conventions, to perform background checks on civilian contractors in Iraq, and to ban such contractors from performing ”security, intelligence, law enforcement, and criminal justice functions.” Bush reserved the right to ignore any of the requirements.

Here’s the bottom line:

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive-power issues, said Bush has cast a cloud over ”the whole idea that there is a rule of law,” because no one can be certain of which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore.

”Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other laws that were already on the books before he became president are also unconstitutional,” Golove said.

The administration doesn’t respect the Supreme Court any more than it does Congress:

Bush has also challenged statutes in which Congress gave certain executive branch officials the power to act independently of the president. The Supreme Court has repeatedly endorsed the power of Congress to make such arrangements. For example, the court has upheld laws creating special prosecutors free of Justice Department oversight and insulating the board of the Federal Trade Commission from political interference.

Nonetheless, Bush has said in his signing statements that the Constitution lets him control any executive official, no matter what a statute passed by Congress might say.

While the Bush administration did not create the signing statement, it is an innovation of earlier power-grabbing Republicans:

But it was not until the mid-1980s, midway through the tenure of President Reagan, that it became common for the president to issue signing statements. The change came about after then-Attorney General Edwin Meese decided that signing statements could be used to increase the power of the president.

When interpreting an ambiguous law, courts often look at the statute’s legislative history, debate and testimony, to see what Congress intended it to mean. Meese realized that recording what the president thought the law meant in a signing statement might increase a president’s influence over future court rulings.

The Bush administration has just taken it to the next level. And to wrap things up, here’s why you really shouldn’t worry:

Defenders say the fact that Bush is reserving the right to disobey the laws does not necessarily mean he has gone on to disobey them.

How comforting. In spite of my prodigious quoting, you really should read the whole article. It’s chilling.