No data has been received for the last 10 seconds.

I have no idea what this means. This problem only arose after I switched to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). I get this in situations where I never had a problem before. I don’t think it is a firewall issue because I can connect okay; it only seems to trigger after being connected for a little while (anywhere between a few seconds and a few minutes).

Ideas?

Essentially, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC had no rights in forcing manufacturers to include copy protection technology (specifically, the “broadcast flag”) that was intended on limiting unauthorized distribution of over-the-air TV on the internet. However, introduction and mandate acceptance of such broadcast flag would have prevented much innovation in the area by essentially blocking out Open Source/Free Software from using digital television by making the drivers difficult or impossible to write for.

Cory Doctorow has a good write up of the subject at Boing Boing: V-TV DAY: WE WON THE BROADCAST FLAG FIGHT! I suggest you take a look, as this ruling is huge in terms of consumer electronics for the next few years.

As it stands now, the FCC can regain this power to institute a broadcast flag only if congress explicitly passes a law granting them that authority. But no politician wants to pass a law breaking the TV’s of their voters. With any luck, it’ll be a dead issue.

I’ve installed the drivers from Samsung’s website (for Mac OS X 10.3), but they do not seem to show up when I add the printer.

If you aren’t a friend or family, some 400 of those won’t be initially visible to you. If you are a Flickr user already, leave a message here and I’ll add you as a friend. If not, either leave your email and I’ll send you a password to get in, or sign up for Flickr and leave your screenname.

I’ve also put together about 30 photo sets that should be interesting to browse.

I have updated this plugin to use version 2.0.8 of the TextilePHP class. Thanks to Adam Gessaman for the original plugin.

You can download textile2.0.8-smartypants.zip or textile2.0.8-smartypants.tar.gz.

Note: This was updated from Adam’s 2.0.3 plugin (not the more recent 2.0.5 plugin) by merging the changes in the Textile.php class into the plugin using the GNU utilities diff and patch.

Here’s a list of applications and neat additions:

• iChat
  • Ability to choose between Away and Logging Off when using Fast User Switching… this was a huge annoyance for me in the past.
  • Multiple AIM/Jabber accounts
  • Mobile users show up with the word Mobile next to their name. This means I won’t accidentally IM Gary’s phone anymore.

• Group support is much better! (It’s actually usable now, because they adopted a method similar to how all the other IM clients do it).

• Safari
  • RSS: I’m not sure I’ll use this here. I’m quite used to NetNewsWire.
  • Undo in forms! (Was this is Safari 1.3?)

• New page pops up helping you get on the internet if you lack a connection when you try to load a webpage.

• Airport/Wireless

• The menu bar meter seems to always show more bars… nice psycological effect.

• iCal
  • Calendar Groups (much like Folders in iPhoto, etc). Not sure what use these have.

• Show birthdays in iCal (no need for extra programs or plugins).

• Mail
  • Smart mailboxes

• Different interface (unsure about my feelings on this).

• Dictionary
  • Very useful
  • Pretty interface/font selection

• Looks very professional

• Preview
  • Annotation features

• New display options (continuous pages, book mode, etc).

• Spotlight

• AWESOME

• System Preferences

• I like the ability to search for what I’m looking for. Doesn’t always pop up with what I was thinking (e.g. a search for ‘scroll’ doesn’t highlight the Keyboard and Mouse Preference Pane).

• Grapher

• Cool program for plotting 2D and 3D images. It won’t replace gnuplot for making graphs for papers, but it is easier to use than say Mathematica for quickly making and manipulating a 3D graph.

Update: I just remembered I posted my inpressions on the Developer Preview last July. It’s an interesting read to compare my views… some things (like Safari and iChat) were fixed up, but other problems (Dashboard) remain.

For example, yesterday I ordered:

Shipping estimate for these items: February 21, 2005- February 21, 2005
Delivery estimate: February 24, 2005- February 28, 2005

“Colgate Phos-Flur Anti-Cavity Fluoride Rinse, Cool Mint – 16 oz”
Health and Beauty; $9.99

And yet it shipped today, February 14th, a full week before it was scheduled to ship.

I understand that the free shipping probably cuts significantly into Amazon’s bottom line (and therefore they’ll do a lot to get you to pay for shipping), but can they at least not lie about the ship date by a week!?

Update: The other items I ordered (3 books) were shipped the day after (Feb 15th). All arrived on Friday, February 18, almost a full week before the predicted arrival time.

What a great way to temporarily clear the input box to type a quick response.

Key strokes:

• Ctrl-s: replace the input box with the stack.

• Ctrl-up/ctrl-down: Push/pop messages onto a stack.

However, Expose has this little problem when all your windows are the exact same size and all right on top of each other (like if you have a bunch of Safari windows fully maximized after being loaded from say NetNewsWire).

!(/images/2004/09/thumb-expose-issues.jpg “Expose Issues”)!:/images/2004/09/expose-issues.jpg

Apple should try to do something to break the stalemate of where the individual windows go so you could at least see some of them.

However, the problem isn’t that bad because if you have any other window open (like Adium) it figures out a better placement.

It was a charm to get working with WordPress after I found instructions online. In fact, this post was written in MarsEdit

Let me quote the instructions for posterity:

In the (excellent) online help there are special instructions for a number of different blogs but there is not one for WordPress.

To get wordpress to work, the rpc url will be the home url plus “/xmlrpc.php”.

The blog-ID should be set to ‘default’ – it seems to hang if you set it to a number (like 1).

Also note that future posts will be retrieved even though they are not yet visible on the blog (in other words the xmlrpc is not filtering – this is not a MarsEdit problem).”

MarsEdit