blueZhift Blog

During the bits of Super Bowl XXXIX that I watched yesterday (prior to Iron Chef America), Napster ran some ads for their new Napster To Go music service. The ad promises to allow you to fill up your music player for a mere $15/month (actually $14.95) which is  a lot less than the $10K it would cost to fill up your iPod with 10K songs. Well this math is certainly correct and sounds like a good deal when pitched that way. But as the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics! That may be stretching it a bit, but the damnation lies in what Napster doesn’t tell you in the ad.

What they don’t tell you is that you only get to keep those songs and play them as long as you continue to pay $14.95/month. Not only that, if you do not sync your portable music player with the service at least once a month, it will stop playing the songs you’ve downloaded to it. This is all in the terms and conditions on the Napster web site. I guess there wasn’t enough time to talk about this on TV.

Well this sounds more like being Married to the Napster than Napster to Go. There’s certainly more commitment than a lot of marriages these days. I mean, if you get a divorce, you usually get to keep half of your stuff. But with Napster to Go, forget it! Once you cancel or fail to check in regularly, you lose your whole downloaded collection.

Some people may find that this is still a good deal, but it would be nice if Napster were more upfront with the true level of commitment required for this relationship. There’s nothing new about this though, this model has been tried before and largely rejected, hence the popularity of the iPod and iTunes Music Store. So I can only guess that Napster hopes to hook a lot of suckers before they discover that they’re locked in.

Well it’s upgrade time! So if this site is acting a little strange, well, you get the picture….

Today I spent a good deal of time looking at Plone, the content management system written in Zope which is itself written in Python. I’ve been  working on a Zope based app for a while now and have gotten fairly comfortable with Zope, but I hadn’t given Plone much of a look at all. That all began to change last week when I had a situation in which a Plone based portal would have made things a lot easier for the customer.

To make a long story short, Plone has just blown me away! I’ve installed it on both Windows and Linux systems without a hitch and so far I’m very impressed. I’ve been building portals around PHP-Nuke which is a nice package, but Plone runs circles around it in terms of flexibility and ease of use. I know many great modules have been built for PHP-Nuke and I’ve been able to modify many for my own purposes, but Plone just seems to make all of this easier which means less time for me to set up.

In particular, role based user access and security is built into Plone from the underlying Zope. This is the biggest pain to implement in PHP leaving plenty of opportunities for security holes. Another thing I’ve grown to love about Zope and Plone is the browser based management interface. You can do virtually anything in the browser and since everything is stored as an object in Zope’s database, you don’t have to monkey around with the file system to manage your site. I’ll still keep using PHP for some things, but I am definitely a Plone fan now!

When I bought my iPod over a year ago, the first time I used it in public during my lunch time walk abouts, it felt like I’d gone backwards in time. During my college years I would often go on walks around Hyde Park and along the lake shore with my portable cassette player and whatever cheap headphones I had at the time. It was fun to overlay my own soundtrack on the world around me. So experiencing this with my iPod was like revisiting my youth, not that my youth is all gone yet!

This is all good fun, but could there be more to it? Markus Giesler, an assistant professor of marketing at York University in Toronto seems to think so. He thinks that iPods are transforming their users into cyborgs. In his view, a cyborg is someone who uses a variety of technologies and is highly connected. Well that certainly makes me guilty. Keeping the pod fed has led me to make a few computer upgrades for convenience and has increased my desire for convergent devices that embody multiple functions. My poor Palm IIIe finds itself left out in the cold as my cell phone, tiny USB drive, and iPod usurp much of its functionality. While I have no desire to take the next step and make these devices a part of my body, I’m sure that given a chance, many people are going to do just that in the coming years.

Resistance is futile. You too will be assimilated, to the tune of JPop anime soundtracks!

Here’s a little something I just got in the CNet newsletter. It’s a little old now, but pretty funny. In Dear IE, I’m Leaving You for Good, Robert Vamosi describes his unhappy breakup with old squeeze Internet Explorer. All I can say is, I hear you! Four years ago I was really excited about IE because it had all of these cool programming hooks, bells, and whistles. It really looked like a platform that a Windows programmer could build on, and to some extent that is still true. But once Netscape Navigator all but died, IE got all fat and lazy. No more sweet talk of new features, no more cool stuff, no more nothing!

Firefox is my browser of choice these days. I only use IE for Windows Update (because you have to) and testing web pages for compatibility.

After much on and off badgering, the good kind mind you, my lovely spouse has finally joined the blogosphere. Be sure to check out Willow Talk, and bring your brain, it’s a bit more intellectual than the fare you’ll usually find here or anywhere else! So welcome to the machine! I think the internet just became a better place.