nerdyH writes "The Debian project's maintainer, Luke Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the 'testing' or 'Lenny' tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux in ... September! The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian — and by extension, in the inner sanctum source lists of distributions such as Ubuntu that are based on it. After the freeze starts next week, Debian maintainers will turn their attention to 364 release-critical bugs, and half-a-dozen high-priority goals. Given the work to be done, is September really feasible? Lenny always was a little slow getting back to his right place ..."

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Your guilt at work. If ten people sign up for a tenner-a-month ORG membership and send their confirmation code to Danny O’Brien, he’ll put out a special one-off issue of NTK!

creyes123 writes "I run a free website with an online model airplane design calculator. The number of registered users has quickly climbed and I've gotten many compliments. Out of nowhere, a fellow shows up and proceeds to bad mouth the calculator in a posting in one of my forums. After I politely point out that he's mistaken and should have looked at the documentation before posting, he changes the subject and bad mouths a different 'flaw.' The cycle repeats a few more times, with no apparent end in sight. I want to encourage folks to share their opinions, but constructive criticism was clearly not his goal. I feel that the whole episode was just a massive time waster for me. What did I do to deserve this? Could I have handled this better?"

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Slatterz links to a story which shows that nowadays, it's sometimes possible to find out whether someone is a dog on the Internet, excerpting: "A freelance photographer is facing a £22,000 bill after setting up a fake Facebook page that libelled a former classmate. Grant Raphael, a freelance photographer, set up a Facebook page in the name of former school friend Mathew Firsht and posted false information about his sexual and political preferences. He also set up another page for Firsht's television company, the latter entitled 'Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?' ... 'The significance of this case is that it shows that what you post is not harmless, but has consequences,' media lawyer, Jo Sanders, of Harbottle & Lewis, told the BBC."

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Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret (allthingsd.com) consider the new App Store “the single best feature in Apple’s second generation iPhone 3G.” The “easy availability of so many programs,” they say, “makes the iPhone a true computing platform, like a pocket-sized Windows or Macintosh PC,” one that allows iPhone owners to “have a device with fresh, different capabilities every day.”

“Better than the original in almost every way,” iPhone 3G “is an endless source of entertainment — as well as a platform for useful business applications that transform it from a cute gadget into a true hand-held computer,” suggests Mike Himowitz (baltimoresun.com).

Brad Templeton writes "I (whom you may know as EFF Chairman, founder of early dot-com Clari.Net and rec.humor.funny) have just released a new series of futurist essays on the amazing future of robot cars, coming to us thanks to the DARPA Grand Challenges. The computer driver is just the beginning — the essays detail how robocars can enable the cheap electric car, save millions of lives and trillions of dollars, and are the most compelling thing computer geeks can work on to save the planet. Because robocars can refuel, park and deliver themselves, and not simply be chauffeurs, they end up changing not just cars but cities, industries, energy, and — by removing dependence on foreign oil — even wars. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords." (More below.)

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Thanks to a “dramatic overhaul,” Aperture 2, “Apple’s all-in-one photography tool, overtakes Adobe’s Lightroom,” reports Alex Singleton (macworld.co.uk). “Much faster than its predecessor,” Aperture 2 has “a new user interface [that] makes it more appealing to first-time users, and over 100 new features means it significantly leapfrogs Lightroom in functionality.”

Dekortage writes "As today's lawsuit indicates, Hasbro has apparently had enough of Scrabulous, the online word game remarkably similar to Scrabble. Filed in New York, Hasbro's suit is against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, brothers from Kolkata, India, and asks the court to remove the Scrabulous application from Facebook, disable the Scrabulous.com web site, and grant damages and attorneys fees to Hasbro. Why did Hasbro tale so long to 'protect' its intellectual property rights in court? They waited 'in deference to the fans' until EA had launched the official Scrabble Facebook app earlier this month. EA's version has netted fewer than ten thousand players, versus Scrabulous' estimated 2.3 million. This was the next logical step for Hasbro after filing DMCA takedown notices against Scrabulous in January."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Forrester report released on Wednesday revealed that of 50,000 enterprise users, over 87 percent were still using WIndows XP. The author of the report compared Vista to the ill-fated "New Coke"

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder examines what appears to be an open source job market boom, as evidenced by a recent O'Reilly Report. According to the study, 5 to 15 percent of all IT openings call for open source software skills, and with overall IT job cuts expected for 2009, 'the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software,' Snyder writes. But are enterprises truly shifting to open source, or are they simply seeking to augment the work of staff already steeped in proprietary software? The study's methodology leaves too much room for interpretation, Savio Rodrigues retorts. 'That's why the 5% to 15% really doesn't sit well with me,' Rodrigues writes. 'I suspect that larger companies are looking for developers with a mix of experience with proprietary and open source products, tools and frameworks,' as opposed to those who would work with open source for 90 percent of the work day."

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TechFiends32 writes "After years of working with NASA to bring Internet connectivity to deep space, scientists say Vint Cerf's efforts may be nearing completion. To combat the apparent challenges of extending the Internet into space (such as meteors and weighty, high-powered antennas), Cerf and others have made significant efforts, like adjusting satellite-based IP, and working on delay-tolerant networking (DTN) to address pure IP's limitations in space. According to principal engineer at The Mitre Corp., Keith Scott, 'The 2010 goal is designed to bring DTN to a sufficient level of maturity to incorporate it into designs for robotic and human lunar exploration.'"

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What makes the App Store “a win for the user”? Andy Ihnatko (suntimes.com) ticks off the reasons: “The entire universe of iPhone software is in one central location.” “Prices start at free.” “Buying and installing an app is dead simple and reliable.” And thanks to the App Store, iPhone and iPod touch now “represent a formidable and legitimate new computing platform.”

Even though Apple has apologized to subscribers for the glitches in the MobileMe launch, MobileMe's problems are nowhere near over, according to David Pogue at the New York Times on Thursday

RevWaldo contributes a link to an AP story carried by Google, according to which "The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer. The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don't find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration." RevWaldo continues: "One possible solution offered? 'Use a wireless headset.' No risk of EM exposure from one of them, no sirree!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

skeazer writes "Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students' homes. It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph — part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act — is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress objects to it."

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Silverback has launched!. Clearleft’s “guerilla usability” software for OS X Tiger and Leopard—specialist screencasting software optimised for conducting usability tests.

Apple's products and Western IP laws are currently incompatible with China's politics, according to Mike Elgan at<em> Datamation</em> on Wednesday. It's a messy reality

Thanks to Stig Albjerg for alerting us to a subtle problem that has cropped up in iTunes 7.7, Apple's latest release. Playing or getting info on songs whose artist or track names contain accented characters causes those characters to be swapped with other other characters, rendering the names incorrect or even unreadable. For people with large collections of non-English music (or, I imagine, heavy metal!), this is, needless to say, troubling. It affects only MP3 files, not AAC files, and seems to be related to the string encoding format used in ID3v2.2 tags. Thus, it may also affect tracks named with Unicode characters, such as Japanese or Chinese.

Although not all iTunes users seem to be suffering the problem, I was able to reproduce it in iTunes 7.7 running under Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Affected tracks show an ID3 Tag field of v2.2 or earlier in the Summary pane of the Get Info window. The problem occurred only with songs that I ripped before mid-2007 using versions of iTunes prior to 7.3. (Tracks ripped using iTunes 7.0.2 suffer the problem; apparently I didn't rip anything using versions between 7.0.2 and 7.3, so I can't quite tell when Apple stopped including ID3 tags in ripped tracks.)

Unfortunately, the only solution for tracks that have been played or viewed in the Get Info window is to correct the artist and track names manually in iTunes. Once fixed, they'll stay fixed.

Prevention is more important, and for that you'll want to select the tracks that contain accented characters in iTunes and then choose Advanced > Convert ID3 Tags > ID3 Tag Version > v2.4. Although I've seen a report that doing this deleted album artwork, that didn't happen in my testing. Don't mess with any of the other options in the Convert ID3 Tags dialog.

The brute force approach to fixing the ID3 tags is to select everything in iTunes and then do the conversion. Be careful, though. Depending on how many tracks you have selected, it could take some time to modify all the files, especially if your music is stored on a server and accessed over a network. Also, because you're modifying each file, you will likely end up backing up all those files again, thus wasting a potentially large amount of space in your backup.

For a more focused fix, search for and convert just those tracks that will be affected. Unfortunately, iTunes can't distinguish between accented and unaccented characters in its search, but there's a workaround. Using a text editor like Bare Bones Software's TextWrangler or BBEdit, open the iTunes Music Library.xml file that's in your iTunes folder. You can then search for various accented characters, and if you're not sure what they are, look near the end of this thread in the Apple Discussions for a list of common ones.

Of course, another option is simply to avoid playing any affected tracks until Apple fixes the bug in a future version of iTunes. There's no telling how long it will take for a fixed version to appear, if it ever does.

 

Copyright © 2008 Adam C. Engst. TidBITS is copyright © 2008 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you're reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

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