Why does this seem like a joke?

FruuppIt was bound to happen eventually, and now it has. Tonight I finally joined Twitter (follow me!). One of my first acts as a Twit (?) was to become a follower of some people I have already been following in more traditional fashions — if blogs and podcasts can be considered “traditional.” And those would be: gruber of Daring Fireball, and scottsimpson, lonelysandwich and hotdogsladies of You Look Nice Today.

I am already a little scared of the power of Twitter. It feels like I’m injecting other people’s thoughts directly into my brain, especially if you are foolish enough to delve into the public timeline. Truly frightening. And a stark reminder that, obscure though you may be, what you do on Twitter is public.

And now then, on to what I’m actually writing about. This tweet from scottsimpson brought to my attention (or to my recollection, as I think I had heard of them before) an obscure early ’70s Irish, as he puts it, “‘hengeprog” rock band named Fruupp.

The unofficial fan site seems suspiciously like an elaborately conceived parody: Spinal Tap, now with more Stonehenge. For a while I was convinced the band had never really existed, until I heard some rare live recordings (warning, it’s MySpace) and found their jaw-droppingly high-priced import CDs on Amazon. So it appears they are were real, after all! Intrigued, I am. (Sorry, been watchin’ a lot of Star Wars lately with the kids.) But not at those prices.

And now, as I drift off into dreamland, I ponder my ability to convey future thoughts within the constraints of 140 characters.

RegisTrap 0.4 released

Luckily the bug in RegisTrap I discovered yesterday after upgrading to WordPress 2.7 turned out to be a very minor one. I just had to move the return $errors; line outside of a conditional in my function to ensure that it’s always returned, even if no error value was set. In the previous version of WordPress, it didn’t matter that if there were no errors the function was returning… well, nothing… but in the new version it seems you can’t apply an error handling filter without returning a WP_Error object.

Anyway… it works now, and you can download version 0.4 right now from my site. I’ve also checked it into the main WordPress Subversion repository, so it should be showing up on the official site sometime fairly soon. Enjoy!

Special thanks to Jenny for happening to try registering for the site within about 8 hours after I had upgraded, and bringing the problem to my attention. Otherwise I might have gone days or weeks without knowing the plugin was broken!

It’s definitely still necessary though, because in about a day of running my site without the plugin I had already received over a half dozen spam registrations.

Wherefore my Mac malaise?

Mac and PC -- do they both suck?Anyone who knows me well knows what a Mac fanatic I am. I’ve used Macs exclusively since 1994 (except one Dell desktop I stupidly purchased in 2000… but I did still own an iBook at the time), when the LC 475 I purchased as a sophomore in college replaced the pitiful Tandy 1000 EX my parents had bought for me in 1987 when I was in seventh grade.

Over the past 14 years I have owned a number of Macs, specifically:

1994: Macintosh LC 475
Sold three years later to this guy.
1997: Motorola Starmax 3000
Yes, a clone… those were the days; I ended up selling it to my mother-in-law.
1998: PowerBook 1400c
Sold on eBay.
1998: Souped-up Macintosh SE
Purchased second-hand for $50 at a now-defunct Computer Renaissance; I still have it although it doesn’t really work… and I don’t have an ADB keyboard and mouse anymore… but I fired it up last week for the heck of it and at least got to the question mark folder icon.
1999: Power Macintosh G3
Blue-and-white, first generation; sold a couple years later to the singer in a band I was in in Atlanta — which now has only one remaining member from those days, and possibly the worst MySpace page in existence… no offense, guys.
2000: “Toilet seat” “Clamshell”-style iBook, graphite
I still have it but it barely works.
2002: Inspired-by-the-desk-lamp-in-the-Pixar-stinger iMac G4
I still have it, and it still works perfectly, although there’s some weird damage on part of the LCD display.
2004: 12-inch iBook G4
Currently SLP’s main computer.
2006: 13-inch white MacBook
Recently sold to my dad.
2008: 13-inch black MacBook
I am typing on it right now. Also, spare me the comments about paying $150 just for the color.

So that makes (at least — I don’t think I’ve forgotten any) ten Macintosh computers I’ve owned in a 14-year period. Half of which are still in my house today. I could also regale you with a similar chronology of the various iPods that have lived in my house, but we don’t have all day.

Clearly, I believe the point has been made: I’m a big Apple nut. But lately I just haven’t been feeling the love. I’m trying to figure out why. I still use my MacBook every day and have no desire to switch platforms (even though it is currently configured to triple boot Mac OS X, Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux, so it’s not like I don’t have options). I am rarely more than 10 feet away from my iPhone. I think the new line of MacBooks is fantastic, and I am extremely envious, even though I’ve only owned my current (last-generation) MacBook for about three months.

And yet… for the past few weeks, I just feel like the relationship has lost that spark. But why?

There are a few possible explanations:

XBOX 360. It pains me to have to praise a Microsoft product. It’s like the Fonz admitting he was wrong. I just can’t quite get the words out of my mouth. And yet, what can I really say? In the video game world I’ve been almost as loyal (OK, a rabid fanboy) to Nintendo as I’ve been to Apple with computers. And yet, I’ve still used Windows. I know the experience. And I owned an original XBOX. It was pretty cool, to be sure, but it didn’t really seem to have that much over the GameCube besides a better selection of games. I’ve always been hooked on the Nintendo franchises (Mario, Zelda, Metroid) and I’ve owned both a DS and a Wii for a couple years now. But although the DS has seen some serious action, I have to admit I’ve been disappointed with the Wii, mainly for the mountains of shovelware and dearth of decent games available for it. So when my annual Black Friday ritual came around this year, I went for it and bought an XBOX 360, and it was like stepping out of the cave for the first time. It’s not just the graphics. It’s not just the cool games. Microsoft has really nailed the user experience with this, and the online options with XBOX Live are mind-blowing, especially compared to the anemic efforts Nintendo has put into the Wii’s online services.

Of course, despite their outstanding success with the XBOX 360, Microsoft can never quite make a perfect user interface, as anyone who’s ever had to key in track names when ripping a CD on an XBOX 360 can attest. Neither Apple nor Nintendo would ever stand for the clunky, tedious process Microsoft subjects you to in this regard. But honestly, that’s the only bad thing I can say about the XBOX 360 so far. I love it. It’s a Microsoft product, and I freakin’ love it. I love it so much, I want to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant. (OK, that crossed the line, but Tracy Jordan fans will appreciate it.)

The sucktastic world of iPhone apps. I cannot express how much eagerness was pent up within my being by the day the App Store finally went live. And like many iPhone devotees, I devoured as many apps as I could. Granted, many of the apps are outstanding. But with every passing day the ratio of good-to-crap goes down by an order of magnitude. It’s beyond disheartening to see the potential of this revolutionary platform being squandered on all of the pointless 99-cent apps that have flooded the store. But sadly, Apple’s woefully undercooked interface for the app store seems to encourage cheap, fast and pointless rather than high-quality, useful, well-designed applications. So that’s been a major let down.

Underdogs no more. I’m not sure why, or what it reveals about me, but I am almost always a fervent supporter of the underdog. Maybe it’s the dismal state of American politics over the last eight — no, 14 — years. Maybe it’s the fact that my hometown sports teams are perpetually doomed. (I realized last week that, at some point in the season, the Vikings always choke. Every year, in the history of the franchise. Think about it. The only thing they never fail to do is fail.) Maybe it’s simply due to the fact that I have been a Mac supporter for so long, and I’ve seen the company struggle to reach the high single digits of market share (not that market share matters nearly as much as some would have you believe). Whatever the case, my underdog fetish has been fed well by my devotion to both Apple and Nintendo for the past several years. But now Nintendo is producing the top selling video game systems, both console and handheld, and although Apple still has a long way to go in the battle for the desktop (if that’s even relevant anymore), their market share has surged, they possess unparalleled dominance of the MP3 player and music download markets, and they’re tantalizingly close to the top of the heap for smartphones. But if neither Apple nor Nintendo is an underdog anymore, can I still love them?

I’m not sure I can yet say definitively what it is that has caused me to lose some of my enthusiasm for Cupertino. But it’s provided some much needed self-reflection (most of which, I am sure, could not be less interesting to anyone else, but here it is for your disinterest nonetheless), and I think the effort of cataloging my long history of Apple computers has actually helped to remind me a little of what has made me so loyal to them for all of these years.

WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” is out!

WordPressThe latest version (2.7) of WordPress, codenamed “Coltrane,” has just been released, and it looks like a winner!

I have obvious reasons for liking this version of WordPress for its codename alone, but I am also extremely impressed with the new enhancements to the Dashboard. It is a delight to use (design counts, both aesthetically and practically), and upgrading was seamless.

Well, almost.

I found out today that RegisTrap, my registration spam-busting plug-in, is broken in this new version. Broken as in it makes your registration form not work. So, if you happen to be one of the five or six other people in the known universe who are using it, and you upgrade to WP 2.7, you’ll want to deactivate the plug-in until I can update it. (For now I am just going to run the site without it and see if registration spam is even a problem anymore with this version.)

Overall though, more outstanding work from the WordPress dev team! Kudos!

Update, about 24 hours later: In the day (roughly) since I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and deactivated RegisTrap, I’ve already received a half dozen spam registrations. I can’t possibly be unique in this, and my site doesn’t even draw very heavy traffic. How can the WordPress core team not be doing something about this problem? I’m kind of in disbelief, but I guess it just means I need to get to work on updating RegisTrap for WP 2.7 compatibility. I hope to get on that by next week.

Strictly for the Yes fan(s) out there

I realize I’m not exactly surrounded by a vast sea of Yes fans. We’re few and far between, and with every further Spinal Tap-esque step our beloved band takes, our numbers dwindle even more.

Perhaps no step the band could have taken would epitomize their claim to the title of “real-life Spinal Tap” more than the tour they’ve undertaken this year. With legendary lead singer Jon Anderson facing a long recuperation from acute respiratory failure, and longtime keyboardist Rick Wakeman no longer up to the rigors of touring either, the band forged ahead on the potentially dangerous decision to have Rick’s son Oliver fill in on the keyboard duties, and they (temporarily) replaced Jon Anderson with a guy named Benoit David, lead singer of a Montreal-based Yes tribute band that bassist Chris Squire discovered on the Internet.

True fans may see parallels between the current situation and the infamous period in 1980 when, faced with the abrupt departure of Anderson and Wakeman (Anderson’s first, Wakeman’s second), the band recruited The Buggles as replacements, because they happened to be recording in the same studio at the time.

Trevor Horn may be a great producer (may be), and he’s a decent enough singer. But he could never be a replacement for Jon Anderson, and not just because Chris Squire made him perform songs at Madison Square Garden after only having heard them on a cassette during the limo ride to the gig. (Does it really happen? It can happen.)

Although I have seen Yes live more than any other band (five times), I had no intention of seeing them on this tour. That may be in part because it would’ve required driving to Milwaukee, but I’ve driven to Milwaukee for a concert by a prog rock dinosaur before (King Crimson in 2000). Mostly, though, I was afraid of Benoit David.

Then I saw this:

Pardon the poor sound and picture quality. Apparently Yes is OK with having video from someone’s cell phone represent them on their official site. So be it. But the lack of visual clarity only helps to reinforce the message I’m trying to convey here. You wouldn’t know by looking (the white pants, the vest, the quasi-conductor dancing) — or by listening — but no, that’s not Jon Anderson. It’s Benoit David. And now I get why Chris Squire was so excited to bring him in as a substitute. Too bad teh interwebz didn’t exist 28 years ago.

And too bad we can’t shut up the tone-deaf holder of the cell phone.

Full disclosure of geekdom: 8 or 9 years ago, before Yesworld was established, I ran a Yes fan website — well, it actually poked fun at the band, song by song, album by album, but it was done out of love — and I was approached to be the webmaster for the band’s official site. It was not a paid gig, of course — I would’ve just been compensated with some merch, backstage passes, stuff like that. I decided it was too much work for too little reward; plus, it would probably mean I’d have to take down my own site. Which I eventually did anyway.