Thomas Legg's Geek Blog

So I haven't booted back in to Tiger to test 10.4 compatability yet, but it runs fine on my 10.5.8 box. This will require a G4 or G5 as I've enabled altivec optimizations during the build.

The build reports itself as 1.4.3, which just means it comes from the 1.4 branch sometime after the 1.4.2 release was made. There may be a later build that is an official 1.4.3 and we'll get to that when and if it happens.

Download it, test it and let me know if it doesn't work. If it doesn't, please open up Terminal.app and run "grep -i songbirdnest /var/log/system.log" and cut and paste the output in to an email to me. If you need to backup or delete Songbird prefs/application profiles, they are located at ~/Library/Application Support/Songbird2

Songbird 1.4.3 dmg
md5 for Songbird 1.4.3 dmg

So like every good Mac fanboi, I follow MacUpdate/Versiontracker for the latest software updates. So when I saw an update for Livestation (a peer-to-peer TV app for watching live broadcasts from various stations) I was ready to download. But according to MacUpdate the 3.0 version of LiveTracker was Intel only. Lots of software producers have gone this way as they drop support for PPC, but I decided to trudge over to livestation.com and check out the situation for myself.

Loh and behold there is a new 3.0 version of the software available. This normally wouldn't make for a blog post, but the little graphics and captions to differentiate the Mac versions made me laugh. Intel -- Get this one if you have a shiny new Mac. PowerPC -- Get this one if you're in a long term relationship.

That's me. Long term relationship.

Since I was being down all week anyway, I decided to take an extra day to do an OS upgrade. So the server moved from FreeBSD 7.2 stable to FreeBSD 8.0 pre-release. FreeBSD just released 8.0-RC3 and should be very close to a 8.0-stable release within a week or two.

Lots of changes between the 7 and 8 branches, so there was a need to rebuild all of the ports used locally, like perl, php, python, and erlang and apache, postgresql, dovecot, ejabberd, openldap, openser, privoxy, clamav, spam assassin and so on and so forth.

So there were a few hiccups, but I think I've resolved the major issues. So now on with the show.

So the-eleven.com has been having a lot of downtime lately. An old SCSI drive has been having issues and causing kernel panics.

So I backed up the data on the drive, took the server down and performed a SCSI-level format on the drive. I then relabeled and newfs'd the drive and restored the data from the backups. While the machine was unavailable I used the opportunity to move from Postgresql83 to Postgresql84 as well.

While listening to episode 14 of the TuxRadar podcast, they had a not-quite-open ballot question on whether it matters to use free web services versus Free web services. The classic example is the difference between identi.ca and twitter.com

I've had my opinions about Twitter and it's role on the internet for a while as I've listened to folks like Tim O'Reilly tweet about why he uses twitter. Some analysts say because of it's "realtime" features, that it is part of the future of the internet. Most of these analysts though are listed on the featured users list at Twitter. Most of these analysts (and the TuxRadar crew) said the preference from twitter comes from a larger user base and that you can build a larger number of followers more quickly on twitter. What's the point of having more followers? Better conversations? No. More people listening to your broadcasts.

With the modification by twitter of the "mentions" to actually be strictly "replies" and hiding "replies" from the timelines of readers who don't follow both ends of the conversation, it becomes even clearer that Twitter is being designed as a 140 character blast fax service for those who like to pontificate. Replies to a tweet become even less valuable to the greater public discussion, because the default setting is to hide the replies from the public.

On the other hand identi.ca has become more and more about conversations. With the 0.8 release, the developers have even included views of comments in context, so with one click you can checkout a threaded view of the whole conversation. identi.ca also doesn't hide replies to third-parties and there is strong developer reaction against moves towards the twitter model. Why? Because most people on identi.ca find one of the best ways to find new people to follow is to who is participating in interesting conversations. If you follow PersonA and they make a comment to PersonB about a topic you find interesting, you never need a FollowFriday recommendation to check out PersonB. On Twitter either PersonB won't see the comment from PersonA because it's not a direct reply (so no show in the mentions section) or the reply from PersonA is hidden from all of his followers who aren't already following PersonB. The filtering/censoring of information flow by twitter makes it far less useful as a tool for conversations than other communications media.

The larger user base makes it a great broadcast media and thus the hot buzzword from marketing and VC types who fancy themselves as "social media experts". If you want to actually learn about the software and services, like xmpp or memcached or comet or rabbitmq that really are creating the new real-time web move your ass over to identi.ca and stop filling your head with the drivel of the hustlers and self-proclaimed experts at Twitter who don't have the technical expertise to actually give an expert opinion on any of these technologies.