In LA

I’m used to seeing CDs on the racks at Tower Records bearing stickers that say such things as “Contains the hit tracks ’stupid track’ and ‘another crap rock ballad’” but I never thought I’d see a CD marketed with a sticker saying that it contains music used for a television commercial. How surreal.

Earlier today I tried to quit iPhoto, only to have it inform me that there was a user browsing my shared photos and would I really want to cut off their access by quitting. I was intrigued, as I had no idea that anyone would bother accessing my shared photos (excellent as they are).

The best way to deal with a voyeur is to voyeur back, so I decided to try and figure out who was looking at my share.

Benjamin Han, at his Unix Tips for Mac OS X page, kindly points out a way to see who is listening to one’s iTunes share:

lsof -r 2 -n -P -F n -c iTunes -a -i TCP@`hostname`:3689

So I modified that line to instead check for iPhoto (8770 is the port iPhoto uses for sharing):

lsof -r 2 -n -P -F n -c iPhoto -a -i TCP@`hostname`:8770

And that gave me the IP address of the person browsing my photos. Once I had this IP address, I did not seek out the user behind the address, but instead promptly lost enthusiasm for the whole enterprise. Ah well, I hope they enjoyed the photos.

I hadn’t really paid much attention to RSS until fairly recently, and now I find it very useful. With RSS and a good aggregator I can blaze through my daily scans of news and other websites much faster than I ever could with a web browser using NetNewsWire. It’s a lot easier to skim through such sites as Slashdot, New York Times, BBC News, Fatwallet and Anandtech hot deals forums, Cool Hunting, and MacOSXHints, with a unified and quick interface and pre-downloaded lists of summaries and images.

Similarly, I’d never paid podcasting (basically RSS feeds that list audio files and update on a regular basis) much attention until it landed on my computer via the iTunes 4.9 update. Suddenly, I can easily “subscribe” to podcast feeds of some radio shows that I only occasionally manage to catch on the air, such as KCRW’s “The Treatment” with Elvis Mitchell. But that’s the tip of the icebreg. Not only are many commercial and non-commercial traditional radio broadcasts going to find new listeners due to the ease with which users can now find and subscribe to their podcasts, but so will the many niche and homegrown podcasts.

I’ve subscribed to a few random homegrown podcasts so far, such as a semi-weekly Mohawk language tutorial, The Movie Show, and A Bit of Jewish Wisdom (which is fun to listen to if you picture Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski as the voice reading the bits).

Showtime will be premiering a new show (this fall or winter) entitled Sleeper Cell, about an Al Qaeda-like terrorist cell headquartered in Los Angeles. I hope that’s a temporary title — it is accurate, but “sleeper” in my mind evokes a Woody Allen film about stolen noses, robotic Jewish taylors, and giant bananas rather than excitement, dramatic tension, and action. Regardless of the final title, I’m very much looking forward to this show.

I’ve known about this series for months because my friend Henri Lubatti is part of its regular cast. Henri is a great guy, but he leads a double, sometimes triple life playing murderers, spies, demons, and assasins. I’m really looking forward to seeing him in some long scenes that are written with enough depth for him to sink his teeth into.

This New York Times article On a New Showtime Series, America’s Protector Is a Muslim is the first yet in-depth article on Sleeper Cell.

“Muslim Terrorists” have been a bad-guy staple of American television and film for a long time, but as the title of the article points out, this show is a little different. Rather than show only irretrievably evil Muslims as most simplistic action films have, or throw in one or two minor token good-guy Muslims to defray criticism (Executive Decision, I’m talking about you), the hero of this series is a devout Muslim who feels that it’s imperative that he shut down those who he believes are perverting Islam to violent end.

It will be interesting to see how Showtime markets this series, and how the American public responds. And if you’re considering writing a letter of complaint to showtime, please end it with “PS. Henri was great”. Thanks.

This is a video of one crazy radio-controlled boat/plane. The linked film is windows media but plays fine in Microsoft’s Windows Media player for Mac. Those verticals are amazing.