Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Thursday, December 30, 2004
19:25 - That trick never works!	(top)
Are we dead yet? I wonder if John Dvorak will ever tire of predicting doom for Apple. Now he says that you can feel free to ignore all those iPod sales this season, the Apple Stores sprouting up in malls everywhere, the Apple logo at the end of Return of the King, and every other sign that the company has never been healthier�because he went scraping through some Apache logs at a particular site and found that Mac users represented only 2.7% of the hits, less even than Linux. Well, shucks. I guess that means I can go hit the W3Schools site a couple dozen times from my Mac and change history, huh? MacDailyNews has a neat little rebuttal, though, using some of those pesky "fact" things we've heard so much about lately: Let's take a look at W3Schools. W3Schools is a website designed to teach people how to develop Web sites for Microsoft's Internet Explorer using the the Microsoft ASP.NET framework. W3Schools statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, and also include "monitoring other sources around the Internet" (W3Schools doesn't disclose which sources or their weight in relation to their own logs). Therefore, it should come as no surprise that visitors to the W3Schools' site would be using predominantly Windows and Internet Explorer. On the flip side, if you took a look at MacDailyNews' logs, you'd conclude that Macs have 91.7% market share and Windows has less than 7%. However, the real stat of importance, the stat Dvorak fails to mention (perhaps because it blows the foundation for his whole theory to pieces), ironically comes directly from W3Schools' windows-slanted logs themselves: Mac market share in March 2003 was pegged at 1.8%. Mac market share in December 2004 was 2.7%. Oh no! More Mac users than ever before are learning how to program for .NET! What'll we do? Meanwhile, how's that whole Passport thing workin' out for ya? Incidentally, I spent about an hour today trying to figure out an alternative to the utterly maddening Windows Media Player, which I'm obligated to use a couple of times a day for various tasks (namely, opening WMV animations created by certain people, scrubbing to a visually auspicious point in the movie, and selecting and saving a still-frame for use as a thumbnail for the movie). Windows Media Player, totally apart from the insane "disappearing mouse-over window-frame" thing and the bizarre bulbous pseudo-transparent shape, drives me bonkers in that dragging the scrub bar control back and forth through the timeline does not actually scrub through the movie�the video desynchronizes and does not update to match where you place the playhead, and even if you try to play it from that point, it might be five or ten seconds before it hits another keyframe and starts showing you video again. So scrubbing to a good point in the movie for a thumbnail is impossible�and to add insult to injury, Windows Media Player has no Copy function. That's right: you can't simply save a still frame. you have to do a screenshot at the Windows level. "Oh, what I'd give," I said, "for the ability to scrub real-time through the movie and save still frames at will, like, oh, I don't know, in the QuickTime Player." But such was not to be my fortune. Until I asked a friend about it and was directed to this site, where you can download a "Classic Media Player" that looks like WMP before they "prettied it up" in the manner befitting Homer with his "makeup gun" invention. Download the "K-Lite Codec Pack" (I got the "Full" one), and use the media player that comes with it. It's pretty trashy; the menus freeze randomly for several seconds every time I try to open them, and the scrub bar is slow and laggy, so I have to scrub slowly�but at least scrubbing works, meaning that this seemingly basic feature of video playback is quite simply beyond Microsoft's competence. The player is also very disk-intensive, meaning that I have to copy the movie to the Windows machine to open it and play it properly, rather than playing it over the network via SMB; but that's a small price to pay�for glory be, it has a "Save Image" function. As hideous as this piece of software is, it's worlds better than WMP. And I've now shaved about 15 minutes of work off my daily chores. Whatever deep-rooted psychological torment John Dvorak must suffer from to make him lash out so pointlessly and cluelessly at Apple whenever a column is due, perhaps this tip will dull his pain a little and we can all be happy.