Posted January 22nd, 2009 @ 08:00am by Erik J. Barzeski
I'm pleased to announce the release of Rivet 2.0, a free upgrade to all Rivet 1.0 customers and a product that's holding steady at its $18.95 price despite the doubling of its feature set.
Rivet 2.0 supports both the Xbox 360 and the PS3!
In addition to supporting the PS3, this release has several other features and improvements:
Displays photos within deeply nested projects/folders in Aperture. Prior versions would fail at about three to four levels.
Dramatically speeds up load times of media and photo thumbnail loading by as much as 800%.
Fixed file size info for files larger then 4 GB ((If, of course, the console supports playback of that file and encoding type.)). If you've got a file that big, it'll stream now.
Fixed folder parsing for items in folders more than six levels deep.
Fixed an issue that caused problems when folders contained folders and files.
Fixed an issue that caused the iTunes library parser to abort and list no tracks.
Removed the filtering of iTunes Plus files because the PS3 plays them.
Unlike some other companies, who would have you spend $40 and run two applications, Rivet is an all-in-one solution for $18.95, and again, a free upgrade to anyone with a license.
Posted January 19th, 2009 @ 02:27pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Florio of PFT objects to the playing of music while players were injured at Heinz Field yesterday.
Call it making something out of nothing. Call it overly PC. I call it "Florio knows how many Steelers fans there are and he's trolling for hits."
The fans were respectfully silent. They wished Willis "good luck" and everything else while he was being carted off the field. They cheered (encouragement) when he was moving around.
The quotes I choose to pull will tell you where I stand on this.
Posted January 14th, 2009 @ 10:50pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I've changed this site's favicon. It's no longer the old FSS orange: it's now the Rivet icon which I've appropriated for a few other places, too: my Twitter icon, my chat bubbles (in comments here), and a few other forums.
Posted January 13th, 2009 @ 10:59pm by Erik J. Barzeski
140 characters is not much to work with.
Keep your Twitter names short. @ replies suck when you're wasting 20 characters on a username.
BTW, mine's "iacas." But that falls under "duh." Follow me if you'd like - I'll probably follow you if I have any clue who you are or if you live in the Erie area.
Posted January 10th, 2009 @ 11:30am by Erik J. Barzeski
For awhile now, we've noticed that iTunes Plus songs - despite being "AAC files" according to Apple - will not play on the Xbox 360 when streamed from Rivet.
There were work-arounds. Primary among these was choosing "Convert to AAC" from within iTunes. This method has the unfortunate side effects of re-encoding and re-compressing the music ((I'm not certain if re-encoding at 256 kpbs technically re-encoded the file, resulting in a loss of quality.)) and losing your metadata.
What reason did we have for the work-arounds? It turns out Apple's doing something a bit funky with the files. A little research led to the post of a Nokia N95 user named Joshua, who discovered that the pinf atom is listed as a sibling instead of a child, "breaking" the AAC file (at least as far as the Xbox 360 and Nokia N95 are concerned).
I'm not sure why Apple chose to do this, but since it's been this way since version 7.2, I'm no longer holding my breath for a fix ((If a fix is even needed - maybe this conforms to the AAC specification?)) from them. It's been too long ((Though, admittedly, the new wave of people upgrading to iTunes Plus songs may put more pressure on them.)) and I doubt Apple cares much about the Xbox 360 or other products ((And again, that's if it's even off-spec.)).
Fortunately, Joshua's put together a Java application (works on 10.5.6) that copies the file, fixing the "incorrect" bit in the process, and leaves you with both copies.
I think comment reply notification is one of the most critical things you can add to a blog. Sure, people can check back to see more comments or, on some systems, subscribe to that post's comment feed, but both of those are much less elegant than clicking a "Subscribe to Comments" checkbox that emails you when new comments are posted.
I'm probably four or five times less likely to post a comment when there's no "Subscribe to Comments" functionality.
Posted January 8th, 2009 @ 07:22pm by Erik J. Barzeski
On My PowerMacBook Pro, when I wake it up, it takes a little while to grab the 802.11n connection from the Time Capsule that serves as its base station and its place of backup. Unfortunately, in the ten seconds acquisition takes, Time Machine tries - and fails - to start a backup. Why can't it just wait? If I don't manually start it, the thing rarely gets a backup in because I don't use it long enough for the next attempt.
On my desktop (Mac Pro), I back up to another internal disk. Occasionally a file will be modified while backing up (most often likely my Entourage database), and Time Machine will put up a dialog alerting me to the problem. The issue I have with this is that even four or ten successful backups later, the dialog is still there. The dialog might appear at 9pm one evening and, when I sit down at 9am the next morning, I'll see a dialog about a problem that happened 11 backup cycles ago.
I'm pleased to announce the release of Rivet 2.0, a free upgrade to all Rivet 1.0 customers and a product that's holding steady at its $18.95 price despite the doubling of its feature set.
If you can see each of the shades of grey (black/white) to the right, congratulations: your display is at least moderately well 
U = University
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