TidBITS#790/01-Aug-05
=====================
An era comes to an end, as Adam reports on the proceedings of
the final ADHOC/MacHack conference. Jeff Carlson takes a break
from reality, for a good cause: reviewing Star Wars Battlefront.
Also this week, Geoff Duncan looks at the revised iBook and Mac
mini lines, and in the news, we cover HP dropping the iPod,
iPhoto 5.0.4, and Dejal Software's Simon 2.0.
Topics:
MailBITS/01-Aug-05
Apple Revs Up iBooks, Doubles Mac mini RAM
Adieu ADHOC
Pounding the Ground in Star Wars Battlefront
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/01-Aug-05
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MailBITS/01-Aug-05
------------------
**HP Dropping the iPod** -- Only one month after adding the iPod
shuffle to its product lineup, Hewlett-Packard reportedly plans
to stop reselling Apple's iPod digital music players by the end
of September 2005. The reselling arrangement between Apple and HP
was launched in January 2004 to much fanfare and, at the time,
seemed like a good way for Apple to get the not-yet utterly iconic
digital music player into new retail and marketing channels. But
that's not quite how things worked out: HP apparently never made
much money selling iPods, and its versions often fell behind
Apple's product offerings and were sold as discounted also-rans.
HP's portion of the iPod phenomenon reportedly amounted to less
than 5 percent of iPod units sold. And HP has bigger problems
to solve: it's currently in the process of jettisoning about 10
percent of its workforce in order to make its bottom line roughly
$2 billion fatter. [GD]
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jan/08hp.html>
**iPhoto 5.0.4 Flips Photos Properly** -- Apple has released
iPhoto 5.0.4, a minor update that "addresses an issue with
browsing photos that have been auto-rotated by a camera."
Honestly, I've not seen the problem (it seems to relate to
editing photos that were auto-rotated by your camera and that
appear in the wrong orientation), but the speed with which
5.0.4 followed 5.0.3 means that it's probably bugging a bunch
of people. The update is roughly 40 MB via Software Update or
as a standalone download. [ACE]
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/iphoto504update.html>
**Simon 2 Says: Monitor Your Server** -- Dejal Software has
released Simon 2, a major update to their server monitoring
utility. Simon performs repetitive checks on a remote Internet
service and reports back if the test fails and, if so, when the
service comes back online. Simon can also watch Web pages for
changes. The most important new feature is a Port service that
provides the capability to check virtually any server type;
that's key for keeping tabs on POP, IMAP, SMTP, AFP, DHCP, and
other servers that weren't previous supported. Simon can notify
you of problems with a variety of local actions, via email
(which can enable text messages to cell phones), by launching
an application (which extends Simon's reach even further),
by playing a sound, or by speaking pre-defined text. Simon 2
also features a more flexible interface that better lends
itself to the creation and maintenance of many tests and
multiple notifiers. Simon 2 costs $30 (Basic License: 7 tests),
$60 (Standard License: 20 tests), or $200 (Enterprise: unlimited
number of tests). It's a 3.4 MB download. [ACE]
<http://www.dejal.com/simon/>
Apple Revs Up iBooks, Doubles Mac mini RAM
------------------------------------------
by Geoff Duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Apple Computer last week took the wraps off minor updates to two
affordable segments of its Macintosh product lines, speeding up
and improving the iBook portable line while (finally!) doubling
the default RAM installed in Mac minis.
<http://www.apple.com/ibook/>
<http://www.apple.com/macmini/>
Improvements to the iBooks aren't just limited to processor
speeds - which have been boosted to PowerPC G4s running at 1.33
GHz in the 12-inch model and 1.42 GHz in the 14-inch model -
but extend to a higher-performance ATI Mobility Radeon graphics
controller, built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth wireless
technology, and the scrolling trackpad and Sudden Motion Sensor
technologies which originally appeared in the PowerBook G4 line.
Prices start at $1,000 for a 12-inch iBook with 512 MB RAM,
a 40 GB hard drive, and 512 MB of RAM; prices for the 14-inch
model start at $1,300. A variety of build-to-order options are
available for iBooks, including larger hard drives, more pre-
installed RAM (although we usually recommend purchasing RAM
through less-costly sources than Apple), and, for the 14-inch
model, slot-loading SuperDrives. iBooks still sport two USB 2.0
ports and a single FireWire 400 port, along with 10/100Base-T
Ethernet; iBooks ship with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Apple's
iLife '05 application suite pre-installed.
Apple's also cranked up the default RAM installation across
its Mac mini product line, with 512 MB of RAM now being the
new standard with no change in Mac mini pricing, which still
starts at $500. The top two Mac mini models - at $600 and
$700 - now include AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth wireless
connectivity by default, and the most-tricked-out Mac mini
offers a slot-loading SuperDrive. Mac minis also ship with
Tiger and iLife '05 pre-installed.
Adieu ADHOC
-----------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
After 20 years, ADHOC, the conference formerly known as MacHack,
is shutting down. Attendance, which was similar to the level of
last year at about 100, was simply too low to be sustainable;
conference organizer Expotech essentially broke even on the show
for the second straight year. With increased competition from
companies handling their own logistics for small conferences and
from large exhibition organizers now handling smaller conferences
than they would previously have considered, Expotech's Carol Lynn
decided to close down her company and move on.
<http://www.adhocconf.com/>
Honestly, it's a blow. ADHOC/MacHack was a fixture in the lives
of many of us, and numerous top Macintosh programmers honed their
skills and made key contacts at MacHacks of the past. Winning the
MacHax Group's Best Hack Contest was a mark of honor for years,
and the contest generated both early takes on software that would
later become available commercially and proofs-of-concept that
would find their way into the Mac OS itself (I still remember the
standing ovation, coupled with happy catcalls of "Useful!", that
greeted Lisa Lippincott's UnFinder, a hack that finally added
Undo to the Finder many years after the debut of the Macintosh).
ADHOC/MacHack was unique, and everyone who attended a show will
mourn the passing of its unique aspects, the hacks, the midnight
keynotes, the sleep deprivation, the convivial atmosphere of
Mac geeks at all hours of the hotel lobby, the always-available
snacks, the nightly pizza or ice cream parties, the last-day
movie, and more. Other conferences could mimic some of these
ideas, but I've yet to experience one that did.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05470>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1199>
Alas, there's no sense crying over spilt milk, and so let's
celebrate the passing of ADHOC with a look at what made this
year's event as unique and enjoyable as ever.
**Tour of Dearborn** -- When I wrote about ADHOC last year, I
made an offhand comment about how one frequent attendee had gone
to another conference in Seattle rather than attend ADHOC in
"charmless Dearborn." Two TidBITS readers independently forwarded
that minor slam to Sharlan Douglas, head of the Dearborn Chamber
of Commerce, who volunteered to give me a personal tour of
Dearborn in the hopes of changing my opinion of the city.
So on Friday after lunch, I met Sharlan, a slight, energetic
woman, for a drive around some of the more interesting parts of
Dearborn. To share the amusement, I invited Scott Knaster and
Lisa Lippincott along for the ride; when we met Sharlan in the
hotel lobby, she said that her boss couldn't believe she was
going to give some random people she'd met on the Internet
a tour. Of course, everyone we had told about the tour was
equally incredulous that there was anything interesting to
see in Dearborn.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07752>
Happily, the drive proved to be highly enjoyable, as Sharlan
ferried us around and filled us in on the history of the area.
It's all about Henry Ford, whose heavily wooded Fair Lane estate
is located in Dearborn and whose family farm now houses a Ford-
designed development across the street from our hotel. Henry Ford
built large chunks of Dearborn, including a now-historic district
of cute brick homes designed for Ford workers; the summary seems
to be, "It's good to be king." Sharlan also showed us the two
downtown areas of Dearborn, one of which is a vibrant Arab
community, and treated us to ice cream at Shatila, a bakery
considered one of the top ice cream stores in the country.
The most notable problem is that, with the exception of the
small downtown areas, Dearborn is almost entirely impassable
for pedestrians, an unsurprising fact given the supremacy of the
automobile in the area. We didn't have time to visit the highly
recommended Henry Ford Museum and associated Greenfield Village,
or the Arab American National Museum, and although I still can't
rank Dearborn among the country's top tourist destinations,
Sharlan's tour easily convinced me to retract my "charmless"
categorization.
<http://www.dearbornchamber.org/>
<http://www.hfmgv.org/>
<http://www.theaanm.org/>
Hmm, if a mild insult about Dearborn, Michigan garnered a personal
tour, perhaps I need to think more carefully about what I write.
After all, I've always thought of Dearborn in the same category
as perennial conference towns like hum-drum Austin and bland New
Orleans. Just kidding!
**Google!** Although the first night's speaker was Jordan Hubbard,
co-founder of the FreeBSD project and Apple's manager of the
Darwin core of Macintosh OS X, he was joined by only one other
Apple employee - ex-Mac OS 9 technical lead Keith Stattenfield.
Despite the conference's start in the Macintosh world, it was
telling that there were more attendees from Google: Scott Knaster,
Jorg Brown, and Maf Vosburgh (along with a recruiter who flew in
for the last day). All three go back a long way with the Mac, but
like so many other engineers in Silicon Valley, they've moved from
more traditional software companies to the high-flying Google,
with its geek-friendly culture, policy of giving engineers freedom
to work on whatever they want for 20 percent of their time, and
informal motto, "Don't be evil."
<http://www.google.com/jobs/>
Google was one of the main sponsors of ADHOC, and the company's
name was on everyone's lips. There were jokes about Google needing
to buy a satellite to improve the image resolution in Google Maps,
not one but two sessions about what it's like to work at Google,
and rumors of Google opening an office in nearby Ann Arbor,
Michigan. Several of the hacks in the ADHOC Showcase revolved
around Google, including the winning entry.
In short, Google is hot right now, and it seems the company can do
wrong. I'm sure there's more to Google than meets the eye, but the
fact that they've managed to maintain a strong sense of humor and
desire to do things differently helps convey the feeling that
there are individuals behind the corporate facade
[Brief aside: While writing this in the Detroit airport, I saw
a middle-aged woman roll by on a Segway; perhaps I'm out of the
loop, but I've never seen a Segway in the wild before. Cool,
but when I was later telling Tonya about this at the Ithaca
Farmer's Market, we were overheard and then harangued by a woman
on an electric scooter about how Segways were overly expensive
and hard to live with in comparison to electric scooters.]
<http://www.segway.com/>
**ADHOC Showcase Hacks** -- Though the number of entries has
fallen precipitously over the years (I remember one MacHax
Best Hack Contest that ran from midnight to daylight), this
year's ADHOC Showcase saw plenty of inventive hacks, including
Andrew Turner's DashSaver, a screensaver module that displays
Dashboard; Shawn Platkus's HoverDash, which lets you "extract"
Dashboard widgets and display them as normal windows; and David
Steinbrunner's Jobs for Everyone, a command line tool that,
as a joke, automated the task of applying for jobs at Apple
via Apple's Jobs Web page.
The top five vote-getters this year were:
#5: Improbability 101 from Avi Drissman, which was a humorously
presented hack that modified the Finder's sorting algorithm from
Mac OS 9 style (where 10 came before 2 because of the leading 1)
to the more-correct approach in Mac OS X to a version that also
properly sorts files named with spelled-out numbers (as in 1,
two, three, 4, 17, two-hundred thirty-seven, and so on).
#4: Don't Panic from Keith Stattenfield replaced the kernel
panic screen with an alternate picture. Keith showed several
possibilities, including one with icons of a person and a screw,
separated by the letter R (work it out yourself), but settled
on a logo from Douglas Adams's book The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, complete with the words "Don't Panic" in large,
friendly letters.
#3: bTop was a Mac mini-based, wheeled robot built before the
show by Perfectly Scientific's George Storm, but the hack part
of the project coupled an iSight camera with the bTop digital
acquisition board to perform rudimentary visual processing for
robotic navigation. That's a fancy way of saying that the robot
relied on code from Lisa Lippincott and Andrew Turner to activate
its wheels when it saw the color green. George Storm demoed
the hack by walking in with the robot hesitantly following
him, lured by several strips of green gaffer's tape around
George's leg.
<http://www.perfsci.com/hardware.htm>
#2: CubeDetach from Adam Goldstein modified Fast User Switching
to go beyond the current cube-rotation transition between active
users. With CubeDetach loaded, you could rotate a cube whose faces
showed the Desktops of each active user, either by pressing a
number key associated with each user or by using the mouse to
rotate the cube freely; once you'd settled on a user, you could
press a key to display the login screen and enter that user's
password.
#1: GoogleFlash by Geoff Adams and Allon Stern took home the
top honors, coupling a Google pin with flashing multi-colored
LEDs with a clever presentation and some custom software. Geoff
and Allon claimed to have created a Bluetooth interface to the
Google pin and pretended to pair with the pin at the start of
their presentation. In fact, the whole Bluetooth thing was a red
herring; they'd renamed a phone "Google Pin" and were actually
interfacing with the pin via one of the bTop digital acquisition
boards over USB. Then they performed some Google searches in what
looked like Safari (in reality it was a custom browser, and with
each search, the Google logo on the Web page flashed colored
outlines around particular letters as the Google pin that Geoff
was wearing flashed in exactly the same pattern. For their prize,
Geoff and Allon received an engraved "code injector" - a large
basting syringe filled with the green glowing liquid from a
light stick.
**Final Memories** -- ADHOC/MacHack is the sort of event that lays
down indelible memories for the attendees, and a few from this
show will stay with me.
On the positive side, Scott Knaster and Andy Ihnatko ran the
Showcase and presented the awards in a style to which I'd
like to become accustomed. Their humor, good will, and massive
collection of pop culture fan films kept us all entertained into
the wee hours. Andy also filled in at the last minute with the
second night's keynote, delivering a multi-hour extravaganza
despite having hard disk corruption problems just hours before
he was slated to begin.
On the other hand, the group movie this year, Stealth, was
the worst movie I've seen at one of these conferences, and,
although I don't see many movies, is very possibly the worst movie
I've ever watched. It's bone-crushingly, mind-numbingly, soul-
suckingly bad. It was so bad that in the immediate aftermath,
the main positive thing we could think of to say revolved around
the font face used for the credits. Only the audience heckling
made this 121 minutes of our lives worthwhile; the highlight was
a balsa glider that someone threw into the projector beam just
as one of the movie's airplanes (OK, they were cool looking)
zoomed across the screen during one of the near-instantaneous
and disbelief-defying flights between Tajikistan, North Korea,
Siberia, and Alaska.
<http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/stealth/>
<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050727/
REVIEWS/50713001>
My five-year-old running joke of hiding a 4-foot wooden stake in
the hotel ended this year, as the hiding place at the base of one
of the fake trees in the hotel lobby was apparently discovered at
some point during the year. The hotel staff must not have realized
they'd found it, since the ADHOC organizers told them about it
in the pre-conference setup meeting, and they were apparently
extremely excited to see if they could figure out my hiding place.
Even though I wasn't able to pull the stake from a hiding place
one more time, the joke lived on. Andy and Scott, knowing in
advance that it had been lost, told the entire story during the
awards banquet and gave me a special prize of a new stake...
actually, a leftover steak from the Chili's restaurant across the
street. The stunt garnered much laughter and I certainly hope the
steak doesn't stay hidden in the hotel as long as the stake did.
And lastly, I'll remember the end of the awards banquet, where
nearly everyone said the most incredibly nice things about
everyone else, an act notable not just for its generosity, but
because I dare say that more than one person in the audience felt
moved nearly to tears at the thought of losing the opportunity
to connect personally and professionally with so many intelligent,
interesting Macintosh users and developers. Other trade shows may
have their pros and cons, but to those who have attended it,
ADHOC/MacHack had real meaning. It, and all who made it what
it was, will be missed.
Pounding the Ground in Star Wars Battlefront
--------------------------------------------
by Jeff Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
When I was 7 years old, I sat in the back seat of my family's
car and imagined the Millennium Falcon flying through the stars
in the cloudless night. We had just seen the original Star Wars
movie, and it lit up my imagination like nothing before.
Although the films have been disappointments since 1983's
Return of the Jedi, the universe George Lucas created has
thrived. I collected and played with Star Wars action figures
for years as a kid, acting out my own adventures in the Death Star
(the living room coffee table with the glass top) and on the ice
planet Hoth (my parents' white faux animal fur floor rug that
I'm sure was cool at the time). However, I distinctly remember
the day when, in the midst of playing, I realized that action
figures weren't as much fun anymore. Not long after, the figures
and plastic starships ended up in storage.
Now it's the twenty-first century, and computer games make it
possible for me not only to fire up my imagination, but also
to play an actual role in the Star Wars universe. Star Wars
Battlefront, a LucasArts game ported to the Mac by Aspyr,
puts me in the boots of several types of Star Wars characters,
fighting battles in locations from the movies from a first-
person viewpoint.
<http://www.aspyr.com/games.php/mac/swbf/>
Star Wars Battlefront spans all of the Star Wars movies, enabling
you to inhabit four different character classes: the Rebel
Alliance and the Galactic Empire from Episodes 4 through 6
(the first three movies to be released), as well as the Republic
Clone Army and the Separatist Battle Droids from the most recent
prequels, Episodes 1 through 3. Within each class, you choose
a soldier type, such as infantry, scouts/snipers, heavy weapons
soldiers carrying rockets, and pilots. Each class also has its
own special type: flying troopers for the Empire and Clone Army,
wookies for the Rebels, and the rolling, lethal droidekas for
the battle droids.
<http://www.starwars.com/databank/species/wookiee/>
<http://www.starwars.com/databank/droid/droideka/>
These characters inhabit 12 environments located on 10 planets,
many of which are the sites of battles from the movies, such
as Hoth, Endor, and Geonosis. And of these, many also include
vehicles such as AT-ATs (the giant walking dinosaur-like ships
from The Empire Strikes Back), X-Wings (the Rebellion's ship
of choice for attacking the Death Star in Star Wars), and Jedi
starfighters. If you've ever wanted to sit in the cockpit of
a TIE fighter, now's your chance.
Like other "battlefield" type games such as Battlefield 1942
and Call of Duty, you're not a lone superhuman soldier blasting
away at everything in sight. Instead, you're part of an army,
one of a large group of soldiers working toward specific goals.
The primary goal is to eliminate the other team. But to do so,
you need to capture command posts to gain tactical advantage
over the enemy. Some maps have additional goals, such as
destroying shield generators.
<http://www.aspyr.com/games.php/mac/bf1942/>
<http://www.aspyr.com/games.php/mac/cod/>
**Stay on Target** -- Star Wars Battlefront offers two campaigns
in the single-player mode, taking you chronologically through
the two movie trilogies. However, you don't get to choose which
side of each conflict you're on. I'm sure this behavior is meant
to give you a taste of each character class, but it's a bit
confusing to be fighting for the droid army on one map and
then blowing them away on the next.
If you want to choose your class and play single maps, the Instant
Action option is the route to take. You can choose the battlefield
and the character class, and switch sides in the middle if you're
not happy with how well your fellow soldiers are doing their jobs.
The last gameplay option is Galactic Conquest, where you choose a
scenario (such as Dark Side Rising, representing the birth of the
Empire) and must attack and take control of every planet in the
galaxy. If you win a battle, you get to choose the next engagement
and hopefully conquer the planet. As you add more planets to your
winnings, you take advantage of planetary bonuses, which range
from having reinforcement troops at the ready to being assisted
by a "Jedi hero," such as Luke Skywalker or Mace Windu, who run
around slashing foes with their lightsabers.
In terms of visuals, Star Wars Battlefront doesn't disappoint.
It ran perfectly fine on my 1.25 GHz PowerBook G4, and superbly
on a fast dual 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5. The G5 took advantage of a
higher setting for drawing shadows, which was often helpful when
trying to sneak up on stormtroopers behind a corner or spotting
a snowspeeder's location from inside an AT-AT.
But to me, the game's audio is its signature element. The sound
design of the Star Wars universe (accomplished by the talented
Ben Burtt) has been consistently unique from other movies, and
it's all here in the game: laser blasts, which vary depending
on the gun and the character class; the specific engine whines
of each ship; the powerful crunch of AT-AT legs in the snow.
Rounding out the auditory experience is John Williams's score.
These aspects do more to put you into the game than the graphics
or playability, in my opinion.
<http://www.starwars.com/bio/benburtt.html>
<http://www.starwars.com/bio/johnwilliams.html>
Star Wars Battlefront also sports multiplayer action, either on
a local LAN or over the Internet using the GameRanger service.
However, since the game has only recently begun shipping, there
were only a couple of multiplayer games available to test, so
I can't offer much more commentary other than it seems to work
fine. You can play only single maps, not Galactic Conquest or
campaigns.
<http://www.gameranger.com/>
**Apology Accepted, Captain Needa** -- Star Wars Battlefront isn't
without its shortcomings, which are more annoyances than fatal
flaws. For example, when you finish a battle in Instant Action
mode, you must wait for the next battle to load and start before
you can exit to the main menu. If you've loaded only one map,
it must load again before you can return, which is pointless
and frustrating. The addition of a simple button at the end
of a battle that let you return to the main menu would easily
fix this.
Flying can be a problem, because often you're piloting a
supersonic spacecraft within a small area of battle, so you end
up turning and turning often to avoid leaving the battlefield.
The exception is Hoth, which is large enough that the Rebellion's
snowspeeders, which play an integral role in the battle to bring
down AT-ATs, have plenty of maneuvering room.
Unfortunately, sometimes your fellow soldiers simply act dumb.
Several times I've been the rear gunner in a snowspeeder and
watched with dismay as the computer-driven pilot flew around
in circles or smashed us into a cliff. When fighting in groups,
other soldiers sometimes push you around as they move into
position, making it difficult to aim at the opposition.
Oh, and the ewoks. As in the movie Return of the Jedi, the
chirping and squealing of the little teddy bear creatures is
annoying, but in the game it's worse because you spend more
time on the Endor maps trying to accomplish the mission. Some
people may take some small pleasure in the fact that you can
blast the little fuzzy obstructions without diminishing your
troop reinforcement numbers.
**Now, I Am the Master** -- However, these irritations haven't
kept me away from the game. As someone who grew up with the
original trilogy, it's exciting to jump into the Star Wars world
and fight the battles depicted on the big screen. And in at least
one way, this option is better than the movies: one of the great
pleasures of playing Star Wars Battlefront is that it offers the
best parts of the most recent trilogy without the inane dialog.
At no point did a clone trooper stop and say, "Hold me like you
did by the lake on Naboo."
Star Wars Battlefront costs $50 and is available now. It requires
a 1 GHz PowerPC G4- or G5-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.3.6
or later, and at least 256 MB of RAM (512 MB is recommended).
Video requirements include ATI Radeon 8500 or later, or Nvidia
GeForce4 MX or later, with at least 64 MB of video memory. Lastly,
the program comes on a DVD, so your Mac needs a drive that will
read DVDs.
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/01-Aug-05
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The second URL below each thread description points to the
discussion on our Web Crossing server, which will be faster.
**iPod bags** -- Purses and other bags are being designed to
accommodate iPods, but the implementations have their pros
and cons. (2 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2656>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/507/>
**AirTunes OK for Audiophiles?** How is the audio quality of
AirTunes, Apple's system for streaming music wirelessly to an
AirPort Express? It turns out that the Express's optical output
is probably a more important consideration than the AirTunes
software. (14 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2657>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/508/>
**Places to recycle computers** -- Dawn D'Angelillo's article on
E-waste prompts discussion of where you can take your old machines
to be properly recycled. (4 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2659>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/510/>
**Music Collection Databases** -- Not everyone has digitized their
music libraries, leading to the need to keep track of all of those
CDs, LPs, and 8-track tapes (well, maybe not the latter). Readers
suggest a few programs that help you wrangle your music
collection. (4 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2660>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/512/>
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