iTunes 7 Killed My Clock Radio

Well, actually, it didn't. I think. But there was a suspicious coincidence, and iTunes 7 did break my clock radio.

Let me explain.

The clock radio in question is the Roku Soundbridge Radio (SBR). This is a cool device that works as a standard FM radio, dual-alarm clock, and sounds great. We got it as a replacement for our ancient, dying Proton clock radio. The SBR's key feature, however, is that it connects up to your iTunes library or to Internet radio stations (it also works with Rhapsody and other "PlaysForSure" (ha!) music services, but I don't care about that). It's not cheap (we got ours for about $350), but I'm happy with it. I like waking up to my own playlists. I like the way it sets the time by itself after a power failure. More specs.

The unit has a few drawbacks that bug me, though. It only has wireless networking, which makes it a bit harder to hook up; for us it would have been lots easier to plug it into an Ethernet jack. Of course, I recognize that most folks don't have an Ethernet jack in the wall behind their bed. To make the encrypted wireless connection to our AirPort Extreme Base Station, I have to enter the WEP Equivalent Network Password, a delightful 26-character hex code, using the SBR remote control. The discerning will note that we're using WEP wireless security instead of the much more-secure WPA; we had to switch because the SBR does not support WPA (it's promised in a future software update). Most annoyingly, the SBR's WiFi radio is 802.11b, not 802.11g. So we had to switch the network to b/g mode. Now none of this was that big of a deal. The setup only happens once. WPA will eventually arrive. And b/g mode is fine considering that we mostly just use the wireless network for Net access, not sending around big files.

I'm more amused than anything else that the SBR will, in rare circumstances, crash and reboot itself. I presume that will change with software updates, too.

Back to our story. Last Tuesday, Apple released iTunes 7, and it changed something in the way iTunes does its music streaming. This broke the SBR's iTunes streaming ability. To their credit, the Roku people, whom of course Apple did not bother to warn ahead of time, immediately sent out an email blast to their customers telling them of the problem. But I had already upgraded to iTunes 7. So as you can see, iTunes 7 really did break my clock radio. I'm probably going to revert to iTunes 6 until Roku gets a software update out. No big deal, since iTunes' new features aren't that compelling anyway.

But how did iTunes kill my clock radio, as I initially said? Well, sometime on Tuesday, our SBR just died. Totally inoperative, as though the power supply inside had given up the ghost. Yeah, it probably was a coincidence, but it was weird that it just happened to occur on the same day as I upgraded to iTunes 7.

I contacted the Roku folks, got an RMA, and prepared to ship it out. Then I realized that we were going to be driving very near the Roku office in Palo Alto on Thursday when we were bringing Sean to school in Santa Cruz, so I'd just drop it off and save the shipping cost. And as it turned out, Roku was having an open house for their customers Thursday afternoon. So we arrived, gave the broken unit to one of the engineers for repair (he said we'd get it back in about a week), and enjoyed the open house. Saw some cool products, met a bunch of nice folks, got Roku t-shirts, and ate some munchies. Then the Customer Care Manager found me and said, "Rather than make you wait for a repair, here's a new unit" and handed me a new SBR. That's excellent customer service, and I really appreciated it. As it turns out, the new unit has a hardware revision that solves one of Dori's gripes with our old SBR (which was from the first production run), which was that the front panel display was too bright in a dark bedroom, and had a flicker when it was turned dimmer. That's gone now. So we ended up with a better product all round.

In sum: the Soundbridge Radio is a very good product, though not without flaws. We got unexpectedly (and delightfully) good customer service. They made some happy customers.

Update: If you're thinking of getting a SBR, you can still do it, stream from your iTunes library, and have iTunes 7. You just can't use iTunes to do the streaming until Roku revises the SBR software. But they offer an alternative, the free Firefly media server. This is open source software (Windows and Mac versions available) that runs in the background and scans your media library, then streams it to the SBR and other Roku products. It supports streaming of MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, and OggVorbis files.

The Future Of White Boy Clubs

Ho hum, another day, another group of blogs bitching about how the tech conference biz is all-white, all-male. But I have to say that things may actually be getting a little better, as I saw one sign of hope: the bitching this time is being done by a guy. In The Future of White Boy clubs, Chris Messina wrote about how the recent Future of Web Apps summit was all-white and all-male.

Given that I've been griping about this for over five years, it's nice to see others helping me out with it.

OTOH, I posted something in the comments there, and as what I wrote is in moderation limbo, I thought I'd put it here as well:

I can only talk from my own experience, but it’s that I often hear about cool conferences after they’ve happened — or even worse, while they’re happening. If I could only hear in advance, I could make arrangements to attend/apply to speak/do whatever it takes to get there.

When the usual crowd tells the usual crowd that they’re having a conference, no one should be suprised that the usual crowd is who shows up. It doesn’t mean that those outside the crowd aren’t interested (and in fact, it doesn’t even mean that they don’t consider themselves part of that crowd). Again — just speaking from my own perspective — I thought that I *was* part of the Ajax community, until I heard about conferences that I wasn’t speaking at (me: author of a best-selling Ajax book/co-lead of the WaSP DOM Scripting TF) as just one example. Would I like to be there? Absolutely. I just don’t hear about the possibilitiies until it’s too late.

As I posted over on the BarCamp Diversity page as you asked, here’s my recommendation: go where the women already congregate and tell them about your event. It could be that they’d be happy to attend, if they could just find out about it in advance.

Two other things I should probably mention:

• I posted a few thoughts along these lines over at Scoble's place a couple of weeks ago.

• Several weeks ago I submitted an entry for the AjaxWorld Call for Papers. No, they never contacted me; yes, the speaker list is 100% male; and no, I'm not surprised.

  Okay, I'm a little surprised at one thing: I know several of the guys on that speaker list, and I'm surprised that they're associating with a company that's that short-sighted and well, that downright wrong. And no, this isn't about me: I'd be happy to see any women on their speaker list. If they can't find a single one — even when one (with a best-selling book and years of teaching experience on the topic) applies — it's not a matter of lack of applicants, it's not a matter of lack of knowing who the talent is, it's not a matter of knowing who to talk to… it's stupidity and short-sightedness and a few other ugly names.

Later note: I should probably add that if you are (or someone you know is) doing a Web or Mac or JavaScript or Ajax or Dreamweaver-related conference or event, and you are looking to have a more diverse speaking list, please contact me. I'm qualified, available, and interested, and my references are available upon request.

College Daze

About a year ago, Kathy Sierra made a couple of college-related posts in which she said:

Does college matter?:

I've been watching Dori with some envy… going on visits with her son to check out prospective colleges, talking about application forms, entrance exams, all that stuff

College matters… sometimes:

I'm just glad that Dori's going to be posting what her son is up to, though, so I can still get a little vicarious parent-of-the-college-kid experience.

This is the week it's all come down to: we've been on a massive spending spree recently, culminating with leaving town on Thursday to move Sean into the dorms on Friday. In all of this, I've been too busy dealing with the reality of the situation to blog about it, so here's a quick recap for those of you (such as Kathy) who are following along (vicariously or otherwise).

He's enrolled at UC Santa Cruz with a major in Bioinformatics (FAQ). UCSC has residential colleges (similar to UCSD and many other universities); given Santa Cruz, you can understand that nine of the ten are focused on the environmental impact of differently-abled third-world GLBT performance artists of color. Sean? He's in the tenth: Crown, the math and science college. And to add to that, he's in Galileo—the academic focus house—which features 24 hour quiet time. We figure he'll fit right in.

So far this week we've gone on a shopping spree through Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, REI, The Gap, Vans, and The Dollar Store. And that was after some serious online shopping at Amazon, Tiger Direct, and Overstock.com.

And of course, there was the all-important visit to the Apple Store today (had to wait until after the Stevenote, y'know…). Our choices were:

What it came down to: we just couldn't justify spending that much more for the Pro. For another $134 (with the education discount) we were able to make the RAM and hard drives of the MacBook identical to those on the Pro, which meant that the differences in the favor of each were:

MacBook: $466 less, longer battery life, smaller form factor, lighter weight, and better Wi-Fi reception.

MacBook Pro: ExpressCard slot, lighted keyboard, better video (both internal and external).

Aside: I have to say that I can't imagine that Apple is selling many Pro laptops these days. Unless you have a driving need for lots of extra pixels (and if that's the case, should you really be using a laptop?) or have a need for an ExpressCard (and good luck finding one), the Pro is a lousy buy. I've been figuring that Apple can do the math at least as well as I can, and therefore they'd be upgrading the Pro to Merom chips to make them competitive. While something along those lines is sure to happen eventually, it wasn't in time for this year's back-to-school purchases.

To answer the other questions I know you have:

• No, the free Nano deal did not extend to the new Nanos that Apple announced today. However, they did extend to Sean's brand-new 2 GB Black Nano that he's pretty darn happy with.

• No, Kathy, we did not buy him any "pink faux velvet bean bag chairs." Partly because pink faux velvet's not his thing, and partly because those dorm rooms are pretty darn small (no fridge or TV, either).

• Sean's both excited and nervous. But come to think of it, that's probably true of all three of us.

• The one thing we know we still have to buy: a DVI extension cable, so he can hook up my old 20" Dell flat screen. What, you thought we were going to make him live with only 1280x800? Pffft.

And one bonus link for Kathy, from earlier this week: UCSC creates new major in computer game design. You know it's calling your name…