I saw an item on Scripting News this morning about software which captures songs off of XM satelite radio and saves them as MP3 files on your PC’s hard drive. The software, Nerosoft TimeTrax, enhances a $50 XM accessory called the PCR which is an XM radio receiver that attaches to and plays through your PC’s audio system. TimeTrax captures individual songs and sames them as MP3, complete with file names and tags. I’ve been considering getting satelite radio for some time now (either XM or Sirius), and I thought that this little device–along with the software–would be just the thing to tilt the scales in favor of XM and lead me to subscribe.
That is until this afternoon, when I read on CNET that XM is pulling the device off the market. The article says that the RIAA didn’t pressure them to take that action, but I don’t believe that for a second. Pardon me, but didn’t the Betamax Decision twenty years ago specifically allow consumers to record broadcast signals for their own personal use? Just because this isn’t a VCR recording a television show shouldn’t make any difference. The principle is the same.
It’s time for some good old-fashioned Consumer Rights legislation which spells out exactly what we consumers have the right to do (and not do) with the copyrighted material which we buy. The entertainment industry is just going to get more and more restrictive in their licensing terms. It’s time we the people stood up and started seriously complaining about the loss of our ability to do what we please with the thing that we purchase. The entire House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate are up for re-election this fall, so now’s the time to get their attention.

The conversion from Radio Userland over to Movable Type has gone very smoothly so far. There’s no support or directions from Six Apart for importing from Radio, as there is for a few other blogging systems, but I found a Python script by Krzysztof Kowalczyk which did 95% of the work in converting my Radio entries into the format the MT can import. Fixing up the other 5% didn’t take too long since I only had about 10 entries in Radio. If I had a more “normal” load of blog entries, then it would have been much more painful to do the conversion.
I’ve poked around at the templates a bit, modifying things here and there so to be more to my liking. I’ve exported them to external files so that I can use a normal editor to modify them. I found a Dreamweaver Extension by Shabbir J. Safdar which integrates those template files with Dreamweaver very nicely. One thing which puzzles me a bit is that they have the master CSS file setup as a template, even though (apparently) no conversion or substitution takes place when that template is “rebuilt.” It appears to be a simple copy operation, in which case, why did they bother making it a template?
I bought the book Teach Yourself Movable Type in 24 Hours by Molly Holzschlag and Porter Glendinning. Although it’s for an older version of MT, the format of the “24 Hours” series makes it very easy for an advanced user to skim through it and pick up the important points. I’ve read one other book by Molly and I think she’s a terrific author, on par with Zeldman and Meyer.
BTW, I don’t really need to buy and use books like this. I’ve got 30 years of experience with computers and programming, and I could easily figure this stuff out on my own. But one of the things that those years of experience have taught me is to not waste my time unnecessarily. This particular book cost $30, and if it saves me 1/2-hour in getting up to speed on Movable Type, then its well worth the cost. There are plenty of other things out there to learn that don’t have books written about them. Take advantage of other people’s experience when its available.
Browsing Amazon, I see that there is another book about MT due out this fall, Movable Type 3.0 Bible Desktop Edition by Rogers Cadenhead. Rogers is the author of a similar book about Radio Userland which I found similarly helpful when I was (trying to) learn about that blogging tool. I doubt I’ll need it by the time its published, but I’ll probably buy it anyway.

I started this weblog last year, because I wanted a place where I could publish my thoughts and analysis on various topics related to my interests, hobbies and profession. I chose to use Radio Userland as my blogging tool because of my familarity with Dave Winer and his earlier product Frontier. But I quickly discovered that Radio outputs the worst sort of tag soup HTML that you could imagine, and as a web standards advocate, that would never do. Since I knew how to program in UserTalk, Radio’s underlying scripting language, I had thought that if I had the time, I could correct Radio’s output so that it would conform to the current W3C web publishing standards.
Well, I don’t have the time to fix Radio’s problems, and Userland doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in fixing them either. Life’s too short to sit around waiting for something like this to get fixed, so I’m switching to another tool, Movable Type. Why MT? Because I recently attended a web development conference, and “everyone” there who published a weblog was using Movable Type. So I checked it out and found that it seems to do everything I need, it outputs standards-compliant code, and the copy behind it, Six Apart, seems to actually care about the product and support it.
So, so long Radio Userland, hello Movable Type. My first project will be to import my old Radio posting in to MT. We’ll see how it goes…