And so we come to the third and (I believe) final installment in my brother’s Harry Potter book series. His first two installments, Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery, and Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction, covered the sixth and seventh years of Harry Potter at Hogwarts, following Rowling’s first five books (picking up at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) and ending Harry’s years as a student at Hogwarts. Veil and Ring were written in the same style as Rowling’s books, covering one year at Hogwarts, and written in the “third person limited” point of view–that is, the story is told completely as the protagonist views it. Each of these two novels were also long, equivalent to perhaps a 1000- to 1200-page book.

This last novel, Phoenix Intuition, breaks those rules in many ways. First of all, it is not written in the third person limited; it is in the third person omniscient, and often leaves Harry to view other events outside of Harry’s experience. Second, Harry is no longer a student and this novel does not restrict itself to the Hogwarts calendar–in fact, it starts several years before the main events in the story. Third, the novel is shorter, about half as long as the previous novels. And fourth, the story not only incorporates real-world events, but is set on a world stage. So if you’re looking for a different kind of Harry Potter novel, written by someone whose writing is excellent and tested, then this will be a good read for you.

Since Phoenix Intuition relies somewhat heavily on the previous two novels by my brother, I would strongly suggest reading the other two before picking up this one, otherwise you won’t know a lot about what is happening. Also keep in mind that these three fan fiction books assume a branching of events after the end of The Order of the Phoenix; they diverge–sharply, would be a sound guess–from the direction Rowling is taking in her sixth Harry Potter Book, The Half-Blood Prince, due out in less than a week. So if you read The Half-Blood Prince, assume its events take place in a different Harry Potter “universe” or “timeline.”

Please find the novel presented here in PDF form, in two versions: U.S. Letter (8.5 x 11) size, for those who wish to print the entire book out on your printers (496 pages), and B5 (roughly 7 x 10 inches) size, for easier reading on a computer screen. A text-only version for those who will read on their iPod, PDA or other plain text reader will be released soon; look to this post or the main Harry Potter Fanfic entry.

From David Corn:

…tonight I received this as-solid-as-it-gets tip: on Sunday Newsweek is posting a story that nails Rove. The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine’s Matt Cooper and that Rove–prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official — told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson’s now-controversial trip to Niger.

To be clear, this new evidence does not necessarily mean slammer-time for Rove. Under the relevant law, it’s only a crime for a government official to identify a covert intelligence official if the government official knows the intelligence officer is under cover, and this documentary evidence, I’m told, does not address this particular point. But this new evidence does show that Rove — despite his lawyers claim that Rove “did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA” — did reveal to Cooper in a deep-background conversation that Wilson’s wife was in the CIA.

With the Republicans solidly in control of both houses of Congress and the executive branch, one can expect first-class protection for the GOP’s golden boy. While I hope Rove gets sent to prison–and not Danbury minimum security–it seems very likely that he’ll be able to feign ignorance of Plame’s undercover status just well enough to escape serious jail time. Of course, it’s obvious that he knew full well: revealing Plame’s CIA status would have had no purpose for Rove unless she was indeed undercover.

One good thing that will come of this is that it will expose the Bush administration for what it is, with zero ability of the right wing to claim otherwise without looking like complete fools. Of course, that never stopped right-wingers before: Oliver North betrayed his country, violated national security, lied to Congress and the people and generally did a lot of loathsome stuff, and he’s still a hero of many conservatives. It’s the whole faith-based thing: believe no matter what.

“My first thought when I heard – just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, ‘Hmmm, time to buy.'” —Brit Hume, Fox News Anchor

Brian Kilmeade, Fox News Host: … I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world’s advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened.

Stuart Varney, Fox News Commentator: It puts the Number 1 issue right back on the front burner right at the point where all these world leaders are meeting. It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner. It sticks terrorism and the fight on the war on terror, right up front all over again.

Kilmeade: Yeah.

It’s like I said — 40 people dead, 150 seriously wounded, 1,000 wounded, out of over 1 million people in that transit tube. It’s not a successful terrorist attack, folks. —Rush Limbaugh

I’ve stopped watching CNN regularly because their reporting is so terrible (they’re not as bad as Fox News, but they’re trying to be), but with the recent bombings in London, I’ve had the Babble Channel on from time to time to see what’s going on in the video news world. And, as usual, once the direct reporting of the big story is over and they turn to the commentary, I can’t listen for three minutes before they say something outrageous. This time it was in a story about the Madrid train bombings last year. The story included a good amount of detail on finding the suspects in the bombing and how that investigation ended up. The reporter mentioned about how so many Spaniards took to the streets to protest terrorism, but then he went on about how they voted out of office the conservative government which had gone into Iraq despite its unpopularity–and mentioned how this was seen as a capitulation to terrorists.

In other words, after a year and more, after the story should be settled enough to be clear in retrospect, they’re still regurgitating the Bush administration spin rather than reporting the whole story; they are still intentionally editing out important, even overriding facts which put a completely different light on that election.

The conservatives did not lose the election because of the bombing; they lost it because the Spanish people were angered by the government’s attempt to play politics with the bombings. After the train attacks and just before the election, the Aznar government blamed the attacks on the ETA (Basque separatists) and withheld information about possible al Qaeda suspects and evidence that pointed away from the ETA. An ETA attack could have given more credibility to the conservatives:

Spain’s ruling Popular Party went down in defeat to the Socialists in Sunday’s national election. It did so amid accusations that the government had withheld information on the bombings in an effort to influence the forthcoming vote.

A tough line on ETA had long been part of the Popular Party’s platform. If indeed such a horrific ETA attack occurred, it would be certain to win Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s chosen successor the prime ministership. But with the Iraq war strongly unpopular among Spaniards, Islamic jihadi involvement in Thursday’s nightmare would have grave implications for the Popular Party’s votes, and it indeed did.

In short: the Spanish people voted out the Aznar government because it tried to manipulate the attack for political purposes on the eve of an election.

It was people like the Bush administration who went into high spin mode after this humiliating defeat for the so-called “coalition of the willing” (90% of the Spanish people were not “willing”). They painted the election results to say that the Spanish people caved in to al Qaeda out of fear. However, the huge anti-terror protests following the bombings showed they were spectacularly unafraid and unintimidated; far from being cowed, they were outraged and resolved.

The truth about why Aznar lost the election is not a secret, nor is the story hard to find or even disputed by any actual evidence whatsoever. It was absolutely clear why Aznar lost.

And yet, here we are, one year and four months later, and CNN is still spouting the Bush lie; the CNN reporter, who clearly looked into the story well enough to find the truth, plainly omitted the fact that the Aznar government manipulated the bombings and withheld evidence (the CNN story included details about the al Qaeda suspects, after all), and just as plainly ignored the entire scandal that changed the election.

Like I said, this is why I stopped watching CNN, and why I would be even more disgusted were I to even try to watch Fox News. Journalism has gone from reporting the truth to choosing a spin to cover–and then perpetuating it. Just like the Jessica Lynch story and the tearing down of the Hussein statue–both stories fabricated by the Bush administration, and yet knowingly swallowed whole by a willing press, who still report them as true even today–the Spain election story is yet another in the line of conservative rewritings of modern events that is maintained and preserved by these shilling media whores.

You remember the Valerie Plame case: Joseph Wilson was asked by the U.S. government to investigate claims that Niger was selling uranium to Iraq; he found and reported that the claims were bogus; Bush ignored these results and “relied” on debunked foreign reports to the contrary, citing the Niger case in a State of the Union speech as rationale to invade Iraq; Wilson spoke publicly on the matter; Karl Rove went ballistic, and in an act of revenge, called reporters under the cloak of the anonymous source, revealing that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative, blowing her cover and putting her life and the lives of others at risk. Essentially, a treacherous act against our own intelligence community in the name of political payback.

You may have heard recently about the developments in which two reporters, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, have been threatened with prison if they don’t reveal their sources for the information about Plame. Even though the disclosure of these sources would help reveal crimes committed by the Bush administration, few if any liberals have been cheering the idea of reporters forced to reveal sources; most have reservations, and some stand strongly against the idea. (Imagine the situation applying to a Democratic administration; a lot of conservatives would be out there demanding the reporters reveal the source or go to prison.)

I’m in the “strongly against” category. I don’t think that a reporter should ever have to reveal a source. This despite a strong personal abhorrence for how the anonymous source is abused, both by dishonest reporters and by dishonest sources. And it even must cover reporters when a crime was committed, else the oft-used cloaking lie about “national security” (which can be applied without fear of exposure to make just about anything a crime) could be used to pry any source from any journalist.

That said, I also believe that Cooper and Miller should have, from the very beginning, willingly revealed their source.

Why? Because they were used. Not just politically, but criminally. While the state should not be able to force disclosure of anonymous sources, journalists should not be bound to secrecy if the anonymous source was not acting in good faith. Once these reporters realized that Rove had used them to commit a highly illegal act of political vengeance, they should have outed him without even being asked.

The confidential source is supposed to be all about protecting whistle-blowers who feel compelled to uncover secrets, either government or industrial, which could lead to retribution against them, personally, legally, or both. “In the public interest” is supposed to be the yardstick; why not use it? If the public interest is not being served and the reporter was misled or otherwise used by the source to commit a crime or attack innocent people, I would think it would be against the interests of the journalist to protect the source, as it would only encourage further abuse in the future. So long as journalists made this principle clear, then anonymous sources coming out in the public interest would not feel any lack of trust in being protected by the journalists they speak to.

Case in point: back in the days of the Iran-Contra scandal, Oliver North was testifying before Congress about why he had lied to them about what he had been doing. North claimed that the Reagan administration feared leaks from Congress, which could not be trusted to keep secret information without blabbing about it all to the press. When pressed for an example of a Congressional leak, North pointed to a case where information was divulged to the media regarding how the U.S. tracked a plane carrying the Achille Lauro hijackers bound for Tripoli. North called this a breach of national security, and berated Congress for putting our intelligence sources at risk. And that was his rationale for lying to Congress about Iran-Contra.

Here, North was trying to cover his own ass for working against the public interest and then lying about it to Congress and the people, and at the same time he was attacking the Democratic Congress, blaming them for violating the public trust when it was he himself who was responsible for it.

Of course, Congress didn’t leak that information to reporters. In fact, Oliver North himself did that. And in that case, the Newsweek reporter who received the information from Oliver North came forward and outed North as the source. Quite rightly, and quite justly. If an anonymous source abuses their anonymity, they should be revealed for what they are. (The reporter who ratted North out, by the way, tells the story himself and expounds on the Plame investigation.)

By the same token, Cooper and Miller should have exposed Rove the first time they were asked. Nothing Rove told them was of value to the public, quite the contrary in fact. And Rove was only hiding behind the anonymity to commit a federal felony, the purpose being payback for embarrassing him and his boss. Do reporters want this kind of thing to happen? I know the argument about the principle of confidentiality, but as I said, if the lines are drawn clearly and publicly enough so that everyone understands them, then confidentiality can be preserved, sources can feel safe and protected, and journalists can be shielded from this kind of abuse.

Image from The Londonist

Yet again, our fearless leader fall off his bike and go boom. This is, if I am not mistaken, the third time he has taken a bike spill, not including the time he fell off of a Segway (which takes talent). This time, in England for a G8 summit, Bush collided with a police officer, who was immediately shot taken to a hospital.

As usual, the White House press office insists that Bush was going really, really fast and it had been raining. Maybe, but take that with a huge grain of salt: the last time this happened, in Texas, they also claimed it had been raining and the topsoil was loose, but when someone checked the weather, they found out that it had not rained for more than a week.

So we know they lie about the weather to make it sound more dashing and less stupid; we still have no confirmation that Bush was actually riding super fast (“pretty good speed” and “quite a clip” are the terms used). It is not unlikely that in both cases, Bush was going slowly when he crashed. One piece of contributing evidence: if you’re really booking along and you collide with someone, you usually get more than just a few scrapes and bruises. Bush’s injuries are more consistent with lower-speed falls. So the high-speed thing is possible, but not likely. The whole thing with the press office trying to make Bush seem macho when he falls off his bike is laughable and not just a little pathetic. Simply say he had another spill and don’t embellish.

“You know what really makes this embarrassing? The other day the president said the leaders in Iraq are ‘ready to take off the training wheels.’ That’s what he said, ‘take off the training wheels.’ Then he goes out and falls off his bicycle. And they wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t take us seriously.” —Jay Leno

About a week ago, I made a podcast and was successful in getting listed in the iTunes Music Store. That first podcast wasn’t really an “official” cast, though–I just needed something to fill the space, and so I read the post I made about podcasting and uploaded it. Since then, I’ve been waiting for the right topic to start the real series of podcasts. Alberto Gonzales seemed to be a good topic. As may be the case with a lot of the casts I may do, this was not just a quickie with little detail; I tried to make it fairly extensive, without getting too gabby or getting into boring detail. Still, it runs just shy of ten minutes. But hopefully it’ll give you a good idea about a man who might be a Supreme Court nominee.

So I’ve uploaded the podcast (and deleted the first episode from the RSS feed). However, iTunes is of two minds on podcasts: they have the searchable listing in the Music Store, and then there’s the subscription in your podcasts window. The subscription can be updated immediately, and will show you the new podcast. However, the searchable listing in the Music Store may take a day or more to update. You can still search for “BlogD” or “The Blog from Another Dimension” and find me, but you won’t hear the Gonzales podcast unless you subscribe and go to the Podcast window. More on how that works when I figure it out.

So from now on, I will make a post to announce when I have published a new podcast. The XML feed for the podcasts is here. The episode on Gonzales can be found here (you can either click to listen in your browser, or right-click and download the file to listen with another application). I am also including an iTunes icon into the title of each post with a podcast; you can click the icon to download the podcast. Let me know if the HTML code within the title looks screwy in any way or in any situation.

Sometime soon, though, I’m going to have to buy an actual microphone; I’m using the built-in mic on my Powerbook, and the quality is not what I’d hope for.

For those of you who have been following the perils of this blog lately, you know that the latest implementations of perl/mysql/cpanel have knocked out some of the Movable Type scripting that makes comment and entry posting-and-rebuilding work. The dreaded “500 – Internal Server Error” messages have plagued both commenters and myself alike. It’s all very technical, but let me see if I can lay it out so that maybe you can clear it up if you’re having these problems yourself.

First of all, the errors are not fatal. They only occur on a save-and-rebuild with making new blog entries and with making new comments. The entries and comments are saved, but the pages are not rebuilt. That can be solved by a manual rebuild. Everything gets saved and eventually appears on the site, it’s just that the rebuilding must be done manually.

The fix: in the perl scripts, downgrade the DBI to 1.47, and downgrade the DBD::Mysql to 2.9006. If you don’t run your own server, then ask your web host to do it for you. However, you must also tell them to reset the cpanel autoupdate for your site so that it does not automatically reload the upgrades every night. My web host did this once, and it worked for 12 hours or so, then reverted. I told them of this, and again, they fixed it. They did not tell me if it involved further settings changes, but it was likely something in the cpanel that continued the autoupdate. So stress to your web host that the cpanel autoupdate must be verified as turned off, and then wait 24 hours to make sure that took hold. I’m still not clear as to whether the problems will return yet again, but it is clear that they are fiddling with the right toggle which gets rid of the bugs. I’ll let you know when the problems have stayed away for more than a day.

This should end your MT blog problems for the time being. Word has it that the developer of DBI::Mysql has versions 3.0000_0 and 3.0001_0 out by now, but whether that will fix the Sql/MT bug or not, I cannot say. More news as it comes in.

Update: for four days in a row, my web host tried to disable the automatic upgrading of the site, and on each day the fix worked–for about half a day. The auto-update kept kicking in and the errors would return. Well, maybe five times lucky: my host has disabled the auto-update completely now, so let’s see how that plays out.

You know it had to happen, somewhere. NASA is being sued by an astrologer in Russia for disrupting her work. She claims that she cannot accurately calculate horoscopes anymore since the Deep Impact probe hit the comet Tempel 1.

“It is obvious that elements of the comet’s orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope,” Izvestia daily quoted astrologist Marina Bai as saying in legal documents submitted before Monday’s collision.

Ms. Bai wants NASA to cough up $300 million.

The article goes on to state that “NASA representatives in Moscow were unavailable for comment.” Apparently they have not finished laughing yet.

Apparently the cat is–or might be–out of the bag: three days before an official announcement is expected, Engadget has posted photos and an iTunes screen shot of the new phone. It uses a TransFlash card for memory, the biggest size for that format being 256 MB. The phone appears to have some video function as well. However, the nature of the video function, or even if the phone includes a camera, is unclear. There is also talk about whether this is the real deal, or if it’s an older proof-of-concept version of an existing phone model, and not the final product. The same site showed this image of what was then also rumored to be the new iTunes phone. So nothing is certain–except that there will be an iTunes phone, and we’ll likely know its real final form by the end of this week.

About 8 months ago, I switched from cable to satellite TV here in Japan. When I was on cable TV, there was a program guide mailed to me every month; however, with satellite TV, there’s no guide. Yes, there’s a live “what’s on” channel that you can go forward for one week, and they even have an English version for it–but it’s clunky at best.

So for six months, I subscribed to an English TV Guide magazine, which gave all-English listings for cable and satellite channels (not the terrestrial Japanese-language channels). That was good, but it was also expensive–¥800 ($7.20) an issue, with no price break at all for 6- or 12-month subscriptions. At almost ten thousand yen per year, that’s a pretty pricey TV guide–especially if you only use it for half a dozen channels or so.

I was about to re-subscribe, however painfully, when I figured I’d give it a pass for at least one month. During that time, I found out something that made me feel a bit foolish: you don’t need to pay for it. Each channel publishes its full schedule on their web site, and most–even though they’re Japanese companies in Japan–publish an alternate schedule in English. Each one is presented as a PDF file, and these files are sometimes almost identical to what I’d been paying so much for. All you have to do is visit the sites for the channels you watch each month and print out the PDF file: instant TV guide in English, for only a few pennies. Like I said, I felt like a fool for dishing out that much.

Strangely–or not so strangely, considering–the Fox channel (entertainment, not news) is the only one I watch that does not publish and English-language schedule. Which kind of figures; Fox is also one of two, maybe three channels on all of satellite TV (another is the Disney channel) which does broadcasts bilingual (Japanese and English) in a non-standard format that defies the usual technology for extra audio channels. With other channels, like Super-Channel or AXN, you can set the channel to bilingual mode and it will always be in English from then on. But with Fox, you have to switch from Japanese to English every time you change the channel. Furthermore, it’s not easy to switch; at least on my set, you have to activate the menu, move up one level, across one, and then down to, and then set–pushing five different buttons six times just to change the audio. But worst, the audio cannot be controlled from my DVR–meaning that I have to manually switch audio for every programmed show recorded off of Fox. A huge pain in the neck.

All whining aside, here are the pages where you can download English versions of monthly programming schedules:

AXN
Super Channel
LaLa (a cumbersome PDF, takes a while to display)
Movie Plus
Cinefil Imagica (click “Schedule” on the left)
Fox (Japanese only)

This site is always deluged with spam, but every once in a while, some very subtly weird spam comes along that just catches your attention. The most recent has been a series of trackback spam from fake blogs. As I’ve mentioned, trackbacks are when other blogs refer to and link to this one, and their site software “pings” mine, or sends a special message to mine alerting me to the reference. Spammers fake such pings in order to get a link on my site to theirs.

But these latest fake pings don’t make much sense. There has been almost one a day for the past several days; all are fake blog posts on fake blog sites; all have an address which would indicate a recent blog post. The address includes “/archives/2005/07/” and then a blog article file name–all looking rather authentic. In each case, the message contained in the trackback ping is very similar: “Excerpt: You can read about it also on my blog page,” “Excerpt: More info can be found on my page,” and “Excerpt: Look at my page for more info….”

Now, I would expect in each case for the bogus blog addresses to be a shell domain with a redirect: go to the address given, and you’re automatically redirected to a different domain with hideous porn spam. Instead, when I visited each site to find out what was going on, a 500 Internal Server Error was returned. For the entire site, not just for the one page. And it’s not a 404 error or a domain not found/doesn’t exist error either.

There is one possible explanation: by ironic chance, these spammers got foiled by the exact same perl scripting bug that’s been plaguing this blog for the past several days. In short, the redirect software which they use to transfer you to the hideous porn site is incompatible with the new perl software, causing the error messages. Which would be both funny and all too fitting.

It’s also possible that these spam are fake fakes–spam which doesn’t connect to a spammer. I’ve gotten these before. In the past, spammers have sent me referrer spam pointing back to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and spammers sent a lot of people referrer spam that claimed to come from the John Kerry web site. My guess is that these are either hoaxers, or they’re spammers testing out a software configuration and not leaving their own address in case something goes wrong. Even fake blogs have been the seeming origin of spam before–although in the past, these fake blogs showed a specific address ending in “/archives.html”, which is not a real location in any blog that I know of.

Nevertheless, it does make it all a bit interesting. For me, the main thing is, none of this gets onto my blog anymore, so it’s just a nuisance or a curiosity. Even my anti-referral patch for AwStats is working well–I’ve been getting almost no referral spam this month so far. A few are leaking through, but can only manage to get one or two hits on my site per day, like a few small leaks in a dam holding back a deluge.

Everyone, please be patient while Movable Type gets its stuff together. Recently, upgrades to perl and mysql have been upgraded on web hosts all around, and it appears that the new versions may not be compatible with Movable Type, this blog’s operating software. This means that certain events on this blog will not function properly, such as posting to comments. If you try, you may get a “500 – Internal Server Error” message. However, your comment will have been saved–it’s just that the Movable Type script that’s now incompatible with perl can’t go on to rebuild the post or give you any other message. It is also possible that this is worse with TypeKey than with unregistered commenters, at least for the time being. The malfunction also makes it harder–though not impossible, as you can tell–to post new entries for the blog.

I am trying to see if I can get my web host to downgrade the elements that are causing the problem, so the site can go back to the way it was before–but I have the feeling that the elements are server-wide and so cannot be changed just for me. Otherwise, I’ll have to just wait for Six Apart to fix the problem on their end and issue a patch or an upgrade (3.2 is due out soon).

So please be patient, and I’ll get things back to running smoothly again as soon as I can.

Update (July 4): my web host has downgraded at least part of the new software that might be causing the problems–but I’m still experiencing errors. There might be fewer errors than before, it’s hard to say. Still looking for a way out of this mess.

What a country this is. Less than ten years after being a lowly legal counsel for the Texas governor, helping him get out of jury duty because it might expose a drunk driving charge, Alberto Gonzales is now Attorney General and currently at the top of a list being considered for Supreme Court Justice. Amazing where you can go if you help a friend weasel out of a political scandal.

Bizarrely, Gonzales would actually be a better choice than most candidates one can imagine Bush nominating. And considering Gonzales’ stand on prisoner torture, that’s saying quite a lot. Of course, the question is, in the torture issue, was Gonzales conveying his own beliefs, or was he simply doing dirty work for the administration? And how tightly will his friendship with Dubya hold him to decide conservatively when he’s got a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and is suddenly answerable to no one or nothing except the Constitution and his own conscience?

If his loyalty is greater than his conscience, he’ll do what Bush wants; he owes his entire career to Bush, who hired him as an advisor, elections officer and liaison with Mexico. Later, he became Bush’s legal counsel to the governor’s office, then appointed him Secretary of State and finally to the Texas Supreme Court. When Bush became president, Gonzales left the TSC to become Bush’s legal counsel in the White House, only to be named Attorney General this year. And now he’s in line for being a SC Justice. Let’s face it, if it weren’t for Bush, Gonzales would probably still be a junior partner for some legal firm in Houston, doing adjunct work as a college professor on the side. It is wholly possible that he will allow that bond to influence his decisions as a Supreme.

Strangely, Gonzales will be protested by both sides. Die-hard conservatives dislike him because he tends to be pro-choice, once deciding that pregnant teens in Texas had the right to have an abortion without the permission of an adult. Liberals will remember the torture memo and the hiding of Cheney’s energy policy meetings.

I wrote, two years ago in 2003, when Gonzales was still a White House counsel, that he was a candidate for a SCOTUS position; it was no secret ever since Bush took the White House that Gonzales would be an obvious choice. No one doubts his friendship with Bush, but there is also the less-than-attractive but very real fact that he is being considered because of his race, which would make it much easier to confirm him–and as I’ve noted, the right wing remembers how Clarence Thomas was able to get confirmed, despite a practically blank record and charges of sexual harassment against him. The GOP is acutely aware that the best way to get a hard-core right-winger on the bench is if it’s a minority or woman. Furthermore, let’s face it: Gonzales has been riding Bush’s coat-tails for the past decade. Does anyone really believe he’d be considered for a SCOTUS seat if he hadn’t been a political flunky of the president? These do not bode well as professional qualifications.

Frankly, I’m on the fence about this one. Gonzales seems to be at least moderate on social issues, when he’s given the chance to speak his mind. He did call out Priscilla Owen when she tried to exceed the law and go activist in restricting reproductive rights in Texas, calling her guilty of “an unconscionable act of judicial activism.” And he is more likely than other possible nominees to swing left, at least on some issues. But his loyalty and debt to Bush is troublesome, as he has shown that he’s willing to get into some pretty nasty stuff to please the boss. He might agree to serve on the high court on the condition of taking marching orders, even if for a limited number of issues, or only as long as Bush remains in office.

But here’s a question: will Bush ever nominate someone who is even half as acceptable as Gonzales is?

I just bought a new piece of Mac shareware and thought you might be interested in it. The software is called “Typinator.” What it does is essentially the same as what Microsoft’s AutoCorrect function does–it looks for you to type specific text strings, and when you do, it replaces them with other text strings that you have listed in the app. For example, if I want to type “The Blog from Another Dimension,” I could abbreviate it in Typinator as “bgd”; then, whenever I type “bgd,” the entire phrase is automatically replaced.

This function is also similar to the long-time Mac app called “TypeIt4Me” (around for close a decade), but from reports it works a lot better. TypeIt4Me works in the input menu, meaning you can only use it with the standard keyboard layout, and not, for example, Dvorak or any language other than QWERTY English. Typinator works differently, so you can use it with any keyboard layout; I’ve tried it by assigning English letters to activate Typinator to place Japanese characters, and it works. Typinator also allows for you to input images by typing specific strings. Typinator can also deliver date and time stamps, pre-formatted the way you prefer them. Finally, Typinator is cheaper, $19 shareware compared to TypeIt4Me’s $27.

In my case, I plan to use it as an AutoCorrect feature, system-wide. I want to switch over to using Pages more, and rely on MS Word less. However, Pages lacks an AutoCorrect feature; Typinator now fills that need, and not just in Pages–it does it everywhere. If I visit a blog and want to leave a comment, people usually require an email address, and I might want to type my own blog’s URL–but that can sometimes be a hassle. Yes, I know, I’m lazy as hell. But it’s nice to be able to type just a few easy keys in each text box and have a full email address and URL in a second or so.

Another good feature is that Typinator allows multi-line fill-ins. MS Word 2004 for the Mac allows this also, but not on Windows. For example, you can enter your entire multiple-line home address into Typinator, and get it back in a split second. Another good use would be in scripting web pages; if I want to make a quickie web page, it’s a hassle to type the basic HTML, HEAD, TITLE and BODY commands; takes a few minutes. But I can type them once, copy and paste the whole lot into Typinator, and from that point on I can insert the whole structure with only a few keystrokes. I can create similar fill-ins for TABLE or FORM tags, or any tag and attributes I please–which could save a lot of time writing basic HTML.

Typinator can also pay attention to your capitalization, so that if you have the string “typinator” with the trigger string “tpn,” then typing “Tpn” will similarly capitalize the “Typinator” expansion.

Typinator does have a few down spots. For one, whenever it’s activated, the automatically-replaced expansion text gets placed into the clipboard, kicking out whatever was in there previously; this has caught me up a few times, but I can live with it. Typinator is also a version-1.0, having just come out of Beta, so it’s not as feature-rich as it could be. Future versions may include a workaround for the clipboard problem, and other new features, whatever they may be.

I also had some concerns about security. What Typinator does seemed to me to be similar to what a keylogging program might do: watch what you type. I emailed their support department, and got a detailed reply back explaining why that was not a problem. Typinator uses an Apple feature introduced in Panther called the “event monitor” which allows them to watch what you type without logging anything except very temporarily; furthermore, password fields in Mac OS X are protected from prying eyes (Typinator can’t see what you type in a password field). It uses a completely different kind of technology to do its job. It would be easier for a hacker to simply create their own keylogging program than to somehow use Typinator for that purpose, so the security seems tight. Good enough for me.

TidBits reviewed Typinator, and you can find some user reviews on its download page at Version Tracker (assuming the reviews are genuine and not sales-related), or you can go to the product page at Ergonis. You can use Typinator as a trial, but it will only remember five expansion strings and no more, until you pay for the license.

As a side note, this app, along with the Dictionary now integrated into Tiger, make up the key elements I felt were lacking in Pages, which is now my first-string word processing application.

Today is the 700th day in a row that I’ve blogged, no breaks. August 2nd will be the 2-year anniversary for nonstop blogging.

On a side note, the iTunes Music Store has finally recognized the audio blog. Do a search in Podcasts in iTunes for “Blogd” and you’ll find it. As I mentioned before, it’s just a dorky little trial recording, so don’t expect to be blown away.

Now to tune up the RSS feed to get the details straight (and by this I’ll find out how fast the iTMS updates its listings via the RSS feed), and then record a real podcast. Or at least try to.

Well, it’s the end of the first day of the new month, meaning I’ve got a new start on the stats. Now I can see how the referral spam is working. It is supposed to use the MT-Blacklist to filter out spam as it arrives (there’s no getting rid of it once it’s in, not yet), but there’s a snag: I just upgraded to MT-Blacklist 2, which does not publish a blacklist. And there was no way to enter new strings into the existing blacklist file. Fortunately, someone posted a script which would allow MT-Blacklist 2 to export a blacklist. However, there’s a snag.

MT-Blacklist 2 is supposed to import your old blacklist and incorporate it into its own, but mine clearly did not do that; there are 400 or 500 entries fewer in the new list than in the old one, obviously all of my custom entries. And since the referral spam is a mix of old and new spammers, I need all the data from both lists. And MT-Blacklist’s import function is badly broken (don’t start it, it will never end). Worse, the new MT-B seems to lack the ability to add new strings more than one at a time–which means that re-entering the strings from the old list would be a very laborious task.

Feeling that most of the spam I’ll get will be from new addresses, I decided to archive the old list and use a newly-generated list. And so far, the results are a mix of good and bad.

The good: it does seem that the referral spam is being blocked. After one full day, only 8 of the top 25 referrers are spammers, and most of them are brand-new ones that slipped in only a few spam before I caught them. So the list looks like it may be a lot cleaner than before. Additionally, the total tallies from last month’s referrals was encouraging: 17 of the top 25 were spammers, and the spammers in the top 25 unleashed a total of 1,637 spam. That is opposed to May’s figures, where fully 24 of the top 25 were spammers, who unleashed 10,000 spam hits. On top of that, June’s figures include unblocked spam from the first five days, 867 spams from that time span alone. Meaning that there was less referral spam in the last 25 days than there was in the first 5. So clearly the AwStats patch is doing its job.

The bad: the patch is not doing a perfect job. One gay porn spammer, for instance, has been leaving one spam hit regularly every four hours or so–and they’re somehow getting past the filter, despite being on the blacklist. Which means that there is a way around it. And if there’s a way around it, then eventually it is likely that all spammers will find their way around it. This is the part I was talking about earlier when I said that it was a constant battle of putting up defenses and the spammers working to get around those defenses.

So we’ll have to wait and see how long this solution works. At least I’ve got pretty airtight control over the comment and trackback spam. (Knock on wood)

Sandra Day O’Connor has announced her retirement from the Supreme Court.

Everyone expected Rehnquist to be the one to step down, and while it would have been bad for Bush to get to appoint a Chief Justice, at least he would have been replacing someone who we know is a rabid right-winger; the worst that could have happened was that someone just like him could have come in; at best, Bush could have appointed someone who looked like a right-winger, only to have the new person turn left on him, as has happened several times in the past. Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, Stevens, O’Connor, kennedy and Souter all proved more liberal than was hoped for by the Republican presidents who appointed them.

Nevertheless, the idea of O’Connor leaving is a body blow. She has been a swing vote on abortion, the death penalty, and even more recently, the ten commandments ruling. Were it not for her, Rehnquist’s rabidly “anything goes” merge-church-and-state ruling would be law today. And if Bush and the GOP get their way, the replacement will be sufficiently right-wing, and wingnut conservatives around the country will start scrambling to get new test cases on every conceivable issue up before the Supreme Court so that they can change the legal landscape of the entire country.

What’s worse, Republicans have been getting much, much better at getting the people they want on the court. Justice Clarence Thomas is an excellent case in point. The replacement for Thurgood Marshall who just “happened” to be black, Thomas was supremely unqualified for the position, except in one way: politically. He was a far-right-winger, without much of a track record that could be held against him in hearings, but most importantly, he was one of those few minorities who is rabidly conservative. Any attempt to deny him his appointment could, and was, painted hypocritically and opportunistically as racist. And Thomas was also discredited by accusations of sexual harassment, remember–and the right wing fixed that by going on an all-out rampage to smear the accuser. It worked. And since then, they’ve gotten even better.

How much money you want to bet that Bush puts forward a jurist who just happens to be a woman (coincidentally, of course), but also a wingnut glad to overthrow Roe v. Wade? Or maybe Bush won’t feel to pressured to put a woman on the court, as Ginsburg is there? Somehow I doubt he’ll put forward a white male, as one of the GOP’s best ways to work the system is to put up women or minorities as bulletproof bulwarks against criticism, enabling them to accuse Democrats of racism and sexism when the objections are clearly about politics and professionalism.

If anything is for certain, it’s that the GOP is now gearing up for a fearsome battle, will try to get a right-winger on the court who will be 99% guaranteed not to go lefty on them–and that the fundamentalists will have more than just a little say in who gets nominated.

The question is: will Democrats be gearing up just as strongly? They’d better, This will be the fight of their lives. And now, I must admit that I was wrong in my opposition to the deal made between moderate Republicans and Democrats to back off from the GOP’s “nuclear option” of doing away with the filibuster. While there is no guarantee that the GOP won’t go balls-to-the-wall in trying to rekindle efforts to axe the filibuster again, it is at least in place for now, and might even make it possible for the Dems to force the Republicans into compromising, even a little.

But my hopes are not high. If the past five years have taught me anything, it is that the GOP will go to almost any length imaginable, commit almost any act, tell any number of lies, and will put on a show-of-horrors PR campaign of such dishonesty and corruption that it would make Satan’s scrotum shrink in embarrassment. They’ve shown that they will go to practically any length to get everything they want. And they won’t turn into shrinking violets now.

Then there is the fact that Americans who might not have felt their rights and liberties at stake before will not have another election before O’Connor is replaced. And Bush will probably still get to replace Rehnquist–though we can only hope that Democrats will gain back control of the Senate before that happens.

Senator Ried, Howard Dean: this is your moment of truth.

I used to work for minimum wage. But it’s not like it was some great inconvenience to me. At first, I was a high school and then college student just making a bit of money, with my folks covering the food, shelter, clothing and health care parts of the equation. Later, returned from stints in Japan, I got minimum wage jobs at movie theaters because they were not a strain in terms of hours worked and were good for getting in study; also, I was mostly living off of savings I’d made while working in Japan as I got my degrees at the state university.

But actually living off of minimum wage, with no one to fall back on, no one to help support you, and no savings to use, even in a pinch… that’s a scary thought.

The minimum wage is currently $5.15 per hour, and has been since 1997, for eight years now. While that sounds like a goodly amount more than the $3.35 I used to get right out of high school in 1982, one factor runs that illusion into the ground: inflation. Your money doesn’t get you what it used to. In 1998 dollars, the 1981 minimum wage was $6.15. In 2005 dollars, that would have been about $6.50.

The minimum wage today has again dropped to very low levels, and if you look at this chart you’ll see that before the Reagan era, in which minimum wage was allowed to fester and stagnate, the minimum wage in 2004 dollars was between $6 and $7 an hour for the previous two decades. Currently, Congress is talking about hikes in the minimum wage, but there is the usual argument over how great a hike it should be. Do I even need to tell you that the Democrats are pushing for the biggest wage increases, and the Republicans and shutting them down, arguing for far lesser increases, and trying to weasel in a great number of exceptions and amendments for even more tax cuts for wealthy people?

Senator Kennedy is aiming high, for a $2 hike in the minimum wage, which would bring it back up to where it was in the 1960’s. The Republican response if for a $1.10 hike, which would be treading water, similar to hikes in 1991 and 1997, or to the middle of the Reagan era when the wage was in a historic downward slide. But more than that, the Republican plan would double the minimum-business-income exemption to paying minimum wage from half a million dollars a year to a million, meaning a lot more people would be getting a huge pay cut, not a raise. The plan also calls for doing away with a requirement for the minimum wage to be paid if the business deals in any kind of interstate commerce. Another large group of people would get their wages slashed.

The GOP would also allow businesses to play with their worker’s pay periods so as to maximize their ability to avoid paying overtime. Republicans claim this is only if the worker agrees, which is another way of saying it is mandatory. I worked on a minimum wage job in the early 80’s where if you worked overtime, you got paid just the regular wage; after one employee sued, the bosses simply had us re-work our time cards so that the overtime was spread out so little or no overtime appeared to be happening. If we did not agree to sign these, we would have been fired. (On a side note, when I quit later, I successfully sued that employer in small claims court for unpaid overtime hours–but could not reclaim the overtime after they made me re-work the time cards.)

What is it like to live at the minimum wage today? Morgan Spurlock, the guy who at only fast food for 30 days in the divisive “Supersize Me” documentary, carried the idea over, in a way, to a much higher and more respectable level in his new 6-part series on the FX Channel, called “30 Days.” In each episode, a person from one part of society (usually representing a group thought of as more “normal”) would spend 30 days in the life of a culture very different from their own–a sort of “walk a mile in another man’s shoes” concept. The first episode had the filmmaker Spurlock and his fiancé spending 30 days living at the minimum wage.

The experience for them was brutal. Spurlock worked one and often two full-time jobs, his fiancé worked in a restaurant with meager tips (although there is a national exception for restaurants, not mentioned in the show, to include tips in deciding the minimum wage for their workers). Even with a cheap, under-heated apartment over what was recently a crack house, free clothes and furniture from a charitable organization, and three full-time jobs between them, they went way over budget due to hospitalization. (They could not even come close to affording insurance; Spurlock had to see a doctor for an injured wrist, his fiancé for a urinary tract infection. And remember, these are the kind of people who will be hit hard by the recent Republican cave-in to the credit industry, the new law that will make it harder for poor people to escape debt, even in medical emergencies.) And that was without kids.

And it is examples like this which make a mockery out of plans to offer “vouchers” for public schools which would give families thousands of dollars less per child per year than it would require to pay for schools. And it gives new emphasis to providing national health care, insuring tens of millions of Americans who presently have no insurance. We know the Spurlock and his fiancé are headed back toward a better life after their month is up, but seeing them talking about not being able to afford to get a health concern looked after, having no choice but to work when sick or injured–it’s a scary thought.

And yet countless millions of Americans live in this hole from which it is next to impossible to escape. Let the Republicans who spout on about how people can become wealthy if they only got off their asses and tried, let those assholes try living like Spurlock did for a month–hell, for a year–and see how much they talk about how easy it is after that. Betcha they’d shut up real fast.

Simply put, minimum wage is not enough to live on. A single full-time job would earn only $10,712 a year, $4,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. But imagine single parents, who have to somehow arrange day care, whose children suffer if the parent must work overtime, without even the luxury of having two parents able to work. Live like this for a while and you’ll begin to understand what a mockery the minimum wage is. Even Kennedy’s proposed $2 hike would only barely push that working single mother just a hair above the poverty line. And if you think that’s good news, ask yourself if you’d like to live just a hair above the poverty line.

In the meantime, the Republican Congress continues to stall and push back minimum wage reform. Even the paltry hike they proposed didn’t get through–despite the fact that they could easily push it through with only a minimum of effort, which tells us that even when they talk about raising the wage a bit, even with all their new loopholes and exceptions–they’re lying about it even then. They don’t want to raise the minimum wage at all.

And what’s their reason? The same tired old argument: that raising the minimum wage would result in economic disaster. Well, they argue that every time, and there’s no evidence for it at all. The last two wage hikes took place right before and right in the middle of the biggest economic expansion in recent history. Raising the wage didn’t even cause a hiccup.

Henry Ford was far from a wonderful human being, but he had a very good viewpoint when it came to paying workers well: workers should earn enough money to buy the products the companies make. That’s what drives the economy. Strange, when it comes to giving trillion-dollar tax breaks to the wealthy, Republicans are all about injecting money into the economy. The whole idea of “trickle-down” economics was that the lower classes would bolster the economy by spending money (once it filtered down through the rich). And Republicans are all about the common people working hard for a living. So why is it they suddenly run in circles, screaming and shouting death and disaster, whenever someone suggests that workers get paid a fair, living wage for a hard day’s work?

All the corrupt societies are top-down. We should be bottom-up.

Well, I was successful (I think) in creating an RSS feed and the iTunes Music Store said they accepted my submission–but it’s been more than a day and I still don’t show up in a keyword search in iTunes. So the success is tentative. I only prepared one item, and that was a 3-minute reading of my last entry, with a bit of music slapped onto it. It was not so much an audio blog as it was a test. If I start doing audio blogs, they’ll be a bit more original and hopefully more interesting (and better-read) than that one. If you happen to listen to it, keep in mind that it’s a throw-away.

In trying to figure out how it’s done, I came across my pet peeve: documentation. In this case, it’s not a lack of documentation, it’s a lack of complete documentation. For example, in order to produce my own RSS feed, I had to search for a few hours just to find someone who wrote down the simple fact that an RSS feed file had to have an “.xml” extension! A vital piece of information, one that most newcomers will not know, and yet most people trying to help beginners will not even mention it. What are people thinking? Enough information should be given so that, from start to finish, a newbie can complete the task and, hopefully, understand all the elements. Maybe this is just obvious to me since I teach beginners how to use computers, but it seems like something one should know if one wants to help others do stuff.

So here, I will try to tell you how to get a podcast feed going. Keep in mind, however, that I have just learned and I may have made an error or two, especially where I was forced to assume something, and then it seemed to work. If I find that I erred, I’ll try to revise and update. Also keep in mind that I am working on a Mac (so recording solutions will concentrate on that) and you must have a web site with your own domain that you can upload to. But here’s what I figured out so far.

First, I tried a plug-in to Movable Type, called MT-Enclosures. Couldn’t get it to work. Usual reason, spotty documentation. Followed all the directions given, and nothing happened. Even tried leaving a comment on the page describing my problems, and no reply. So I abandoned the attempt to have MT auto-feed the podcast, and instead went for the manual approach, which I’ll use until someone comes out with a podcast solution that works without your having to be a hacker to get it to do its job. Again, I fell into the pit of despair you find when everyone assumes you’ve had several months of training when they tell you how to do things. One commercial site even had a video of a guy telling you, the average Joe, the layman, how to do it. He told us to make our show, and then… promptly assumed we’d be able to follow labyrinthine steps simply because he told us a web site to go to, without even telling us what page we needed to visit or even the basics about what steps you should take. Another dead end.

But as I noted, in the end, I finally got something done. Let me go over a few things.

RECORDING YOUR PODCAST

I should note that I use a Mac and that’s what my advice for recording will center on; you’ll have to look for your own recording apps for Windows.

First of all, you need your MP3 file. To make one, I used two programs: SoundEdit (to record and edit) and QuickTime Pro (to convert to MP3). But don’t expect to be able to download SoundEdit; while it is an excellent program for recording and editing sound, it is a Classic app, about a decade old. It’s a great app, but you probably won’t be able to find it anywhere; Macromedia stopped selling it last year. There’s a freeware app for recording sound, Sound Recorder, which is an ultra-simple no-frills audio recorder, though when I tried it, it played back with an annoying reverb/echo. You’ll need a converter to change the file to mp3.

Then there’s shareware, probably SndSampler would work okay, but the interface is a bit less than intuitive, and the 15-day free trial version is marred by the constant (not to mention hostile!) “reminders” to pay for the product, which interrupt the program for ten seconds at a time every few minutes, making the program very unattractive to use in trial mode. You also cannot save as an MP3 file, unless your version of QuickTime supports that, so again, a converter is required. Fee is $30.

A much better shareware option is WireTap Pro ($19). It will record not only audio you input, but also any audio coming in on your Mac, such as streaming audio from Real, QuickTime, iTunes or any other source. Unfortunately, the trial version does not allow saving in MP3 format or recording via your built-in mic or audio-in line; if you try, your recording will have a “this is an unregistered version” recording dubbed over it. Also, it does not allow for editing or applying effects such as fade-ins and fade-outs. But twenty bucks for this kind of an app is not bad.

For the experience of a commercial sound recording/editing app like SoundEdit, the choice today seems to be Peak LE, a $99 app with a 15-day free trial. It also has reminders, but very quick ones, and only at program startup and when you save an app. This program has a bit more of a learning curve than SndSampler, but it’s not so bad. It also does not come with built-in MP3 support, but you can add it relatively easily: go to http://homepage.mac.com/awk/lame/ and download the bundle, then install it as a plug-in via the app’s “Get Info” window in order to save as an MP3. Peak is a good app, but the problem with the LE version is that all the features in the pro version are in the menus but always grayed out–as if to tease you constantly about what you could have if you only shelled out 500 bucks.

None of these, however, compares well at all with SoundEdit 16 in terms of convenience, power, and ease-of-use (at least in the manner I use the app). So as long as I have a Mac which can use SoundEdit, I’ll continue using that app.

CREATING THE FEED

As I said, using one of the services available (either MT-Enclosures or one of the web sites that offer a solution) can be problematic at best. There may be a simple, workable solution I haven’t found. There are services which say they will host your podcast, but I prefer to try to host my own, to avoid ads, spam and to be able to control my own media. If you want to get a domain, you might try GoDaddy, and then go to Surpass Hosting to get the domain hosted. You’ll need to use an FTP program to upload the podcast and the RSS file to your web site. You could use Fetch, Captain FTP (Shareware), or FTP Thingy or PW FTP (both freeware; PW FTP is off-line at the current time).

The RSS feed file will be a simple text file containing some script. It can be given any filename, so long as the filename extension is .xml. Open a text editor and type the information, or copy and paste from an example.

The basics: the file should begin with <?xml version=”1.0″?> to identify it as an XML file.

The file should begin and end with the RSS tag:

<rss version="2.0"> </rss>

However, if you want to upload to iTunes, you’ll have to add an iTunes xml attribute:

<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0"> </rss>

Within the RSS, you have a "channel." This decribes your podcast in general. Within the channel tag, you’ll have "item" tags, each one decribing a specific podcast. The podcast file is identified by the "enclosure" tag. The basic structure, without attributes, looks like this:

<rss>
     <channel>
          <item>
               <enclosure>
          </item>
          <item>
               <enclosure>
          </item>
     </channel>
</rss>

Within each channel and item, there will have to be tags to designate various information points about the podcast. The tags for the channel include:

<title> – The title of the podcast “show,” the general name
<link> – A link to the web page for the podcast
<description> – A description of the show (preferably small, 256 characters or less)
<language> – Which language it is in (I’m guessing here)
<category> – What category you’d put your show in
<image> – What image you’d like associated with the podcast.
<pubDate> – The most recent date of publication for the show.
<lastBuildDate> – The most recent date the RSS file was rebuilt.
<copyright> – a copyright message
<webMaster> – your email address
<ttl> – how many minutes a subscriber should wait between refreshing the rss feed from your site

These are straight tags with no attributes; just put the information between these tags and their end tags (same tag, preceded by a slash).

Tags for the item include:

<title>
<description>
<guid> – uniquely identifies the location of each podcast (I don’t pretend to understand this one at all)
<pubDate> – The date of publication for the podcast.
<enclosure> – the address of the podcast

The “enclosure” tag requires attributes:

url – address of the podcast
length – the length of the podcast in bytes. Do a get info on the file to find this out. Don’t use commas.
type – identifies the type of file; for an mp3, it would be “audio/mpeg”.

Therefore, an enclosure tag might look like:

<enclosure url=”http://www.blogd.com/podcasts/blogdpod1.mp3″ length=”1807241″ type=”audio/mpeg” />

iTunes also asks you to add some special iTunes tags:

<itunes:category>
<itunes:explicit>
<itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>
<itunes:author>
<itunes:keywords>
<itunes:duration>
<itunes:keywords>
<itunes:owner>
<itunes:name>
<itunes:email>
<itunes:image>
<tunes:block>

These are explained in Apple’s specification file [PDF]. Mostly they are stand-alone tags, with the target information between the start and end tags (such as <itunes:author>Luis</itunes:author>); others have the target information within an attribute, namely the <itunes:category> tag, which seems a bit complicated. The “itunes:owner” tag appears at the Channel level only; the “itunes:duration” and “itunes:keyword” tags appear at the item level only. All other tags can appear at the channel or item level.

If you want a quick and dirty, non-iTunes-optimized RSS feed, you could go here and type in the basic information to get a basic RSS feed text output. But you will probably want to tinker with the RSS code, especially for the iTunes store. Here is an example script (you may want to right-click the link and download the targeted file, otherwise your browser might read the RSS file as such) which I’ve tried to keep simple. The example script uses my own blog and podcast data, so if you use this, you’ll want to change that.

When you’re finished, save the rss file as plain text, and give it a name with the “.xml” extension (for example, “podcast.xml”).

Later, after you’ve succeeded with the first one, you can add new podcasts to the feed simply by adding more “item” tag groups, one for each podcast.

PUBLISH AND VALIDATE

Now you have to upload the mp3 file and the rss feed. Open your FTP program, then upload the files into the directories you decide are best. At this point, I do not believe that any directory is better than any other. I have placed my RSS feed into my main directory, and my podcasts into a subdirectory. So long as all you URLs are given correctly, I don’t think that should be a problem.

The next step is to validate the feed you have created. Go to the Feed Validator page, type in the address of your RSS feed file, and then validate it. If a problem is found, you will be told the line and the general problem, though not necessarily a solution. The validator will only correct one error at a time, so for each error, you will have to go back to the text editor, correct the error, re-save the file, and re-upload it, then you can go back to the validator and try to validate again. Once all your errors have been corrected (or the lines simply edited out), the validator will tell you that your feed is valid.

Once that’s been accomplished, now you have to tell people about the existence of your feed. To do that at the iTunes Music Store, you must open iTunes, go to the Music Store. While no membership is required to get podcasts, but you do need membership to publish! Membership is free, and publishing doesn’t cost anything, but you will need a credit card with a billing address in a country with an iTMS in order to get the account.

On the main page of the iTMS, click on the “Podcasts” link; then click the “Publish a Podcast” link. You will be taken through a process where you will give the URL of the feed file, log in to your iTMS account, and then you’ll get a page to confirm your settings.

You can check if the feed works independent of your podcast listing at the iTMS by going into iTunes, choosing “Subscribe to Podcast…” in the “Advanced” menu, and typing in the URL of the feed directly. That won’t tell you anything about whether or not the iTunes store has started publishing your podcast, but it will tell you if the feed and the podcast are working. Otherwise, you might try out iPodder, a podcast subscription client.

And that’s it–so far as I now know. Let me know if you see an error in what I just wrote, and I will try to keep this page updated.