[Programming note: I'm going to try to keep my music posts to Monday mornings.  That is all.]

For months, there's been a low buzz in the internet about when The Beatles and Radiohead are going to break down and sign a deal with Apple to provide their music on iTunes.  Radiohead last night told Apple (and the rest of the industry that treats musicians as slaves) where they can stick their 1s and 0s.

Last night, Radiohead announced they will not only be selling their next album, In Rainbows, on their own site, but they'll allow the purchaser to name the price, from $0.00 to $1,000,000 (or whatever your credit card max is).  From their site,

Radiohead have made a record.  So far, it is only available from this website.

The release will come in two flavors: digital download, and in a "diskbox" which will contain

the new album, In Rainbows, on CD and on 2 x 12 inch heavyweight vinyl records.  A second, enhanced CD contains more new songs, along with digital photographs and artwork.

The latter diskbox will cost 40EUR, or roughly $57USD.

You can get more information about the purchase by wandering through Radiohead's website, or by going directly to the order page for In Rainbows. 

I think there are a couple of very interesting things to note here.  The first is that witness to a significant paradigm shift in the world of music distribution.  This isn't the first band to distribute directly, nor will they be the last.  But they are arguably the biggest band to do it.  Beck has been toying with direct-to-consumer material for over a year, and Barenaked Ladies released Barenaked Ladies Are Me tracks before their album was complete.  With BNL, Avril Lavigne, Dido, Jars of Clay, and Sarah McLachlan have moved their management to the non-traditional Nettwerk Music Group, who is foregoing the traditional methods of band conscription by (among other things) offering alternative methods of distribution.

The second, more geeky, and real deal maker/breaker, is whether Radiohead's site will be able to manage the traffic gracefully.  Their site is very cool, but at the sake of being lightweight.  The main store page for example is nothing but imagery which makes the page about 100x bigger than it would otherwise be if it were the textual analog.  The rub is this: if they can't manage the traffic that will be hitting them on 10/10/2007, the band's goodwill might be shot.  What's the over/under on Radiohead.com and the download site denying connections by the time NYC wakes up?

I love finding new music that speaks to me on a different level; meaning that it's not the same style music I've been playing or listening to in the recent past.  About a year ago, I came across Marcus Eaton, whose most recent album is rhythmically reminiscent of old Dave Matthews or Duncan Sheik.  Something I appreciate Marcus Eaton for is that he embraces technology and allows you to listen to his entire album just by visiting his site.  Sure, it's not high fidelity, but it whets the appetite.

Anyway, I was looking over this weekend's Austin City Limits Music Festival lineup, and although I came across quite a few bands that are new to me, Gotan Project really jumped out.  Maybe they remind me of my most recent trip to Paris, or maybe they're a little pop-tastic, but there's something very cool about their sound.

Somebody forgot the admin password for our Visual Source Safe 2005 (VSS) install. I think that jackass was me.

Crap.

OK, well, off to my search engine of choice..."lost vss admin password" and the first link is a forum thread that seems to be completely implausible.  Mainly because it's six years old, but also because it's impossibly simple (if you're not afraid of hex editors).

You know what?  It worked like a champ.  Here's the tip:

1. find the um.dat file sitting in your ...\VSS\data directory
2. back it up.  No, seriously.  If you jack this up, it's not my fault.
3. Load up your favorite hex editor of choice  (I didn't have one on hand and didn't want anything heavyweight doing anything behind the curtain, so I found, downloaded and used frhed)
4. Open um.dat and change bits 80 through AF** to be:
   

   0:80 55 55 bc 7f 41 64 6d 69 6e 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

   0:90 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

   0:a0 00 00 00 00 90 6e 00 00 a8 01 00 00 00 00 00 00

** YMMV: If you have users with names that (alphabetically) are lower than "Admin", then your Admin password location may not start at 80.  In that case, watch for the string in your hex editor and change accordingly.  Luckily, this was not my problem.

In a nutshell, what you just did was reset the Admin password to the base install (empty) setting.  In your editor, you'll see that 85-89 spells "Admin", and if you have other users, you'll see their names further down.

Now, open up your VSS Administrator tool.  If you did it right, you will be greeted with the Administrator toolbox with all of your users' login names staring at you.  Worst case, the tool will bark at you and will ask you to run Analyze.exe.  Very worst case, you need to put your old um.dat file.

As for me, I can take off the Dunce Cap and get back to work.  As for the team in charge of VSS?  Well, I'd suggest they hit the books.

This message is for me.  If you, the reader, like this list, you're welcome to bookmark either Scott's site or mine, but I need this link here to save me the 5 minutes of my life I lose every time I go looking for the list.  Scott's a prolific writer, and digging through his "Tools" tag isn't simple.

That was a horrible sentence.

Without further adieu, Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows.

After setting up a few different domains to use Google Apps (specifically Google Analytics and Gmail), I've found a few best practices and an order to make the process go a bit more smoothly.

Before we get started, I'm assuming that you have a domain name set up with the registrar of your choice.  If you don't have any preference, I'd suggest you use GoDaddy.  Their UI is horrific, but their prices are fantastic.  I've on occasion had to deal with their customer service, and they've been top notch.  I'm also assuming that you have the rights and the skills to edit DNS entries and add JavaScript to a website.  The latter isn't life-or-death, but you won't be able to use Analytics.

From here down, let's call your domain "mydomain.com".

1. Set up a new "root account" email  Even if you have an existing Gmail account, it's best to have an account dedicated to mydomain.com.  This is especially so if you have or maintain many domains, and are planning on moving them to Google Apps.  The big payoff for this is step #8 (below).  So,
   • Visit Google and sign up for a new Gmail account.
   • Hint!! Use [mydomain.com]@gmail.com as your Login Name.  This will keep things nice and tidy, and you'll never have to guess what your admin account name is.
   • Make sure to use a strong password and save it somewhere safe like VirtualKeyChain.com
2. Sign up for Google Apps  Creating your Google Apps account gives you access to all of the fun Google toys, like Gmail, shared calendar, and online spreadsheets among other features.
   • Visit Google Apps and pick the option that best fits your organization: small, enterprise, school, or family/group
   • Sign up using the "root account" email you created above, i.e. mydomain@gmail.com
   • For the Apps account, you'll need to create an administrator account login.  I suggest something very original, like admin@mydomain.com or administrator@mydomain.com.
   • Hint!!  It's easy to forget (or not notice) this, but you and all users can reach their shared domain Google page via http://partnerpage.google.com/mydomain.com
3. Verify your domain ownership  This step proves to Google that you are really who you say you are, and you do indeed have the rights to the domain.  Google has a good FAQ on what this is all about.  Follow the link at the top of your Google Apps dashboard that says "Verify your domain."
   • You can perform this verification by either creating an HTML file on your root website at mydomain.com, or by creating a CNAME record in your DNS entries.  Pick your poison, and follow the instructions.  Google will provide you with a unique CNAME or html page that you need to add to DNS or your website (respectively).  Hit 'Verify' once you're done.
   • The verification process may take 48 hours, especially if you use CNAME
4. Gather all existing email account information  This is important, as midway through the next step, you're likely going to lose access to your old mail server. 
   • If there is a way to export user names and passwords, do so.  If you can't do that, at least copy all of your email names to manually generate accounts in Gmail.
   • Send out a warning to all users to make sure to download/read all mail on their server
5. Activate Gmail  Before starting this step, make sure your client knows their email server is changing.  Once you set your DNS entries, the web will start propagating the change which will likely cause some confusion.  You'll notice that on your Google Apps dashboard, Email is the only application not activated by default.
   • Click on "Activate Email" and read the instructions for setting up your DNS entries for your MX records.  There should be around 7 MX records.
   • Go to your DNS manager and add those records as shown, making sure to delete any existing MX records you currently have.
     • You may not be able to set the priority exactly as Google suggests, but just get the order right, i.e. set ASPMX to the lowest (0, 1, 5, etc), then ALT1 & ALT2 to the next, and so on.
   • Click "I've completed these steps" and wait for Google to "see" your MX changes.
6. Add Email accounts
   • Using the information you collected in step 4 above, generate new users.  
   • Per RFC requirements, make sure to add postmaster@ and abuse@ addresses.  Because Gmail automatically (and quietly) listens to those accounts, you can only create these as "lists," but that's a preferable method.  When you create them, you'll see "Google Support" is already in the distribution list
7. Sanity Check: make sure you don't have any DNS issues  I'm a fan of the free DNS tools available on the web, my favorite being DNSStuff.com.  You can just type your domain in and get a report of all of the potential or real issues with your DNS records.  Since you just fooled with your DNS, it always helps to have a fresh check to make sure you didn't do anything "bad."
8. Sign up for Google Analytics  Outside of Gmail, Google Analytics is definitively the crown jewel in the set of domain applications.  What's very odd about this tool however, is a) Google does not include this application in it's set of applications for domains, and b) you cannot use a non-@gmail.com domain email address to sign up for Analytics!  This is why step #1 up above was so key.  You can now sign up for analytics using your mydomain.com@gmail.com account, and keep your stable of applications all together. 

Where are we now?  We now have a single Gmail account that serves as the home for all administrative communications on our Google Apps.  This isn't as simple as it sounds.  Although you could have used any old Gmail account, what happens if you want to give administrative rights to someone else you work with, or the client themselves?  You certainly wouldn't hand over your personal Gmail account login, but this is now an easily transferable object.