@lindsay.at

If anyone out there cares, I've finally gotten off the $100/year hamster-wheel called .mac, and transferred the existing major pages living there into this site's CMS. Most notable are the Paradiddle and ConTeXt pages, both of which document work done over three years ago. I hope Google is able to index the page transitions, but in general, I seem to be pretty find-able.

Hey, has anyone else noticed that there has finally been a boost to the iTunes Plus library on Apple's iTunes store? I noticed while browsing the iTunes Wi-Fi music store, but confirmed it using the normal store.

There are some notable things about it:

• The independents have arrived: it's not a cluster of further EMI songs, but rather they appear to be from small labels.
• The per-track price of the iTunes Plus (DRM-free, 256kbps AAC) tracks are $.99, not the increased $1.29 price. See, for example, the new Iron & Wine album's listing. The album costs $9.99, but the individual tracks are still only $0.99.
• As of this writing, the FAQ has not yet been updated: it still says that "iTunes Plus songs are available at $1.29 per song."

Which came first, the agreement with the indies on the new price, or Amazon's MP3 store? From where I sit, this looks like a reaction to Amazon, which seems like a first for Apple with the iTunes store.

Oh, in case anyone is curious, but hasn't been following my Twitter feed, I got an iPod Touch last week. It's magnificent, and a delight to use. It's even more of a joy to demo it to my colleagues and friends around here. They're very impressed with the price (£199), as well.

I've written before about what a ZFS-based storage appliance might look like. I think I've glimpsed a first step in that direction. Yesterday, by chance, I came across Norco's recently-announced DS-520, a build-your-own barebones storage server. You provide the operating system, disks, and RAM. I hadn't seen such an open, x86-based platform in that form factor before, so naturally my mind wandered towards OpenSolaris.

My first concern was the chipset compatibility. Norco emailed me back quite promptly saying that the Marvell 88sx6081 was the SATA chipset they used. Cool. That's what goes into the Thumper, so Solaris support seems trivial, at least for the one component that might cause the most trouble.

It sounds like the makings of a very nice home-server platform:

• $729 for the 1GHz / 2×GigE unit
• add 1 GB RAM,
• a fast CF card for the OS, and
• five 750GB disks (looks like they're on the right side of the price/capacity "knee" now), topped off with
• OpenSolaris stripped down to a fairly minimal set

Not cheap, or trivially easy at this point, but it could make for an interesting project, and a great piece of kit to sit on the shelf.