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“Well, you know, I think when you go into a bar and you serve the country, you deserve to have your chicken wing not be alligator-clamped onto a booklight. That’s what separates us from the Russians.”

— Merlin Mann, You Look Nice Today: “Aunt Nancy”, approximately 15:52

Note: In case you wondered, StupidFilter rated that quote as “not likely to be stupid.”

Oh. My. Gosh. I heard about and installed the Taxonomy Manager module for Drupal 5 — which was a just-completed Google Summer of Code 2007 submission — and it is fantastic. It makes managing taxonomy in Drupal so much more fluid. No, it makes taxonomy management possible.

It’s not perfect, and there are little visual oddities in the version I installed, but Taxonomy Manager is so much better than the normal user interface for taxonomy in Drupal core that I can’t see using anything else now. I’ve been spoiled.

Hearing about stuff like this — even if it’s nearly a throwaway comment by Angie Byron, almost lost in all the other voices on episode 48 — is exactly why I listen to the Lullabot Drupal Podcast. Thank you.

Oh, and sometime, I will look into free tagging. Gotta do that. Love it on del.icio.us.

In listening to MacBreak Weekly 25, it hit me that the new 802.11n AirPort Extreme base station could very well be the first Apple home server. In some sense, it could compete against Windows Home Server (see a preview here), which was announced at CES.

Let’s think about backup, which is one of the neat features announced with WHS. We know that Mac OS X Leopard is supposed to include Time Machine. Time Machine is going to eat drive space; to keep your current data plus historical data—so you can go back and forth in time—you’ll need more storage than you have internal in most single-drive Macs. You can do this with a local drive or a network drive, although I’ve seen no public information on the requirements for network access. (Apple coyly says only, “Or back up to a Mac OS X server computer,” on the Leopard preview pages.) It could be a shared AFP volume or it could be a disk image on a network share—that information simply isn’t public yet so let’s not speculate.

We know that the AirPort Extreme base station has a USB 2.0 port for attaching a drive. The attached drive can be shared for Mac and Windows, according to Apple, which implies AFP and SMB/CIFS support. You can set up accounts and access controls. (Oh, by the way, it still offers printer sharing.)

It’s in providing the share points that AirPort Extreme could enable over-the-network Time Machine backups for one or more computers. That would compete with WHS.

There is suspicion that the base station could be running a similar embedded “OS X” to the iPhone. This could account for the file sharing, print sharing, accounts, and access controls features; these are already part of Mac OS X today.

Now, I’m going to extrapolate. Let’s assume one could hook up a USB 2.0 hub to the base station. That implies that you could connect several devices, possibly even multiple drives—whereas right now, Apple advertises only a single “USB 2.0 port for connecting a USB printer or USB external hard drive.” [My emphasis.] This might not be ideal if you don’t have a good, consumer-friendly way to manage that storage.

Enter a new volume format. What if ZFS ever comes to the “OS X” platform, as many hope it will in Leopard? Wouldn’t it make sense to connect multiple drives, bundle them into a ZFS storage pool to provide scaling and redundancy, and then share them out?

It’s at that completely hypothetical wishful-thinking point that the AirPort Extreme base station competes more capably as a home server against WHS and my new Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. The others both have on-the-fly expansion capabilities that are not advertised for the AirPort Extreme. Assuming you just need AFP or the ability to store a disk image—a big but reasonable “if” at this point—then a multi-drive ZFS-based AirPort Extreme network storage solution would be a grow-with you home server.

Note that Microsoft itself mentions WHS as being a good host for Time Machine backups in the preview I linked to above.

It’s too bad the LAN Ethernet ports on the AirPort Extreme are only 100 Mbit.

Hm, only time will tell how this will play out.

Merlin Mann, on the “MacBreak Weekly” podcast episode 23, says, ”Web 2.0 is going into a bar, drunkenly requesting a program, and having it appear while you’re still on the air.” Someone in the live audience had created a Web page that featured a countdown to the June 2007 debut of the iPhone, as flippantly requested by the show’s cast.

I have to laugh because I have this weird connection to Confab topics. I was listening to the latest episode, Number 28, and the discussion could have been drawn from currently-open tabs in my browser, notes in Entourage, other podcasts I listen to, and television shows that we’ve watched recently.

• Missing the snow: we’ve barely had any this year in Rochester, while there’s been extreme weather in Buffalo, Seattle, Denver, and the midwest.
• Brainstorming and bad ideas: see Python PEP 3099, covering “Things that will Not Change in Python 3000.” The first sentence is, “Some ideas are just bad.” And there are bad ways of expressing them, too. Grin.
• Discussion about where to live for a year: this reminded me of the great Bruce Campbell interview response:
  

  Q: When stuck on a deserted island, what would you most want with you?
  Bruce Campbell: A continent.

• Houndsditch restaurant reviews: I’d never had Eggs Benedict until the fall trip Christen and I took to Vermont to visit Michelle and Lyle, so my ears perk up when I hear about them. Thus, I know that Christen was watching one of those Food Network TV show last night that talked about the history of Eggs Benedict; the upshot is that it sounds unlikely the dish was being served in London before New York. The show also featured a gentleman who’d sampled Eggs Benedict from over 150 restaurants in New York City—he’s feeding that obsession.
• Old buildings and the Hagia Sophia: I listen avidly to the Twelve Byzantine Rulers podcast (one of the best podcasts I’ve ever heard), and have been interested in the Eastern Roman Empire for years. (It’s the history buff in me…all the good history books were up on the quiet, empty fourth floor of the university library when I was in school.) I just listened to the episode about Basil II, who created a building to rival the Hagia Sophia—but not a brick of it remains today.

Last night, the Sabres went to Air Canada Center to try to snap their two-game losing streak. Buffalo started out 2-0, and finished the first period ahead 2-1. The rest was highly quotable, and thankfully, the Sabres held on to win 4-3.

After a series of early icing calls against the Sabres, Rick Jeanneret exclaimed, “And again the puck is fired down the ice [by the Sabres]. Again again, Kaberle [of the Leafs] just let it go by him. And icing, again! I’ve gotta read the rulebook. I’m missing something partner [Jim Lorentz], I’m missing something.”

Christen looked at me and responded to that with, “I think Rick Jeanneret is going to break a blood vessel or something, the way he’s yelling.”

Later, there was a bit of a tussle between the Leafs’ McCabe and Maxim Afinogenov in front of the Toronto net. Jim Lorentz summed up the mutual cross-checking with, “I think McCabe was shocked that Max reacted. Max is a short fuse and he snaps.”

Buffalo’s third goal came on a deke by Briere. Jeanneret described it with, “…And Raycroft decided he was going to go downtown Toronto somewhere. Just took himself right out of position. And Daniel Briere stepped around him and lifted the puck into a wide open net.”

In the second period, penalties were assessed to both Roy and Numminen. (I think that Numminen, by the way, has the most Tolkienesque name in all of hockey.) To me, both were questionable, but I just watch the games on TV and I’m no professional referee. These back-to-back calls resulted in a 5-on-3 and, very quickly, Toronto’s second goal. That was their twelfth power play 5-on-3 goal of the season, which leads the league. I’ll just choose to blame it on the zebras.

The Sabres added a fourth goal, though. Lorentz really liked it, saying, “We saw a shot last night taken by Denny Malkin [of the Penguins] that was perfectly shot. Well, so was the one moments ago by [Buffalo forward Ales] Kotalik.” I have to admit it was pretty, and the defenseman looked like he was trying to get out of its way.

Lorentz later brought up one of Buffalo’s defensemen, Toni Lydman, who “is one of those players who’s deceptively strong. He just threw the Leaf forward down to the ice, right in front of the bench. As he flattened Stajan, hit him, spun him around. Then Pohl came in to challenge Lydman, and Pohl ran into a wall.” Lydman did not go down, but Pohl stumbled.

Frustrated with the penalties—which I agree were being called in one-sided fashion, Lorentz sardonically remarked, “And you know it’s going to Buffalo [the penalty] because that’s the only team that has been called for penalties here for about the last 15 or 20 minutes of hockey.” At this point, I dropped my jaw and laughed out loud at Lorentz’ audacity in implying on television that the officiating was uneven.

Apparently, RJ agreed because he interjected that, “The Sabres are certainly getting plenty of practice at penalty killing,” in his play by play.

There were quite a few instances where both teams had crowds in front of their nets. RJ summed one such instance up with, “They all whack at it but it’s held by the goaltender [Marty Biron].” That’s a good thing because Marty had given up a save on the glove side when he couldn’t hold the puck; apparently, he’d had problems with his glove in warmups. Luckily, Biron didn’t have to make the save at the end of the game; Toronto could have tied it up but a shot on the open side went wide, hitting the outside of the mesh.

Kevin Sylvester, from the Sabres Shootout postgame show and podcast, suggested, “Tell Marty he can give Rick back the suspenders.” In the postgame interview, Biron was wearing grey suspenders over his dark shirt—and RJ has been known to be seen in suspenders, himself. Grin.

Other game notes:

• There were 24 blocked shots by the Sabres.
• Buffalo was 0-5 on the power play.
• This was Pominville’s 100th game.
• The Sabres are fourth on the list of fastest franchises to reach 1000 wins, at 2118 games. The Oilers just slipped ahead of them this year. Philadelphia and Montreal are ahead of both.

The Global Geek Podcast has it in writing from Cupertino: “Apple Does Not Licence the Term ‘Podcast.’” So says a scanned letter they received from the Apple Trademark Department. Now, can we all end the insanity around “netcast” and other alternative terms? Or, we could continue to dilute our language into uselessness. Whatever.

[Via iLounge.]