Microsoft have no sense of irony

Er, guys, you know going up to eleven really didn't do anything.

Things I hate ....

People who use Flickr Notes to *comment* on a picture.

That is all - © The Hodge Man

On the Leopard delay....

Me, I'm not overly perturbed. What Apple are doing is making sure they hit the "Just Works" target and they are going with an old strategy of Sun's, "All the wood behind one arrow", that arrow being OSX. The odds are that they are building all the OS's, AppleTV OSX, iPhone OSX, Leopard (and dare we say iPod OSX, I think we can) from the same source base and it's that which has diverted resources as they avoid the cul-de-sac approach of taking a branch of OSX, porting it to the phone and then spending the next few years running independent dev teams and trying to keep things in sync.

This "All the wood behind one arrow" does have the potential to pay back well for Leopard, especially if people want that funky sub notebook which really knows how to handle location independence and "On The Plane/Down the Tube" modes. And the experience of being tight and lean and mean for a phone is going to be good for the development team, who have been a little spoilt as Apple's hardware chaps have been giving them more performance in the last couple of years than they've had previously; the desire to burn performance for features is always high, and reigning that back in can pay back in a faster tighter slicker desktop OS.

And, what, boohoo, I have to keep running Tiger... It's not like I actually need an update, it's not like Tiger is collapsing under the weight of it's own patches. If I really want Java6, I can download it from Apple and run with it. And I can keep making backups as I always have done. The only people who are going to be groaning are the ISV's who've been romping through the Leopard APIs and deciding their next version will be Leopard only. They will have to rethink what they are going to do for the bulk of 2007, and probably roll out a new Tiger version of their applications in the interim. It's all down to development roadmaps in the end and roadmaps are aspirations with a timeline attached.

So, in summary, sky not falling, sun will come up tomorrow, and the only things that are certain are death and taxes; no one added "Leopard in June" to that short list.

Yahoo thinks iPod owners are pirates

In an article on TechCrunch,Yahoo’s New Media Device, a sterling quote from "Ian Rogers"...

For those of you about to complain about the $12/month to get unlimited tracks (like, um, Steve Jobs), check yourself before you riggity wreck yourself. Labels and artists get paid for every radio play and every Yahoo! Music download to the Sansa Connect, whereas we all know iPods are mostly full of not-paid-for MP3s.

To which I respond, "Oi, Ian Rogers.... you just made sure I wouldn't even suggest a Yahoo music subscription to anyone, let alone think about it myself, because you hold consumers in utter contempt."...

Alanis rocks....

AAA Cellphone

Philips Cellphone Supports AAA Battery Use - What a neat idea.... Damn you Philips, it'll probably suck in implementation.

Yeah, Applets are slow...

JPC - Computer Virtualization in Java, the dry and stuffy name for an x86 emulator written as a Java Applet, and yes you can try the demo in your browser, complete with games.

(Via ikvm.net.)

Thou Shalt....

Watch this video - dan le sac VS scroobius pip "Thou Shalt always Kill" - for it completely rocks!

Thanks Ade

TFL mashing up

Check out TFL's own little mashup, google maps and traffic cameras as live travel news. Nice work. Now, can we tear off the camera bubbles and make a dashboard of live feeds?

Curious

So who reads this blog I wonder? Go ahead, drop a comment, and what you read it for.

Or I'll um.... post bad YouTube videos... Bwahaha!



Update: Apparently hardly anyone. So I resort to good YouTube videos first.

Reading problem...

A story about a Methane sniffing Mars Plane on Engadget... which I initially read as saying ...

then be able to detect methane at levels as low as a few farts per billion,

But, hey, that's kinda right isn't it?

You've used the font....

You've used the font...

Now see the movie

(Actually, it sounds quite interesting...)

(Via Helvetica (kottke.org).)

AjaxTerm - Thats quite neat...

AjaxTerm is a rather impressive bit of work. It's a python script you run which lets you point your browser at a port on that machine and get an Ajaxy terminal session which you can login in with.

Continuations for Curmudgeons

After the last LRUG meeting there was much discussion of continuations, and following up from that Ross pointed the LRUG irc channel at Sam Ruby: Continuations for Curmudgeons which explains continuations pretty damn well.

Acts_As_Ferret - Full text searching

This tutorial, Rails Envy: Acts_As_Ferret Tutorial strikes me as jolly interesting, and alleviates my fear that it would feed my models sugar candy till they go hyperactive like Kiki.

Did I mention I've been Railing?

Yes, I've been getting into Ruby on Rails and it is quite a pleasant place to work. I came to it with a purpose, to understand it's mojo so one can compare with the various Railsy frameworks popping up for Java, but it is tempting me to settle in and work a lot more with it. The current challenge, Converence; the prototype works, now to make it all shiny and slick. Oh and scalable. Ish.

Trying Marsedit....

As there's no widget at the moment, I thought I'd check out Marsedit.

Apparently it plays nice with New Blogger.

Update: Well, it does play well so far. This might be a goer.

Well.... The prototype worked.....

My little project "Rix" which was meant to be just an experiment with Ruby on Rails. Well, the experiment went pretty well; for the first time, I felt confident enough to try it out on a couple of folks and it seems to work. So, I'm killing "Rix", or more coopting it as the basis for Converence. What's Converence? It's my long running attempt to glue the threaded message style of conferencing with the immediacy of IRC and IM. I'm well impressed with Ruby On Rails, it's let me get something that works together far quicker than in the past. Now, the real test is how it'll all work out as I push the design forward and make the UI as natural and slick as possible.

I'll need something to think about over the next few months to stop me worrying about getting an ingrown toenail removed (and though that isn't that much of a deal, it is for me for when I was young, the same operation went bad and it has stuck with me since)... So I'll be getting plenty of screen time.

I do wish Blogger would sort out a MacOSX widget for the current Blogger; blogging is lacking it's immediacy.

8 bit joy....

I just found 8 Bit Operators. Kraftwerk as played on 8 bit game consoles.

8-Bit Operators |
8-Bit Operators Myspace

Astralwerks Records |
Buy At Amazon.com

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