A thought... Annotated licenses....

When mixing code libraries together, wouldn't it be neat to be able to enumerate all the licenses that applied to the code base.

How about an @License annotation?

@License(name="MyNeatLibrary",type="BSD",author="Blah Blah Inc")
@License(name="IrregularExpression Library",type="CCattrib",attrib="Fred Flintstone",attribemail="fred@example.com",attriburl="http://example.com")

At run time, the "About" dialog then scans the code base for the annotations, which would be set to runtime persist, and then display about information based on what is actually used.

It wouldn't attempt to enforce the licenses, but would allow for automatic visibility of licenses.

Of course, this would have to be done in some coordinated way to standardise the types and attributes, but it has some potential... just as long as we don't end up with per-method licenses.

[ This thought caused by following Matt Gemmell on Twitter ]

And it goes a little something like this....

(via Why Thats Delightful)

Finally, an end of Time (and Date)

Top of the list of things that any Java developer can agree, sucks like a sucky thing from suckington, suckania, it's Date and Time. These have never got better, and like a scab have been picked at with no healing up. Well now there's JSR 310... and here's an interview at Java Lobby with the JSR leaders.

This is going to be a long four years.....

Stanley Johnson (Boris's father) on News 24

"I have been amazingly impressed by the determination which he has shown. Number one, he hasn't had a drink for three months. Now if you give up drink for three months, you have to be serious. I mean you have really to be serious about what you are doing."

Oh, that's so reassuring that is. Let's see how Boris wrapped up his acceptance speech.

"Let's get cracking tomorrow, let's have a drink tonight."

On Climate Change and Feedback

From a conversation with DHM...

DHM: I'm still a bit boggled by the discovery that none of the climate models have any feedback effects in them. They know that raising the temperature of the Siberian permafrost a few degrees will release a LOT of methane, for example, and there are many others associated with melting sea ice and the like but none are included, which I think means we're all about to get a salutory lesson on control theory any year now

Me: I have to say, I wasn't overly boggled by that. The reasoning appears to be that there are no ways of knowing all the feedback effects and counting 'known' ones would leave the model open to being redone every time one was determined. So they go for the baseline...

DHM: The problem to me is that once that's been filtered through the PR dept and the press, the worst-case first-order projection is presented as the worst-possible-case projection

Me: I prefer to think of it as a projection half full of doom than half empty.

An experiment....

Method

Take a friend with kids and a number of crappy PCs running Windows XP. Plaugued with virii, despite AV controls.

Ask them to try "Ubuntu" and install one machine for them and give them a quick guided tour.

Wait.

Result

Phone call the next day. Friend loves it, so does her children. Installed it on all the other machine herself last night. All machines are "Just so much faster and everything is just there".

Conclusion

Ubuntu Linux... it's what a Mac user like me can recommend to someone who has a crufty PC.

Discuss.

A Morning with NetBeans 6.1....

I've been off working on the iPhone SDK, so I wasn't too interrupted when NetBeans 6.1 made an early entrance this week. That was until Nomine said to me "What I'd like is an application which looks up the people you are following on Twitter and the people following you on Twitter and shows who the mutual followed/following are"...

So, I broke out NetBeans 6.1 and gave it a go. First up was the Twitter access. That turned out to be very easy; NB6.1 has precanned code generators for lots of well known web services out there. So I selected Twitter and the appropriate function in the tree and drag it into my code. And pow!, there it is, complete with separate classes generated to handle the result and authentication, including popping up a user name/password authentication dialogue.

Parsing the XML was more interesting. I decided to use the XML Schema design tool in NetBeans 6.1, which I hadn't used before, but after about an hour or so of fiddling, I had a schema file which was automatically generating code for JAXB.

Next up, feeding the result of the Twitter API to create objects... Already in there. The result of the Twitter API call can be parsed into a JAXB object by calling a method on the result and telling it what JAXB class you want it turned into.

The GUI, Matisse as usual, but it's just getting better. Now there's Java Application Framework support in there I made a JAF application, and getting a button to call up Twitter and do all that parsing was a matter of picking the button and doing "Set Action" on it. NetBeans 6.1 can also code generate all the background processing bits, including an animated busy indicator.

And that was an application built. Doesn't actually change anything but boy, it shows how useful NetBeans 6.1 is.

Goodbye Humph....

Here's a compressed burst of ISIHAC from the South Bank Show.



And here's all the South Bank Show.

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



Part 4



Part 5



Part 6



What a great guy... goodbye Humph.

On a bit of a video roll here....

Oh, and I'd better throw in the Thunderbirds one too



And the Avengers one has emedding disabled so go here for Avengers remix excellence

Ah.... U F O....

Cracking stuff....

Update... and more....



and more....



"Flood cue! Dive Dive Dive!"

All from the wonderful Power Themes 90....

Who's On First: The Movie....

FIRST!

"This" for the day....

I'd like this on my desktop.

I'd rather not think about how awful this is.

I'm not going for dinner on this.... I like to stretch my legs between courses.

"This" for the day....

I must not even consider building this.

This is so not on my Amazon Wishlist.

This has left me abruptly deflated.

And finally this reminds me never to ask for a show of hands if you don't know the result in advance.

Just for fun....

If you read this blog, and have a PS3... do remember to add "codepope" to your PSN friends.

Psystar-k-raving-bonkers....

Well, you'd have to be bonkers to buy anything from a company who's terms of service are 'Well, you are on your own matey..." and thats before all the other shenanigans.

Natoooopsy...

And you thought couriers were bad. NATO accidentally supplied arms and food to the Taliban.

New rule time....

Inspired by this Nokia "concept"*....

Rule: You can't call your whacky rendering a "concept" device if something better designed has appeared in a SciFi TV series.

That is all.

* Rodenberry's Earth Final Conflict had a much nicer device which looked like people could use it.

Inconsolable....

Cross posted from Codepapacy

I was looking for monospaced fonts, after I was reminded that Microsoft had actually made a decent monospaced font with Consola. After some hunting, and a false start finding the original Inconsolas, I found the latest version, with a slashed zero, and my it looks good. Check it out here.

Inconsolable....

I was looking for monospaced fonts, after I was reminded that Microsoft had actually made a decent monospaced font with Consola. After some hunting, and a false start finding the original Inconsolas, I found the latest version, with a slashed zero, and my it looks good. Check it out here.

Selected links....

A tweak on Toshiba's USB... powered when the machine isn't powered up.

An Overheard in New York I'd have loved to overhear.

(Extracted from past twittering)

What's heavier than a dumbbell?

Easy. A box of weights for a dumbbell. Heavier still? Two boxes of weights for a pair of dumbbells. And don't ask me about my enormous pole. Still, that lot will keep Nomine busy...

6 People and their ids....

Playing with the iPhone SDK? If you are working with the addressbook, you might want to know what the default record ids of the simulated addressbook is.

1 - Kate Bell
2 - Daniel Higgins
3 - John Appleseed
4 - Anna Haro
5 - Hank Zakroff
6 - David Taylor

Now you know. This might be handy for testing if nothing else.

Vodafone impressed me....

Sent them my old E70 for unlocking on Thursday. Back today all unlocked. Jolly quick. I'm impressed. Not with them any more, having got O2/iPhone, but if I had an unlocked iPhone, Vodafone wouldn't be out of the question as a carrier.

FAQ intros...

From The Blu-Ray Disc site:

FAQ
These are the questions frequently asked, so please refer to them before getting in contact with the Entity.

Hmmm.... The Entity you say....

Long Photography...

Looks like Flickr has gone for the video thing, which means 90 second long videos. An interesting approach, dodging taking on Gootube head on and playing to the world of cameras with a video option. Quality looks decent enough... let's see how that plays out.

Oooh - Quake3 on an iPod touch....

Sweet work....

McCain (not Oven Fries)

What a nice man. Sounds like he's got the right stuff for the presidency.... sorry, I mean, a residency at a Sweary McSwear Swear's Comedy Club.

And in font news...

Microsoft finally find a use for the font "Comic Blackmail Sans".

When April Fool's leak...

Ok... I got caught... The mobile plasma story turns out to be a late delivered April Fool. Which is quite a pity as we could do with something different in the mobile display space. Hey ho, back to OLEDs and ePaper and LCDs....

Grails and Groovy....

I've done an article on Grails and Groovy, which you can find at here on Heise Online UK. It's an introduction to what Grails is about.

Thinking hard....

Well, I'm doing my usual thing of hacking code and then going into "This isn't right" rethinking, but I'm trying to push forward. The big mind blocker is making "the app" slick in the hand and until I get it in my hand, simulators don't really crack it.

Anyway, let's see what's been distracting me today....

First up, the news that Panasonic are putting plasma screens in phones which I'll admit is a place I hadn't really expected for anyone to do. The new twist, low power, apparently with the magic enabled by AbleComm's work on headsets. It'll be interesting to see how these pan out in practice.

John Cole's Balloon Juice analyse McCain's new ad and have worked out what the foundation of his policies are.

Oh My! SOOO CUTE but I'm still not getting one... unless it's that cute.

And another thanks to Balloon Juice for Mike Gravel's Helter Skelter... But heck.... I kinda like it as art.

Right, that's enough for the day.

Apparently....

The most popular thing I've posted here is... a little thing on Windows Se7en. Who knew. Well, apparently Google Analytics knew after a little bit of a sample. Using Analytics on this blog is like using the Large Hadron Collider to crack a nut. Actually, could you crack a nut with the LHC? Maybe that is its real purpose. You can never tell with these physics types.

Now I've tidied up the kipple that was here, time for me to get down to some steady bloggery. On what I don't know yet.

Anyway, that's my blogging quota for the day.

All Change On T'Blog...

Twittering is now archived on Codepope Tweeting.

Previous twittering has been archived there and removed from this blog.

Carry on. Regardless.

BloglinesMenu 1.6

I completely forgot to mention, but BloglinesMenu 1.6 just lost the RC tag and is now a release. And the source it up on the site too. So get BloglinesMenu 1.6... if you use Bloglines, that is. Or if you want the source for a simple menu notifier app which you can modify for whatever service you want.

Ah... __MyCompanyName__ no more....

XCode is a tad opaque as to where it keeps the company name value it uses when it makes templates into files. So how to change? Quit XCode and start up a terminal and type

defaults write com.apple.xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions -dict ORGANIZATIONNAME RunState

Restart XCode and all your code is mine! Bwahahaha... Oh yes, change RunState to your company name.

Interflora Sucks....

Placed order for flowers for yesterday..... nothing turned up. Ring Interflora (numerous times) and it's all engaged tones or dead lines. That's shite. That's shite on a stick with a shite topping.

Update: For a more reasoned reasoning of the reasons that Interflora sucks, see Nomine's Just How Wrong Can You Get It

Update+: Interflora are refunding. Still never going to use them again.

BloglinesMenu 1.6rc

Yes, finally, I updated the BloglinesMenu to be universal. I'm flagging this one a release canidate as I'm not 100% on how this will run in the field*, but it's out there now. If no one flags a problem in the next month or so, I'll just drop the rc from the zip file name.

Enjoy.... I won't because I'm all Google Reader these days.

* When I say that, I've given it a good run and it seems to still stay small and work, it's just this is my first Universal build.

Regular readers may note....

Regular readers may note that I'm using LoudTwitter to preserve those links and bits that I twitter. Good? Bad? Annoying? Let me know. Or not.....

[ Update : The Loudtwittering has been moved to it's own blog ]

Hmmm

Guessing LoudTwitter isn't sending the mail then.

Well, there we go. Above this, my first LoudTwittered autopost. There'll be more links'n'shit in there in the future, but now you can either sniff my twitter (fnarr) or just wait for a daily posting of the tweets of the day.

iPhone Displays in the UK - Good News/Bad News

In the US, AT&T iPhone POS displays use Windows. Cue the pictures of Windows errors on them....

In the UK, it appears O2 use Macs. Yay! Except...



Yes, that's a nice "This Mac was unexpectedly restarted" dialog.

Green Blackmail, New Scientist Style....

So, here's a bit of green blackmail from a New Scientist subscription email.

"Not only will you save hassle later on, but you can also help us reduce the number of letters we send you, contributing towards a greener environment."

Uhuh, so, If I don't renew right now, New Scientist are going to send me paper mailings till I do, and I'm the one supposed to feel guilty about the carbon footprint.



I'm surprised it didn't have "Nice planet, shame if anything.... happened... to it". It also lessens the impact when you note this is an email.

Bah! Basshunter's broken....

Basshunter did a wonderful track called Boten Ana. How many songs do you know about IRC?



And now it arrives in the UK and.... OMG.... It's been... DEGEEKED....



It's almost a crime. Ah well, at least I have the Basshunter album "LOL <(^^,)>"... And I wish Basshunter great bleepy europop success.

Morning links.....

A review of The Rails Way can't wait for my copy to arrive.

iPhone 1.1.3 firmware rumours makes sense, getting ready for the SDK by letting people manage their home screen.

Aw Kitties!

Spooks....

Well, thats another series of Spooks wrapped up. If you haven't watched the last episode, look away now...




















Ok?

Right....

I enjoy Spooks, but there it has now just established itself as utterly misogynistic.

This series ends with the death of Jo, who despite being a solid staunch strong character goes from 0 to wreck in less than two jump cuts and a fade in. And so yet again a Spooks series ends with a female character dead because they were weak. This just keeps happening. The men are strong and get a million second chances (cf Adam, who should have been retired after the last series as he was a wreck, but oh no, he can manage it). The women are 'apparently strong', but always break. The next series, as soon as a new female character walks on, you will find yourself wondering how she's going to end up dead or disgraced. Take Ros this series, she was a strong, possibly too hard, character, and bish bosh, she's broken by torture, she's off helping Yalta (the chaps who torture her) and it's all down hill from there for her and off she's shuffled to a life of hiding... organised by the chaps.

It's not just this series, this has been happening from the start, from the deep fat fryer in episode one, series one. And it just keeps happening.

It's all so bloody infuriating, as the big arc story in Spooks this series worked really well, but when it comes to the character management, there's a big "Spying's a blokes game, watch us break the little ladies" theme running through.

Read XKCD?

Then you may want to watch this.

BBC's iPlayer works* on Mac and Linux

Hussah! (and w00t!)

And the volume control goes to 11.

Class work.

* Streaming only. Now about those downloads........

Pope notes* - Rails - restful_authentication --stateful

* Pope notes - things that I've just worked on, and got halfway, but need to press on with. Like little papal snapshots, mainly for my reference so I can come back to it later.

I like state machines; they make life cycles much easier to manage and acts_as_state_machine is a nice way of expressing state machines. The problem I just hit though was that restful_authentication plugin just added --stateful, which generates up an authentication setup that includes the Stateful authentication setup. It went well enough getting it to work, but there seems to be a mismatch in statefulness and the use of an observer to generate mail. The observer watches save and creates, and then uses the state of the user to decide what should be done. But, it does this for all saves, and because there's no indication of a state change having just occurred, then having the after_save observer mail when the users state is active triggers off multiple "you have signed in mails" and the variant, checking for a pending state, triggers an activation mail. What struck me was it should be better to move the mail generation into the user model, using the same hooks that the state machine uses for when a state is entered. I had a quick hack, and it seems to work, but does generate two activation mails.... this is probably fixable if I understood the acts_as_state_machine plugin better, so I'm going back to another part of the code which does use that.

Oh, and I'm in day two of my "coding rails without an IDE"... it's all TextMate and Terminal here for the next fortnight. No better way to know what an IDE is doing right or wrong than getting back to basics.

Lost By Translation

Lost By Translation.

Bonus link - Why Teller Is So Cool.

Logitech do the right thing...

I've just noticed that Logitech have released Logitech Control Center 2.4. In the past LCC has sucked because it installed APE. Well, now thats changed... "Unsanity's Application Enhancer (APE) is no longer installed and needed". Heck, I might even give it a try.

Update: Eyw, read the comments. I'll wait for 2.4.1....

Busy Busy....

What I find hard? Testing. Doubly hard, TDD. Triply hard, BDD. But dammit, I will do this new code base right for a change. Well, righter.

Busy at the moment working on Lendery. A simple application, I suspect, but I thought I'd mention it.

Lendery replaces my previous Libr project as I realised that Libr was a lot of work for users creating a library which they may only get one use out of per thing loaned. And thus Lendery was inspired. It lets you record who you loaned something to by their email address (initially) and uses email to tell them (after authenticating the account.... a once only event per email address)... sign up and you can create an identity of multiple email addresses (akas) and the ability to manage your loans on the web.

Well, thats the plan.

Twitterific defined

Twitterific: An application designed to display a nice yellow box over one third of it's UI explaining why Twitter isn't working at the moment. Alledgedly, twitters from your followed folk occasionally leak past this yellow box.

What I'd like in a clock/radio....

I like alarm clock/ipod playing/radios. I also like dawn wake-up lamps. But currently my bedside table has both on it. Now this is a tad redundant. I'd prefer just a straight lamp and an alarm clock/radio.

So here's the idea. An alarm clock/radio which had a connection (wired or wireless... I think wireless might be easier, and be easier to make international) to a plug adapter (which would be country specific). You plug your favourite lamp into the adapter and plug it in. You now control your lamps on/off and brightness from the alarm clock/radio. And when the alarm is due to go off, the alarm clock/radio starts ramping up the light brightness half an hour earlier.

Better still, the plug adapters could be sold seperately, and you could "pair" one or two of them to the radio so you could raise the lights on two lamps. And there could be a version for permanant installation in a socket, so you could have a "dawn enabled" socket.

Would you want one?

Touched up

Well, this I'd my first posting here with an iPod Touch via wifi and Safari. Neato.

iChat supports "/me"

iChat now (apparently undocumented) supports "/me"

/me is happy
/me does a little dance

So when you go to the chemists....

You've got a question to ask them... "Are you a Catholic Pharmacist?" because now, there's a good chance your Catholic pharmacist will not be doing their job and instead be trying to apply their "morality" to your life.

"We cannot anesthetize consciences as regards, for example, the effect of certain molecules that have the goal of preventing the implantation of the embryo or shortening a person's life"

On the plus side, at least Pope "But I wasn't a Nazi" Benedict XVI has made it explicit, welcome to the "War On Molecules".

Just a warning for Leopard upgraders.... You may have APE even though you never installed it.

The following appears to be true... APE screws up the Leopard install. What people may not realise is that they may not know they have APE installed. If you have ever installed Logitech Control Center, then this installs APE. If you uninstall Logitech Control Center, it doesn't get removed. It's why I don't install Logitech Control Center any more, and I bet that a metric shit load of the people getting 'blue screens' are people who've installed Logitech's mouse/keyboard support software.

So, if you are going for an upgrade, if you have Logitech Control Center, uninstall it and manually remove APE... This is the FAQ for APE.

I am integral to the project!

That's me, in a whole frame or two of the Pet Shop Boys New video.

No2ID are promoting it, and you can see the whole thing here.

So I'm writing code....

Well, I'm back to writing code, though I'm enjoying working in Ruby on Rails and Netbeans 6.0.

So what am I writing? Well, it's called Libr and the idea is that you can use it to keep track of things that you have loaned to other people. Say you have a book you want to lend to someone, and lets assume that you are 'Adam' and the someone is 'Joe' and you have accounts on Libr already set up. Adam creates a taggle for the book; a taggle has all the essential information about the book and it can generate a taggle code, which you can write/label the physical book with. Adam then goes to his "Borrowers" list which are all the people Adam has a lending relationship with. Adam adds Joe to his list, then goes back to the books taggle and selects lend, and then selects Joe and sets a date when he wants the book back. The taggle is now lent.

When Joe logs in, possibly after being prompted via RSS or email, he can see that Adam has lent him a book. If Joe has the book, then he selects "Confirm", and the book is now a confirmed loan.

A couple of days before the loan period is up, Joe is reminded that the book is due to be returned. He returns the book, and then clicks Return next to the taggle. Adam is notified by email or RSS and can confirm his reciept of the loan.

And that's the basics of Libr.

Lolsocks

How it feels starting to code a project....

Remembering Pavarotti and James Brown...

Links'o'the'day

• Now that looks like a fun job... Rockets and lightning
• Eric Raymond is not happy with Microsoft's 'open licenses'
• Sony get smart with CC licenses
• A hard drive with 1GB of cache?
• An LCD Screen that can scan from Sharp

Links'o'the'day

• Reagan on Rayguns
• NSA@Home... Respec'

Links'o'the'day

• Google News gets deduplicated! Hussah!
  
• Apple and Jaguar, the car, not the Mac OSX version.
  
• Google Earth gets a flight simulator. Check out San Francisco.
  
• Making a Facebook app with Ruby on Rails.
  
• NSFW: Shanghai Gynocology Sign
  

ClearBlue...

You've seen the television ad for the ClearBlue pregnancy tester?

"The most advanced technology you will ever pee on".

That bugs me. I keep adding "deliberately".

Not Overheard

"So like Vista came up and offered 'Revert to last good configuration' so I selected it and it rebooted in Windows 2000"

Safari searching....

I like searching from the address bar. I liked Sogudi, the plugin for Safari which let you do just that. But it don't work with Safari 3 Beta. So I went hunting and found SafariSIA which doesn't claim to work with Safari 3 but, after a brief try out, I can say, it does appear to work.

And yes, I'm trying Safari 3 again, the 3.0.2 beta seems to have addressed a bunch of issues I had. So here we go again.

E70 Fanboys....

The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face. is the delightfully titled, E70 vs iPhone page, complete with sweariness, dubious animations, suspect illustrations and stickiness.

Of course, as an E70 owner, I can point out that the UI sucks, and double sucks with J2ME apps, but yes, native SSH client and IRC clients do work remarkably well.

But I still want a iPhon€....

Right, let's try that again....

Yes, it's been quiet. Maybe I should remember to leave MarsEdit open.

Embeddable Exellence - Crazy

via Truthdig

How to read all the national newspapers using RSS

Press Gazette Blogs - Fleet Street 2.0 » How to read all the national newspapers using RSS gives you a nice ready to roll feed of 384 national newspapers. So, how big a news junkie are you?

On Microsoft Surface Computing

"It's half arsed, under specced and no, you *can't* buy it" - Sarah

And that kinda sums the entire feeling of underwhelmingness that I got from Microsoft's Surface technology. A vaguely productised rendition of a multitouch surface device aimed at people who can afford $10000 to have it installed.

It feels more like Bill Gates attempt to slap his cock on the table at the D conference today. A Digger nailed it for me...

"Awesome, a touch screen table.
Now if only it could fit in my pocket, hold songs and video, had a phone built in and only cost $499 or $599...." - Fitzfan

And that's the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple release consumer products, Microsoft release statements of intent and demos of things which they hope will make a consumer product one day.

Anecdotally, I was playing with the concept of touchable desks back in 1984... We're still not where I was imagining things then...

Beans, real Beans....

Richard Bair's posted about JavaBeans and what makes a real Bean. Food for thought. And no, JavaBeans don't make you do this....

Enjoy Weird Al, Bobbing about.

The Repurposing

[ I'm playing around with getting some oped out of my head, so this is a developing article ]

Adobe, Microsoft and Sun have all rolled out their Web "Rich Application" Platforms. Now that the wraps are off the WRAPs, there's one thing that's obvious. They are all based around repurposing each companies existing platform. Adobe took Flash, gave it a programming language that didn't sit on a timeline and glued it into Eclipse so code developers don't have to step out of their IDE to develop for it. But basically, it's Flash, with a pony tail and sandals and a tool bag. Microsoft took their .Net platform, created a bucket of glue for Python to run on it, called the glue the DLR, and made it web embeddable. Sun took Java, fixed up the long standing issue of Java being a big download, popped a new scripting language on top, and called it JavaFX.

What does the repurposing achieve though? It does establish dynamic scripting languages as a first class platform, rather than its more traditional position as the left-field platform of geeks and hackers. But beyond there, they still have a lot to do. Adobe and Microsoft have delivered not so much open platforms as ajar platforms; they both have open sourced elements to their offerings, but both have proprietary lock-ins, Adobe on the server side (with the Flex platform playing 'best' with Adobe server extensions) and Microsoft on the development tools (Silverlight might run on a Mac, but to develop it you'll be wanting Windows and Visual Studio). Sun have a more open offering but they also have a different problem; over ten years of "Java's too slow, too big" folk analysis is a lot of baggage to take into a fight, a fight which Sun started on back in 1995 when they launched Java.

But there's also another competitor to all these technologies. The repurposing of the browser. Five years ago if you'd said people could drag and zoom maps, work with documents and spreadsheets, drag and drop components and all this in a web browser with no embedded virtual machines or components, folks would have called you a fantasist. And yet that is where we are with the whole host of Ajax related developments. All they miss is the ability to step "outside" the browser, but even then it's not a huge leap to think of using the core of the browser, the rendering canvas as the run time for non-browser applications; just lose the back button and address bar and you have the repurposed browser. What this approach lacks is a big hitting company behind it.

So now we have four approaches in play...

[ to be continued ]

I'm in both camps....

Freaky Friday Idea...

I have this idea, it's like Freaky Friday crossed with Life On Mars but it follows an IT pundit getting swapped with some one else.... It'd start something like this

"My name is Guy Kewney.
I had an accident and woke up at the BBC.
Am I mad, back in time or in a Goma?"

Hmmm... maybe not.

Bestest iTunes Visualizer Evah

Magnetosphere

It actually *reacts* to the music and looks fabulous.

Ah... Skamoto and Pop

Ah, so good.

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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