Talking about the last flight of the space shuttle brought up the age-old topic of “going to the bathroom in space”. The basic question of just how these things work has been answered by greater minds than mine (plastic bags and adhesive? ew!) but the old adage that a picture – or a movie – is worth a thousand words really comes into play here. Text – no matter how descriptive – just does not convey how incredibly fucking complicated it is to go the bathroom in space.
A couple of days ago I linked to an excellent timeline that showed the ongoing erosion of user rights on Facebook. It was a succinct and frank look into how selling your private information for profit is the raison d’être for Zuckerberg’s little creation*.
*NOTE: I felt I had to qualify the description of Facebook as Zuckerberg’s “creation” because there are large and towering schools of thought regarding his having stolen the thing from his early partners who actually did create it.
Wow. Just when you think the Grey Cup can not possibly get any more epic, well, there it is. Honestly, words fail me. I’m just surprised that we didn’t actually see any Roughrider players be sick to their stomachs on the sidelines. It would have been entirely excusable.
That one will live in story and song for a long, long time.
And, in a not-entirely-unrelated note, you can get some of Blue Rodeo’s more stellar ablums on the iTunes store right now for less than eight bucks a pop. If you don’t go buyFive Days In July, Lost Together, or at the very least the Greatest Hits package, you are a fool.
It turns out that some, but not most, iPhone 3G users are having an issue with email after applying the legit 3.1 upgrade. I have checked with some people who used the 3.1 3G unlock files here, and none of them report any issues, but just to be on the safe side I am taking down the 3.1 3G files for now. There is some debate as to whether this is a carrier issue or a software issue, but as soon as there is a resolution either way I will make the files available, corrected if necessary.
Steve Jobs is on stage at the Apple event right now. I am honestly floored by this. And I guess I am not the only one – trying to hit the “iTunes 9″ download link still gives you the 8.2.1 installer. The web guys in Cupertino must also be flabbergasted.
So I posted my original assessment of Snow Leopard prematurely. See, for the first 48 hours or so with the retail release I pretty much worked exclusively in the terminal and with BBEdit (the best text editor for coders, ever). But when I finally tore myself away from text from that and surfed a bit of web and settled in for a nice couple of hours of Warcraft I found myself rubbing my eyes and blinking and wondering if my display was going on the fritz. The colours of virtually everything on screen were completely ass.
After a couple of more minutes of squinting and what-the-fuck-ing, I realized that I have seen colours exactly like this shade of crap before. In fact, I see them pretty much every time I sit down at a windoze machine. Sure enough, it turns out that the gamma for pretty much every display in Snow Leopard has been defaulted to 2.2 instead of the correct 1.8. Why? I have no fucking idea. But if you value your retinas at all – or you just care about colour quality – then please note my revised review of Snow Leopard:
Best. Update. Ever. But be sure to open System Preferences – Displays – Colour – Calibrate and set the target gamma back to where it is supposed to be.
Unless, you know, you enjoy peering at rampant hideousness.
It’s worth noting that Damien Cox once reported on the twitter feed of the obviously fake Gary Bettman as the real thing. Then again, he also once reported that this clown was the real Jim Balsillie. It would seem that Damien has a fairly tenuous grasp on this whole technology thing.
The scene: The newsroom at a mid-sized Canadian daily newspaper.
The players: Myself, and some members of the sports department.
The phone rings, and a sports reporter / page editor answers the phone. We’ll call him “Lem Sportsinterviews” – the names have been changed to protect the imbecilic. Lem listens to the caller, who is later revealed to be one of the “Make It Seven” media relations flunkies – ie: the poor saps who are charged with calling various members of the press each and every day to remind them how to cover the story and to portray Slippery Jim as a Selfless Canadian Hero.
Upon disentangling himself from the call, Lem turns to the rest of the office, rubs his hands and cackles with glee, and says “You’ve got to see this – Balsillie is getting aggressive now!” So we all gather round as Lem brings up the “Make It Seven” website and clicks on the link he was just breathlessly informed of.
“Look,” says Lem, “you can click here to send this letter right to the league! They will crash the NHL’s internet!”
“Uh,” says I, “did you look at the address? That is going to go to ‘gbettman@makeitseven.ca’ – why would Gary Bettman have an email address at ‘makeitseven.ca’? That is just stupid, who would fall for that?”
So Lem turns in his chair and looks at me with much pity and scorn and says “Dude, the guy invented the Blackberry, I think he would know better than you how to get mail to Bettman.”
Ooooookay, With nothing left to say, I just wandered off to find a convenient wall to beat my head against. Fortunately for my cranium, I found no such wall – cubicle partitions just don’t do the trick there – and instead blew off the steam by making my own version of the web page. Yes, it sends the letter to the same bogus address. But I think you will find my version much more entertaining.
Epilogue 1: Lem’s quotes, in case you wondered, are word for word. I tapped them down immediately … some things just need to be saved for posterity.
Epilogue 2: Not only does the Make It Seven email form not work for a lot of people, but the whole web page looks like crap on mobile browsers. You would think that the guy who “invented the Blackberry” would have a better grasp on these things.
Well played, Mr Bettman, well played indeed. I burns my ass to do so, but I have to tip my hat to your deft touch.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who actually thinks that Jimbo Balsillie will somehow get the upper hand and land himself an NHL team. When push comes to shove the fact of the matter is this: What Gary wants, Gary gets. Which means the Penguins do get the cup, and Hamilton is not getting a fly-by-night “stop in for two or three years of free rent while we wait for our real arena in Waterloo” hockey team.
A couple of people pointed out that it is impossible to use Tweeting Too Hard to it’s fullest if you don’t actually go on Twitter yourself. This is true – but even if you hate Twitter, you can still make an account for purposes like this. Just don’t go around broadcasting what you picked out of your teeth after dinner, or whatever the hell people are tweeting about today.
Bonus link: If you find someone extra pretentious and want to follow them so you can get their most puerile stiff for general mocking, there is a faboo site called Tweetstalk.com where you can follow people to your heart’s content – but without letting them (or anyone else) know.
The PR team that spends all of their days “guiding” the Canadian press on how to report on St. Jim and his battle against the evil dragons of the NHL is apparently on the up-and-up. He has hired them directly and they are not a bunch of hapless mopes at RIM that he has suckered into doing his dirty work. So hooray for a small victory in the name of decency there.
The obvious corollary here, of course, is that the Orlando Magic – having spoiled the NBA’s dream match-up – haven’t got a fucking prayer. The league will make the pay for their effrontery.
It was pointed out to me that the gang up in Waterloo may have gone out of their way to invite the comparisons between the Storm and the iPhone – comparisons that inevitably end up with the Storm on the wrong end of the stick. Fair enough. If nothing else, the nudge-nudge “secret” code name of the thing as the “Apple Killer” was more than enough to point out what they hoped to be getting at. However – that is neither here nor there. People whose job is to know better should still compare oranges to oranges. Or Blackberries to Blackberries.
A couple of other people took umbrage to my categorization of the UI on the Storm was a “showstopper”. Not that they disagreed – they were in fact of like mind – but they were miffed that I would be willing to overlook a supposed showstopper if another unrelated showstopper was fixed. The sentiment boiled down to “either it is a showstopper or it isn’t, there is no ’sorta’ here”.
Annoyingly, they are right. So I have modified my original wording thereof. Happy?
Oddly, people were more vocal about the fact that RIM didn’t take advantage of the “situation aware” capabilities of a virtual keyboard than were concerned about the UI. People are getting more sophisticated when it comes to mobile computing, I guess. This is a good thing.
So I am told by Reliable Sources that there is a new Muppet Christmas special tonight. Part of me wants to be all happy about that, but a larger part of me is less-than-enthused. Because the show will have the same Muppets, but – after the passing of Jim Henson – the Muppets aren’t the same. You might have to dwell on that for a while, but trust me, you will eventually get to the same point.
So yeah. Instead of doing a new Muppet special, why not get busy and free up the old Christmas Together special with John Denver and the Muppets of yore. I am of the understanding that the thing is tied up in the reams of litigation that still surround the Denver estate, but come on people – this is Christmas. Find a solution and get it done. Between that and the perfectly delightful Muppet Christmas Carol” you will have all the holiday Muppetry you need, without bastardizing the legacy in the pursuit of a few more bucks.
In the meantime, watch this. The sound quality sucks, and the video looks like it is ripped from a copy of a copy of a copy of a bad VHS, but it’s still … magic.
A couple of people pointed out that the “online Muppet building tool” is gone, having been replaced with a lame order form for a “kit” you use at home. Since the tool appears to be scheduled to come back in February, I will assume that this simply means they have as many orders as they can possibly process right now, and this is not a permanent change. Too bad, tho – they could have just left it up and running to play with, even if they weren’t accepting any more orders.
There is no easy way to slide into this, so I will put it right out there: I was completely and utterly wrong about the rumour that Apple would be milling their Macbook cases out of a single chunk of aluminum. The fact that they are able to do it without adding waste is wonderful, and the end result is stunning, and I am mostly happy to be eating crow on this one.
As far as the other “stupid rumour”, I did indeed get that one right, but I can take no real credit there. You would have had to have been spectacularly stupid to put any credence into this sort of thing. What was interesting was that Apple made special note to point out “we make money by building quality products and not pushing low-end crap” which was – as far as I can tell – directly aimed at the simpletons and fenderheads who were pushing this stupid idea.
It has taken me a few days – okay, a couple of weeks – to get around to writing this because I honestly thought that Canadians were better than this. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am shocked and dismayed that my countryfolk don’t seem to care one whit about the health of a planet that we have to fucking well live on.
“… think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?†she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?â€
Canadians had pretty much the same choice, except that ours was a selection between chicken, fish, a pork chop, a nice dinner salad … or the aforementioned platter of shit. And incredibly, Canadians – a minority thereof, mind you, but enough – chose the platter of shit. Complete with broken glass.
There was one party out of five (or out of four, if you don’t count the Bloc Quebecois) that had no plan, no credible ideas, no care for the disaster that is the environment. One party that didn’t understand that we need to do something now or we condemn the next generation to an unlivable ball of dirt. And to my everlasting shame, that is who we voted for. Stephen Harper and his Plate Of Steaming Shit Party.
JohnJohn dropped me a line to point out that you can only superficailly spec a Dell machine to be the same as a machine from a quality brand. A lot of the places where Dell cuts the worst corners and uses the absolute lowest-quality shit – power supplies, planes, disk controllers – are places where you cannot upgrade, and have to take the low-end crap whether you want it or not, no matter how much you pump into the machine.
Reducing carbon emissions – and their attendant effect on the environment – is clearly the number one issue facing every single person on this planet. What concrete and workable ideas do you personally have to make a deep and permanent cut in carbon emissions and fossil fuel usage both in Canada and across the globe?
How can we permanently free the Afghani people from the threat and oppression of the Taliban and give them a workable and secure domestic government?
What is your position on net neutrality?
How do you propose that Canada maintains both political and environmental sovereignty in the Arctic?
Why are tax-paying and law-abiding homeowners forced to live in fear – and in some cases forced from their legally-deeded property – by people who seem to think they are above the law in Caledonia and Brantford?
I am especially interested in the answer to number 5 from my Conservative candidate – Stephen “Dead Eyes” Harper goes on and on about refusing to be soft on crime, but his party has been in power during this time and has done nothing to stop these violent thugs that blatantly operate outside the law. Should be interesting to watch the dance on this one.
As is normal for these sorts of events, the Apple Store has gone dark in the hours leading up to today’s Apple Event. This invariably means new products, and that they will be available for purchase immediately. The last minute scuttlebutt is that the Touch will not be given any increased storage, but will drop in price instead, and that the new Nano will have portrait and landscape modes (like the iPhone and the Touch) to add support for widescreen video.
I still vote for bigger Touch models, but we only have to wait a couple of hours now to see for sure. Tick, tock.
The massive overload of television advertising time allocated to Bell’s new logo and branding has managed to drive home three very interesting points;
1: Two weeks later, the logo and commercials still suck, but now in a much more annoying way. They have gone from “what the fuck is that?” to “fuck, not this shit again” in less than a fortnight.
2: This is a complete turnaround for Bell, who hit a huge home run with their last branding effort featuring the talking beavers, Gordon and Frank. People stopped skipping ahead on their PVR and went back to watch those ads. They went from having a couple of beloved national icons to having blue and white and forgettable dreck.
Talk about missing the point – the idea is that you can work within your network as if you were right there: Manage servers, manage your network, hit workstations and other data points regardless of where you are. This is know in the IT biz as “getting shit done”. Whether or not you can hit some file share somewhere is immaterial, since that is not the definition of “getting shit done”. We are talking about doing work here, not getting some lame spreadsheet file off of some ghetto file server.
However, if you are in a situation where your company is so lo-tech and backwards that they do depend of Windows-based servers for mission critical data, then you could just SSH into the thing from your phone like you would any other unix-fired machine. That is, of course, provided that terms like “unix” and “SSH” are not beyond you, which is a distinct possibility if you are in fact a Windows user.
It is probably worth pointing out that – if nothing else – Bell has been consistent in thier general lameness here. Much like their web site, the new television ads look like someone’s semi-professional attempt to “look like Apple”. That wouldn’t be any sort of ultimate sin, except that instead of highlighting or featuring their products the ads are built around their new logo … a logo which is, by anyone’s most forgiving definition, pretty fucking lame.
I hate to admit it, but a filter for this sort of thing on TwittEarth (TwittEvacuatEarth?) might have some serious potential in the Web 2.0 world. Just imagine – every time someone dumps, the globe spins into a new orientation and reveals the details of the latest voiding. Spin, dump. Spin, dump. Spin, push push grunt push, dump.
On a more serious note, the tableau of the cartoon reveals a potentially more interesting issue – namely, that Twitter is far more useless in Canada than it is in the U.S. of A. Twitter only really makes sense if you can update on the fly (or in this case, on the can) so people can interact and follow you when you are out actually doing things. The ruinous rates for both text messaging and wireless data in Canada – as set by the predatory mandarins who run our quasi-monopolistic cell networks – make updating Twitter from remote devices an exercise that many prudent people in the Great White North may simply wish to avoid, preferring to sink that money into things like food, mortgages, or possibly a Mercedes or two.
It turns out the screenshot function that is an official part of version 2.0 has been around since version 1.1.3 … or at least the ability to use that function, in a possibly naughty and totally unsupported manner.
Browse down into your phone and look for:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist
if you open that file up, you will find that as of version 1.1.3 there is a key labelled:
SBMobileScreenshotr
Set this to TRUE and the same screenshot function that is in version 2.0 will be live and running on your phone. Simply hold down the home button while toggling the silent switch on and off. The screen will flash white to show you the image has been captured, and the screenshot will be in your Photos module as the newest item in the “Camera Roll” album. After that, you can do whatever the hell you want with it … even plaster it here:
NOTE: Depending on how you unlocked your phone, the plist file may or may not be encrypted. If it is, you can use your credentials as root to unscramble it. Have fun.
It’s worth noting that you don’t have to manually spread the URL around for your Mixwit “tapes” – there are built-in publishing tools to blast the thing off to whatever social networking page you happen to frequent. And, if you are some sort of non-comformist asshole and prefer to run your own space instead of flocking to MyLiveFaceSpaceBook (or whatever the hell is hot this month), you can just stick your mix in-line with the pasting of some code, thus:
Also, a couple of people dropped notes to point out that Gruber had a link to a similar sort of deal yesterday. It’s called “Muxtape” and while it has generally the same function, it’s more of a “playlist” than a tape, and there isn’t the same sense of discovery as the thing spools out – it’s just not as cool. Nor does it have the same visual vibe – if you really start to play with Mixwit you can work up your own skins and labels and stuff, either with some quick uploading or by using the downloadable template and really getting busy. It’s personal.
That said, Muxtape does have a certain industrial flair about it, and looks good on a big screen, so maybe you might want to have it as your “virtual DJ” at a party or basement rave. It’s certainly worth a look. (Via DF)
A couple of folks asked about the Wii Guitar Hero sales numbers, wondering where the data came from. Wonder no more – it comes from the NPD Group, whose job is to track sales totals and consumer trends. Looking at the numbers for February, we see the top ten on the software side of the game biz (with units sold) are:
Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360) – 296,200 Guitar Hero III (Wii) – 292,900 Wii Play (Wii) – 289,700 Devil May Cry 4 (Xbox 360) — 280,200 Devil May Cry 4 (Playstation 3) – 233,500 Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games (Nintendo DS) – 205,600 Lost Odyssey (Xbox 360) – 203,600 Turok (Xbox 360) -197,700 Guitar Hero III (Playstation 2) – 183,800 Rock Band (Xbox 360) – 161,800
By the way, if you are interested in such things (and maybe surprised that the PS2 version of Guitar Hero is in the top ten and the PS3 version is no where to be found) the hardware sales numbers for February were:
Nintendo DS – 587,600 Wii – 432,000 PlayStation 2 – 351,800 Xbox 360 – 254,600 PlayStation Portable – 243,100 PlayStation 3 – 240,800
This is a bitch for Sony – one one hand they are desperate to get rid of the PS2 because they have staked a large chunk of their future on the PS3, but on the other hand the PS2 actually makes them cash, and the PS3 is still a money pit. Meanwhile, over at Nintendo they just sit around and count their money … all day long.
How about that - I was completely and utterly wrong. Certainly there was an announcement regarding the distribution and sales of applications via iTunes – I did manage to get that one right. But the list of stuff that came out of the blue ranged from interesting to surprising to “holy shit”:
Real-time full-push integration with Microsoft Exchange: This was a Truly Big Deal, and definitely the “holy shit” moment – especially since it bypasses the whole “middleware” concept that RIM has pushed with the BES. No middleware means less cost, less setup, true “remote data wipe” security, and (as was gleefully pointed out by Phil Schiller) no system-wide outages like Blackberry users get skewered on when RIM occasionally drops the ball.
A full suite of enterprise tools: The Cisco VPN was the star of the show here – maybe not a “holy shit” but definitely a development that I am personally salivating for.
Apple footing the bill to host freeware for the iPhone: Very nice. A little bit of apparent altruism goes a long way here.
A full remote simulator and debugger for the iPhone on your Mac: Again, very nice. The ability to simulate the entire stack of the iPhone and grab stuff out of it to send to Xcode is wickedly slick.
Over-the-air software purchase and install from the iPhone: This is another “wow” moment – and one that will pay off quite well, I think … everyone from bored commuters to travelers cooling their heels in airports is going to feel the temptation to buy something to while the time away or do something cool. This is the ultimate encouragement for impulse purchasing.
Finally, it is interesting to note that this is the first time that Apple has explained why they need to charge for updates to the iPod Touch and not the iPhone. In the past, Apple has been loathe to try and explain the concept of subscription-based accounting and what products it applies to, mostly because the average mope doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Sarbanes-Oxley or “generally accepted accounting practices”. This, I think, is Apple giving a nod to the fact that you can no longer gloss this shit over and you have to throw a bone to the press, if nothing else.
UPDATE: After the main event there was a short Q&A session about the enterprise package, a session that left no doubt on how they are going to target the Blackberry megalith – they are going to aim squarely at the RIM middleware infrastructure, and apparently have no qualms at all about trying to drum up some mild panic regarding system reliability and – the big boogieman here – data security. Money quote from Phil Schiller:
“Why aren’t CIOs really worried about security? Every email message sent to or from a RIM device goes through a NOC up in Canada. Now, that provides a single point of failure, but it also provides a very interesting security situation. Where someone working up at that NOC could potentially be having a look at your email. Nobody seems to be focused on that. We certainly are.”
Ah yes, those dirty Canadians and their evil Waterloo data scraping bunker. This just got very interesting indeed …
Mean Gene dropped me a line to point out that Country Style has come up with another fabulous idea. They are riffing on the fact that the vast majority of Tim Horton’s “Roll Up The Rim To Win” cups are losers – so much so that getting a losing Tim cup is the basis for universally-understood national jokes – by offering to accept any Tim Horton’s “Sorry, Try Again” cup at any Country Style store for a free medium coffee. The promotion runs from March 3 (that’s today, if you are keeping score at home) until March 9, and there is the expected limit of one “winner” per customer per day.
This is a fucking brilliant plan, and I hope that they manage to get the word out because this is the sort of thing that Canadian’s like – the underdog flipping the bird to the big bully on the block, and hey, it’s free coffee, which is a big deal in the Great White North.
