There are two kinds of Windoze users – those who know better but are forced into 8-bit purgatory by their employers, and those who do it by choice. The latter group is beyond both hope and concern … the less said about them, the better. The former group, though, is a heartbreaking bunch … and there are times when I watch them struggle bravely with their sad little DOS shell and I – hard-bitten though I may be – get a tear in my eye.

One of those times is when they pick glumly away at the task bar, using those poorly-labelled and badly-designed little buttons to try and find the document or app that they need. Their pain is magnified by the knowledge that if only they had a real computer, they could use a single touch to find their target with the magic of Expose.

Luckily there is a light at the end of this particular tunnel. Most of the innovations that come out of Cupertino eventually show up in the Windoze world as bastardized or half-baked imitations. Usually it takes 3 or 4 years, sometimes it takes 14, but in this case it only took a double dozen of months. Now Windoze users can have an Expose sub-set with TopDesk from Otaku Software. You can download a free demo, and the real deal is only 10 bucks. As a free bonus, there is a fair amount of entertainment value in the documentation where they constantly talk about TopDesk as a fabulous new invention as opposed to a, you know, cheap and shameless copy.

Enjoy.

NOTE: I was way off base on this one, and I made the appropriate apology and corrections here.

There are few things that are more cheerful on a rainy Tuesday morning than a selection of great movies … performed by bunnies in 30 seconds or less. For obvious reasons, the treatment of Star Wars is my favourite … but it makes me wish I could find a copy of MacLean and MacLean’s two-minute version for comparison purposes.

“Ying! Fuckin’ guy’s arm flies off!”

Yeah, so pretty much everyone liked the Colours Of Doom, and is ticked that I had to go back to this. There was one poor soul who hated the colours, but hey, you can’t please everyone. I think that I have found a way to get around the limitations of Exploder and the retina-searing layout should be back tonight.

And surprisingly, it seems that a lot of people liked the icons, which I had mostly jammed in the old layout just to amuse myself. It wouldn’t have been easy in the older versions of WordPress, but 2.0 has some tasty new category tags, and it was simpler than I thought to plop them in over here. If you are looking to do the same, here is the chunk of php that i used:

<?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $cat)
{ echo ‘<img src=”http://yourblogsurl.com/wp-content/images/’ . $cat->cat_ID . ‘.png”
alt=”‘ . $cat->cat_name . ‘” />’; } ?>

Obviously, you would want to replace “yourblogsurl.com” with, well, your blog’s URL, and then just put the icons in the “images” directory, named to match the category numbers in the WordPress “manage categories” control panel. Feel free to toss it in to your own stylesheets – just remember that it has to be in the “loop” or the variable for the category ID will come up blank. Oh, and if you are using something other than PNG files for your timeless art, you need to change that sort of obvious string at the end of the second line. Have fun.

The Globe and Mail article on the NTP/RIM saga is generating startling amounts of traffic – to the point where the site temporarily caved in to the Slashdot effect. It is also generating a fair amount of comments from readers, which is to be expected. What is not to be expected is that a few comments from obvious astroturfers have slipped through the fences of the moderators – all user posts at globeandmail.com are screened and approved by editorial staffers – and have seen the light of day. Happenstance? Or an attempt to give a bit of positive spin to a story about a Canadian Business Community former sacred cow? Hmmmm.

Oh – as an aside, you can actually make money as a ‘turfer. If you were, you know, looking at a career change.

34: The estimated percentage of adults in North America who are infected with toxoplasmosis.

I have long lamented the demise of “arch enemies” in the fields of science and technology. There was a time in the early part of the last century when every scientist or geek had a dire rival … another person in the same field who you were driven to best at every opportunity, no matter what. Much of the great progress in the 20th century came about because of this very idea … the brightest of the bright driven to create on (and past) the bleeding edge by a formidable combination of pride and ego.

There was a dark side to this creative gestalt, though. Once in a while better judgement would get pushed aside in the name of the chase, leading to embarrassments like O.C. Marsh inventing the “brontosaurus” to top his rival Ed Cope … or this whole unfortunate mess with Messers. Campana and Lazaridis.

It is a fact that, in general, there is a certain camaraderie in the geek set .. an “us against the world” kind of mindset that is probably born out of the somewhat distasteful yet formative high school years. But there is also a raging competitive fire that burns inside those who have the techie gift – one that is quite possibly hotter and more intense than that in any musclebound jock. There is a need to be “the man” … the one who can stand up and say “I invented the coolest thing ever, I am the king of the digital castle, I am the alpha geek.” It is not a fire that allows you to share the glory, or to admit that someone else might have the same right to a claim that you do.

It is the fire that leads to the kind of confrontation that would not allow Campana and Lazaridis to shake hands and divvy up the pie. It’s not about the money … it’s about the fire. And the fire makes you do things that outsiders would shake their heads at and say “stupid, stupid, stupid.” Stupid like polluting North American museums and textbooks for the better part of a century with a phantom sauropod that never existed. Stupid like rigging a demonstration in court – one that was guaranteed to be exposed as a fraud for reasons we shall get to momentarily.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Anyway. The Globe article is being hailed by pretty much everyone as a stellar piece of work, and I mostly concur. There are, however, a couple of curious omissions … one quite possibly excusable, the other not so much.

Curious – and excusable – omission 1: In the late 80’s and early 90s there was a very cool room in the building that is now known as the “MC” at the University of Waterloo. It was called the “Futures Lab” and it had a whack of gee-whiz items that researchers there were playing with – technology that was totally cool but maybe not so practical at the time. One of the displays consisted of a pair of Bondwell 2 “portable” computers – and if you remember what “portable” meant in the days of CP/M computers, you know that I am using that term loosely indeed – that had been retrofitted with the Skytel “Safari” hardware. You could haul one of these computers anywhere in the building and (after a suitable amount of time to rest after that little chore) type a message into the MDM730 terminal program, and it would instantly and magically appear on the screen of the second computer. No wires! No floppies! It was serious techie witchcraft, and one of the most popular toys for both undergrads and visitors – including a certain tour group of U of W “Newton” math competition winners that I was lucky enough to be a part of. I would be startled beyond belief if Mike Lazaridis – a guy who I think is pretty fucking cool, by the way, and a guy that I wish hadn’t chosen to go down this legal road – hadn’t had his mitts on those boxes at some point … boxes that held silicon that was a bastard child of Tom Campana’s Telefind system. I would not go so far as to say or even suggest that the stuff that eventually became the Balckberry was based on the Safari hardware. But it is a safe bet that Lararidis was at least inspired by the very item that his legal team now says is irrelevant.

Curious – and not so excusable – omission 2: One thing that the Globe article mysteriously glossed over was that SAM was the great shining example of vapourware in the late 80s, and never actually worked. There was no way at all that NTP’s team wouldn’t know that the courtroom demonstration was rigged, simply because SAM only worked in rigged demonstrations … a fact that had David Keeney in and out of legal hot water with backers and investors for years. It also nullifies the idea that SAM is “prior art” when evaluating the NTP patents. The Globe piece needed to point out that the NTP patents are not going to be overturned for any valid technical reason – from a nuts-and-bolts standpoint, they are pretty much beyond reproach. If they get overturned, it is simply because the American government thinks it is convenient to do so. I am not sure why the Globe writers seemed to hedge their bets here … just another layer of the mystery that may or may not be unwrapped.

The SpamCop issue has already been resolved – there must have been a lot of wailing from the gang in Waterloo, because the jerks at SpamCop never, ever work this fast.

For reasons that are still not clear, the IP addresses of the blackberry.net mail servers have been added to the SpamCop blacklist. Most ISP mail from Blackberries is now being flagged as spam – people who use enterprise servers are still okay. RIM is working on the problem now, but the gang at SpamCop aren’t the quickest movers in the world … which is not the least of their public perception problems.

Coming hard on top of all the other news, this is just weird.

It has been mentioned in passing that the U.S. Patent Office is under severe pressure from well-placed Crackberry addicts in both the White House and Capitol Hill to just up and throw away the NTP patents that are at the core of the current shitstorm of legal woe. These power-brokers don’t really give a rat’s ass about intellectual property concerns here, they just don’t want their Blackberries to stop working.

This, of course, is a wildly dangerous precedent. There are other corporations – with far more political and financial clout than RIM – would love to see this particular doorway to darkness opened just a wee crack. Just enough to get their slime-covered toes into the gap and start pushing. Case in point: Our friends at Microsoft, who aren’t just fighting one case of patent misappropriation … they have an outright slew of the damn things on the go. When it comes to stealing someone else’s work, the trolls in Redmond have a long and storied tradition that makes RIM look like a bunch of pikers. The latest round of this sort of litigation is especially worrisome for them because they didn’t just have to fork over cash – which they have gobs and gobs of – but also need to issue a patch, something that doesn’t sit well with Bill G and his assorted minions because the problem becomes annoyingly public.

A somewhat curious document that outlines the U.S. military’s plans for a “new media” information war has been unearthed by some researchers at George Washington University. While much of the document is predictable stuff about disabling enemy computer networks and shutting down portions of the internet, there is a eye-opening section on controlling the flow of news and information to U.S. citizens. The military acknowledges that it is now impossible to seed information (misleading or not) to foreign sources and not have it eventually blow back to the states. Because of this, they mention that they have plans to “control” the content that the American news media feeds to the citizens of the U.S.A. The plans are never mentioned, but it doesn’t take an Al Gore to put two and two together and come up with “censorship”.

Of course, if or when this comes to pass, you can be sure that republican voters in the red states will still defend it as a move that “protects their freedoms” … and they will do it without a hint of irony, to boot. They honestly believe that revoking freedoms to protect those same freedoms is perfectly logical and not a bizarre contradiction … and really, it isn’t their fault. It turns out that they are wired that way.

Yes, Ernest Thayer. He wrote “Casey At The Bat“, you morons … a fact that you could have fucking well Googled for yourselves. I even spelled the name right, so there is no excuse. Jeezus.

Yeah, so it turns out the groovy new “boxes and colours” layout works for everyone except people that are using Explorer on Windoze. We won’t get into the entire discussion of how dangerous it is to use Exploder, especially at work – we have beaten that to death more times than the Phantom has come back to life. Essentially, Exploder doesn’t use real HTML or CSS, and doesn’t parse the “margin” command properly. It will be fixed at some point in the near future, but for now, it’s back to the somewhat “austere” layout. Don’t like the lack of style? Blame Microsoft. It’s usually a safe bet.

In a not-overly-fearless act of prognostication, I predict that the name “Infinium Labs” will start to crop up in the press this week. Again. There is an apparent 12-month “media life cycle” here, timed to climax just before E3, with the following developmental stages:

- Infinium makes grand announcements about their “new” and “groundbreaking” Phantom game console.

- Less-than-savvy members of the mainstream media report on this “new” and “groundbreaking” product.

- A few gullible investors – ones who don’t remember the last iteration of this – toss money at Infinium.

- The gaming and tech press run stories pointing out that Infinium is run by low-life scum and their product is essentially vapourware.

- Obvious jokes based on the name Phantom abound.

- The gullible investors get cold feet.

- Infinium launches huffy legal “actions” that end up amounting to nothing.

-Infinium fades away until the next “rebirth” and the circle of life begins all over again.

Last Friday we achieved stage one, with Infinium promising to “steal the show” at E3 in May. If you don’t want to wait the full two months for the inevitable to play out, you can read a compressed version of the whole mess from the 2004 life cycle here.

Giant Bonus Props for the first reader to spot a breathless mainstream piece on how the Phantom is going to change the gaming industry forever.

Over at the Globe they were kind enough to make this mostly well-considered piece available to all instead of just to Globe content subscribers, as has been their wont as of late. I want to give this one the “senate” treatment – a sober second thought – before I pass judgement on it one way or the other, but it’s nice to see some work that actually delves into the timeline … big kudos for mentioning the Glenayre suit, something that RIM is mostly trying to avoid mentioning whenever they possibly can.

And, really, anything that makes Jim Balsillie look like a buffoon is good journalism in my books.

UPDATE: The Globe’s web servers just got hammered hard by Slashdotters – as of 10 minutes ago they were apparently dead in the water. If you haven’t read the story yet, here is a cached link … praise be to Google.

Poking around and reading the news at a stupidly early hour this morning resulted in a somewhat startling discovery. There was a story about an upcoming (and delicious-sounding) World Of Warcraft raid instance in the New York Times. That in itself was not overly surprising – although two years ago it would have been, and no, smartass, not because WoW wasn’t released yet – as the NYT has managed shed it’s Grey Lady lo-tech image and tends to run more with the geek flow than against it these days.

What was startling was that the story was in the Sports section. Most fiber-n-ink rags tend to put whatever game reporting they actually lower themselves to provide in the Entertainment or (ugh) “kids” sections. Sports? Really? I mean, it makes sense in a “well, they put fucking poker on ESPN” kind of way, but … I dunno. I think that there must be a fair number of polyester-wearing, bud-swilling career sports wretches who choked on their Nicorette when they saw that.

Note: The link above will steer you around the somewhat odious “registration” required for reading the Times. You’re welcome.

Everyone needs an oven that they can monitor and control via the ‘net.

There are certain items in the “geek toolkit” that go beyond “useful” and tread into the realm of “beloved” … your favourite multi-tool, a Cat-5 crossover cable, keychain WiFi detectors … and a really good flashlight.

Now you can dispense with the “really good flashlight” and instead carry “the most fucking awesome flashlight ever“. Retina-searing power, full-on infrared imaging, and a GB of built-in RAM to record whatever it is you are peering at.

Yes, please.

175: The number of countries that drive on the right.

Good news and bad news on the high speed wireless front: The standards for 802.11n are more or less set in stone now, and the prospect of affordable, consumer-level WiFi that is faster than a wired network is no longer a chunk of digital pie in the sky. Annoyingly, the mopes at the IEEE are now talking about the end of 2007 as the timeframe for this to see the light of day.

Patience is a virtue, they say. But it sucks.

Talk about a lose-lose situation. Half of you said “thank the maker that you got rid of those gay colours” and half of you said “it’s so boring, where’s the purple?” In the grand spirit of compromise, I decided to go with enough colours simply to fry everyone’s brain and be done with it.

Bah.

Oh – and update your RSS link. It’s down at the bottom – the old feed will just sort of atrophy away and die. Not pretty. You don’t want to see that. Trust me.

86: The number of countries that drive on the left.

The Great Blackberry Patent Saga continues to creak along, with at least another month now before any decision will be made on NTP’s proposed injunction – February 24th is next date available for the U.S. District Court to hear the motions, countermotions, and general blathering. Some people think that it will never get that far, though, because the gang at RIM have pulled out a hammer of their own – panicmongering among Crackberry addicts in the U.S Senate and House. While the NTP patents are pretty clearly valid and should probably be upheld, there is a movement afoot among congressmen to pressure the U.S Patent Office just to toss the things out and pretend that they never existed. The old watchword of “money talks” has apparently been replaced with “don’t fuck with vote-wielding email freaks as they try and seduce interns while they are supposed to be working”.

I am a sucker for the shirts and ties make by Thomas Pink. The fact that Mr. Pink has no retail outlets in Canada has been an ongoing personal tragedy for a few months now, and I pine for my next opportunity to purchase his fine products. Today the pining got worse, and has in fact moved into the realm of veritable hand-wringing … Pink’s latest product is The Commuter, a shirt with extra wrinkle-reistance (for those sweaty bus and subway rides), concealed storage( for your iPod), hidden earbud routing (for those dreary meetings), and a place in the cuff to stash your proximity cards (for actually, you know, getting into the office).

The shirts don’t yet come in a cut with a proper cuff, and have buttons instead of links or knots, but it is a start.

iBlog is no more. Like most every other mope on the planet, I am running a WordPress/MovableType kind of blog now. There will be a delay as the older content crawls into place … if you were here to search for something older, you might be out of luck. On the other hand, the conversion script for iBlog seems have have found some of the missing Smarties.

This layout may or may not be temporary – I didn’t feel like spending all night with the CSS. Feel free to complain.

Some of the classic Foamy episodes have suddenly gone missing over at Ill Will. In something that is probably not a coincidence, the cuts that have given up the ghost are ones from before the sudden appearance of the “suitable content” disclaimer. Recent episodes that appeared with the disclaimer already in place (“Exotic Chocolates“, “Hatta’s Rant“) run just fine, but classic episodes (“Small, Medium, Large“, “Foamy’s Rant IV“) all suddenly crap out after the first half-second or so. No explanations have been forthcoming from the Foamy camp at this time.

There is a tasty new build of Handbrake available, which now allows you to rip and convert any DVD to MP4, even if said DVD was encrypted. Better, you can still mix and match video and audio codecs, so you can make the most of the storage space on portable platforms like iPods and the PSP. Or you can just make you porn fit better on your hard drive. Whatever.

Out of the blue, Stanford University has made over 500 lectures, speeches, and other bits of university content available via iTunes. For free. This is extremely cool, and one would hope that it is the start of a general trend in these sorts of things. Kudos all around.

People are now firmly divided into two camps on the RIM/NTP patent thing: Those with strong and often wildly-divergent opinions as to what it all means, and those who are completely confused. It should be pointed out, of course, that these two groups have pretty much the exact same amount of concrete information – it’s only how they choose to deal with it that is different.

And – speaking of choosing and dealing … the way that RIM chose to deal with this is the root cause of a huge chunk of their current problems. For reasons that probably make sense to them – and only them – they have elected to lower the Cone Of Silence in an attempt to turn Waterloo into some sort of latter-day Fortress Of Solitude. Instead of being forthright and open about all of this from the word go, they have positioned themselves as a wanna-be Microsoft with Jim Balsillie playing the role of a ghetto Bill Gates. The upshot? As you pick through the flood of speculation-charged “news” today, you can’t help but notice that RIM comes off as the bad guys, a shadowy-yet-evil empire trying to crush the plucky little inventor who is gallantly defending his patents … not particularly the image you want to project in a war that will be fought on the treacherous battleground of public opinion.

Is that really the case? No, of course not – both sides have some valid points, both sides have some dodgy stances. RIM, however, needed to take the high road early. Any sort of cursory examination of the patents in question or the history of NTP leads to the fairly obvious realization that Thomas Campana’s patents are valid, they were filed long before RIM came onto the scene, and that NTP has every right to them – this is not a case of patenting a widespread technology after the fact. RIM’s position was tenuous from the word go, and they needed to be the white knights in this endeavour, transparent to the media and making a big fucking noise about gallantly fighting for their beloved user base. Sadly, this is not the course that RIM has elected to follow, and the public and media perception that they have created by this tactic is definitely not working in their favour.

Now – nobody wants the Blackberry service gone or halted. The potential injunction that NTP keeps waving around is their “nuclear bomb” … a threat, but one that they hope they never have to use. NTP wants to get their share of the sweet Blackberry pie, not to toss the whole damn thing out the window. The latest development here is the offer of a 30-day “grace period” … something that makes NTP seem (once again) like the good guys, with user needs in mind, but is really an extra-heavy tactic … it lets them pull the trigger and prove that they are not bluffing, but puts the onus back on RIM to find a way to dodge the bullet. Very clever, and very manipulative.

RIM, of course, is still championing the “software workaround” that they claim will save the day. However, their above-discussed refusal to actually talk about any of this – including the details of the workaround – gives everyone the idea that whatever it is, it will suck large. Rumours are rampant (mostly due to people who participated in focus groups stateside) that it will involve manually having to “check” your mail the way you do on any other handheld or desktop device. Is this true? Maybe, maybe not, but who the hell knows? If it is true, though, it is a nine-inch nail in the RIM coffin, since the only reason to carry a Blackberry is the instant mail synchronization. As a PIM, the Blackberry sucks ninety-seven kinds of wang (and still has wang lined up around the corner waiting for a turn) and for those functions you would be further ahead to carry a Treo or PocketPC or (when you get right down to it) a pad of fucking paper. Not coincidentally, some of the news feeds today are starting to mention the alternatives – something that they did not do in the early going here – and supposedly factual reporting of the goings-on is starting to be tainted by outright recommendations to get a Treo.

Is this the start of the avalanche? Maybe. Is it too late? No, of course not – RIM could stem the sudden surge of user and public resentment simply but opening up and honestly talking about what is going on. Will they? Don’t hold your breath … there seem to be some delusions of tech royalty up Waterloo way, and lowering themselves to chat with the peasants doesn’t appear to be anywhere on the agenda.

12: The age of the youngest soldier to be killed in the U.S. civil war.

New Strong Bad email! Three words: Decay, Despair, DeLouise.