Alan Quatermain

Remember

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:18:28 -0500

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

—Lt. Col. John McCrae, 1872-1918

The peace we now esteem so lightly was bought dearly by many millions who felt that it was important enough to fight for. Though they were terrified, they fought on, because to not do so would have been an insult to their families, their children, for whose future they were prepared to sacrifice themselves.

We owe them a greater debt than we can ever hope to repay; at the least we can remember what they did for us, and pray that such sacrifices will never need to be made again.

An interesting story here, and one I’m not at all...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:23:09 -0500

An interesting story here, and one I’m not at all surprised to hear.

adobegripes:

Adobe gets bitchy over the iPhone and Flash, bit of an insight from the reddit thread :

About six months ago, a friend who was working closely along side adobe’s flash application development team told me that they received a prototype of Flash for iPhone. The prototype allowed the iPhone to have less than half an hour of battery life using flash. They then sent the prototype to apple and suggested incorporating this prototype iPhone flash into the iPhone OS in the next update.

Apparently apple sent this letter back thanking them for being interested in developing a working version of flash for the iphone but because the prototype is so processor intensive, and awful for battery life, they would not include it with their OS because it is just not good enough. They suggested using the gpu instead of the processor to render flash. Then they suggested building a seperate app for flash and web browsing because there was no way apple could endorse flash integration on the iphone in its current state.

Adobe apparently didn’t want to release the app under their name either and it never showed up in the app store.

A long story in short: Adobe sucks at programming, then apple told them they sucked at programming. If they want to release that shit under the name adobe so be it, but it sure isn’t going to be endorsed by Apple.

That was the last they saw of that prototype.

Try-before-you-buy comes to the App Store! Developers can now...

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:08:43 -0400

Try-before-you-buy comes to the App Store!

Developers can now ship ‘free’ apps which can be upgraded to ‘full’ versions via in-app purchase.

marco: Toothpaste For Dinner: interview cheat code I wonder...

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:03:00 -0400

marco:

Toothpaste For Dinner: interview cheat code

I wonder how many people actually know (no cheating with internet searches) what game that code was for and what it did.

Other reblogs/comments indicate this one comes from SimCity 2000. My all-time favourite, however, has to be ‘pooslice’ — who can remember where *that* one came from?

A Blocks Gotcha

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:57:03 -0400

So I was just writing some code, and I refactored it a bit by putting a little chunk into a block, then calling that block in multiple places. Here’s the gist original declaration:

NSXMLDocument * (^fetcher)(NSString *) = ^(NSString * typeName) {
    NSArray * arguments = [NSArray arrayWithObjects: ...];

    // fetch the data
    NSXMLDocument * doc = ...;
    if ( doc == nil )
    {
        LogError( ... );
        return ( nil );
    }

    dispatch_async( dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
        [progress setDoubleValue: [progress doubleValue] + step];
    });

    return ( doc );
};

Attempting to compile this, however, resulted in the following error from Clang:

error: incompatible block pointer types initializing 'void *(^)(NSString *)', expected
'NSXMLDocument *(^)(NSString *)'
     NSXMLDocument * (^fetcher)(NSString *) = ^(NSString * typeName) {
                                              ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I scratched my head for a while over this, but it all came down to this line:

return ( nil );

It transpires that since MacTypes.h (used by Security in this case) #defines nil as a synonym for NULL, the preprocessor turns that into:

return ( (void *)0 );

Since that’s the first return statement in the block, the compiler creates a block with a void * return type. DOH. The solution was to type-cast the result:

return ( (NSXMLDocument *) nil );

It’s not the most elegant, and it would be nice if MacTypes.h didn’t stomp all over ObjC’s nil data type, but at least it works.

Villain laughs as he guts public library

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:23:33 -0400

“I wanted that kid to lose sleep that night,” a grinning Xinos says Wednesday, as he invites me for a nearly two-hour interview in his Mercedes-Benz in the gated Oak Brook community where he lives. “This is the real world and the lesson, you folks who brought your kids here, is if you want something, pay for it.”

If there were any doubt about this asshat’s nature, there’s the following quote:

He campaigned, successfully, against a plan to bring subsidized housing for seniors into town by declaring, “I don’t want to live next to poor people. I don’t want poor people in my town.”

The message I’m getting from him is that if you’re not rich as pig-shit, you have no right to anything beyond the ability to call 911. If you want anything more, then you should become rich. If you can’t become rich, then you can fuck off.

Charming bloke.

(hat-tip to @Strand206 via @Salanth via @neilgaiman)

"If MonoTouch and Flash applications are slow and crash or use gobs of memory or break under future..."

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:48:37 -0400

“If MonoTouch and Flash applications are slow and crash or use gobs of memory or break under future versions of the iPhone OS, the end users aren’t going to take away a negative impression of Adobe or Novell, they’re going to think “Apple Sucks”. They’re going to blame the iPhone.”

- iPhone Development

Jeff nails it again.

Thawte FreeMail (Web of Trust) Certificates to Expire in November

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:43:59 -0400

Just found a link to this FAQ on Slashdot (so it might be a little bit inaccessible).

I use this for my main email account (and have done for about 5 years now), but still haven’t received the official email from Thawte enabling me to enrol for a one-year VeriSign email certificate just yet. I have to wonder if that will arrive before my certificate becomes invalid on November 16 this year…

Thawte - Knowledge Center - SSL Certificates Support

Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:00:57 -0400

Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?:

cleversimon:

Charlie Brooker’s thesis is “I hate Windows, but I hate strawmen Mac evangelists more, so I’m going to marinate in my misery just to stick it to these imaginary fanboys. I’m unhappy and unproductive, and I’m going to stay unhappy and unproductive—that’ll show ‘em.”

Finishing the sentence “I’ll never buy a Mac because” with anything but “it doesn’t meet my needs” means you don’t get to accuse Apple users of making irrational purchasing decisions based on slavish adherence to an ideology.

Amen to that. I’ve pretty much given up reading anything about the Mac from most major online news sources these days because I invariably wind up reading the comments from a large number of people screaming bloody fury at any Mac users they can find. It used to be mildly amusing (the insecurities-on-view psychological side of it, at least), but now it’s just tiring. Especially when someone starts using “MAC” instead of “Mac” or even “Apple”: yeah, you obviously know what you’re talking about, mate.

The Cider Portability Engine

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:33:59 -0400

The Cider Portability Engine:

Steve Troughton-Smith has a great article detailing the increasing performance and capabilities of Transgaming’s Cider game translation engine. Particularly interesting are the results of a comparison between Aspyr’s native Doom 3 port and the Windows version running via Cider— a near-tie:

Doom 3 (id tech 4) is one of the most graphically demanding engines that Aspyr (arguably the premier native Mac porting house) has ported to the Mac. That the Windows version of the game, using the Cider portability engine, is able to run just as smooth is certainly a sign.

However, I have to say that I’m not happy with the conclusion he makes:

I believe that there’s not much future for native Mac gaming, and Cider is the future. Cider games are performant, and can be released on the same day (in same box) as the Windows versions. … Long live native Mac gaming. You won’t be missed :-)

I will be very sad if the capabilities of Mac games in the future are purely dictated by the services made available by Microsoft for their own platform. I’m thinking here of things like Black & White integrating with the local Address Book to pull out names of your contacts for use in the game, and the QuickTime-based video recording capabilities of World of Warcraft.

I’m a Mac user dammit, and I like my platform— I don’t want to buy cast-offs written to a largely-incompatible set of APIs, I want software which makes use of the facilities of my chosen operating system and hardware, and is tailored to it.

And most importantly— I don’t want to be marginalized as a consumer. If you want to sell me your game, make some fucking effort and learn about my system. This wasn’t so hard back in the 80’s and 90’s when most games were released for a variety of different systems by much smaller development houses. Now that they’re being produced by massive companies with turnovers larger some some countries’ GDP, we’re supposed to believe it’s infeasible to target more than one operating system? Get fucking real.

Now that’s what a software update dialog should look like.

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:42:48 -0400

Now that’s what a software update dialog should look like.

One for @wilw & other D&D fans:

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:05:03 -0400

- Wheaton’s Furious Cock-Punch of Vengeance
- Utility 2
- An enemy deals you a powerful blow, and you respond in kind by ducking below his outstretched arms and delivering a blow of your own— landing somewhere most people deem uncouth to target…
- Daily • Reaction
- Immediate Interrupt
- Personal
- Trigger: You are bloodied by an attack from an adjacent enemy
- Target: One creature
- Attack: Strength + 5 vs. Reflex
- Hit: 1d4 + Strength modifier damage
- Effect: The target is knocked prone, curling into a foetal position, and is immobilized (save ends). After standing, the creature is slowed (save ends).
- Miss: 1d4 damage
- Created with DungeonMastering.com’s DM Tools

Yeah, I know. I get bored sometimes, ya know? And after hearing the name on the first episode of the Penny Arcade D&D Podcast (Season 3 is being published now) I couldn’t resist trying to codify something. So this is the result: a power which enables any class to deliver an … overpowering blow to an opponent that bloodies them.

Oof.

via Amber Benson et al

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:49:09 -0400

via Amber Benson et al

So if you’ve been following my Twitter feed you know by...

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:30:22 -0400

Trash part 1

Trash part 2

Trash part 3

Trash part 4

Carpet & baseboard ruined & mouldy

Lower 18" of drywall has to come out

This wall should have water protection

The malfunctioning sump pump well

So if you’ve been following my Twitter feed you know by now about the flood which destroyed my basement office, and you’ve seen the number of computers which had to be thrown out. For everyone else, here are those pictures, and some more of the damage inside.

We also found out that there’s a ton of stuff in this basement which is against building code. So that’s not good either. Sadly, since the water came in through the sump pump, the insurance doesn’t cover it (only damage caused by water leaking in through the superstructure is covered).

As to the computers on the lawn: yes, there are some classic PowerPC macs there. Full of water now, of course.

sigh

Announcements and News - iPhone Developer Program

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 11:34:35 -0400

Announcements and News - iPhone Developer Program:

Apple have made a good step towards App Store transparency: yesterday they unveiled a page with news and information on the App Store process. They’ve announced appreview@apple.com as the primary way to get hold of the app review team, and they’re showing average wait times for App Store review.

It’s a step in the right direction.

Daring Fireball: Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:39:56 -0400

Daring Fireball: Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline:

John Gruber has written another insightful article on the nature of the Mac vs. Windows (or perhaps one might say ‘generic PC’) markets.

There is much in this article about playing the ‘cheap’ angle, and a comparison to Wal-Mart as such:

They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus — not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users — that Windows PCs are second-rate. They still dominate in terms of unit-sale market share, yes, but not because people don’t recognize Windows as second-rate, but because they don’t care, in the same way millions of people buy metric tons of second-rate products from Wal-Mart every hour of every day.

That’s the business Wal-Mart wants to be in — selling a zillion cheap low-margin items and turning a profit on volume. That’s not the business Microsoft is in.

There is more to this argument of ‘cheapness’, even. Most people, even those who actually regard cheaper as better value (my in-laws take this to extremes sometimes) actually aspire to the good stuff. They may bring home cheap crap, but more often than not it’ll be the cheap crap which is made to look like the expensive, posh stuff. For instance, if they don’t buy a Sony Bravia TV, they might well buy a Goodmans or Durabrand with the same pale red brushed-metallic finish. They perceive the Sony TV as the best (or among the best), and like cargo cultists their ‘value for money’ choices usually echo that perception— it looks like the popular high-end model but costs less, so therefore it’s ‘good value for money’.

By pitching themselves as the ‘value’ brand, Microsoft is actually reinforcing Apple’s position as the high-quality brand; they are showing people that Windows-based computers are not the targets of aspiration. This just serves to cement them into the same perceived place as ‘generic’ brands of all kinds: they’re cheap, they’re low-quality, but they get the job done, so long as you’re not fussy. This is not the position of a so-called ‘market leader’.

There’s a second point to take into account here too: people may go and buy cheap stuff from Wal-Mart, but the perception is that because it’s cheap, if it breaks it can be replaced easily and — of course — cheaply. Buy some plastic garden furniture from Wal-Mart for $70, it might not last a long time but it’ll only cost $70 to replace. Microsoft doubtless likes that idea because since each computer sold generates a Windows sale for them it means that they will make money every time someone gets another. And sure, for a few hundred bucks a year, people might well be able to afford that. But here’s the rub:

People’s data is NOT cheaply replaceable.

If I have a computer and I choose to upgrade to a newer model, then I can get that new model and transfer stuff. If my garden chair’s back legs snap off I can go and buy another chair. But the two together don’t work: if my computer dies or falls apart completely, I can buy a new computer but I don’t have my data any more— at least not without potentially costly data recovery services.

Microsoft is preparing for this somewhat with its Windows Live offerings, selling people on the idea of storing their important data on the web. They go so far (rightly so, in my opinion) to integrate this into their applications, and to encourage the use of pure web applications to reinforce this bond, this idea that the computer is just an access node, and the data is elsewhere, separate, and above all safe.

But that doesn’t cover everything. I’m not about to use a web-based image editor to do what I could with Photoshop. Not even for what I could do with iPhoto. The issue there isn’t about capability, it’s about the amount of data. I’ve got gigabytes of photos. Fancy working on those over your internet connection? No, me neither. And so, for the moment at least, we’re tied to our physical computers for storing and working with the products of our digital lives— increasingly so, as our lives become increasingly bound to our capability to manipulate the data that surrounds us (we are what people perceive us to be, and today more people perceive us by the data we create than by our physical actions or habits).

Microsoft evidently employs people who have the right ideas, but the management just can’t decide what’s most important, so it all comes out in a mush— as though the whole were as great as the sum of its parts. But some of those parts cancel one another out. The more web-based the world becomes, the less reliant it is on Windows on the desktop. To sell lots of computers, you need people to keep buying new ones. To entice people to buy new things you need to make things which they aspire to own. To be the target of aspiration, you can’t be the nearest, simplest option.

Microsoft needs to pick one thing to be good at, and be good at it. They need to focus.

I just don’t think the current management will ever realize that.

"With Windows 7, Ballmer vowed prices would go up"

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:38:35 -0400

“With Windows 7, Ballmer vowed prices would go up”

- Microsoft ultra-thins to ‘out cool’ netbooks, Apple • The Register

Steve Ballmer just makes this too easy.

But I R Lexmark, U n00b!11!!

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:42:07 -0400

Me: This is just some handwritten text, to be emailed. 75dpi is fine.
Lexmark: Okay. Here's a preview.
Me: That's good, now scan it.
Lexmark: … … … done.
Me: 12MB? I thought it was going to be 1.5MB… Hey! Everything but the first page is at 300dpi! I said to use 75dpi!
Lexmark: OH HAI U WUR SEEREEUS ABUT DAT? DURR U SILLEE 300 R BETTR THEN 75! PFFT U N3WB!!1!

Quoth @davidkaneda: Honored to have had my first blatant...

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:20:39 -0400

The Outpost mailshot

Vision Board mailshot

Quoth @davidkaneda:

Honored to have had my first blatant design rip-off.

Wow. There is indeed a striking similarity there…

furbo.org · Waving a red flag

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:48:20 -0400

furbo.org · Waving a red flag:

Craig Hockenberry shares some delightfully useful information for developers who need to get out a quick bugfix for their iPhone apps:

An email to appreview@apple.com that explains the critical problem and which product is affected will help speed your update through the system.

Note however that, as he points out, you must not abuse this. Only use it for problems with application review times, and only when it’s an absolute requirement (not a ‘gee, wouldn’t it be nice if my app was reviewed faster’ case).

Remember: with great power comes great responsibility