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December 2006 Entries
"NEW YORK - As if its options woes weren't trouble enough, Apple Computer Inc. said Friday it is facing several federal lawsuits, including one alleging the company created an illegal monopoly by tying iTunes music and video sales to its market-leading iPod portable players." Source: Yahoo! News Hmm, I'm not sure this is an issue best resolved by the courts; it's probably best left to the market to sort out. If this "lock in" bothers the market then people will purchase another player and that drop in the market will prompt Apple to move away from it's ridiculous DRM. A case in point, I was looking for a new media player for a Christmas gift this year, and Apple's DRM ensured that the iPod was discounted straight away. That's what'll make Apple change it's ways not court decisions. I mean look how many anti-trust cases Microsoft has lost and they have weaseled their way round most of them so that they haven't changed their business in any significant way. In situations like this, the market rules.
"The former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, has been hanged in northern Baghdad for crimes against humanity." Source: BBC NEWS Executing Saddam raises many issues (far more than it solves). The most serious, in my mind, is that the trial was universally condemned as being flawed; which raises the question, was Saddam executed so that he could not embarrass the US government, who supported him for many years? I bet Saddam could have told some very bad stories about high ranking US government officials. We'll never know the truth about what happened now, as there is only one side left to tell the story; and that strikes me as being too convenient.
... we did nothing wrong! Then does some financial jiggerypokery to prove it... "SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 29 — Apple Computer said Friday that a special committee of its board had found that its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, was not responsible for improper dating of stock options at the company. To account for the backdating, Apple restated its financial reporting back to 2002 and took an $84 million charge." Source: New York Times Is it just me or does this really smell?
"Fancy being an Xbox 360 games developer?
A new era of garage computer games development begins with the launch of XNA Games Studio Express." Source: Microsoft 10 Check out Paul Foster's video covering the UK launch here; very cool! :-)
Just a week after I wrote “Uh Oh, Gmail Just Got Perfect” a number of users started complaining that all of their Gmail emails and contacts were auto deleted. Source: Techcrunch This is why it's important to have control over your own data, and if it must be on someone else's servers then you better have a good back up. Technorati tags: Google, Gmail, Deletion
Add at number one it's... Microsoft Office 2007 
Photograph: Marc Simon Innovation? Microsoft? Yes, we were surprised, too, but the Redmond giant's latest upgrade of the world's most popular productivity suite introduces several new features that revolutionize how people work with documents. Source: PC World And deservedly so, in my opinion. I've been using Office 2007 for a while now and it's a great product.
This sends out totally the wrong message "Microsoft and AMD sent out a pile of very expensive (yet trashy looking) laptops to a number of bloggers over the past week. We were told we could keep them - now after a day of minor outrage by some people they are emailing us back with the following request that we not keep them after all!" Source: Marshall Kirkpatrick Why does it send out the wrong message? Simple; those of us who are trying to evangelise PR 2.0 and web 2.0 practices can point to industry leaders, like Microsoft, and say "this is what we are trying to do". However, if companies like Microsoft waiver from that line then it weakens us all. Microsoft did absolutely the right thing by handing out those laptops. Where they went wrong was to cave in the face of the whiners, they should have just sucked down the negative publicity or better still, added to the conversation by telling everyone why it was the right thing to do. That's why I say Microsoft, if you are going to lead then lead damn it!
... outside my house this afternoon 
Mac | Windows Technorati tags: Police Speed Trap
"Ok, so yeah, I’ve been blogging about Microsoft quite a bit lately. I guess their marketing people are doing their job well, since the launch of Windows Vista is next month. Speaking of which, last week I received an email from Edelman, the PR firm who is handling the launch of Windows Vista, letting me know that Microsoft is sending me a present in the form of a laptop with Windows Vista installed on it, no strings attached." Source: Laughing Squid Now that's the way to do it! Okay, not everyone who gets a laptop will write nice things about Vista, but the point is it doesn't matter; the fact that bloggers are writing about it will get it up there on search engine results, and if bloggers do write bad stuff about it, it gives Microsoft a chance to add to the "global conversation" and put their views forward. So long as there's no strings attached and the bloggers declare their "conflict of Interest" then this is definitely a good idea. Nice job Microsoft!
This doesn't surprise me (but it's good to see). I know I did all my shopping online this year. SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 26, 2006--Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that the 2006 holiday season finished as its best ever, with its busiest day being December 11th. On this day Amazon customer orders exceeded 4 million items. Additionally, the company wrapped up its first ever Amazon Customers Vote promotion, where 1,000 Xbox 360s were sold in 29 seconds, and 1,000 Axion portable DVD players were sold in 34 seconds. Source: Amazon.com Technorati tags: Amazon, Sales, Best Year
Well we had fun opening presents this morning, hope you did too. 
Click here to see the rest of your Christmas morning pictures. Technorati tags: Christmas 2006
Merry Christmas everyone! :-)
"We understand that Bono is 'very flattered' to be honoured, particularly if the honour - like its French counterpart - opens doors for his long standing campaigning work against extreme poverty in Africa." Source: U2.com But not flattered enough to respect Her Majesty's embargo as protocol requires; but then again neither was the Prime Minister "Tony Blair says the honorary knighthood awarded to anti-poverty campaigner Bono is a deserved reward for his "remarkable" humanitarian work." Source: No 10 That being said, we all know Tony Blair is a self serving politician who would sell his own son for a positive news story; we expected more of Bono, did we not?
..and talks sense. He asked what question I'd ask of him, and I asked what he'd do to evangelise software engineering in schools as it is not part of the the curriculum in the UK. He responded "Each and every IT blogger in the blogosphere should consider volunteering at the high school level and teaching computer skills." He is spot on there. Kids in this country leave school and head to university with little or no knowledge of what software engineering is all about, and that is not only pitiful, but dangerous in this day and age. If the government don't realise how important software engineering is to our future economy, then it is up to us to get into schools and evangelise this subject. James has, I have, have you?
... Well, sort of. Back in this post James criticizes me for not answering questions he asked in this post. The odd thing is, the original post wasn't directed at me, that's why I didn't answer them. Never mind though, I'm game, I'll answer them now. - Of the choices you outlined you should use Smalltalk (though you should probably learn to spell it). The reasons are simple. The syntax itself is straight forward and it's dynamic nature means you spend less time satisfying the compiler and more time solving the issues of the problem domain. Moreover, it's proponents clearly do not follow the herd mentality and are therefore more likely to come up with an innovative solution to your problem. Also, it's is a very mature technology especially in the area of it's virtual machine.
- Added, let's see what they bring to the conversation.
- In general outsourcing is a bad idea (not just outsourcing to India) the further that development is from the customer the worse the finished product will be. With regard to affecting the uptake of RoR and Smalltalk, I believe that there are so many developers in India that whatever they decide to program in will be "popular".
- Can't help you there, I'm not an RoR evangelist, but with regard to Smalltalk (in the UK) you should look at JP Morgan.
- The question I'd ask of you is, since software engineering is not taught as a subject in schools in the UK, how can we get more of our young people interested in becoming software engineers?
Stand still long enough in our house these days and you'll get decorated. Don't think the fact that you are a dog will save you either. :-) 
...RIAA! "I haven’t been able to find information on the largest lawsuit in history but I’m sure this one is right up at the top. The RIAA (yes, I was just as shocked as you  ) is suing the website AllofMP3.com on behalf of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music in the amount of $150,000 for each of the 11 million songs that were downloaded from June to October of 2006. That comes to a lawsuit totaling $1.65 trillion!" Source: CyberNet News The big question is, since iTunes set the price at 99 cents per downloaded song, where do the RIAA get a figure of 150,000 USD? I sure don't pay that for online music!
The 80 year old Monarch show's you how it's done. Merry Christmas ma'am :) "The Queen's Christmas Day speech will be made available as a podcast for the first time this year." Source: BBC NEWS
but we can't get planes off the ground in the fog; amazing! "Christmas travellers endured a third day of misery as thick fog caused flight cancellations and delays, but the weather should improve on Saturday." Source: BBC NEWS
And I thought it was just UK judges that were "out of touch", but no, the US proves it can turn out clueless judges too. "A federal judge in Texas has ruled that it is unlawful to provide a hyperlink to a Webcast if the copyright owner objects to it. U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in the northern district of Texas granted a preliminary injunction against Robert Davis, who operated supercrosslive.com and had been providing direct links to the live audiocasts of motorcycle racing events. Lindsay ruled last week that "the link Davis provides on his Web site is not a 'fair use' of copyright material" and ordered him to cease linking directly to streaming audio files." Source: CNET News.com
Check out Auntie Beeb, there's life in the old girl yet! :) "Hundreds of episodes of BBC programmes will be made available on a file-sharing network for the first time, the corporation has announced." Source: BBC
How can Microsoft apply for a patent for this stuff? Is there no one in the Patent Office with a clue? "A content syndication platform, such as a web content syndication platform, manages, organizes and makes available for consumption content that is acquired from the Internet. In at least some embodiments, the platform can acquire and organize web content, and make such content available for consumption by many different types of applications. These applications may or may not necessarily understand the particular syndication format. An application program interface (API) exposes an object model which allows applications and users to easily accomplish many different tasks such as creating, reading, updating, deleting feeds and the like." Source: United States Patent Application: 0060288329 Technorati tags: Microsoft, RSS, Patent
This is interesting news for the vloggers amongst us "NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- In what is perhaps a sign of the difficulty facing those looking to compete against YouTube, fledgling video-sharing site Revver.com has reshuffled its executive suite, with two of the three co-founders departing." Source: Advertising Age
Okay, so there was a big fight at an NBA game, not the kind of thing the governing body wants to happen and not the sort of thing that shows it in a good light. However, in a totally PR 1.0 move it looks like the NBA tried to cover it all up. "...in a post on the Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt notes that the NBA demanded that YouTube remove all clips of the fight -- and, indeed, if you look at the videos that were linked to or embedded from the various blogs, all are now missing." Source: Techdirt There's a slow dawning of the realisation amongst companies that we are now in a PR 2.0 timeframe. The days where you can cover up stuff like this are over. What are you going to do, delete the Internet? Companies are now realising that Internet commentary, on stuff like this, is just a "conversation" and the way to deal with it is to take part in that conversation and not try and stop it. Looks like sports governing bodies haven't caught up to that yet. Technorati tags: NBA, YouTube, Brawl, PR
Tonight our friend Leanne came round for a birthday tea. Just so she doesn't feel left out, I'll post her blowing out her candles too. Again, it appears that 27 year olds require birthday candles too :) 
Click here to watch the video
Google dump SOAP (the "simple" API that became as complex as CORBA) and, not surprisingly, Dave Winer's not too chuffed about it. He makes it sound like Google are getting out of the API space; they're not, they are just going for better technology. "We were excited when the Google API came online, we waited for them to come up with a licensing plan that would allow developers to build Internet-scale applications using the API. Today, the wait is over, and it's not good news." Source: Scripting News: 12/19/2006
"For the past three months I've been privately engaged in a time-consuming dispute with Nathan J. Hole, a lawyer representing MGM Studios who claims that Wargames.Com, a domain that I've owned since April 16, 1998, is the rightful property of the film company because it produced the 1983 movie WarGames and registered it as a trademark." Source: Workbench I feel sorry for Rogers here, but I think he's on a hiding to nothing; if it's a trademark it's a trademark and that's the end of it.
Proof, as if it were needed, that just because a guy has a badge from a big company, doesn't mean he knows what he is doing. "A Comcast customer's Powerbook exploded after a Comcast tech plugged coax, connected to her computer through her modem, to an electrical wire." Source: Consumerist Technorati tags: Exploding Mac
Check out the list of cool new features to be added to the Digg web site. I'd just send you to the site to take a look, but it's down right now (oops!) :)
Today the family made it's now annual trip to Camperdown Park to see Santa. You can see a few of "the troops" in the picture below. The rest of the pictures can be viewed here. 
Check it out here. So, I wonder who I have to kill to make it this year. :) Technorati tags: PDC 2007
Well not on Vista you aren't. I'm a little behind the curve on this one, but just incase you missed it too... One of the not supported announcements that seems to be catching people by surprise is about SQL Server 2000 and it's free sibling, MSDE. They seem to have run afoul of UAC, which really does require you to change your application. Source: Kate Gregory's Blog
My daugher Emily is 13 today. Congratulations! :) 
Later the same day... 
Click to watch video
Emily blowing out her birthday candles, and yes, apparently 13 year olds still need birthday candles. :)
I'm just back from a meeting with some members of the Senior Management Team at my local secondary school. We chatted about lots of topics, but the most interesting thing is they are very excited by my idea of providing revision material in a format the kids are already into, e.g. podcasting, vlogging, and providing video for media players and mobile phones. Think YouTube for education. ;) I'm not going to say too much about it yet, but we are having further meetings in the new year to get things started. One really cool idea we had was to get pen drives or cheap MP3 players and just load a whole load of revision material onto them and hand them out to the kids. I can't help but think this has to be a good sponsorship opportunity for some company. They could provide branded pen drives / MP3 players; that's got to be better than having Coke machines in the refectory, hasn't it? :)
Looks like bloggers are going to have to disclose if they get paid for writing about a product or service - well at least in the US anyway. "anyone who markets to US citizens will be required by law to make these disclosures or face potential action for deceptive advertising." Source: Copyblogger Technorati tags: FTC, Blogging, Disclosure
Now that Skype has their customer base, they begin to smell the money. "Skype, the Internet calling service owned by eBay, said Tuesday that as of Jan. 1 it would begin charging $30 a year for unlimited calls to landline and mobile phones within the United States and Canada. Those calls had been free since last spring." Source: New York Times Technorati tags: Skype, Charges
My daughter Gemma has been selected to represent Scotland at an international camp in Sweden :) 
PodTech are running a competition at the moment for a new harddrive. My entry is below. Check it out if you are looking for a cool new harddrive
I can continue vlogging and podcasting Carnoustie Golf Links' run up to The Open 2007. Not only will I continue creating great vlogs and podcasts on this subject, but I've been in touch with Nokia and they've promised me a new N95 for the actual event itself. This will allow me to wonder around the crowd chatting to some to the thousands of people attending each day, and getting their views online. Not only would I use me new drive for the purpose above, but I'll also continue working on my tech blog bringing you news of great tech in the Dundee and surrounding area. Both the golf blog and the tech blog has video in lots of different formats (including audio only) and this takes up space, space, space; space that I just don't have. So Seagate, how about you send me one of those lovely disks of yours, to help out my poor disk pictured below? 
Technorati tags: Seagate contest
Wow, talk about making a rod for your own back! The big companies like Microsoft and Apple should be standing up to the RIAA, not pandering to their ridiculous demands. There is absolutely no justification for saying that "these devices are just repositories for stolen music". It's time this nonsense stopped. So Microsoft is paying the record label Universal a dollar for each Zune sold. (See the story here.) Doug Morris, the CEO of the Universal Music Group, justified it quite succinctly: “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it,” he said. “So it’s time to get paid for it.” Source: StevenLevy.com Technorati tags: RIAA, Microsoft, Zune
If you are buying a new PC / Laptop for Vista you should bare the following in mind... "A white paper published this morning by hardware analysis firm iSuppli, based on its studies of Microsoft Windows Vista running on multiple grades of computer hardware, has concluded that the software publisher's stated minimum requirements for the system -- which include an 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 35 GB hard drive -- may not be nearly enough." Source: BetaNews
The method by which Mr. Dori initiated the claim is the juicy core of this story: instead of going through the normal process of sending the court papers to Dell's headquarters in Texas, Dori thought to have the papers delivered to a Dell shopping mall kiosk instead. Quite unsurprisingly, no-one from Dell turned up in court on the stipulated date, resulting in Dori winning a $3,000 default judgment and a ruling to allow bailiffs to close the kiosk and seize items if the judgment was not paid. Source: Engadget Well it certainly beats wasting your time on the phone to call centres. :) Technorati tags: Dell, Lawsuit
... otherwise, you can find your company in the middle of a PR nightmare. [via Dan]
YouTube quietly added a new feature today to its popular user-generated video site today called Quick Capture, which allows users to record video directly to YouTube from webcams plugged into their computers. This new feature eliminates steps in the process of producing video content, making it easier than ever to publish videos to the web. Source: Arstechnica Now this is very cool and should lead to a new boom in vlogging. Why? Well it takes out a step in the process, not a particularly difficult step true, but one that may have stopped people before. Now, unencumbered by this step, more people will vlog. Okay, the the signal to noise ratio will drop considerably but, buried in there will be some gems I'm sure. More importantly, its another step along the road to vlogging becoming mainstream in the consciousness of the population.
The first paragraph of the Reuters' article states.. "NEW YORK (Reuters) - News Corp.'s Fox, Viacom Inc., CBS Corp.. and NBC Universal are in talks about creating a video Web site to compete with Google Inc.'s YouTube, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday." Which is an eye catching opening. Only, when you look further into the article, the site is not a rival to YouTube in terms of user generated content as the new site will show "videos from their television networks". Which, presumably, YouTube would not be allowed to show; so there will be no competition in terms of content. Where there will be competition is in the area of advertising dollars, as the companies "aim to cash in on the fast-growing market of Web video advertising and have also discussed building a Web video player that could play clips" So not so much rivaling YouTube for content, more competing with Google for advertising dollars then? Hmm, if that is your plan, good luck. :) Source: Reuters.com
Over on his blog, Dave Winer is giving Microsoft hell for the way IE7 handles enclosure downloads. For those of you who don't know what an enclosure is, if you publish or consume a podcast or vlog via RSS, you're using an enclosure to point at the binary file on the server. The problem, as Dave sees it, is this. Microsoft have set up the download mechanism such that "if you are an enclosure publisher that wants to serve enclosures larger then 15MB to IE7 users, then you should use HTTP servers that support HTTP RANGE requests. Most popular web servers support HTTP RANGE requests." and Dave's point is "I don't know whether my server supports this feature or not, and I suspect most enclosure publishers (ie people who do podcasting) don't know either." Dave goes on to say "It surely seems Microsoft could handle the buffering without requiring a special feature from the server." Well the thing is, it's not that big a deal. Most popular web servers support http range, and most ISP will be running a popular web server, so you can pretty much assume that your ISP will support it, and you can go ahead and publish your podcast (or whatever) in the same way as you always have, without there being any problem. However, that's not to say there it not a problem with the way Microsoft have implemented enclosure downloads; it just means that Dave has missed the true nature of the problem. IE7 downloads enclosures by using BITS, which is "a background download service that ships in Windows and which enables downloading of files in the background while limiting its affects on network usage. In particular, BITS uses HTTP RANGE requests to download files in chunks. BITS also monitors whether foreground applications (like email or browser) are using the network, and if so, it throttles back its own network usage to limit its impact on those applications." And, as Tod Cochrane points out "A number of companies including mine absolutley hate that you all decided to continue using BITS it completly destroys stats reporting of downloads and puts ridiculous loads on servers that are serving the data. Here is why instead of having to deal with one file request and serving it at once thus one call to our databases servers that are managing file distribution for load purposes you all send 100's of request for one single file." That's right, your stats get hosed and your data servers get hammered, not a good place to be really. Stats are the life blood of many podcasting sites, it's what they use to get advertising revenue and if the stats are hosed then watch out for a lot of "interpretation" of the numbers. :) You can read more on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog.
If you write a blog, from time to time, people are going to write comments that you disagree with. Some of those comments will put forward a view apposed to yours, some of them will show you up for not knowing as much about a subject as you purported to and some of them will just be purely insulting. The question is, do you delete them? Some bloggers I read delete comments that disagree with their point of view. They argue that they shouldn't have to pay for space in which someone disagrees with them. Well okay, that's a point of view, but it's a pretty naive one. If blogging is about the global conversation, how useful is it if you can only hear one side of the conversation? It is much better, in my view, to be the sort of blogger who leaves comments up no matter how much the commenter disagrees with them.
It looks like the Kims choose their ill-fated route using a State of Oregon map and not by using an online tool as was speculated upon yesterday. Wilsonville Chamber of Commerce – information provided earlier of a tip that a person at the chamber of commerce building provided a map and recommended travel routes has been determined to not be credible. Interviews with Kati Kim revealed they chose this route after looking at a State of Oregon map. Source: Oregon State Police Technorati tags: CNET, Kim, Online Mapping
MySpace.com wants Apple Computer to update its QuickTime media player software so it can't be used in attacks on the social-networking site. The request comes after a worm in the form of a rigged QuickTime movie crawled onto MySpace.com over the weekend, changing people's MySpace profiles. The worm spread because of QuickTime's support for JavaScript code, experts have said. Source: CNET News.com This shows that the days of software companies turning their backs as they mutter, "security, that's a Microsoft problem", are long gone. If you've not waken up to the fact by now, you need to smell the coffee and realise that security is every software engineer's "problem".
Problem You need to check for any sequence of characters in a string. Solution The built in String method findString: returns the starting index of the substring or 0 if the substring is not in the string. Evaluate the following code in Dolphin Smalltalk for an example. 'Apples oranges, lemons' findString: 'lemons'
'Apples oranges, lemons' findString: 'dogs'
MEDFORD, Ore. — The snow-covered, back-country Oregon road that trapped the Kim family for more than a week was meant for tourists, but not at this time of year. Source: The Seattle Times
Looks like Yahoo is shaping up for the fight with Google. SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec 05, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced a reorganization of its structure and management to align its operations with its key customer segments -- audiences, advertisers and publishers -- and more effectively leverage Yahoo!'s significant strengths to capture future opportunities for growth. Source: SearachEngineLand Technorati tags: Yahoo, Reorganisation
REDMOND, Wash. — Dec 4, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced significant product line enhancements along with pricing and availability of the Microsoft® Expression® Studio for creative professionals. The quality of user experience is emerging as a core requirement for differentiating products and services while optimizing customers’ brand loyalty. Expression Studio, a key component of Microsoft’s strategy for improving the user experience delivered by applications, provides designers with an end-to-end tools platform that boosts collaboration with developers in the delivery of next-generation user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista™ applications and beyond. Source: Microsoft You can check out the new Expression stuff here, though I'm not sure I'm buying the "complementing not competing with Adobe" rhetoric; are you? Technorati tags: Microsoft, Expression
Well hop across here to find out. There's some really good stuff here and it shows how Google tries it's best to help out any hacked web masters.
“The Father of the Playstation” and the “Gutenberg of Video Games”, Ken Kutaragi, has just been nudged from his position as president of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), hereby replaced by Kaz Hirai of SCEI’s US wing. Source: GigaOM No one who has watched the development of the PS3 can be surprised by this, it's been a mare almost from the get go. To be honest, if someone doesn't pull it out of the fire, I honestly think the PS3 could be a Sony killer. |