November 23, 2007
I’m a reader. Not just the internet, but actual real life books. Being someone that is interested in technology I’ve been anxiously awaiting the mass adoption of electronic books. To that end, I spent some quality time with Sony’s eReader. I found that I actually liked it better than reading a paper book. While there was certainly room for improvements with the Sony product (button placement, page refresh rates), I really enjoyed reading with it. It was actually more comfortable than holding a book. The biggest obstacle I had to buying one was that I use the local Library for much of my reading, and they didn’t have any mechanism to ’loan’ an eBook. Therefore I would have ended up spending a lot of additional money to read books.
The latest addition to this space, Amazon’s Kindle, has been widely panned in many of the blogs I read. Now, I haven’t done enough research to have a well founded opinion on the product itself, but I’m excited to see additional progress in this space by someone who can be a game changer. Amazon has the power and volume to make a real difference. And while for all I know, the initial stock could have been 10, Amazon apparently sold out within 5 1/2 hours.
I hope the Kindle is a success. The cost and impact of printing, shipping, and disposing of all these books is unnecessary in the current day and age. And why shouldn’t you be able to take an entire library with you on a trip, instead of one 600 page book that is larger and heavier than your laptop.
The Kindle may not be the next ‘iPod’, but it is a step in the right direction, and innovation in a space that has been lacking it for a long time.
November 23, 2007
There have been a few minor spats regarding the move Redacted. First, the director, Brian DePalma, is frustrated with the studio (Magnolia Pictures, owned by Mark Cuban) over their refusal to include certain images in the film. There is a short YouTube Video of an press conference where DePalma and a studio rep verbally spar.
Second, Mark Cuban and Bill O’Reilly have been sparring over this film. Apparently O’Reilly feels that it is unpatriotic. The film depicts an alleged incident of rape and murder of Iraqi civilians by US Soldiers. Bill seems to feels that the film will motivate ’the enemy’. Mark has a summary of the interactions in blog posts here, here, here, and here.
One of Mark’s main points against Bill is that he judged the move based only on the summary. He didn’t actually watch the movie (it had not been released yet). Well, I have HD Net, which showed a preview of Redacted, so I was able the entire film in the comfort of my own home (for free). I’m glad it was free.
Frankly, it wasn’t a very good movie. My biggest issue with it is that it is a ‘fake documentary’. All of the movie is fake camcorder footage recorded by one of the soldiers, fake security camera footage, and fake television reports. I did not find this style compelling. I dislike reality television, but this felt like the worst of both worlds. It played like reality television, and the performances seemed to target style, but it was scripted so you ended up with actors following a script trying to act like they are being ‘real’. It didn’t work.
Second, I just didn’t find the actual issue compelling. Yes, the alleged act is disgraceful, and only makes it more difficult to be successful with the mission. However, the whole movie encompasses what is essentially a subplot in every war movie. Platoon deals with the very same issues, with a much deeper level of emotional involvement. The characters in Platoon seem much more ‘real’ than in Redacted. I think the fake documentary made them less real instead of more. I’m sure there are incidents like this in nearly every war we’ve fought. It isn’t right, and the people should be punished, but I just don’t see this as a shocking or even particularly interesting film.
November 18, 2007
I saw this shirt on Scrubs and thought it was pretty funny:
Turns out Busted Tees sells it. I’m not sure your European friends will get it. Frankly, I’m not sure your American friends will get it either.
November 17, 2007
bThe Slashdot version of this story has the headline: “C# Memory Leak Torpedoed Princeton’s DARPA Chances” This is sort of accurate. The issue isn’t with Microsoft’s implementation of C# or runtime, but with Princeton’s code.
Bryan Cattle has a good writeup of what happened. Essentially, objects they thought were getting garbage collected were not because there were still references held to them. In this case the objects were registered as subscribers to events. By forgetting to unsubscribe the objects when they were done with them, they ended up with a ‘memory leak’.
They eventually tracked down the problem with the use of the ANTS profiler. This is a great example of why it is important to really understand how the ‘magic’ parts work, and to verify that they are behaving as you expect. In this case, by not carefully tracking all the references to these commonly created objects, they ran into big problems.
Every ‘real’ developer should be proficient with profilers and use them as part of the development cycle to verify the system is behaving as expected. You won’t necessarily catch every issue, but you’ll have a lot better understanding of how things really work.
I find today that with the current generation of development tools, developers can function without really understanding what their code is doing. This usually works fine for small and mid-sized web or client applications, but can really cause problems with a project that needs to scale or function for long periods of time.
November 14, 2007
Tim Bray wrote a summary of the recent RubyConf. He did have one comment that caught my attention:
Everybody had a laptop, and it’s almost but not quite a Mac monoculture.
A Mac monoculture, among developers? It isn’t news that the Mac makes a great development platform for any code that is deployed on *nix. The popularity of the Mac UI on top of the *nix platform makes it idea. It has long been gaining in rodes in the Java community, but I’m still a bit surprised to see a Mac monoculture at a non-Apple conference.
This is why there was such an uproar about Java and Apple recently. Like Ruby, Java developers find the Mac platform ideal for developing their server applications. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t giving them the love back.
Still, Apple seems to do well anyway. So while I think Microsoft ‘gets’ how to build developer support a lot more than Apple, I don’t see Apple hurting because of it. I still believe in the long run some additional attention to the developer class could really benefit Apple.
November 13, 2007
Much has been written about the ongoing writers strike. As a fan of (mostly quality) scripted dramas, I’m bracing for dearth of television this year.
Several of my regular shows were already slated to start mid year. Law & Order, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost all begin their seasons in 2008. Already, it appears Lost may cut the season short. And from what I had read previously, Lost had stockpiled more shows for the spring than most shows.
Marc Andreessen has a long post about how to Rebuild Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s Image. This is an interesting read, but I think the part he doesn’t discuss is advertising.
The growth of online advertising has been impressive so far. A prolonged writers strike will even further reduce the appeal of traditional TV advertising. With new shows limited to reality TV, people will spend more time online. The dollars will chase they eyeballs. If the strike goes on for very long, look for a banner year for online advertising in 2008.
November 13, 2007
I released a new version of my iTunes Export utility.
iTunes Export exports your iTunes playlists as M3U or WPL files, allowing you to setup playlists in iTunes and use them with other software or devices.
This release is provides a few bug fixes for handling ‘*’ and ‘+’ characters, as well as songs with invalid “Location’ entries.
http://www.ericdaugherty.com/dev/itunesexport/
Don’t be afraid to suggest new features or bug fixes (eric@ericdaugherty.com).
November 4, 2007
Today, my clocks adjusted back to standard time. Unfortunately, my children did not.
October 30, 2007
Apparently Apple shipped OS X without updating to the most recent version of Java. Welcome to the joys of living in a walled garden.
As a Java fan, I’m pretty disappointed that Apple is not more supportive of Java. I’ve long believed that OS X is a nearly ideal development environment for Java with is *nix base and polished UI. PowerBooks have been taking over the Java developer market for a while, although this latest turn of events certainly won’t accelerate that process.
However, as much as I think this is just stupid on Apple’s part, I can’t say that they seem to be hurting because of it. Apple is just lucky that the main threat is Windows, which most people left for OS X anyway. I don’t think Vista will be winning them back, even if they are stuck on JDK 1.5
October 30, 2007
An OS X BSOD, who would have thought it was possible? John Gruber outlines the issue on his blog. As a possible future Apple Fanboy (as defined by John of course) I find Apple’s products appealing, and believe that they are more stable than Windows. But, let’s not kid ourselves. Apple, and OS X, are not perfect. And as Apple’s market share continue to grow, you are going to see more and more issues with people doing things with Apple devices that Apple did not intend. The number of bricked iPhones is another obvious example.
The problem is, people see computers (Windows, OS X, iPhones, etc) for what they are, multi-purpose devices. They figure out how they work and take advantage of undocumented features. This has been going on for years with Windows, and as regular readers of The Old New Thing blog know, Microsoft has made plenty of ‘hacks’ to their operating system to support applications that leveraged ‘undocumented features’. This brings up the two different approaches that exist at Microsoft and Apple.
Microsoft: Support Everything
OK, not EVERYTHING, but Microsoft seems to spend a significant amount of time testing existing products and applications on their operating system. When they find issues, they are even willing to make changes to the OS to fix it, even if the application is ‘wrong’. This makes live much easier for application developers and application users who may be using applications long abandoned by their authors.
Apple: Upgrade
Apple does not seem to be much of a fan of backwards compatibility. And they are certainly not very tolerant of you playing outside the box. They may not shut you down right way, but somewhere down the line your life will become very difficult.
Microsoft’s approach is obviously more user friendly in the short term. I think a lot of Apple’s reputation for reliability and ease of use comes from their walled garden/clean upgrade approach. I’m torn between the two. On one hand, I like the idea of clean system that does not make concessions to poorly written programs. However, being someone that is prone to writing his own poorly written programs, I appreciate the wiggle room Microsoft affords people. I’m a guy who won’t buy an iPhone until I can deploy 3rd party applications, so while Apple is appealing, I’m not a ‘switcher’ yet.
The bottom line is, John is correct. The BSOD upgrade problem is not Apple’s fault. Just like how many of the BSODs on Windows are not Microsoft’s fault. Apple and Microsoft still get blamed whenever there are issues like this with their operating systems. It isn’t necessarily fair, but your average user can’t distinguish between an OS issue and a faulty driver.
Apple, welcome to real market share, and all the associated joys.
