Miscellaneous Heathen

Oobject.com is a fantastic site filled with picture sets of awesome things, like 8 Classic Nakamichi Cassette Decks or 23 Classic Pininfarina Designs (which includes, naturally, the Daytona -- but also something very special at #15).

No, really. It's a live streaming webcam on a litter of puppies.

Dear Intarwub: please buy us a Van De Graaff levitation wand.

(Incidentally, I just discovered in checking the name's spelling that Robert Van De Graaff was born in Tuscaloosa and attended UA for his undegrad degree. How could I have possibly escaped knowing this?)

This is hilarious only if you know where "Azeroth" is.

Among nerds of a certain age, there is no better calculator for any amount of money than an "oblong" Hewlett-Packard from the 10C series. This excellent family of robust, compact, workhorse calculators debuted in 1981, and included:

• The 10C, a basic scientific model; and
• The 12C, a business/financial calculator -- and the only one still in production (it's also one of the three named calculators allowed in the CFA exam); and
• The 15C, an advanced scientific model; and
• The jewel in the crown for nerds like Chief Heathen, the 16C Programmer's model.

These expensive calculators (a 12C is still $70) were objects of nerd gadget lust more than a decade and a half before the iPod or PalmPilot. Even better, their strict adherence to RPN meant being able to use one marked you as a member of a certain tribe -- a tribe made very sad by HP's eventual decision to stop making all but the 12C.

It should come as no surprise to anyone, then, that several enterprising folks have gotten 10C-series emulators into the iPhone App Store. At the astounding (for the App Store) price of $20 you can have the "SCI-15C," "PRG-16C" or "FIN-12C," complete with simulated LCD screens and brushed metal bezels (from Thomas Fors LLC; no real web site). Yes, we've already got a 16C on the HeathenPhone.

(A competitor, R.L.M., has another 12C on offer for $10, but a quick survey of comments suggests that Thomas Fors' versions are superior -- and even at $20, it's still far less than one of these actually cost back in the day. I do sort of wonder what a $9.99 emulator on a phone will do to HP's ability to sell $70 12Cs, though.)

(Incidentally, it's the Fors verisons we commented on previously, on 5/15/08.)

Randall Stross has a piece in the NYT bemoaning the slow boot time that's still the rule for most machines. Even pushing it down to 30 seconds is too slow, and he's absolutely right about that; in today's world, we should all be able to get our information appliances up and running almost instantly, like our phones. That an iPhone (e.g.) can do this just makes system startups even more annoying, and it's apparently annoying enough for Stross to give it significant space in the New York Times.

Except, of course, that he's missed an important development. I don't know what the state of these things is in Windows, since I haven't used Windows as a main machine or a laptop in nearly a decade, but on my Mac, boot time is also slower than ideal (call it a minute). The thing is, though, that boot time is now irrelevant, since I never shut the machine down. I just unplug peripherals, shut the lid, and stick it in my bag. When I get where I'm going, I just open it again, and within a second or two I'm ready to roll. I haven't actually shut down my laptop in months -- and that was for a RAM upgrade. With increased stability and some clever work between hardware vendor and OS developer, this kind of sleep-stability (and its companion, constant availability) should be achievable by anyone -- though if my Windows colleagues are any indication, sleep isn't any more reliable in 2008 than it was in 1998. They're all shutting down and rebooting every time they pack their computers up. My colleagues are smart people; I'm assuming that if sleep actually worked, they'd be using it.

Windows people, is it really still that broken? Is it reasonable for a nontechnical Windows person to keep his or her laptop booted in perpetuity, as I do with my Macbook Pro? I understand -- and revel in! -- the fact that Apple has a significant advantage here in owning both the hardware and the software, but surely this problem is solvable for the heterogenous Windows laptop world. What about the Linux folks (of whom I think there are maybe two here)?

WWW::Mechanize.

It's a geek thing. You wouldn't understand. Unless you already do. Perl 4 life, yo.

Who can tell us what's going on here?

chet@nogators:~$ cal 9 1752
   September 1752   
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

(More here.)

This will be screamingly funny to like three of you, and completely incomprehensible to the rest. Hint: if you know what "saving throw" means, go ahead and click. SFW.

Despite general warnings to avoid looking directly thereat, I advise you to view these photographs of the sun immediately, as they are powerfully cool.

Blizzard Entertainment is the powerhouse game developer behind some of the biggest and best hits in computer gaming. With competitor Westwood (who did the Command & Conquer series), Blizz essentially owned the real-time strategy game market with its seminal Warcraft (1994), Warcraft II (1995), and eventually Starcraft (1998) and Warcraft III (2002). These last two are still widely played today, which -- in a world of flash-in-the-pan hits -- should tell you something about their quality.

Blizz's other major line started in the midst of all that RTS goodness with Diablo in 1996. It's still viewed as a high point in the constantly evolving "D&D" hack-and-slash dungeon crawl genre. A sequel followed in 2000 even more successful than the first (many of Blizz's games have set sales records, only to be later beaten by other Blizz games). Blizz, of course, found even greater heights of success by combining the lore of Warcraft with the dungeon-crawl motif in their genre-dominating entry into the MMORPG market back in 2004.

So, anyway, the stage is set: company makes consistently excellent products going back 14 years, right? In today's world, you'd sort of expect them to stumble and start to suck, most notably in terms of customer service. Well, turns out, not so much.

They announced a third Diablo game this summer, so I've been vaguely wanting to replay D2 again for a while, but I had no idea where my disks were. When I accidentally found them today (when looking for something else), I was momentarily elated until I realized that they dated from 2000, in an era well before OS X, and would require an OS 9 or "Classic" capable Mac to play. (Or a PC, naturally -- Blizz has consistently also released its games on the same day for both PC and Mac, and put both versions on all the disks.) Classic is now a long time ago in the Mac world, and Intel-based Macs can't even run it. This meant I couldn't play, at least with these disks.

I pointed my browser over to Blizz, and discovered that D2 was available for download for only $19.95, which made me kinda happy (not because I could give them money; because it was available at all), but then I thought to call to find out if I could get a new download based on my 8 year old license key. As it turns out, yes, yes you can; you just create an account at the Blizz store and use their "add game" feature; you type in your license key, and thereafter you can re-download that game (in its most current and up-to-date version) from their site whenever you like. This works for Starcraft, Warcraft, and all the expansions, apparently, in addition to Diablo, Diablo 2, and its Lord of Destruction expansion.

The whole process make so much sense I can't stand it. It'd be so easy for Blizz to just blow off people in my situation -- it's not a significant revenue stream either way, and God knows I'll keep paying my WoW bill, and will probably buy both D3 and all three games of Starcraft 2 when they're released no matter how they handled this. Instead, though, somebody at Blizz realizes that surprising customers with good service is always good business, and that's a lesson far too often lost.

Cool.

Richard Garriott has joined the "crazy wealthy space tourist club."

I'm vaguely curious how many Heathen know who Lord British is without clicking the link.

Right, so, Heathen is under persistent spammer attack right now; we've trapped 2000 spam comments in the last 48 hours, so even a fraction of those getting through is enough to create a noise problem. With Mike D., I'm in the process of migrating to a new system that sucks less, but I'm also about to go out of town for business for a couple days, and I don't want to keep getting swamped with 100+ spam comment alert messages in my email, so:

I have drastically altered the comment policy. Posts get locked up now after 10 days; say your piece before then, or suck it. Also, you have to have an AJAX capable browser to comment, which means you have to have Javascript enabled. This ought to drastically cut down the spammery.

Mrs. Heathen knows very well that our house would look exactly like this if we also absurdly wealthy.

via here:

10² + 11² + 12² = 13² + 14²

Really.

Really, what part of Cooking with Warren Ellis could possibly go wrong?

George Takei and Brad Altman, his partner of 21 years, married over the weekend in California:

Walter Koenig, who played navigator Pavel Chekov in the original Star Trek cast, and Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed communications officer Lieutenant Uhura, served as "best man" and "best lady," Asianweek said.

Best Star Trek wedding EVAR.

HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com will keep you informed.

Palm has released its new Treo Pro, which turns out to be just another Treo-running-Windows (not Palm OS), with few if any new features, and a marginally slicker case.

However, the real fun comes with this tidbit: It's being released without a carrier partner and is therefore unsubsidized; it costs $549, or hundreds more than virtually any competitor from Blackberry or Microsoft or Apple (remember, the 3G iPhone is $199). Sure, it's unlocked as a consequence of this, but this means precisely squat to 95% of the cell-buying public.

Not quite as dumb as the famously-aborted Foleo, but awful close. Somebody put a bullet in these guys; they're done.

The primary Heathen machine developed a hardware fault, so I'm working on a backup and was, until about an hour ago, happy using webmail for both personal and work stuff. Our work tool is Exchange, which means the webmail is Outlook Web Access (OWA). OWA is, generally, not awful, but I just ran into some pretty annoying shit.

One of our products uses an Access database to store some data. A client's having a problem today, so they sent me their DB so I can try to track down the issue. No worries, right? You'd think that, but...

It turns out OWA blocks Access files as "potentially unsafe." There appears to be no way to convince OWA to allow those files through. "Oh well," I thought, "I'll just set up an IMAP account." IMAP is easy and simple and means my mail won't get out of sync despite using multiple computers. For the sake of variety and education, I decided I'd try Entourage, Microsoft's Mac-side Outlook-like thingy.

Setup was easy, but it took about 2 minutes before I wanted to strangle someone.

It turns out Entourage won't let me have the database files, either. The help file says:

An attachment to a message was blocked.

Cause: For security reasons, Entourage blocks attachments that could potentially harm your computer.

• Solution: If you do not trust that the attachment is safe, delete it from your computer.
• Solution: If you trust the message sender and want to receive the attachment, ask the sender to compress the file and then send it to you again.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. MS is now fixing their absurdly broken OS's security problems by crippling their mail programs. Delightful.

More

I did a bit more digging. It turns out that, if you Google long enough there is a way to disable this nanny feature, but it involves changing a .plist file inside the Entourage bundle in /Applications. It's totally absurd to put editable settings in /Applications, but never mind that. (Also, this little "feature" is yet another example of how Microsoft is actually not interested in selling software that appeals to users; it's interested in selling software that appeals to administrators, but what ever.) What's even more fun is that the list of verboten filetypes is dominated with extensions that are meaningless in the Macintosh context. I can click all day on an EXE file, but it's not going to run on OSX, so there's little point in keeping me from downloading it. On the other hand, Office files can and do carry destructive payloads, but .DOC isn't on the list. Yay Redmond!

The Olympics video site is built such that it will only work on Intel Macs, not PowerPC Macs.

Based on my understanding of building Mac software, doing this means they made a choice to deliberately exclude the PPC machines (and there are still millions out there; Macs have long useful lives -- Mrs Heathen's laptop, for example, is one) when compiling the software. Apple's build tools create so-called Universal binaries by default that work on both architectures. Someone at NBC or the Olympics is basically just being an asshole.

Hanford Lemoore explains why. Go. Read. It's an excellent example of why your consultant may well know better than you about what needs to get built.

We give you the Periodic Table of Awesoments. N.B. that element 1 is, of course, Bacon. Number 2? Ninjas. 3? BATMAN. 75? Catapult. 11? Chuck Norris. It's totally made of truth.

Work in software or IT? Over 30? Read this and weep.

Actually, I'm pretty sure only Mike is going to get the humor in this.

This is delightful.

"Programmers today are mostly idiots because they've only been taught the Java link-a-library cargo-cult development method that's little more than connect-the-dots." Discuss.

Note: if you happen to be a non-idiot programmer -- which is to say, you actually understand things like pointer math and stacks and interrupts, and you've actually written more than a dozen instructions of assembler or, god forbid, machine code, and you've actually attempted to work around operating system limitations like "DOS isn't re-entrant," and you understand endian concerns, then this development probably means you can command a higher salary and enjoy better job security. As a friend of mine once said, "I love stupid people. They make me look even smarter than I actually am."

Check out this old version of the Wikipedia page comparing file systems. Note: most of you will not get this.

A List Of People Who Should Stop Writing Software. Example:

Printer Manufacturers: A Printer driver is a folder with one “.ini” file, and a couple of “.dll”s and that’s it. It is not a 50 MB download. It is not an IE Toolbar, and Side Pane. It is not half-baked photo software. It is not a splash screen when your computer starts. It is not a tray icon.

Someone has figured out the rough size, shape, and density of Azeroth, i.e. the world in which World of Warcraft takes place, based on observable in-game experiments.

Via John Gruber's Daring Fireball, we find this amusing story, wherein Sony CEO Howard Stringer contrasts Apple and Sony: "Apple is a marvelous company, but it is a boutique. We are a giant conglomerate."

Well, maybe so, but here's Gruber's take:

As for just how giant, Sony’s current market cap is about $44 billion. The boutique’s market cap is about three times larger, at $149 billion. In terms of net income for the most recently reported financial year, Sony’s was $3.7 billion; Apple’s was $3.5 billion.

Heh.

This scanned copy of Byte's 1984 review and dissection of the original Mac make me miss what the tech press used to be capable of. Sigh.

Ten years ago, we all talked about putting Java in everything, even coffeepots, and having them on a household network for whatever reason. The Java part didn't take, but now more and more household items are getting network capabilities -- including, inevitably, coffee machines.

It turns out that such devices are really no different than anything else you put on your network, and that if you're not careful, people will hack your coffeemaker.

Don't you want this toaster?

Sometimes, I use my cell phone to call someone because it simplifies the process. My iPhone has all 600+ contacts in my address book in it; looking up a number there and dialing gets me talking to someone faster than looking up the number (on the phone or on my computer) and manually dialing the house phone. I can't be the only person who does this. Trouble is, my office is on the first floor of a 3-story building, and my house is sheathed in metal, so my cell doesn't work all that well in here.

The upshot is that I've often wished for a way to click a number in my address book and have it be dialed automatically. This used to be pretty common, when we all used modems, but who has a modem anymore?

Well, thanks to their sponsorship of Mac-blogger John Gruber over at Daring Fireball, I just discovered Dialectic. I tell it to dial any number from my address book, and sets up a connection using my Vonage account; my phone rings, I answer, and then other side starts ringing. How cool is that?

Even better: It plays nicely with Quicksilver, so talking to someone is never more than a couple keystrokes away. This is awesome.

It's not just Vonage; this thing'll work with damn near anything (Bluetooth cells, landlines, Asterisk systems, BroadVoice, CallVantage, CiscoIP, countless softphones like Skype, etc). It's not free, but it's cheap enough ($25) that I'm almost certain to buy it.

Oh, yeah: It's Mac-only. Suck it, Windows dorks. LOL.

Go watch this presentation and, if you like, then peruse the accompanying PDF.

(Note: Familiarity with this cartoon may, or may not, help.)

The WWDC keynote was today, and Apple has just raised the bar for the entire mobile phone world in a way even more threatening to the smartphone status quo than the intro of the iPhone 1.0 last year. Even if we skip the SDK -- and you shouldn't, since what you can do with an iPhone makes all the other smartphones look stupid -- it's still a gamechanger.

The new software, for all iPhones, includes:

• Bulk copy/move/delete operations
• Contact search
• Full iWork document support
• Complete support for Word and Excel documents

Thereby closing some glaring usability gaps in an otherwise tremendous platform. (To be fair, most people don't have 600 contacts in their phones -- but I do, and that made me really miss search.)

Add to this a new service called MobileMe (replaces .Mac; $99/year) that provides over-the-air sync of not just email but also addresses and calendar data. It works with native Mac tools (iCal/Address Book) as well as PCs running Outlook, and includes access to incredibly rich web apps for all that data, in case you need it. Exchange + Blackberry Enterprise Server? Who needs that?

Additionally, iPhone 2.0 includes optional support for Exchange and Cisco VPNs out of the box, including the ability to remote-wipe a lost device.

That sound just then? Someone in Canada shitting their pants.

And that's not all. The new iPhone 3G, as expected, got introduced today. It includes data speeds approach Wifi as well as an integrated GPS. It's also slightly slimmer, has a flush headphone port, and the 8GB model is only $199. Available July 11 in the US (and 21 other countries; *48* other countries to follow).

I said I wouldn't upgrade immediately, and I really meant it. I just got my iPhone a few months ago. But at $199 for the speed bump and GPS, it'll be hard to say no. I'll still wait for a month or two post-launch to ensure no problems surface, but DAMN.

They like it. It sounds reasonable. Take a look if it interests you.

Check it out. It's on Mars.

In the wake of the California ruling, George Takei and his partner of 20 years will wed in September. His best man? Walkter Koenig. Matron of honor? Nichelle Nichols.

Someone has created a loving parody of WoW as a sidescroller. Check it out.

We used one of our spaceships on Mars to take a picture of another of our spaceships on Mars.

Tricia "6" Helfer is starring opposite Leelee Sobieski in a new comedy/thriller called Walk All Over Me. In it, Helfer plays a dominatrix.

Go here to read the whole thing, which includes some biz theory discussions of supplier power, adding value, commoditization of businesses, and related topics, but the money shot is the last line:

Why do I love Apple? They intend to make money because of my desires, not despite them.

Contrast ATT and Apple. AT&T wants to tie you to their network, and wants to make money from you at every turn. They'll gladly fuck you over for an extra $30 a month, secure in the knowledge that you're in a contract. Apple, on the other hand, damn near has a cult of motivated users who are actual FANS of the brand. This is why.

One of these options is a good business model. Guess which one.

Concerned with the growth of Linux in the micro-PC market, Microsoft has started offering a Windows variant to compete. There's a kicker, however: in order to use Windows, ultraportable vendors have to promise not to make the machines too powerful.

Nice. We're sure customers will FLOCK to these hamstrung boxes.

From Merlin Mann, who discusses platform choice via metaphor.

We knew GTA4 was going to be awesome. We even bought an XBox 360 to play it. What we didn't realize was how amazingly they mimicked some parts of NYC. Check it out.

An Emergency Party Button.

MS's Xbox.com web site shunts me off to the Japanese version when I visit using Opera, presumably because of a flaw in their stupid browser-sniffing script. oops.

This is conceivably useful, in the event you suddenly need to find a 7,267 mile drive in North America. Just in case.