Robert Synnott

NEW SHOUTIER URLS

2010-03-12T00:46:00.000Z

Are your URLs dull? Self-effacing? Meek?

THEN PERHAPS YOU NEED NEW SHOUTY URLS, AS USED FOR NETNEWSWIRE! SHOUTY URLS! THEY MAKE YOUR WEBSITE SOUND LIKE IT'S SHOUTING!!!!

Nice little touch in the new Blogger templates

2010-03-12T00:34:00.000Z

Google's Blogger service added a new templating system today. This may not sound like much, but, you know, it's Blogger; they never, ever change it. This is probably the biggest change in about two years.

So, bored with my existing template, I used one of the new fancy adjustable ones. You can see it here now; I think it's rather nice.

Now, I've an iPhone 3G. In case you don't know, iPhoneOS device speeds go as follows. iPhone, iPhone 3G - slow. iPod Touch 1st gen - faster. iPod Touch 2nd gen - faster again. iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3rd gen - very fast. iPad - fastest (one assumes). So, it can often take a few second to render larger web pages. With the old template, the background appeared almost instantly, and the rest of the blog after about five seconds. With the new template, though, this happens almost instantly:

And then the sidebar and comment box and so forth appears after a bit. I initially actually thought that it was a special cut-down mobile-optimised view, but it's just very graceful loading under difficult circumstance. Perfectly usable while still loading. Very clever, Google, and hopefully it's a design technique that we'll see more people employing as smartphones become more mainstream.

Google introduces a marketplace for App Engine apps, as I predicted two years ago

2010-03-11T23:36:00.001Z

From a post of mine two years ago:

There's another possibility, though, and I'm surprised that no-one seems to have picked up on it thus far. Google's Google Apps thing provides private email, calendar, and so forth, to various corporate users and universities. Wouldn't it be nice if a small business could simply go to a website and buy themselves, say, a CRM, or an accounting system, or whatever, maybe paying by user count or per year, which would be private to them, hosted by Google, and integrate nicely with their existing Google login system? I suspect that Google will do something like this, something along the lines of Apple's proposed iPhone software store. The developer will get a cut, Google will get a cut, the users will have their application without having to worry about hosting it themselves... Everyone's happy. Except the webhosts, and the traditional vendors of custom corporate software, but it's not Google's job to look after them.

Also this, which is sort of obvious, but took over a year to show up:

Some form of cron-job-like functionality; that is, the option to have a function executed at set intervals. This is essential for all sorts of applications, and could be relatively easily implemented in the current model.

Anyway, today they launched a thing to allow the integration of any web application into a business's Google Apps for Domains, and the selling of access to such applications in a marketplace, so I suppose I was sort of right.

This 'app store' meme seems to be taking off very quickly...

The Forbidden Photo!

2010-03-11T01:01:00.001Z

So, I was at the shops over the weekend, buying clothes. I know, clothes, me. Unbelievable, right? But anyway, I came across this mildly amusing pricing sign, with the cost spelt out in words, presumably for the benefit of customers who can read and comprehend numbers, but just can't manage digits. So I took a photo.

And a guy from behind the desk came over and said not to take photos. I mean, really. Who do they think they are, a high-security military installation or something? Why on Earth shouldn't people take photos? What did they think I was going to do with it?

Blog topped up a bit

2010-03-11T00:38:00.000Z

I just came across the MovableType export file from my old blog, and decided I might as well import it. If you look at the archive section in the right column, you'll see that the blog now goes back to 2005! Almost five years!

Here's the very first post. Wow, I was a completely different person back then... It seems like a million years ago.

Terrifying startup story

2010-03-10T22:11:00.001Z

Jamie Zawinksi, an early Netscape person, on getting out Netscape 1.0 for UNIX.

All looks terribly familiar, somehow...

Of course, these days, we don't get to relax just because the product has launched, dear me no. You see, it's all online services nowadays! They require constant attention! Bloody desktop software people didn't know how easy they had it...

More exploding space shuttles

2010-03-07T16:19:00.000Z

Delta 2, destroyed by range safety device

Did you know that the Space Shuttle has a (euphemistically named) range safety device? The range safety device is rather like the Enterprise's self-destruct system in Star Trek, but without the tedious countdown or opportunity to escape. There is one shaped charge on each solid booster.

There is a person called the range safety officer, whose job is to press the button to destroy the assembly if it veers off course. Imagine having that job! Bear in mind that there are almost no realistic circumstances where the solid boosters would need to be destroyed when they had already detached from the orbiter; nearly all possible applications of the range safety system would involve destroying the whole thing.

For the moment, it's only been used once; on the Challenger boosters after the orbiter had already been destroyed. Still, though, very, very creepy, especially for the operator. All manned spacecraft have range safety devices, but in most other cases either the occupants (Vostok, Gemini, Buran) or the whole capsule (Mercury, Apollo, Soyuz) will have been removed to safety beforehand. Besides the Shuttle, Voshkod, only used four times, is the only one where the range safety officer is likely to have to blow up people; you'd wonder how they get people for these jobs...

Rails, from the perspective of a Twitter developer

2010-03-06T21:03:00.000Z

From an interview with a Twitter developer:

Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow.

Oh, dear.

Mongrel on MacOS Snow Leopard - quick tip

2010-03-06T15:31:00.000Z

I do a lot of Ruby on Rails at work these days. This weekend, I'm getting some stuff done from home, so I tried to run a Rails app on my laptop... And it stalled/hanged indefinitely, using the processor flat out.

It turns out that I hadn't used it since I upgraded to Snow Leopard. This seemingly broke the installation a bit. Initially I tried just removing the offending gem (sudo gem uninstall mongrel), but when I re-installed it, the problem persisted.

Eventual solution:

sudo gem uninstall mongrel
sudo gem uninstall fastthread
sudo gem install mongrel

It turns out that the fastthread library I had installed was the problem; I suspect that it was trying to load 32bit native code into my 64bit ruby.

Anyway, hope this is helpful to someone.

Verity Stob on Lisp

2010-03-04T23:05:00.000Z

From a Verity Stob article on exception handling:

I apologise in advance to the industry’s senior commentator for not covering Scheme or other Lisp dialects and, thus, continuing the tendency to dumb down. This does not mean that I fail to recognise that Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension. It just means that I have no idea how, or indeed if, Lisp handles exceptions.

It does, by the way, assuming Common Lisp. It is slightly peculiar, as is the CL custom.

Reeder iPhone feed-reader mini-review

2010-03-04T01:15:00.001Z

I'm a big fan of RSS (well, generally Atom, these days...) feeds, especially on the move. Brilliant for passing boring train journeys and so on.

Until recently, I've been using Google Reader for my mobile feed reading needs.

It's quite nice, but has a few quirks. It can be slow to load on a not-so-fast connection, especially EDGE, and navigation is slightly slow and clunky. And then, of course, if you're reading an article and click a link, it'll open a new browser window. This is generally fine, but if the new page happens to have lots of graphics, it'll tend to push Reader out of memory, causing it to reload disconcertingly upon return, losing my place in the article, and hiding it; after all, I looked at it, so it's read now! And, well, it just doesn't have that native feel.

I tried NetNewsWire for the iPhone, as I'd been pretty impressed with it on the desktop. It's generally nice, but slow, slow, slow. The UI is slow, syncing with Google Reader is slow (though the author is doing something about this), and, unfortunately, this just makes it too much of a pain to use. It's probably fine on a 3GS, but I still have a lowly 3G.

Enter Reeder. Reeder is in principle very much the same sort of thing as NetNewsWire; it's a phone-based client which syncs with Google Reader. The difference is, that where NetNewsWire is, on my older device, unusably slow, Reeder is perfectly fast and pleasant to use.

There are some quirks:

Note the thing at the top, where, by rights, the clock and network status things should live. This goes away when syncing is done, but it's very odd, and I can't help feeling that the traditional little spinning wheel would have been better. Speaking of the wheel, this is about the only iPhone app I have seen which uses the network where that wheel doesn't put in an appearance; I was actually under the impression that a progress indicator of some sort was mandatory under the HIG, but Reeder doesn't use one when loading inline images, so presumably it must be allowed. Personally, I miss it.

Here's another oddity.

This is a webpage in the inevitable built-in browser. Now, the builtin browser is in many ways a good thing, as it saves you from having to go out to Mobile Safari, and come back again. This is why so many comms apps have it. This looks exactly like the browser in Meebo, Tweetie and countless other apps; it's just a UIWebView with some controls. But there's a difference. Note the button on the bottom right. In every other arrangement like this I've seen, that jumps out to Safari. Here...

It opens up a little window which allows you to share the link on Twitter, save it on various services, and so on. This is all very well, but sometimes I just want to see it in a proper browser; if nothing else UIWebViews embedded in apps can be slow, presumably due to memory starvation, and besides, it's sometimes nice to have multiple browser windows. You can't do that here. You can, if you like, copy the link before you go to it, by holding down on it; you can then paste it in Mobile Safari. This seems overly awkward, though, and it's not like there isn't space for a button to open Safari on that view.

On a similar topic, what happens if you close the app while half-way through reading an item? In some apps, when you come back, the item will still be there; Apple recommends this approach where practical. This is even the case with the Google Reader webapp, as long as Safari doesn't take it into its head to kick it out of memory in the meantime. Here, however, you're back to the home screen, and, of course, because you looked at it, the feed item is deemed read, and is gone.

I sound like I'm complaining a lot, but really, this is a brilliant app, one of the best I've seen. It's certainly now my feedreader of choice. It's just that a few little touches could make it so much better...

Dictator of the month club

2010-03-04T00:04:00.000Z

Did you know that a certain section of the American right wing openly expresses admiration for Pinochet? Not just 'oh, well, at least he wasn't as bad as Hitler', but actual admiration?

Really, truly, disturbing.

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Bret Stevens attributes the low rate of death after the Chilean quake to Augusto Pinochet and Milton Friedman

Ah, yes. Low rate of death and Pinochet. Perhaps a principle of conservation of murder is in play, to make up for all of those people he killed during his rule?

I mean, what's next? Low death toll in German snow storms attributed to the sterling work done by Adolf Hitler, Albert Speer, and thirty million slave labourers?

Incidentally, the Chilean building codes, which required buildings to be earthquake-averse, predate Pinochet. And here's Paul Krugman on just how exactly Pinochet and Friedman caused a boom, a mere fifteen years after starting fucking with the economy.

And that's not all! An admittedly smaller portion of the US right wing actually expressed some guarded enthusiasm for Franco. As in the Fascist dictator of Spain.

iPads of Dune

2010-03-03T01:35:00.002Z

Dune was a very good science fiction series by Frank Herbert, later ruined by his son and a guy who writes Star Wars novels in a series of dubious prequels. The original book centred around an unobtainium called 'the spice', which was necessary for interstellar travel and such. Later on, things went off in a different direction a bit but this remained quite important.

In the early 90s, Cryo made a computer game based (loosely) on the book. It was groundbreaking in a number of ways; it was amongst the first resource (spice, of course) management games, giving rise to Dune II and ultimately Command and Conquer; it was also one of the first games to feature speech throughout. And that requirement for speech lead to something interesting. The first versions (for Amiga and PC) didn't have speech, and, of course, it being a resource management game, numbers sometimes came up. The designers managed this by just showing the numbers in the on-screen speech bubbles. Of course, once they had speech, they didn't have the bubbles, just subtitles, saying the same thing as the voiceover. So:

An iPad!

As you can see, the emperor skimped on his gadget budget, and got something with a smal screen and keyboard, probably running Windows Mobile.

ATM Usability

2010-03-03T00:18:00.000Z

ATMs are probably the one piece of information technology that no-one, no matter how technophobic, can really avoid using from time to time. This is a shame, as they have perhaps the worst user interfaces on offer in anything designed to be used by the general public.

You put in your card, and wait for a while; give it time to wake up. Select the language; has anyone ever selected Irish? Do they even have an Irish UI translation, or is the option just there for show? Select the amount of money. Enter pin. Marvel at the screen informing you that this machine only does multiples of fifty euro, and the maximum withdrawal is 120 (I have actually seen this). Wait, while machine slowly ejects card. Attempt to re-insert card, and discover that the contraption prefers a few moments to think between transactions, even if they are transactions that it has rejected out of hand. Re-insert card, and continue.

Perhaps you would quite like a receipt, but it's not the end of the world if you can't have one? Select the option for having a receipt, go through above process, receive the message that the machine doesn't have any paper for receipt, throw card away in frustration.

Both of these things are very easy to fix, by simply telling the user of the relevant restrictions beforehand, or, in the case of the first, allowing a new transaction without rejecting the card. You might say that this is not allowed for security reasons, but you would apparently be wrong; a few machines do tell you beforehand, and many machines allow you to opt for a second transaction after successfully receiving cash... but not after being rejected due to choosing something which can't be made up with fifty euro notes, even though that would be rather more useful. The receipt thing is clearly pure perversity. Oh, and to add insult to injury, it will show you ads for undesirable mortgages.

The worst of it is, when the new UIs come, they will inevitably be worse, not better. You know those ticket machines in railway stations and LUAS stops? The ones where you generally have to stab the screen vigorously to get any response, especially if the train is about to leave? The ones which, after you've gone through the whole process, will occasionally decide that they're not accepting some, or in some cases any, payment methods today? It will be just like that. Only with a more annoying voiceover.

Still, it could be worse. ATMs are free here, of course, but apparently in the US they often add a service charge. Imagine! Pay extra, to be insulted by a machine!

On Shuttle explosions

2010-03-01T00:18:00.000Z

The US has just scrapped its return to moon plans, on the basis, more or less, that there simply isn't enough money. Said plans will be replaced with rather fluffy initiatives aimed at funding private space launch facilities, and developing a super-heavy lifter and an orbital tug.

Interestingly, a contract is to be awarded to develop a 'hydrocarbon' (so, in practice, kerosene) engine for the lifter, with performance equal to or better than that of the RD-180, a Soviet/Russian engine used in the US Atlas V rocket and derived from the RD-170 used in the Energia super-heavy lifter. The American company P&W has the rights to manufacture these, though it doesn't currently exercise them; Atlas V engines are made in Moscow. Until quite recently it was planned that it would by 2011, though. The two front-runners for this contract are apparently SpaceX, which has already developed a kerosene engine (though one of considerably lower performance than the RD-180) for its Falcon 9 rocket, and... P&W. Somehow, I suspect that the contract money will be spent in printing a 'this is definitely not an RD-180, goodness no!' sticker. I can't help wondering whether it mightn't be more cost effective to just build the RD-180s, or, if better performance is required, license the RD-170 or 171 (used in Zenit launchers), or the newer RD-190.

Anyway, this isn't the first time the US space programme has ground abruptly to a halt. There have been at least two, and arguably three, previous incidents. The first was the Apollo to Shuttle transition, when the US lost manned capabilities for some time. The second was the Challenger disaster, when the Western world lost all space launch abilities briefly; the Shuttle was grounded, a Titan and an Atlas had recently exploded, grounding both vehicles, and an Ariane 2 had also recently failed and been remotely destroyed, grounding that. The third was the Columbia disaster, which grounded the Shuttle for some time; it had a lesser effect on overall capacity, because most payloads had by then shifted to launching on Atlas or Deltas, or European Arianes or Russian Protons or Ukrainian Zenits; to a large extent the collapse of the Soviet Union saved the commercial space industry, there.

The Challenger failure was particularly interesting; the Shuttle was being operated at an unprecedented frequency, and NASA wasn't being as careful as it might have been. Here's Richard Feynman's appendix to the official report on the matter; it's fascinating and if you haven't already seen it you really should take a look. Amongst other gems, we learn that NASA management thought that the chances of catestrophic failure of the whole stack was 1 in 100,000, and that, while the solid boosters, in testing, had a failure rate of 1 in 25, each, that didn't matter because the Shuttle was a manned vehicle, and thus "the probability of mission success is necessarily very close to 1.0". Getting cause and effect mixed up there a bit, I feel. Boggles the mind, really.

I wonder have things improved, at all?

Space Toilet!

2010-02-24T00:47:00.000Z

It's a space toilet! From NPP Zvezda's online catalogue! They're the company who make the space toilets, you see.

I just love that they have an online catalogue, in case someone should want to buy a space toilet.

And then there's, well, this.

They even have a jobs page, though sadly it's in Russian, so it's not clear whether the jobs involve testing the toilet/ejection seat.

The month's peculiar search terms!

2010-02-22T23:56:00.000Z

Yes, weird stuff which people search for to get to this blog again, I'm afraid.

Dalek mesh hide operator - I must say, I don't like the sound of this at all. I hope it's not a mesh of those fancy new Daleks which can climb stairs.
statistics on liars - How dare you, Google.
+"porn viewer" +nokias - As I've mentioned before (and it's probably how they got here) I really find the whole concept of people viewing porn on mobile phones, presumably while sitting beside me on the Luas, extremely offputting. Ugh.
2010 the end of the world - I'm sorry; you're two years early.
baby otter pet - Awwwww!
very bad grandma perverted - Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
odd business ideas - Goat massage. You're welcome.
steorn - I seem to be an authority on magical mystery imaginary energy devices.
chopping mushrooms - Take knife. Chop mushrooms. The end.
dilbert wedding planning strip - I've read every Dilbert strip for the past ten years, thanks to the wonders of RSS, and I'm reasonably certain that doesn't exist.
esb bill explained - You use electricity. ESB makes up an amount of electricity it imagines you might have used, and bills you for it. Some time later, they have to give you a refund.
filthy deviant - How dare you, Google.
godless repulican - Hmm?
health expenses iphone app - I actually wrote about this. It's absurd.
heil mary - Again, I wrote about this.
how to write a real newspaper - Well, how do you write a fake one?
i cannot pay my electricity bill esb - Well, I'm sorry, I'm not ESB.
ibm cartoons - Like Dilbert, only with more Lotus Notes, one assumes.
jan moir bigot of the year - When's the ceremony?
laziest name - Mr. Slothworth.
lhc evilmatter - Presumably the business about the mini black holes was just a cover for CERN's efforts to open a portal to Hell.
lifespan of sponge cake - Infant stage (cakelet, or 'cupcake'): three days. Adolescent stage (muffin): two days. Adult stage (sponge cake): four days. Twilight years (cake Alzheimer's, or 'trifle') three weeks.
lude not a word - Confirmed.
may contain traces lupin - Apparently I was not the only one to notice this insanity.
misleading map of the day - People expect oddly specific websites to exist.
non-essential oils - Yep, I wrote about this.
photo of new criminal court building dublin in the fog - Again, weirdly specific.
python basehttprequesthandler "long polling" - Do not even think of it.
sauron eye contract lenses - Surely he'd only need one?
trying twitter, of course - What are these people looking for?!
typing bad words - How rude!
ugh!! there must be someone out there for me!!!! - Not with such profligate use of exclamation marks, no. Do people think they're having a conversation with Google?
wasp in the kitchen - RUN!!!
what is radioactive waste made out of? - That's a secret. But old cat litter, mostly.
what is some of the new technology in the keyboard design - Different fonts on the keys, mostly. And, of course, some of them can fly.
what kind of fonts esb bill - One of those ones used in laser-printed bills which look like teletype output, presumably used to avoid disturbing people when daisychain printers became obsolete 30 years ago.
women as chattels - Are they looking for human rights history, or just a particularly distasteful porn site?
zunetastic - EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
cannibalism kosher - No, I wouldn't think so.
worlds largest penis - You flatter me, Google.
welcome datacomp - Something that old Mac keyboards say.
was georege busch's wife blac - No. She was a robot. Only spelt poorly.

The real reason that Flash won't be putting in an appearance on the iPhone or iPad

2010-02-21T17:53:00.000Z

Just for clarity, I'm not talking, here, about camera flashes or flash memory; I'm talking about Adobe Flash. I know that this is obvious, but spare the tedious jokes about hard disks, please.

There's an interesting article by a Flash developer on the subject here. A quick summary here; many if not most Flash applications are heavily dependent on mouse-over events and/or keyboard events. Neither of these are particularly practical on a touch-screen, and it would be far from trivial to replace either without breaking the iPhone's human interaction model.

The response around the Internet has been interesting. A lot of people are saying, oh, sure, as it stands, most Flash applications won't be usable on a touch screen, but there's nothing stopping people making new Flash applications which are, or revamping the existing applications to be usable. This is true as far as it goes, but really misses the point.

There are a number of speculations as to why Apple is so averse to having Flash on the iPhone. The major ones, besides the UI issue, which has really been neglected, have been that (a) Apple does not want other people distributing media for the iPhone (through Hulu et al), (b) that Flash is a bit crap and slow and crash-y even on desktop platforms, especially non-Windows platforms, and there's no reason to think that Flash for mobile devices will be any better; taking into account the slower processors it will probably be worse, and, (c) that Apple would prefer that people pay for games in the app store than get them for free as Flash movies.

These are easily dealt with. (a) is a bit of a red herring; Apple seems to have made no moves to stop things like BBC iPlayer, and in fact has been pushing HTML5 video, which provides a means of doing this without Flash, very hard. (b) is true enough, and we'll shortly see how Android deals with it; for the purposes of argument, though, let's assume it's a non-issue. (c) sounds quite convincing if you don't think too hard about it, but the facts are that there is no restriction on non-Flash-based games for the iPhone being distributed for free through the App Store, and the App Store is not a big profit centre for Apple, anyway; it serves largely to make the devices more desirable. As does the iTunes store, for that matter; Apple does not make its money on music distribution. If Apple thought that Flash would make the iPhone more desirable, it would allow it. They don't seem to be making any efforts to stop the distribution of iPhone apps made with Flash CS5's iPhone app export function, after all.

Another argument, little investigated, is that even on the desktop, non-game Flash interfaces are almost always clunky and broken. Just look at any Flash-based website; if scrolling, copy-and-pasting, and so on works as one would normally expect in a native application, or indeed in a webapp, you should feel very lucky. Adobe leaves human interface design almost totally up to the developer, which is not actually a great idea; human interface design is extremely difficult and specialised, which is why OS vendors go to so much trouble setting guidelines and providing widgets which force the developer to more or less do the right thing.

On the other hand, there seems to be only one major argument for why Apple should allow Flash. Very few people are willing to claim that Flash is actually a good development platform, even on the desktop. No-one, except for the most rabid Adobe fans, and some deluded Flash developers, thinks that Flash will become a first-class development platform for mobile apps. The argument made is that there is lots of Flash content out there already that people want to use, and so the iPhone should be able to access it. These UI objections, which seem convincing, really fundamentally undermine this argument. This existing content isn't going to be usable anyway, not without a lot of work. And if the work is going to be put in anyway, it might as well be put into making a HTML5 webapp or a native iPhone app, thus avoiding the afore-mentioned downsides of Flash.

We'll have more information soon, of course. By the end of the year, Google Android devices will support Flash, and we'll see what happens then. My prediction is that, when users go to their favourite Flash games and find them to be unusable due to the differing interaction model, they won't blame the developers of the games, and nor will they blame Adobe. They'll blame Google and/or the phone manufacturers. It won't increase demand for the device; quite the reverse. Lots of bad press, no concrete advantage. Is this something that Apple really wants to expose itself to?

It's notable, by the way, that Microsoft's new Windows Mobile OS (the one that really seems amazingly like an iPhone) will not support Flash when it is released late this year. Microsoft says that it is working with Adobe on this. I strongly suspect that Microsoft, which has the advantage of entering late, is just playing for time; by the time the initial Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever we're meant to call it now) comes out, Flash will have been on Android for some time, and Microsoft will just be able to point and say "Given that everyone hates Flash on Google phones, we're not going to bother". This wouldn't be a great surprise; when Microsoft pre-announces a feature, that by no means demonstrates that the feature will actually ship, as we saw with Longhorn/Vista. In the meantime, though, they get good publicity because people currently believe that they want Flash, and it will fall on Google to disillusion them.

The continuing adventures of the EVIL POPE

2010-02-20T21:20:00.001Z

From the Guardian:

The Vatican instructed Catholic bishops around the world to cover up cases of sexual abuse or risk being thrown out of the Church.

Ugh. In my view, these people need jailing. Of course, since Mussolini gave them their own little fake state to hide in, this is a lot easier said than done. Confining them to the Holy See for the rest of their lives on threat of arrest if they left would be a lot better than nothing, though. Conspiring to cover up serious crimes must surely be illegal?

A word is born

2010-02-20T19:19:00.001Z

With little fanfare, over the last two years, Apple has gifted us with a new word!

Unsuitable farting

2010-02-20T19:13:00.000Z

From Apple's guide to what sorts of keywords a developer should use for an iPhone app (a puzzle game, in this case):

One wonders why they chose that particular example.

Weird BBC advertising

2010-02-20T19:10:00.000Z

The BBC advertises a radio programme:

Now, ignoring for a moment that what amounts to a broadcast version of the notoriously awful BBC Have Your Say websites is a terrible idea... why, exactly, are they using iPhone application icons to advertise it?

Pah, experts; who needs them?

2010-02-20T19:06:00.001Z

The political issue of the day in the UK is that the Tories want to cut spending at all costs, because otherwise the deficit will eat all the kittens, while Brown wants to pump in more money. He is supported in this, it seems, by the majority of economists.

Mr Osborne said: "There are leading economists who support the Conservative position, but more importantly, there are also leading business organisations, top entrepreneurs - people like Richard Branson - who know more about creating jobs than the entire Labour cabinet put together.

"More importantly". Ah, yes. What would economists know about the economy? BUSINESS LEADERS ARE ALL-KNOWING, LIKE IN THAT AYN RAND BOOK!

Looks like the Tories are falling into the same trap as the US right, then; that is, considering that actually knowing anything about a subject is a liability, and that the man on the street knows better than experts on highly specialised topics. This appeals to our sense of vanity; we personally know better than the silly experts! It is, however, generally total nonsense.

Best. iPhone App. Ever.

2010-02-17T23:18:00.000Z

Meebo's new native iPhone app. Just amazing. The best instant messaging app I've seen yet. Very, very fast, even on my clunky old 3G, and generally nicer-looking and better behaved than Beejive IM, which costs 10 dollars; Meebo is free.

It has taken the coveted fourth place in the bar at the bottom of my iPhone screen (along with Safari, text messages and iPod; I don't really make enough calls to need the phone app there, and I usually use Spotlight to dial, anyway), ousting Beejive.

Of course, as usual, there are some crashes, and they already have vsn. 1.1 in review.

Interesting iPhone app pricing

2010-02-17T21:20:00.000Z

iPhone news apps:

Several other news organisations offer iPhone apps, including Sky and the Daily Telegraph - which are free - and the Guardian - which costs £2.39.

Clearly, Sky and Telegraph are hippy liberal commies, while the Guardian is full of hard-nosed capitalists.