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So, of course, there has been a lot of media coverage about Britney shaving her own hair off, and now going into rehab. The broadly accepted view is that this is some kind of cry for help, but I have another theory.
One of the lesser known things about hair is that it can be used to do drug tests. As hair grows out, chemicals in your system get into the hair, so if the hair is long enough, you get this historical record of all the drugs someone has taken.
Why would she care? Of course, she's not saying, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't come down to K-Fed threatening to bring up past drug use in the custody battle over their children. Of course, this plan may backfire, given that the hair salon is trying to sell the hair for $1M on eBay. Of course, Britney isn't know for her brains. How ironic if she had to buy back her own hair for a million bucks to keep (in her mind) custody of her kids, when she could have bought a hair clipper kit at Target for $15.
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I was driving back from Tucson listening to the Tom Leykis Show on FreeFM. Tom is a talk "shock jock" and ever hour he'll have some topic/theme that is often controversial and usually racy.
This hour his topic was about a Reality TV show being made in the Netherlands which will be a kind of dating show for paraplegics or people with visible disabilities. It all makes a strange kind of sense in a country that has Hash Cafes, I suppose.
Apparently the show was originally going to be called Monster Love, but a lot of people complained, so they changed it to Love at Second Sight. Both names seemed lame to me and an alternative popped into my head right away.
I've never felt the incliniation to call Tom before, but this time I did. I got through and I was on hold, but I guess the other callers were more interesting and I never got to talk to Tom. Fair enough, really, as a couple of the guys were talking about having sex with girls with one leg, which is kind of hard to top.
Anyway ... the name I came up with if the show was to come to the States ...
Bumping Uglies
Yeah, I know its pretty bad, but we're talking about the Tom Leykis Show, not Oprah, so cut me some slack people!
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A four day holiday ... what can I do? I know - I'll make a homepage skin for my shiny (well, actually kind of dull-black) Motorola Q. I just got the new Q in black. Its really nice - I like it a lot better than the original Q, though in this case the differences really are only skin deep. The black Q comes in this rubbery casing that is really nice to hold, and because it is black all the way through, it should scratch up like the silver Q's I've seen. Anyway, I got bored ... so I installed a homescreen shell called Facade and built a new homescreen skin for my Q. The screenshot below is blown up 2x so you can see it better  Yeah, ok, its Yet-Another-MacOS-X-Theme but I was pleased with the way I integrated the email/text/vmail message counts ... The tab control came out well too - you can tab to the Application Finder (basically a launcher window) or to your Tasks. The wording is a little odd, but I had to make all the tab images 107 pixels wide to work in Facade - its just a limitation.
I won't be offering much in the way of support on this as I built it for my own use, but I'm making it available here.
To install it, first connect up your Q with ActiveSync. Hit the Explore button in ActiveSync and navigate to \Application Data\Home. Copy the .xml and the folder to this Home folder. You will also need to have Facade installed for this to work. You can get it here: http://smartphone.net/software_detail.asp?id=2140 Update: Fixed a bug with the color scheme (black on black ... not a good combination). Download the update.
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 I recently got the audiobook version of Steve Wozniak's autobiography "iWoz". It provides an interesting "other side of the story" the the Steve Job's biography "iCon" by Jeffrey Young. Both books seems to agree that Jobs is an opportunist while Woz is the real brain behind Apple.
It is interesting hearing about the early days of Atari. Jobs was working there, and after the release of Pong, actually brought Woz in to design the circuit board for Breakout, the follow up to Pong.
Woz also talks about the decisions that drove him to use the 6502 microprocessor in the Apple I, having thought he would be using Motorola's 6800. I was into electronics when I was 12 which was only a couple of years later, and designed elaborate schematics for computers from what I learned in the British hobbyist magazine Electronics Today International, and often based around the 6800 and its family of chips such as the 6845 graphics chip. It wasn't until I was 14 and my school got a Research Machines 380Z that I got into programming and flipped over to being a software guy, just before the Sinclair ZX80 came out as a tiny computer for £99. Its funny, but one of the reasons I got into software was that while I loved the electronics side of things and designing my own computers, I couldn't afford to build them with the £2 a week I earned doing a paper round in my village in North Wales. I had the catalogs from RS and Maplin (a UK electronics supplier) and studied them religiously but that was about all I could afford to do. I liked software because all it cost me was time, and boy did I pump a bunch of time into software!
A few years later I used the money from a summer job to buy myself an Atari 600XL and not long after got a copy of Synassembler, a 6502 editor/assembler - a kind of primitive IDE I guess you could call it. After the release of the Apple Macintosh (which I couldn't afford but was totally in love with) I spent 2 years writing a word processor that used embedded tags much like Word Perfect would come to do and HTML after that, but also had a graphical WYSIWYG mode with visual handling of fonts, as well as leading and kerning (inter-line and inter-character spacing).
 Why do I bring this up? Well, the narrator of iWoz was talking about Woz writing the Monitor program (the primitive BIOS the Apple I had) and how he was writing out the machine code for it. "In the left column I wrote the assembler instruction 'LDA 44' meaning 'load the value hexadecimal 44 into the A register'. Next to this I wrote the same instruction in hex ..." and before he could say what the was I shouted out "A9 44". I couldn't believe I still remembered that after 22 years!! I guess all those years writing and debugging 6502 assembler games and applications really sank in deep! (On a side note, I still keep a copy of Lance A. Levanthal's "6502 Assembly Language Programming" (published in 1979) on the shelf in my office. It is probably the most used computer book I ever owned and is now held together will a bunch of scotch tape! You can read a little on this book at the bottom of this page)
As for the iWoz audiobook as a whole, its a pity Steve didn't narrate it himself, though the narrator does try to capture the boyish enthusiasm. My one gripe is that the sound engineer did a lousy job of maintaining the volume between recording sessions. Sometimes after a sentence ends the narrator suddenly gets louder or quieter. Its jarring because normal conversation doesn't do that. While I don't expect the narrator to dictate the whole book in one sitting, I've not noticed this phenonemon on other audiobooks and it tends to jolt me out of the narrative.
Still, that said, its a small price to pay for getting that buzz of nostalgia.
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There's a grass roots movement to finally Deep Six Blu-Ray and encourage studios to see the light and move over the HD-DVD. You can find the petition here:
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/HD_DVD_Studio_Support There are also some interesting stats here:
http://www.thedvdwars.com/index.cfm The stats are built from Amazon.com sales data. With the exception of the #1 Blu-Ray title (which is ranked below the top 3 HD-DVD titles), all HD-DVD titles in the top ten outrank the #2 Blu-Ray disc. I saw a separate statistic that said that HD-DVD was outselling Blu-Ray between 8-to-1 and 10-to-1. The studios aren't stupid, and can only be expected to go where the customers are, so I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more major studios jump ship (e.g. Fox, Disney) There was a post on Engadget talking about how Sony is planning to release a PS4 in 2010, which is a complete u-turn from their original statement about how the PS3 was so far ahead of its time, it would be around for 10 years. It will be interesting to see whether PS4 will even support Blu-Ray if that format loses its studio backing. This page is interesting too:
http://www.gamesystemwars.com/index.cfm The top 6 Xbox 360 accessories outsell the #1 Wii accessories, and even the #10 Wii accessory (a Spongebob game of all things) outsells the #1 PS3 accessory.
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When I went to Best Buy in search of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive, there were something like 40 people camped outside with their blankets and deck chairs, waiting for the PS3 to come out. It was the same story at Wal-Mart. Apparently that Wal-Mart has 10 PS3s coming, but again, 40 people or so outside. I guess its some kind of Fan-Boy Endurance Content. Even while I was waiting to check out with my shiny HD-DVD drive, 5 or 6 people were bombarding the poor sales guy about when the PS3 was coming, and when can they can one, and do any other stores have them and on and on. Well color me crazy, but it seems silly to me to be holding out for a console full of new tech with meh games and so on, when they'll be readily available in 6 months. Remember when the 360 first came out and people were buying/selling them on eBay for $2500 and now you can get them at or under MSRP. I see the same pattern happening again, but there are still only a small number of games any one person is likely to be interested in. And the British game magazine Edge didn't rate Resistance of Man (the big PS3 launch title) very highly at all... Ah well - at least we're in Arizona and the fan-boys aren't getting snowed on.
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My HD-DVD add-on drive finally arrived today for the Xbox 360. Amazon.com had delayed it twice, so it is an understating it to say I was looking forward to getting it.
Sadly all was not well. The HD-DVD drive's box was just sat inside a regular Amazon.com box with no additional padding. Worse than that, though - when I took the drive out of its box it was clearly rattling and the drive was thunking around. It appeared that one of the drive mounts had snapped off in transit. I guess the fact that Amazon.com didn't put a Fragile sticker anywhere on the box meant that DHL were throwing it in and out of trucks and planes on its way to me.
Well, thankfully Amazon has a robust return policy. The drive is already packed up and ready to go.
Given that by now I had 4 HD-DVDs sat waiting for the drive, I got in the car and drove to the Best Buy at the I-10 and Ray Rd here in Phoenix, but no luck. At this point I fell back to my old stand-by. With brand new game stuff, I usually find what I want at Wal-Mart. I guess most gamers start out with GameStop or EB Games, 'cos they're "cool". Wal-Mart is the Anti-Cool when it comes to game consoles, which means stuff will often be in stock there. This was true this time last week, when I managed to pick up Gears of War there, despite the Best Buy having sold out of 180 copies in 5 hours.
Anyway, Wal-Mart came through once again. I got the drive home, hooked it up and put in my first movie. I chose Mission Impossible 3, only because I haven't seen it. The titles were stunning, but the movie didn't look much better than a regular DVD to me. Then again, I do have a $1200 DVD player (courtesy of Old Steve) which is fantastically good at 3:2 upscaling ... and my TV is an almost 4 year old 720p plasma screen. Thats the trouble with major advances like this - they tend to lead to a lot of upgrading  |
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As mentioned earlier, Big Tobacco was on the ballot in three election initiatives in Arizona: - Proposition 201: "Smoke-Free Arizona Act" to ban smoking in the workplace and in all restaurants and bars
- Proposition 203: "Childhood Development Fund" paid for through an 80 cent (68%) increase in tobacco tax
- Proposition 206: "Non-Smoker Protection Act", aka the "Fake Non-Smoker Act" sponsored by RJ Reynolds, which bans smoking in the workplace and restaurants, but allows it in bars and overrides (and prevents future legislation by) city ordinances banning smoking (as in Tempe)
Well, it looks like the electorate has spoken. With 95% of precincts reporting here are the results: Prop 201: Yes: 54%, No: 46% Prop 203: Yes: 53%, No: 47% Prop 206: No: 57%, No: 43% With more than a 5% spread in all cases, it seems the vote is unlikely to turn around in any of these races when the remaining votes are counted. Of course, there are questions with 201 and 203. With 201 it wasn't clear who would pay to police it. I was in a British-style pub in Phoenix called The George and Dragon and it was smoky as hell in there. If they decide to ignore the ruling, who will stop them? It will be hard for Environmental Services to inspect every bar in the state ... and we'd rather see the police looking for people committing serious crimes.
Still, a clear message has been sent to Big Tobacco. It will interesting to see how they react.
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Say what you like about Microsoft software, but Xbox Live on the 360 works great! The user interface is slick, fast and intuitive and it doesn't crash - or not often at least. Considering how complicated it is under the covers, it does a great job.
Now Microsoft is adding another nail in the PS3 coffin, announcing Xbox Live Video - HD movies and TV shows in 720p. Launch date: November 22nd. Now 720p may not be the latest and greatest, but I suspect a 1080p movie wouldn't even fit on the supplied 20GB drive. They're saying a single movie will be 4-5GB, so plan on deleting some demos if you want more than one or two on there at a time. Ars Technica recently posted that a 100GB hard drive was on the way for the 360, and now I can see why. With PS3, Wii, the 360's HD-DVD drive, great games like Gears of War and now this ... what is a gear head to do? Oh, and my first movie (cos there's no much selection): Jackass - The Movie. Just because.
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I made a trip to Best Buy this evening to pick up my first HD-DVD movies before the upcoming Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive becomes available, and "beat the rush".
While "one swallow doesn't make a summer", there were 2 sections of HD-DVD titles versus only 1 section for Blu-Ray. Perhaps my wish is coming true, and Sony is already losing out. It doesn't hurt that HD-DVD players cost significantly less, no doubt mostly because it is a more evolutionary step than Blu-Ray. While Sony may have designed Blu-Ray for the long haul by developing a better technical solution, that didn't do Betamax any good.
(Just for the record, the two HD-DVDs I bought were "V for Vendetta" and "Mission Impossible III" ... I promised myself I wouldn't buy into Tom Cruise's loony behavior, but choice was limited and I had most of the other releases already on DVD)
My only regret is that I bought a Sony HDR-HC3 high-definition (well, HDV, which isn't quite hi-def...) instead of waiting for better (i.e. non-Sony) alternatives to come out.
Ah well. I guess we'll see what happens in the next month.
I can't help thinking that the HD-DVD drive is a better bet to ship in quantity just because Sony is potentially constrained not just by the short supply of blue laser diodes but also the cell processors and all the other high-end hardware. At least they won't be constrained by the supply of vibration motors, because the PS3's Sixaxis controller won't have any, despite all evidence that gamers think that makes the games more immersive.
It seems they're determined to die a long slow death.
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Those who keep track here will know I'm no big fan of Sony. Their interests in music (Sony BMG), movies (Universal) and electronics leads them to lock technology or generally make decisions to the detriment of the consumer. Examples: - Atrac (whupped by MP3)
- MP3 players tied to Sony Connect (which wouldn't be so bad if it didn't suck so badly)
- Sony eReader - promising e-Ink technology but let down by terrible software ... and requiring Sony Connect again.
- Region-locking - the movie studios insist, but that doesn't make it good for the consumer.
- PS3 will require you to buy a HDMI cable to be able to connect to your big-ass TV. They only ship with composite video (i.e. not even S-Video!)
- PS3 will only play DVDs in 480p. It won't even upscale to 720p, let along 1080p. Even the Xbox 360 does 720p, but Sony doesn't want to hurt Blu-Ray sales by giving something that makes your DVDs look almost as good at Blu-Ray unless you have a 1080p TV. (A rumored upcoming update to the 360 is supposed to take it up to 1080p ... huzzah!)
- Having a region-by-region release schedule for PS3, and enforcing it!!
This last one is the most recent Sony stupidity. Sony just shut down Lik-Sang, a grey importer that would ship electronics from one place to another even before it was released there. While I'm not one of them, there are some who want the latest game consoles the day it comes out whether Sony wants that or not. In order to protect their release schedule, Sony, aka "The Empire" has shut them down, and did so in a very cynical way. Instead of letting the courts decide, they filed suits in every country in Europe, which Lik-Sang couldn't afford to fight - a death by a thousand paper cuts. You would think all the exploding Sony laptop batteries would be a sign that the Gods were troubled by The Empire, but they keep on keeping on down their path to self-destruction.
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Desert Code Camp is back! After the success of the first one back in May, the organizers decided to do it all again. So, its back, and its next Saturday, October 28th.
The organizers acted on some of the feedback from last time, so the sessions will be longer and there will be travel-time between them. Sadly that meant having less sessions, but hopefully it will help folks get the most out of the time available.
So, if you're in Arizona or can otherwise make it to Tempe (a suburb of Phoenix) then check it out:
http://www.desertcodecamp.com/
I will be doing two talks:
- Writing a custom LINQ search engine
Learn how to write a binding that will let you use LINQ to support custom repositories.
- XLINQ Deep Dive
Learn how to get the most out of XLINQ. Also learn when to use XLINQ vs existing technologies such as XmlDocument or XSLT.
For the first talk I will show a LINQ binding for quering Active Directory, which lets you write queries like this:
// find all people in AD whose last name is Smith or first name is John
var q = from e in AD.Users where e.LastName == "Smith" || e.FirstName == "John" select e;
More details
(for those that haven't heard of it, LINQ or Language Integrated Query is a technology that is part of the next release of .NET, and is used to query database or XML documents using extended C# or Visual Basic language syntax)
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Here's something you don't see every day ... a street legal car with 2200BHP! The funny thing about it is that the guy is in the UK and it only gets 5 miles to the gallon, so it must be costing him a fortune to run it...
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Wow... Republican leaders must think we're some special kind of stupid. It seems like the "Mel Gibson Defense" (as South Park called it last night) of checking yourself into rehab for alcohilism is not doing enough to cover Mark Foley's impropriety. It now turns out that Foley was allegedly diddled by a now 72 year old Catholic priest (who now conveniently lives in Malta) when he was a 13-15 year old altar boy. The irony of this is that I suspect that a lot of people will buy it, and now see Foley as a victim, not as a gay predator of underage boys. Indeed, the whole thing feels like his way of softening up potential jurors in advance of any court proceedings. There was a story a few weeks back about how Jon Stewart (of Comedy Central's The Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert (of the Colbert Report) were going to run for President in 2008. Frankly I hope they do, not only because it will actually rally the younger voters, but also because it would to get away from the apparent corrupting influence of 2-party politics.
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I'm not sure if the problem CafePress (http://www.cafepress.com/) is having right now is a geographic network outage like the one Dell (and doubtless many others) suffered a few weeks back. Somehow I don't think so - looks more like an abrupt death occured: 
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