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Month June 2008

Entries 10 Total

Hardcore SingStar

Jun 30, ’08 10:49 PM

Hardcore SingStar

When my first set of DDR pads got destroyed after nine months of abuse at the feet of college kids, I can’t say I was terribly surprised – but it made me sad.

When I got Rock Band, and stories of flaky hardware were abound, I wasn’t terribly surprised that the strum bar on my guitar got a little flaky. Not bad enough to send in, but causing the occasional miss.

I’ve had to retire two DSes (busted speakers and buttons, then a non-functioning touchscreen), a Mac Cube (optical drive motor), two Sidekicks (trackball both times), a lampshade iMac (optical drive malfunction), a G5 iMac (power supply), and there was that whole 360 thing.

Things break, I know.

Never did I think I’d be such a hardcore SingStar player that I’d break the blue microphone, but here we are. Color me surprised just this once.

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I Love A (Gay Pride) Parade

Jun 29, ’08 7:31 PM

The 39th annual NYC LGBT Pride Day March was today. When it comes to colorful, lively parades, it’s hard to beat.

Rainbow Umbrella

Rainbow Flag

Arms Out

God Is Love

Dildo Cop

Blue Angel

Caution

Pride

View the full set: NYC LGBT Pride Day March 2008

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Buttons Is A (DJ) Trooper

Jun 24, ’08 10:32 PM

Buttons Is A (DJ) Trooper

Our poor cat has been through a lot in the last 48 hours.

Like all of these sorts of stories go, it was supposed to be a regular vet checkup. But after bringing him into the Astoria Veterinary Group, it appeared that his teeth and gums – something that had been pointed out as a potential problem in the past – were in bad shape. They recommended a “deep gum cleaning”. Katie had to leave him behind at the vet, turning a day that was to be spent relaxing with the cat into a day of worry.

The call came around 2:30: he was fine, but the “deep gum cleaning” had turned into a “double tooth extraction”. His trademark fang had apparently been loose and very exposed, as had the tooth directly below it. Both were removed, turning his usual expression – a little bit of exposed fang – into a lip curled sneer that would make Elvis proud.

Buttons returned home at 7PM last night, still drugged out of his skull from the procedure. This manifested itself in odd ways, particularly in his communication skills. Normally, he gets attention with a loud, cute “WOW!” – he doesn’t meow. Last night it was more of a “Wowwwwwweeeerrrrrrooooooooooooowweee.” He also walked around the apartment at least eight times as though he had no idea where he was – although he was very sure he still wanted to go under the kitchen sink.

We’ve had the catsujin for just over five years now (he’s five and a half); this is the first time he’s undergone a procedure of any sort. Being as attached as we are, Katie and I have both acknowledged an inability to deal with the idea of something happening to our cat. Taken as a test of how we would handle a small-scale event, it is easily argued both Katie and I failed brilliantly. We followed him around trying to cheer him up, lamenting to each other that we’d hope he’d be okay and back to his normal self soon.

To what may not be a surprise, he was back to normal not long after midnight, when he nuzzled up to Katie and watched an episode of Buffy on her computer. (They frequently share late-night TV watching. Apparently I’m not invited.) The morning brought the usual pillow-stealing, food-demanding, and lounging on the carpet that we’ve grown accustomed to with him. He greeted us home from work with proper-sounding “WOW!”s, and as I type he’s nomnomnoming away at a catnip plush duck.

Thanks to everyone who sent well-wishes over Twitter and concerned IMs; we do tend to joke that he has a fan club but it’s nice to realize it’s not such a joke after all.

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Some Thoughts On “The Happening”

Jun 22, ’08 12:33 AM

Definitive Evidence I Am A Masochist

June has been a horrible month for movies. The month kicked off with the late May release of Sex And The City. My birthday was marred by the release of Kung Fu Panda and Zohan. The Love Guru and Get Smart came out this week.

But there’s one name in Hollywood that overshadows Mike Myers. One that defeats Sarah Jessica Parker. One that even beats down Adam Sandler. His name is M. Night Shyamalan.

After landing upon Christopher Orr’s amazing review/takedown of The Happening, I found myself reading excerpts to Katie over the phone during lunch. “You know we now have to go see this,” she said.

Last night, faced with nothing else in the theatre on the positive side of the equation, I gathered my spite and bought two tickets to what could very well have been the worst major motion picture in the last five years.

As the company credits began – not the actual movie credits, but the production company credits – the laughter began.

It went downhill from there.

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WWDC08 Keynote – iPhone 3G

Jun 9, ’08 10:08 PM

“The best part of WWDC is the post game analysis. And booze.” – Michael Lopp

(I’m breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

In the post keynote fracas, I was asked by multiple friends if I was upgrading. My answer shocked each and every one – a fairly blasé “no”. One friend shouted over IM that I would soon cave. (I’m taking the reaction as a sad commentary on how I am perceived.) This isn’t to say the iPhone 3G isn’t a good model; it corrects most of the gripes leveled at the original iPhone. Data speeds are faster, batteries last longer, and it has a true GPS module. The headphone jack is flush, eliminating a market of headphone extenders. The cost of the handset is far cheaper. Hell, it even comes in an additional color. Certainly, if you’re in the market for an iPhone, it’s a great model to start with – just not to upgrade to.

A $200 mobile upgrade is not the most expensive thing in the world – we are talking about a handset that started at $499 – but it’s not a drop in the bucket. That $200 gets you a double data rate, but along with that you’re stuck with an additional $10 a month on your bill. This adds up quickly over the life of your new two year contract extension. The true GPS is nice, but I’ve found the fake GPS to be working fairly well. The extended battery life is not a feature point I can wave away, but collectively, that’s the end of the feature list. All the benefits of the 2.0 software – the app store, app installation, push email support – will be on the first generation handsets as well.

Is all of that worth $200? For once, I can’t say yes. Never mind the newly discovered activation hassles. Never mind what will undoubtedly be new hurdles towards jailbreaking and unlocking (for those into those sorts of things).

The simple conclusion: if you don’t have an iPhone, it’s a fantastic phone to start with. It’s going to be the perfect time to jump in. But if you do have an iPhone, you may want to ponder whether the total cost is worth the fairly small bullet list of features.

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WWDC08 Keynote – MobileMe

Jun 9, ’08 9:51 PM

“Not wanting to sound like an asshole, Phil, but I use Gmail IMAP and when I read a message on my iPod, it’s read on Gmail too.” – Yanik Magnan (I’m breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

Apple has been running .mac as a service since 2000 (when it was known as iTools), and for the first six years, the service was happily functional. But the service has languished over the past two years, with service outages and a lack of compelling reasons to chalk up the $100 a year.

MobileMe is the .mac mulligan. It’s been revamped, with a focus now on pushing data to devices rather than enriching your digital life.

From my own experience, .mac became less valuable not because of the downtime but because of strong alternatives – largely from Google. Gmail trounced .mac mail. Google Calendar edged out iCal. Google Talk has grown more useful that .Mac’s piggybacking on AIM. Flickr creamed the iPhoto integration. You get the picture – free and/or cheap services continued to pop up and outclass .mac on nearly every level.

MobileMe certainly appears to have a compelling interface, but the proof is in the service. Apple has to justify the expense of MobileMe over robust free products, and that’s no small feat, even for Apple. And nothing I read about the demo made it sound $100-compelling.

Apple has already posted a few resources for curious .mac users:

The FAQ reveals the features that are getting cut: Web access to bookmarks (not the end of the world), iCards (one of the very original iTools features, which I strangely loved), .Mac slides (meh), and support for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther sync (which should’ve been dropped a year ago).

It also strikes me as terribly weird to announce this, a very consumer-oriented service, at the Developer’s Conference. Perhaps there will be some sessions about hooking into it via an API – joy of joys. But there’s a larger elephant in the room.

While I’m sure there’s some consumers who have bought in that they absolutely must have push email so they can get funny forwards from Aunt Millie instantly, where an “Exchange for the rest of us” is really needed is in the (very unsexy) enterprise. Exchange is costly and cumbersome, and Microsoft is raking money in hand-over-fist in CAL fees.

Were Apple playing it smart, they’d be baking the same core technologies – push email, calendar, and address book – behind MobileMe into 10.6 Server. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely convinced Apple is playing it smart here.

For more, Merlin Mann (like clockwork) has some good thoughts on MobileMe.

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WWDC08 Keynote – Backgrounding

Jun 9, ’08 9:43 PM

(I’m breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

Apple did, in their usual pretzel of logic way, address the big issue regarding application development: apps that need to function in the background.

In many ways, the proposal (a single connection to Apple’s server handles push notification from servers) does have many benefits, and I can practically recite them off of Scott Forstall’s slides. It will lead to better system performance, help save on battery life, and certainly streamline the networking.

But rewind back to the SDK announcement on March 6th. Remember this slide?

Not three months ago, Apple was touting how superior their Exchange support was to the Blackberry because you didn’t have to go through a server owned by a vendor to gain functionality.

The other shoe certainly seems to have dropped here. Apple is offering to be the intermediary for every app that needs backgrounding, much like RIM is for everyone who wants Blackberry email. With the number of issues RIM has had with their service over the last year, Apple is going to be under high scrutiny if they have similar outages.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t nearly as crippling as RIM’s reliance on their cloud servers. I’d rather lose my backgrounding for, say, an IM client than my email. But there are implications for developers, and I don’t even want to think about what this means for enterprises writing apps. I can only hope Apple makes their retention policy very clear.

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WWDC08 Keynote – iPhone App Demos

Jun 9, ’08 9:31 PM

“Loopt is a location-based social network for douchebags who wear two ill-fitting polo shirts at the same time.” – John Gruber

(I’m breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

More than any other segment of the keynote, the demonstrations of the applications excited me the most.

  • Sega, Super Monkey Ball – One of the sources I was following during the event said the graphics were “as good as the DS”. To me, it looks a lot better than many of the games on the DS. The price point is lower than most of the Super Monkey Ball games, but this one isn’t really grabbing me, probably because I’ve played SMB so many times over the years. (Also: if you’re giggling about the name, you probably still think “Wii” is hilarious.)
  • eBay, Auctions – Auctions isn’t much more than a native front end into eBay’s API, but the experience is so well done, I can only hope that other companies can follow eBay’s lead in developing
  • Loopt – I fully expect there to be lots of location-aware social networks forming around the iPhone, but I expect Loopt to get a big boost for being featured in the keynote. Hey Dodgeball? You’re on notice.
  • Six Apart, Typepad – the TypePad client looks like a simple, clean blogging client. But I’m not a TypePad user; I use MovableType (and Tumblr). I asked Anil Dash if there was any reason the app won’t work with their other products, and I was greeted with a no comment.
  • Associated Press, Mobile News Network – it’s truly a thing of beauty to watch the Associated Press innovate within the news space. The citizen journalism things are a thing of beauty. NowPublic? You’re on notice.
  • Pangea – I have no great love for Brian Greenstone, although I admire his tenacity for sticking in the Mac software industry for so long. Enigmo looks promising, but Cro-Mag Rally was generally regarded as a poor cart game when it was originally released. Still, to hear that porting apps from OS X was largely painless is good news.
  • Cow Music, Band – very interesting music making app, and I look forward to seeing where the iPhone drives music creation tools.
  • MLB.com, At Bat – I’m not much for baseball, but kudos to MLB for so quickly integrating nearly real-time video into their box scores. This is a killer app for many of the guys in my office.
  • Modality – when Scott said the medical community has been flocking to the iPhone, they aren’t kidding. Modality is not an obscure app – I’ve been told we use it in our curriculum at the medical college. The iPhone is going to be a great platform for building rich educational apps for all curriculums.
  • MIMvista – again, seeing these apps make me smile because I know there’s lots of latent interest in the medical community for clinical applications.
  • Digital Legends Entertainment, Kroll – the animation style reminds me a bit of Dragon’s Lair, although it looks to have slightly more gameplay. I guess we’ll see how it ends up in September.
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WWDC08 Keynote – Snow Leopard

Jun 9, ’08 9:12 PM

“Man, I should have kept my ‘Mac OS X 10.6 ignored’ square.” – John Siracusa

(I’m breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

The 10.6 is seen in its natural climate.

For the sake of not wanting to vomit every time I type it, I’m going to refer to Snow Leopard merely as “10.6″.

A mere blip at the start of the Keynote (when Steve says “This morning I’m going to talk about the iPhone”, he means it), OS X 10.6 would be talked about only at the OS X State Of The Union. To the chagrin of those who care less about the iPhone, the OSXSOTU is always the first session covered by the NDA that surrounds WWDC.

Luckily, some relief came in the form of a since-deleted press release from Apple. Also, in the time it’s taken me to write this, the official Snow Leopard homepage appeared.

To dissect what we know:

  • A technology code-named “Grand Central” will enable developers to more easily leverage multi-core processors. It’s hard to consider this a bad thing, although I haven’t seen a lot of multithreading issues in modern applications (from my very casual viewpoint).
  • A technology called “Open Computing Language” (OpenCL) allows developers to tap into the GPU for general processing. It has been “proposed as an open standard”, which is interesting as I can find no information to this effect (and OpenCL was a name formerly used by a Linux cryptography package).
  • The theoretical limit on system RAM will be 16TB. So when those 2TB RAM chips come along, OS X will be so ready.
  • Quicktime X will come bounding along, seemingly destroying hopes for Quicktime 8 or 9 in the meantime. Hopefully “support for modern audio and video formats” indicates that Apple will embrace some of codecs that have been killing Quicktime for what feels like ages.
  • Safari will get the recently announced SquirrelFish – but it’s not like you can’t run that and get performance upgrades right this second.
  • Exchange support will finally be rolled into Mail, Address Book, and iCal, which is great if you’re in the sort of environment using Exchange. Everyone else may not care so much – but we’ll come back to this.
  • “Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.” Consider this confirmation that 10.6 will not run on PowerPC. Nothing else is likely to shed that much weight from the OS. I don’t expect Rosetta to die any time soon, much like Classic (technically) will live until 2009.

Lastly, and most smugly satisfying for me, 10.6 is scheduled to ship “in about a year”, which sounds remarkably closer to my August 2009 prediction than TUAW’s “shipping by January 2009″.

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Javascript Benchmarks: Firefox 3.0RC2 vs. Webkit r34367

Jun 5, ’08 2:44 PM

The latest Firefox build, versus the latest Webkit build, using SunSpider. Testing done on my iMac (24″, 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB Ram) under normal conditions (other apps open, browser frontmost during the test).

COMPARISON         FIREFOX 3.0RC2       WEBKIT r34367

** TOTAL **: 1.56x as fast 2597.0ms +/- 2.1% 1666.8ms +/- 0.3%

3d: 1.44x as fast 327.4ms +/- 5.1% 227.2ms +/- 2.1% cube: 1.62x as fast 120.2ms +/- 1.1% 74.0ms +/- 2.9% morph: 1.43x as fast 106.2ms +/- 14.3% 74.2ms +/- 3.6% raytrace: 1.28x as fast 101.0ms +/- 2.8% 79.0ms +/- 0.0% access: 1.48x as fast 363.4ms +/- 2.0% 246.0ms +/- 0.9% binary-trees: 1.54x as fast 44.0ms +/- 2.0% 28.6ms +/- 2.4% fannkuch: 1.61x as fast 136.4ms +/- 1.4% 84.8ms +/- 2.2% nbody: 1.28x as fast 137.2ms +/- 6.1% 107.4ms +/- 0.6% nsieve: 1.82x as fast 45.8ms +/- 3.0% 25.2ms +/- 2.2% bitops: 1.53x as fast 245.0ms +/- 2.6% 159.8ms +/- 1.0% 3bit-bits-in-byte: 1.62x as fast 39.2ms +/- 5.2% 24.2ms +/- 2.3% bits-in-byte: 2.07x as fast 62.2ms +/- 0.9% 30.0ms +/- 0.0% bitwise-and: 1.35x as fast 65.4ms +/- 1.7% 48.6ms +/- 3.9% nsieve-bits: 1.37x as fast 78.2ms +/- 4.8% 57.0ms +/- 0.0% controlflow: 1.75x as fast 30.8ms +/- 1.8% 17.6ms +/- 3.9% recursive: 1.75x as fast 30.8ms +/- 1.8% 17.6ms +/- 3.9% crypto: 1.41x as fast 155.8ms +/- 2.6% 110.8ms +/- 0.9% aes: 1.43x as fast 61.4ms +/- 3.9% 42.8ms +/- 1.3% md5: 1.40x as fast 46.8ms +/- 1.2% 33.4ms +/- 2.0% sha1: 1.38x as fast 47.6ms +/- 3.5% 34.6ms +/- 3.2% date: 2.15x as fast 321.6ms +/- 7.7% 149.6ms +/- 0.7% format-tofte: 2.16x as fast 195.0ms +/- 13.2% 90.2ms +/- 0.6% format-xparb: 2.13x as fast 126.6ms +/- 1.6% 59.4ms +/- 1.1% math: 1.60x as fast 277.4ms +/- 4.4% 173.0ms +/- 0.7% cordic: 1.81x as fast 104.8ms +/- 2.1% 57.8ms +/- 1.8% partial-sums: 1.48x as fast 124.0ms +/- 8.7% 83.6ms +/- 0.8% spectral-norm: 1.54x as fast 48.6ms +/- 1.4% 31.6ms +/- 2.2% regexp: 1.35x as fast 225.4ms +/- 0.5% 166.8ms +/- 0.3% dna: 1.35x as fast 225.4ms +/- 0.5% 166.8ms +/- 0.3% string: 1.56x as fast 650.2ms +/- 0.5% 416.0ms +/- 0.5% base64: 1.16x as fast 77.2ms +/- 1.8% 66.6ms +/- 1.0% fasta: 2.30x as fast 173.8ms +/- 0.9% 75.6ms +/- 0.9% tagcloud: 1.34x as fast 133.4ms +/- 0.5% 99.8ms +/- 1.0% unpack-code: 1.67x as fast 173.4ms +/- 0.6% 103.8ms +/- 1.0% validate-input: 1.32x as fast 92.4ms +/- 0.7% 70.2ms +/- 1.5%

But don’t worry, Firefox! You may be 56% slower on overall Javascript performance, but you’ve been promised to be bug free!

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