So prominent folks are complaining about Apple nerfing the iPod to break the "iPod Download" app. How is this news? Look, when you buy an iPod, you're signing into an implied contract with Steve Jobs that goes something like: "You will give me a pretty object with superior industrial design, and in return, I yield the right to use that object as I see fit." This is not a new thing, this is essentially the deal that every purchaser of a Macintosh has signed up for from day one. Jobs believes in certain business practices that have nothing to do with benefitting his customers.

Apple's products are beautiful and well designed, but like concept cars, they are essentially objets d'art with little or no functional value if you stray outside the narrowly defined parameters of use set by the creators. If you want to do useful things with your music player, get yourself an iRiver iHP. These are the most open players on the market, slightly less beautiful than iPods, but at least you can do whatever the hell you want with them...

/misc | permalink (2004/10/30 18:36)

Presented for your approval, perforce_rss, a small Perl script to publish changelist events from a Perforce source control depot as an RSS channel. It's pretty braindead right now, but it's nifty enough at this point to throw up on the site. I'm releasing it to the public domain, so do with it as you will. There are still quite a few todos though, so this is presented "as-is".

/projects | permalink (2004/10/30 12:12)

This is not how to make GPS enabled games folks. Fishing? Presumably there is some x such that you will never catch a fish greater than x pounds, after which there is zero point in playing the game further. This may be a feature of the business plan, but it's certainly not good game design. "I caught a bigger bluefin tuna than you," is a sentence that will never be uttered with the same satisfaction as "I found an upgrade for my character on my hike last weekend and I am going to kick your ass. Have at you!"

Clearly, at some point in the future I am going to have to start writing the sort of games that will get my son off his ass, where he's been playing games of the sort that I'm making now.

/games | permalink (2004/10/08 00:53)

I've been very impressed with the debates thus far, although I'm pretty sure that I'll be disgusted again after the Town Hall on the 8th. (The moderater of the VP debate asked silly, rambling questions, I'm supposed to believe Joe Random is going to do better?) The tone has been fairly even and civilized, which is a refreshing change after the last 12 vitriol filled months. It would be nice if that sort of dialogue could be sustained over an entire campaign season, rather than clogging the airwaves with slime-by-proxy.

Special mention should go to the way both VP candidates refused to spew nonsense when the moderator wanted to use the gay marriage issue to create sparks. I got the impression very clearly that Cheney thinks that the party is in the wrong in this case (which doesn't get him off the hook for standing behind the position, even though he has little choice), and Edwards managed to state the Democratic position without making a huge issue of the VP's personal stake in the issue.

/politics | permalink (2004/10/06 12:32)