Pirates vs legal ninjas

The Pirate Bay Pros:

• Don’t appear to support the commercial exploitation of copyright infringement.
• Don’t appear to profit from copyright infringement in the way that counterfeiters and the guys selling DVDs in the local market profit.

The Pirate Bay Cons:

• Called themselves “The Pirate Bay”.
• Arranged their site in a way which clearly endorses copyright violation – their TV Shows section lists modern shows, of which none are in the public domain.

The music/movie industry Pros:

• Spend vast amounts of money producing music and movies for the entertainment of the masses – some of which isn’t pure junk.

The music/movie industry Cons:

• Spend vast amounts of money producing music and movies for the entertainment of the masses – most of which is pure junk.
• Spend vast amounts of money litigating against teenagers and claim ludicrous losses whilst continuing to be profitable.
• Failed completely to update their business model to account for digital media and digital distribution instead opting to legally protect their pre-internet business model.
• Insist on charging increasing amounts for their content whilst the distribution and manufacturing costs have dropped – I remember when they said the lower cost of CDs would reduce the price of music – £20 for a blu-ray!
• Trying to control the world so they can control the content – forcing the computer and electronics industry to adopt HDCP, AACS et al – thou shall only watch that purchases blu-ray movie on a blu-ray player!
• Pay “stars” insane amounts to appear in their content.
• Pay non-”stars” as little as possible (writers strike, bands who make very little from their music sales etc).

Sure, I want to see great movies and listen to great music and i’m willing to pay a reasonable amount for it, but the media companies need join us in the 21st century. If they are not going to adopt more reasonable pricing (how can a digital download cost more than a physical CD delivered to your door?) and allow more freedom for us to use the content we paid for (you think I should pay again to watch my 1080p blu-ray movie I bought on my iPhone?). In an age of 160GB iPods and multi terabyte media servers that need filling and very fast internet connections, what do media companies think is going to happen if they don’t provide what the market wants how it wants it?

iPhone therefor I am.

I recently gave into technolust and bought an iPhone 3G. After a rather drawn out purchasing process ( Surely, if someone comes in and walks straight to the counter and asks for an exact phone on an exact contract, you can stop the sales pitch right there and just expedite the process), I left feeling the warm glow of high-tech consumerism and headed home to activate my futuristic communicator. All was well as the apps were stored, my media was podded, calls were made, photos were touched and maps were pinned – except there was a little niggle feeling that all wasn’t right.

Turning the iPhone from portrait to landscape whilst running an orientation aware app would sometimes result in the app rotating, but more often than not, it wouldn’t do a thing, Whilst a good vigorous shake would usually result in the screen locked upside down until it was rebooted, I don’t think this was the effect that Apple had been aiming for. I fired up the excellent App Store and searched for an accelerometer tool, finally settling on iHandy Level. Once installed, iHandy Level revealed that the iPhone seemed to think that being held level was the same as being tilted 45 degrees, although equally as often may just flip 180 degrees. After a soft reset, a hard reboot and eventually a restore, it was clear this iPhone had some issues with its accelerometers.

A quick trip back to the O2 store and an after-sales experience light years ahead of the actual purchase experience, the phone was twisted this way and that for a minute or two, before a brand spanking new iPhone was handed over and I was free to enjoy my iPhone and the forthcoming 24 months of contractual bliss which is certain to ensue…

I love this.

A box full of computing history and Radiohead song are two things that I find appealing – combined in this way they caused me enormous pleasure. I want to buy this. Note: If you can’t stand the sound of a ZX Spectrum loading, then skip to 1 minute in!

In case you haven’t heard the original song (or a variety of):

Is that big doggy running Windows?

Boston Dynamics call it “Big Dog” and it looks rather funny, like two guys carrying a sofa, mixed with the Hunter from Half Life 2 Episode 2.

I am in two minds about this puppy – whilst it is an awesome piece of hardware and software engineering which I would love take apart or ride around town, if you pop some weapons on it i’ll be waking in cold sweats about the T3 Sci-Fi Mule coming back from the future to kill me…regardless you should take a look and prepare to be amazed or amused at it’s handling of icy conditions!

PHP 5.2.5 on Windows 2003

There is an oddity in the PHP 5.2.5 installer (and possibly earlier) on Windows 2003 in that it’s default install path is C:\Program Files\PHP. Nothing odd there and indeed the install finishes without issue with the PHP Application Extension and PHP Web Extension configured automatically in IIS (I was tried with both ISAPI and CGI) however when you try to view a PHP page in IIS you get a 404.

It turns out that the path of the PHP Application Extension is in 8.3 format whilst the Web Extension is in LFN format – as far as IIS is concerned that these are two different paths. Editing the PHP Application Extension to include the LFN path enclosed in quotes ( e.g. “C:\Program Files\PHP\php5isapi.dll” ) makes IIS happy.

So if you find you install PHP to a path with non 8.3 paths and you get a 404 on PHP pages then edit the Application Extension to get it going!

Penny Arcade

I went looking to see if my faviourite web comic had updated and what do I see, Gabe and Tycho talking about the Mac and there was the quote any geek waiting waiting for his new computer wants to see:

It’s just really fucking good and that’s all.

And to top it all off, they had put up a new strip and that was also Mac related.

I Go Mira

I was just drooling over the though of browsing on the Nintendo DS simply because it’s small and easy to carry around the house (read that as browsing whilst otherwise wasting time defecating) and I happened across the increasing buzz about Microsoft Origami.

A while back, I was testing out XP OOBE code and had a Tablet PC to test with, now that was by far the most convenient away-from-desk browsing machine I have had – I don’t consider balancing an increasingly hot laptop on my knees to be convenient. So I was left wondering why there wasn’t a mass market keyboard-less (perhaps touch-screen) device available for browsing and playing media and then I remembered the buzz about the Microsoft Mira webpad/media player.

Now the Mira buzz all went very quiet a couple of years ago and I went from being curious about Mira itself, to being curious about the demise of Mira (from what I read, Mira became just a set of technologies to be included in future products much like Cairo did – although the Motion Computing LS800 does look a bit like the concept wrought in plastic and silicon and other elements). Well from recent developments it looks like the Microsoft vision of web pads is alive and well, morphing into the Microsoft Origami project…very exciting but to be honest i’m not expecting to be able to make a paper aeroplane, a hat or a swan out of it whenever a wifi connection isn’t available.

OrigamiProject.com – A Microsoft registered domain for what appears to be Origami viral marketing – although the whole Touch Me tag echoes the Nintendo DS marketing.
Digital Kitchen (Enter -> Work -> BrandTheatre -> Microsoft Origami) – A showcase for what a Microsoft Origami device may be able to do…ahem.

I guess the XP style interface in the video will be replaced with delicious Minty Aero Glass running on Microsoft Windows Vista Origami Premium Ultimate Ultra 1337…but where will the Gig of RAM, dual core GPU and pixel shader 2.0 GPU that Vista needs to show a frosted border fit in that somewhat larger than pocket0sized chunk of consumer product? Who knows. What I do know however, is that the device in the video reminds me of the Mira mock-ups (wireless pads with media abilities) and of Cario (filled with attractive concepts which will stay out of Microsoft’s grasp for years to come…ObjectFS->WinFS->OhFFS).

I’ve also heard that some other manufacturers may just be working on innovative touch-screen media devices with browsing abilities…so expect to see something from MS soon after! This all just reminds me how much I am itching to buy a device which can read my handwriting and recognise a URL without me first spending months giving it a Rosetta Stone of my scrawl…

Waitbook Pro Ultimate Edition

What a difference a few hours make! I just rechecked the order status and shipping has now moved to the 15th of March with delivery estimated at the 27th of March. Now I understand that it’s a new product and the dates given were just estimates, but it seems very arbitrary to say shipment in four weeks and delivery in 6 weeks…it suggests the whole thing is just guess work.

I’ve got to admit that I am now reconsidering the order for a number of reasons:

• Apple have stated their intention to transition the entire product line to x86 by the end of 2006.
• March 27th is too close to Apple’s 30th anniversary and the expected celebratory product launches.
• Merom will be out just a couple of months with it’s 64-bitness and more mature VT.
• Every month that goes by makes that ATI x1600 look less and less appealing.

So maybe it would be better to wait for the Merom based MacBook and the improved mobile graphics, rather than stick with it and get the MBP on the 27th of March only for Mr Jobs to unveil the 64-bit Merom based x1×00 powered MacBook Pro II on 1st April.

Update: Maybe that should be “Penultimate Edition” because the date has flipped back to the 3rd of March and 15th for delivery!? Maybe they are running on x86 Mac X Servers and Yonah has a repeat of the Pentium Div bug…

Waitbook Pro Extreme Edition

Gahhh, checked the status on my MacBook Pro today and I was a little bit pissed off to see the shipping date has changed from the 24th of February to the 3rd of March, with delivery expected around the 15th of March! So it’s no wonder Apple have upgraded the spec from a 1.83Ghz Core Duo to a 2.0Ghz Core Duo, otherwise by the time the thing actually ships, Intel will have probably canned the lower speed grades. So it’s still a month until I get it, but looking on the bright side at least the month is February and it’s not a leap year…w00t! I’ve just got to resist the temptation to download an OS X 10.4.4 image and use the latest Maxxuss’s patches to run it on the Dell Inspiron 9100.

I’m sure it’s just coincidence, but Apple today released the first update for OS X x86 ( 10.4.5 ) within a few hours of Maxxuss revealing his patch (I did type “revealing his crack” but it made me guffaw like the teenage moron I used to be) for 10.4.4…

Nintendo DS Homebrew

Fancied a bit of a change, so I began trying coding on the Nintendo DS. It’s a bit of an odd beast, living between the 8/16bit and 32bit worlds but the feature set is so dedicated to playing games it gives you a nice retro feeling. It’s the first machine I have programmed which has two different general purpose CPUs – an ARM7 and an ARM9. The ARM9 is the main DS CPU and would appear to be responsible for the bulk of processing and interaction with the graphics hardware. The ARM7 is used for Gameboy Advanced compatibility and also when in DS mode the ARM7 is responsible for talking to the sound and touch screen hardware – so in order to read the touch screen, the main ARM9 CPU gets data from the ARM7 via IPC.

To start off, I installed DevKitPro with libnds and began working on my first standard learning project using straight C. In this case I went for the Mandelbrot set viewer, it’s a good project for getting to grips with framebuffer mode (15bit color) and also gives a good indication of the floating point performance (which in the ARM9’s case isn’t great for obvious reasons). It didn’t take long to get it compiling and after copying the resulting NDS file to the CF card and slipping it into the M3 adapter it ran and I was pleased.

Documentation is quite scarce, but that is to be expected with everything having to be worked out by those luminaries of the DS homebrew scene (and I dare say a sneaky peek at the official DS SDK). It’s certainly enough to get some impressive stuff working as you can see by looking at some of the homebrew apps and demos which are out there. So my plan now is to add zooming using the touchpad, screen swapping so that the touch screen can be used to alter parameters and edit the palette and perhaps switch the code to using 3/29 integer calculations instead of floating point and try and get both CPUs to calculate in parallel. After that it’s straight into Mammary Manipulator DS…

Oh and because the M3 interface looked too un-DSish(sp?!) I made a skin to make it look more DSish!