I’m not sure about the horse power of current mobile platforms for running browser applications, though… And what’s with the pixelated, blocky icons? Is it because games are assumed to be blocky by design? Is no antialias the new antialias?

~

Silverlight vs HTML5 – was a fight to be fought rather sooner than later. Microsoft seems to me like they’re piloting a giant ship which takes ages to change direction. Only they don’t know which direction should they head to: with native applications being less relevant nowadays (at least desktop wise) it seems silly to keep working on new GUI layers and systems in Visual Studio and etc.

~

HTML5 Audio data exposed with Firefox 4 – more Mozilla good news. There was some support for FFT data reading a few Firefox beta builds ago, but they weren’t officially sanctioned until now, so experimenting with that was a bit risky. The video shows also audio data being manipulated too (not only read) with real time filtering… this has huge potential for projects such as jranular :)

I also find of capital interest that all these new audio features have been developed entirely outside Mozilla, as the main author details in his blog. +1 for open source ;)

Oh, and in mrdoob’s words:

Really hope Chrome implements Mozilla’s Audio Data API. Other browsers won’t have other choice then :D http://audioscene.org/

~

Zhook, a simple HTML5 based ebook format. Very sensible idea — specially if you’re reminded that most of the platforms at which ebooks are targeted use the very capable WebKit as their core component for dealing with HTML:

iOs, Android, webOS, Symbian — all use the WebKit rendering engine. That’s four broad global mobile operating systems that basically define the walk-around go-anywhere Internet today.

I looked at the ePub format a few months ago and well… let’s just say it discouraged me :-P

~

Finally, more Mozilla goodness! It seems Firefox’s nightly builds using the superawesome JägerMonkey javascript engine are already available. I’ve tested one of the builds they provide and the latest version from Firefox repository (compiled in my computer), and I’ve seen huge performance increases with mrdoob’s plane deformations experiment.

It still can’t beat Chrome and some of the other experiments run horribly slow, but it’s getting dangerously close, as testified by their are we fast yet? website. Well done, Mozilla people!

On iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone development ethics

I was happily chatting with Mr.doob and exposing him my views about the state of affairs regarding development for iPhone. From day one, I have disliked the absolutism that Apple have decided to impose in their platform (note the emphasis), but I had just recently read a post by Marco Arment that had completely convinced me of not doing any iPhone development at all. So, in short, an iPhone developers are surrounded by NDA’s and have not the certainty of going to earn a single dollar at any point, since they are totally subject to Apple’s arbitrary will. I personally have seen people asking questions about OpenGL-ES in Apple’s OpenGL list, only to be immediately told to shut up because they were under an NDA and couldn’t discuss anything iPhone in public.

It seems to me like Apple has forgotten the message from 1984. But anyway, there I was exposing why it didn’t seem ethical to contribute to Apple’s model of development and distribution, just to find out that Mr. doob had already updated his iPod to the famous iPhone OS 3.0 – famous because it allows you to… copy and paste? Uh, right.

So what do people think? Would you code stuff for iPhone only because it’s a cool device? (like Marco justifies in the follow up post), or do iPhone devs do it just because they have the hope of making an indecent amount of money at the end? Also, do you think it’s acceptable to sign up NDA’s and all that even if you’re not guaranteed that an awesome sum of money will end up in your bank account?

Spam induced constipation

Has anybody seen the new trend in spam messages? The title warns you of what will happen if you don’t pay attention to them:

Open it or get constipation!

I must confess I opened it, wondering whether the new star product wasn’t meant to improve male dysfunctions but to get everybody visiting the loo more often. I was wrong, it was just the usual random crap from China.

Ready? Steady… Unite!

Opera is a strange company for me. I don’t completely like their desktop browser, but I really like the mobile version. This week they released something interesting and, for once, original, in the browsers’ field: Opera Unite.

I don’t think I’m going to use it in the near future, but I quite liked the way they integrate several useful features that in my opinion, should be basic in any computer already. Particularly, the file sharing service is ace. Although I wonder if they have thought much about the security implications. I’m already foreseeing a javascript exploit that runs only when you’re logged in My Opera and shares all your files without you knowing it.

I also wonder why are they assuming that people are going to share things they shouldn’t be sharing, when reading the Note: Please respect artists. Only share content if you have the right to do so. recommendation which shows up in several of their services. And if they are assuming so, how do they plan to fight back when they get sued by the RIAA for providing a way for people to illegally distribute protected content.

Microsoft, on being a lonely nerd who tries to impose his rules to his could-be friends

Microsoft launched an IE8 campaign in Australia with the most possible tacky and distasteful design ever and with several buzzwords as well, such as twitter, followers, clues and whatnot.

It didn’t look good aesthetically speaking, but once you passed it through the W3C validator, it had 20 errors and 19 warnings yesterday, whereas today it exhibits an incredible amount of 48 errors and 20 warnings. It seems errors are multiplying! I would expect exactly the opposite, but you know, it’s Microsoft!

They have also updated the text. Yesterday, it made explicit mention to my old actual browser (Firefox), exhorting me to ditch it and replace it with shiny IE8, “best ever MS’s Browser”. But today it’s a bit more austere and they have toned down their words, and also reduced the number of required steps. Compare the first version (which you can see here):

We’ve buried $10,000 somewhere on the internet and if you’re the first one to find it, you get to keep it.

But you’ll never find it using old Firefox. (So get rid of it, or get lost.)

If you want a serious shot at the ten grand, upgrade your browser to Windows Internet Explorer 8 now. Then follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter for daily clues that point you to the buried loot.

1. Ditch the web browser you’re using. If you try to find the $10,000 with Firefox, you’ll get nowhere
2. Download Microsoft’s best ever browser, Internet Explorer 8. It’s the only browser capable of cracking all the clues.
3. Follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter for the daily clues. Clues will be released at random times from Friday 19th June.
4. Use the clues and your brilliance to deduce where the $10,000 is hidden

with the current one:

Want a shot at scoring ten grand?

We’ve buried $10,000 somewhere on the internet and the first one to find it, gets to keep it.

Those who have Internet Explorer 8 can follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter and www.tengrandisburiedhere.com for daily clues that point you to the buried loot.

1. Follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter for the daily clues. Clues will be released at random times from Friday 19th June.
2. Use the clues and your brilliance to deduce where the $10,000 is hidden

So not only are they presumptuous but they are implicitly saying they, as usual, don’t give a f*** about standards, since the clues can only be “cracked” using IE. Which sounds like: we are using some new proprietary stuff that no other browser can make sense of.

Nothing new or surprising.

PyGTK

I wanted to make a little interface for an application I’m working in and for some strange reason, I thought of giving a go to PyGTK, since the widgets are nice enough* and it uses Python (as you could deduct from the name), which makes things very easy and fast to program.

In a question of a couple of hours, I had my little front-end up and running, thanks to the tutorial and a little bit of experimentation, helped by the nice documentation.

I haven’t polished things enough yet for posting the code, but will probably do it next week. I can meanwhile recommend PyGTK if you want to do some GUI programming without damaging your brain.

* They are nice enough when used under a GNOME desktop, at least. I guess if they are used in a Windows or Mac OS port they might look a bit odd, but honestly, I don’t care much about those systems at this point :-P

Proprietary software on a school

I happened to find the school I attended had upgraded their website and now they were being a little more modern and open about their processes. They were so open, that they spoke about the details of the IT system they had installed recently. When I read them, I was dismayed. They had chosen Windows 2003 server, for a machine to act as DHCP and DNS server, Active Directory and Samba. That was an amazing opportunity to use Linux! And it’s not like our local government hasn’t spent a single euro promoting Linux in Valencian schools. To make it even worse, they had installed Windows XP in all the other computers that hadn’t it installed yet.

I remember when I was there, virus were a rampant recurrent issue, and there were only a few optional computing lessons after school. Maybe a total of 30 kids could have accessed the computers at the end of the week. But nowadays, with computing being a mandatory subject, Windows and the computers being connected to the Net? It just sounds irresponsible, apart from expensive, on the short and long term (i.e. maintenance). I don’t know exactly how licenses work (these pages aren’t helpful either) but we could assume something like $999 + 20 x $100 = approximately $3000 which they could have spent in improving the equipment, for example.

I’m not going to tell you which school it was, I’ll let you try to find it, if you feel like doing it. And you don’t need any special browser for cracking the clues though ;)

On Apple’s announcements about upcoming Snow Leopard

Proud Apple person decides to say a few triumphant words about the success of their strategy vs Microsoft’s one… in public. Something along the lines of we’re so great and you’re in such a big trouble, man!. Makes me laugh: for all that I know, since the first day I installed Leopard I have had nothing but trouble. If that’s a good operating system, I’m happy of not having any Vista-running computer.

Then, about the upcoming version of Mac OS X, is there anything interesting to speak about? Is there any type of breakthrough concept that will really revolutionize the way we think about computers, so to speak in hyperblasting marketing terms? No, there isn’t anything that could be labeled that way:

• a new version of Safari – which essentially incorporates the same eyecandy idea they developed for iTunes covers and then a few functions that aren’t surprising, rather something to be expected at some point in every browser: Top Sites and History search. They also remark pompously about the speed of their javascript engine — except everybody serious about browsers is optimising their js engines too. This obviously doesn’t include Microsoft, of course.
• a new version of QuickTime – oooh! including things that were only available for QuickTime Pro users. They probably noticed too many people running VLC which allows fullscreen without having to enter a serial number, and thought that was abominating. Hence they freed several functions from the Pro version, to avoid people using non-Apple software.
• basically the same Finder, Expose and Stacks ancient, unfinished and unpolished technology
• and compatibility with Microsoft Exchange, which will only ring a bell if you use such thing

They should rather be dispatched in a Software Update, but that would prove they have been playing with all games in the iPhone store and not doing their homework meanwhile. Funnily, what could really be interesting (64 bit support, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL) is hardly heard of. Even though, 64 bit support is not a new idea, GCD will only work if applications are recompiled to make use of it (as far as I understand) and OpenCL is pretty much the same.

I’m happy to read, though, that Snow Leopard won’t support PowerPC computers. That will force me to finally switch to Linux on my laptop when Mozilla stops providing updates for Firefox, for example. If that was an strategy for making people buy new computers for running their new operating system, it didn’t work here, sorry.

Bing? Bong!

The ‘new’ Microsoft search engine was unveiled not so long ago, and it already looks dated. I just tried it once, and performed an egosearch. Dissatisfied with the results, I decided it wasn’t worth to use it. And what’s about that image thing? Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Oh wait, there was an study comparing the effectiveness of bing vs google for ads; because it has that image, it helps balancing things in the page, I deduct. Very clever, except I don’t see ads (using Adblock) and hence that’s probably why it looked odd to me.

Conclusion: another maneuver for getting traffic and clicks. They don’t care at all about search engines or search quality.

WordPress 2.8

Now let’s have some nice stuff to compensate for the fair amount of ridiculousness above. WordPress 2.8 it’s out and working — I have actually updated the site some minutes ago. So far it seems to be working fine.

The update process was smoother than ever: the one click update process is something every other piece of software on earth should have. More relevant though is the fact that they have improved the Widgets area and specially, the API. I haven’t finished yet (for my tastes) the custom widgets I did for this site, and the new way of handling Widgets (by extending the WP_Widget class, instead of defining tons of functions) looks like it will help a lot for having cleaner and easier to follow code.

I don’t generally use other people’s themes but the ability of installing them right from the admin interface looks very slick. I also heard they were about to merge vanilla WordPress with WordPress MU in a future version; that’s going to be interesting too.

I finally found a use for twitter!

I went to the British Museum on Tuesday and found out that an sculpture that was there in the entrance past October when I last visited was missing. So I wondered where it was, but I needed to find out the name of it. Unfortunately there was no way I could find it searching the museum’s online catalog; even Google image search or Flickr didn’t help at all. In a desperate move, I decided to express my frustration in a tweet. And surprisingly, some minutes after, I got the answer, via another tweet by a member of the Portable Antiquities department at the Museum. I imagine he keeps an eye on tweets containing certain words (such as surprise, surprise… British Museum!), so it’s not like this is psychic science. It’s more like being in a giant chat room where some people keep an eye on certain words only. The Portable Antiquities guys also have a blog, just in case you want to have a look.

Damn geeks

First, we have a bit of a desperate cry by a certain Solomon Grundy:

Damn geeks. They’ve screwed up everything. They can’t even get something as simple as the Internet right. No wonder 70% of financial application are still coded in COBOL and don’t use the Internet as their primary avenue of communications.

from the comments at Adobe yanks speech exposing critical ‘clickjacking’ vulns. By the way, why do the Register guys have anchors for each individual comment, but do not show them? I had to use the very helpful Web Developer Toolbar once again for revealing anchors in the page (Information — Display anchors, just in case you need it). Damn geeks!

So yes, that’s quite serious. It seems there’s no way things can be done properly when the internet factor is in the mix. When in doubt, simply blame the Robustness principle: Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

Googleskepticism or just plain common sense?

Following the release of Google’s Chrome, one had the immediate feeling that it was going to be a big news — not only appearing at generalist media but even prompting our families to ask us about that new system Google has released for competing against Bill’s (literally). I wasn’t impressed at all by the G-move neither did feel immediately compelled to download and test it (besides my computer doesn’t run Windows anyway), so I just ignored the complete commotion. But it seems Ted Dziuba got a bit more irritated with all the publicity and media fueled bullshit and/or plain lies and simply ended up exploding:

I understand the argument that as web applications proliferate, the desktop operating system becomes less important, and emphasis is placed on the browser. That’s all well and good, but let’s be realistic here. It’s a fucking web browser. It runs JavaScript a bit faster than other web browsers. That doesn’t add up to a Windows killer.

[...]

People are calling Chrome a cloud operating system because it is a “platform for running web apps”. It renders HTML and interprets Javascript, you know, like every fucking browser made since 1995. It’s also got Google Gears built in. Great. I’ll alert Tim Berners-Lee.

(emphasis added by me)

He also notes the big amount of nonsense that Michael Arrington managed (once again) to produce for the occasion, with allusions to the new and upcoming hot keyword – cloud computing. I would suggest Ted –and any of you–, only one thing: do not read Techcrunch, for your own mental health.

On confusing people

Only two words: Microsoft SDL.

Why did they have to use an acronym which is so well established is something that I can’t understand. Furthermore, Microsoft SDL doesn’t stand up for anything remotely related to media or games. Do not even think they are ditching DirectX for the true SDL. In fact, their SDL is the deceptively boring acronym of Secure Development Lifecycle. Which, coming from Microsoft, absolutely deserves a place on the IT fun saga with a special award in the “Irony” category!