Since the Stargate series came off of hiatus, I've been enjoying the last season of "SG-1" and the third season of "Atlantis". Because of my cable woes, I haven't had access to the SciFi Channel for a while and I would regularly purchase "Galactica" episodes via iTunes. My plan was to do the same with the Stargate series.
Unfortunately, the iTunes Store has been very slow in uploading the new episodes and it got to the point where the store was falling behind as new episodes came out. In order to stay caught up, I began looking for other sources.
Some months ago, Amazon Unbox advertised their integration with Tivo devices. The gist is that you can buy the digital downloads on Amazon and they are automatically downloaded to the Tivo. It isn't an instant process, but it happens within a few hours.
Last week, I went ahead and purchased the shows on Amazon instead of iTunes. I arrived home and found that the episodes were on my Tivo and in pretty good quality. I didn't need to put them on the iPod and hook that up - everything worked well out of the box with my existing setup. I was very pleased and over the weekend, I ordered the latest episodes from Amazon.
I've been very satisfied with my experience and I'll probably continue using Amazon to watch the rest of the Stargate episodes. The only downside to the service is that the episodes cannot be transferred to other Tivos or to other devices. However, Amazon keeps track of the episodes seen and I believe that you can download them again, if need be. Since I plan on getting the Stargate episodes on DVD (to complete my collection), this isn't the worst thing in the world.
So, consider this post a hearty endorsement of Amazon's service.
I'm really enjoying "The Atrocity Archives". It's a mix of classic spy novel, cypherpunk, "Office Space", and Lovecraft. Some choice snippets:
The [Turing-Lovecraft] theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms -- translation: all your bank account are belong to us -- and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.
This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct -- except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe that we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of other universes are things that listen and talk back -- see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, etcetra. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics -- computerized or otherwise -- draws them forth. (And you thought that running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)
Oh, and did I mention that the inhabitants of those other universes don't play by our rule book?
And another:
"Is that a copy of Knuth?" She homes in on the top shelf. "Hang on -- volume four? But he only finished the first three volumes in that series. Volume four's been overdue for the past twenty years!"
"Yup." I nod, smugly. Whoever she's dating won't have anything like that on his shelves. "We -- or the Black Chamber -- have a little agreement with him; he doesn't publish volume four of The Art of Computer Programming, and they don't render metabolically challenged. At least, he doesn't publish it to the public; it's the one with the Turing Theorem in it. Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-Dimensional Summoning. This is a very limited edition -- numbered and classified."
If this book keeps up, it may find itself as one of my all-time favorites.
They say that no man is an island
And good things come to those who wait
But the things I hear are there just to remind me
Every dog will have his dayThe spirits, they intoxicate me
I watched them infiltrate my soul
They try to say it's too late for me
Tell my guns I'm coming homeI swear I'm gonna live forever
Tell my maker he can wait
I'm riding somewhere south of heaven
Heading back to Santa Fe
It's judgment day in Santa FeOnce I was promised absolution
There's only one solution for my sins
You gotta face your ghosts and know with no illusions
That only one of you is going home againAnd I blame this world for making a good man evil
It's this world that can drive a good man mad
And it's this world that turns a killer into a hero
Well I blame this world for making a good man badNow I ain't getting into heaven if the devil has his way
I swear I'm gonna live forever
Heading back to Santa Fe
Got debts to pay in Santa Fe
It's judgment day in Santa Fe
Lord have mercy[Guitar solo]
So I save a prayer when I need it most
To the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
And sign it from a sinner with no name
When I meet my maker
Will he close the book on the hearts I broke and the lives I took?
Will he walk away 'cause my soul's too late to save?Now I ain't getting into heaven
If the devil has his way
I swear I'm gonna live forever
Heading back to Santa Fe
Got debts to pay in Santa Fe
It's judgment day in Santa Fe
From Jon Bon Jovi's album "Blaze of Glory".
The estate of James Joyce has been accused for years of trying to intimidate Joyce scholars, especially those dealing with issues sensitive to the Joyce family. After English professor Carol Shloss was forced to cut important sections of a new book on Joyce's daughter Lucia because of worries that the estate would sue, she published the extra material on a web site as an "electronic supplement." She then took the Joyce estate to court, hoping to secure a declaratory judgment that certain primary source materials did not infringe on the Joyce copyright. After months of legal maneuvering, the Joyce estate backed down on March 19, and now Shloss wants attorneys' fees from them.
This is great news for anyone interested in a fair and equitable copyright system. In a nutshell, Prof. Shloss quoted James Joyce materials as part of her academic research and the Joyce estate threatened to sue her for unauthorized use of the dead author's writing while publishing her research findings.
I ran into this suit while researching the H.P. Lovecraft copyright situation last year. The shenanigans pulled by the Joyce estate are very similar to those exercised by Arkham House Press throughout the publishing house's history until recent years. In the decades after Lovecraft's death, Arkham House founders August Derleth and Donald Wandrei claimed exclusive control of Lovecraft's writings and when skeptics would ask for proof, the press would refuse to provide any documentation to support their claims. People wishing to publish Lovecraft were faced with a choice: call Arkham House's bluff (and spend the money on the accompanying litigation) or give up republishing HPL's work. What made the HPL situation somewhat absurd was that the Derleth estate claimed control of the materials in public, while strenuously arguing in court that the HPL materials were public domain in order to avoid paying royalties to Derleth's surviving partner. Sliminess all around...
What interests me about the present Joyce case is that like the estate of August Derleth, the estate of James Joyce was abusing its position to squelch legitimate and valid reuses of the contested material. I'm curious how often this occurs and we simply never hear about it.
And as an aside, I do have a whole paper written on the HPL situation. I'm not ready for wide public dissemination, but if you're interested in these kinds of issues, drop me a line and I can send you a link to the current version.
As the image on the right demonstrates, I'm firmly in the Apple camp when it comes to my computers. I was a Windows/Linux fan until I purchased a 550 MHz Titanium PowerBook using my undergraduate computer subsidy before I graduated college. It took me a while to become comfortable with how the Mac looked and felt, but after I became comfortable using iTunes, I was hooked.
That said, I am disappointed about today's announcement that the next version of MacOS X will be delayed until October. I've really been looking forward to the new release (codenamed "Leopard") on a variety of fronts and I am a bit annoyed that the delay is due in part to Apple using Leopard developers to push the iPhone out on time. (I have no plans to get an iPhone, so I'm understanably annoyed that something I want has been delayed by something I really don't care about.)
I kept convincing myself that while really no news about the new release's technology or features have been released since last summer's MacWorld, a spring or early summer release would be soon enough to make up for the intentional information deficit. Since Apple's making us wait until October for the new release, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to gripe and moan about two things that are currently driving me nuts within the Mac ecosystem.
1. Steve Jobs
I regularly go back and forth on my thoughts on Apple's CEO and whether he deserves the laurels that he receives. On one hand, I believe that the sheer force of his personality is responsible for wonderful things like well-designed and well-engineered software (NextStep / Cocoa) and hardware (MacBook / iPod), revolutionizing the music and movie business (iTunes Store), and generally raising the user experience bar for things like software, computer hardware, and consumer electronic devices.
On the other hand, I debate whether Jobs was necessary for these good things or whether he was at the right places at the right time. Jobs is neither an engineer nor a designer. I think that his effectiveness comes from being very effective at pushing engineers and designers to do their best. I think that this takes a very stubborn and egotistical personality to do this.
While Jobs egotism and stubbornness has resulted in good things, I'm beginning to wonder if it has been taken too far and is beginning to hurt the company and its relationships with developers and customers. As I mentioned before, little new non-NDA information has been released about what the new version of MacOS X will bring. Sure, we have the snazzy pages on Leopard, but in all honesty we see two major new user features (Time Machine and Spaces), two new developer features (Core Animation, Obj-C 2.0), and a whole host of minor tweaks to preexisting Apple applications. Apple itself realizes that this is meager, promising "Top Secret" new features that will be released at an unspecified later point in time. The simple fact of the matter is that Apple is stingy with releasing new information about the operating system and the major reason I speculate is that Jobs is simply unwilling to have the information released until he is on a stage in front of a crowd of adoring Mac fans.
At the last WWDC, Apple famously posted banners basically claiming that Microsoft's Vista was a MacOS X ripoff. Jobs joked on stage that they were keeping some features under wrap because they didn't want Redmond lifting them at the last minute for inclusion in Vista. Well, Vista has been out for a couple of months now. Is there really any decent reason for keeping everything under wraps now? (A cynic might speculate that some of the secret Leopard features might be as vaporous as WinFS.)
2. The slow death of the consistent Mac user interface
When I first began developing Cocoa applications, I loved that the tools I had were the same ones used by Apple and by using these tools (and their accompanying guidelines), I could create just as attractive and usable applications as the ones Apple shipped.
I don't know when this really became a problem, but since the release of Tiger, I have noticed that that as we get further from the last major OS release, the gulf between what Apple tells developers to do (as encoded in the latest releases of Xcode and the dated HIG) and what they ship themselves continues to grow. Pre-10.2, there was the Aqua interface for applications. 10.2 saw the release of the metal theme and widgets. 10.3 faded the pinstripes, and 10.4 introduced the option for unified title and toolbars. During these releases, Apple released a number of new applications and updates sporting new interface layouts, designs, and widgets. What was true in the "good old days" (independent developers were on the same UI field as Apple's developers) no longer holds. If I wanted to make an app that looked like Mail.app or iTunes, I'd be spending quite a bit of time creating custom controls for common widgets like splitview panes and text fields.
This trend wouldn't be annoying if there was some rhyme or reason for the proliferation of new Apple applications that violate the human interface guidelines (HIG), or of the HIG was updated occasionally to provide some explanation about the new looks and feels. However, neither is happening and because of this, one of the Mac's major advantages (user interface consistency) is disappearing as third party developer mimic Apple and release apps of their own that either try and follow Apple's examples or "innovate" beyond it. A great example of this is the much-hyped unreleased screen capture application Skitch. I'm sure that it is probably a decent application, but honestly to me it looks like a piece of Windows shareware. A less extreme example is Schoolhouse, a homework management application. It's a very nice and good looking piece of software, but a quick peek into the application bundle reveals a whole hell of a lot of custom widget graphics that the developer painstakingly put together so that his app looked something like the modern iLife programs. I speculate that the developer of this program spent more time in Photoshop creating his custom widgets and tweaking minor UI details than working on the underlying bits and logic that make his application unique and useful within the Mac platform.
To be completely honest, there is a valuable point that consistency isn't everything, but the amount of wheel reinventing that has been going on within the third party Mac developer community these days is depressing. What's the point of great tools like Interface Builder if Apple won't keep the widget pallet and UI guidelines up-to-date, and the developers feel compelled to reskin and reinvent basic widgets to produce modern-looking applications?
