Oh no, it’s Hallowe’en again. Note how I don’t say ‘All Hallows Eve’, because it’s become a commercialised nonsense like Christmas in the past few years - thanks to eggs, flour, and trick-or-bloody-treat. I’ve barricaded my house up, and I fully expect them to be covered in pre-birth free range chicken by the morning.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Mac Users Get a Blue Screen of Death
I just can’t help but laugh here… haha! Ooh, the irony.
Except there is a difference between Windows’s and Leopard’s BSOD - the Leopard BSOD appears to be caused by third-party hacks to the OS causing it to hang at the login screen. Windows’s BSOD is generally caused by a kernel problem.
Even though Leopard is a UNIX-based OS, and therefore designed to be hacked from the ground up, you can’t stop automatic installers making errors. This is why whenever I install a new OS, I always do a clean install and then import my data back afterwards.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Intellectual property my foot
The content providers are always telling us what a genuine threat to society copyright infrigement is. The MPAA says, on its anti-piracy page:
Movie pirates are thieves, plain and simple. Piracy is the unauthorized taking, copying or use of copyrighted materials without permission. It is no different from stealing another person’s shoes or stereo, except sometimes it can be a lot more damaging.
Rubbish. The technology being used by the MPAA to peddle this nonsense wouldn’t have existed if people hadn’t shared or ‘borrowed’ ideas from others. In fact, a lot of movies the MPAA claims to be protecting from copyright infringement seem to have copied ideas from others. Look at Finding Nemo - this was soon followed by rather rubbish clones such as Ice Age, Over the Hedge and others. Eragon seems to be an amalgamation of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and with a handsome, hunky lead character thrown in to attract the ladies (although, to be fair, it was adapted from a book). The film, in recent years, seems to have become something of a box-ticking exercise.
Intellectual property abuse has made headlines on this blog, and I doubt that is the only time it will. I mean, the ridiculous way people can be sued just for playing music or a video beggars me beyond belief.
The thing is, it seems not to be the artistes or the film-makers who demand all this DRM and protection of their work. In fact, they recieve relatively little money compared to the directors of the big companies who distribute the work. This is why some musicians dump the record labels and start distributing their songs themselves. They often find that, while only distributing around one tenth of the CDs, they make more than ten times the profit they made from the songs when they were at the record company.
Also, quite often, the artistes will not care much for copyright. Take Michael Moore, director of Farenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine and the excellent Sicko. He was quoted by MTV as saying:
I’m just happy that people get to see my movies…I’m not a big supporter of copyright laws in this country…I don’t understand filmmakers…who oppose sharing, having their work being shared by people, because it only increases your fanbase…I’ve always been happy in the past when teenagers have downloaded pirated copies of my movies…They’ve been downloading them and they’ve been sharing them, and I think that’s great.
In my opinion, there needs to be a change of ethos in the recording industry. People seem to see artistic works as money-spinning opportunities. Mr Moore (and many others) see them as what they are - work they’ve put their heart and souls into.
I myself would be more happy if I made a film that I didn’t make a penny out of, but all five million people who saw it loved it, than if I’d made a film that I could retire thanks to but was overall generally dull and boring.
And again, I come back to the fact that most of the profit from these films, books, songs and software programs seems to go straight into the company director’s pocket. It’s insane.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Build your own spaceship!
It’s 50 years since Sputnik I, the first man-made object to intentionally go into space, was launched. And, the BBC is challenging you to build your own ‘Sputnik emulator’ using a Tomy baby monitor, a biscuit tin, a wireless router, a desk fan, a balloon, a battery pack and a mercury thermometer.
I reckon you can do far better than that…
Mac OS X’s Showoff Mode
Whenever Steve Jobs introduces a new feature at an Apple keynote, he takes great pleasure in showing us the whizzy animation effect in slow-mo. For example, when he revealed the Dock for the first time, he kept the audience amused for practically minutes by slowing down the minimize effect, and watching the window slide itself into the dock, before springing back out again.
Of course, this can make a great party trick. By pressing the shift key while initiating it, it will slow down the effect. I know this works on
- Minimizing windows and restoring them
- Exposé
- The dashboard
- Expanding stacks on Leopard
It may work on other things, but the main concern is that it makes a great party trick.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
The NEW Crashed Pips shop
Thanks to the wonderful people at Amazon.co.uk, we’ve now got our own little shop! It’s not much, but I’ll try to add to it over time. And the idea behind it is that when I start my incoherent screaming about how wonderful x book was, you can see what all the fuss is about and decide for yourself.
But, just to do some housekeeping, this will NOT, in any way, affect this blog’s stance as far as technology goes. I’ll be including most things I review or talk about in the shop, regardless of whether or not they’re any good, or even vaguely relevant.
And either way, no blog is complete without a little shop. Well, in my opinion anyway.
Happy shopping!
Minor facelift in progress
Crashed Pips will be undergoing a minor, gradual redesign over the next few days. Visually, things will stay very much the same, but there’ll probably be a new feature or section of the site (speculation welcome) and some new header images. It’s been ages since I’ve done one of those.
There should be zero downtime, but there may be construction barriers in certain places (for example, there may be a bit of mess and a few error messages as some PHP code is fiddled with and chmods are forgotten). Either way, when they come around, I hope you like them.
A Car Alarm For Your Laptop
I really like this idea. Put simply, you use your MacBook’s remote to ‘lock’ the computer. Then, when the motion sensors built into the machine sense movement (these are normally used to slow down the drives when the machine’s turned on its side) an alarm goes off, and the iSight camera takes a picture of the intruder.
Genius.
How deep and probing the British people are
I was mildly amused to find, that on a day that can hardly be categorised as ’slow news’, with stories such as Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan, the Liberal Democrat leadership race, Iran’s nuclear negotiator resigning, a paedophile being captured by Interpol, and prisons overcrowding, that this is what the ‘Most read stories’ box on the BBC News website looked like at around 2:20pm today.
How deep, probing, intelligent and big-thinking are we? :shock:
Friday, October 19, 2007
Your Phone Is A Computer. So is your toaster, your alarm clock…
Steve Jobs has announced that the iPhone will be getting its own SDK by February. Why is it taking so long, you may ask? Well, there’s a very simple explanation for that, which I can do best by quoting from Steve’s press release.
It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.
This surprised me - I thought the fact that the iPhone is effectively a programmable computer was widely known, and that if it’s a programmable computer, it’s automatically susceptible to viruses.
Obviously, I was wrong.
These days, computers are everywhere. They’re in your toaster (for controlling how brown you want the toast), in your TV (for decoding the digital signals), in your alarm clock (to allow for complex alarm patterns), and, thanks to the wonders of RFID, in your drink can, in your clothes, in your DVD, and so on.
Now, by and large, these chips are safe (except for RFID, which I will go into at a later date) because they have no external input unless the devices are physically disassembled and then connected to an input device. And the virus can’t spread unless there’s a connection between the machines, either physical or wireless. Mains power doesn’t count.
However, a phone makes things more complicated. This is because a phone communicates with other phones (through the GSM cell network) and, in cases, to normal personal computers (when accessing WAP web sites, and when using Bluetooth).
Because these phones are programmable using the same languages as computers (Java in particular), this makes phones susceptible to viruses in Java. If a virus is written in the iPhone SDK language (which I would assume will be Carbon or Cocoa, Mac OS X’s main programming languages), then it can easily infect the phone and others around it (if it’s programmed to spread).
The only ways to stop these viruses are to close the platform entirely (using only the manufacturer’s apps) or to build safeguards into the programming language (or SDK in this case). That is what Apple are quite rightly doing.
But, in the end, the bottom line is… you can’t escape the computer.