*WEDDING.BLOG.LINK*

OSCAR.com - 77th Annual Academy Awards - Winners: THE INCREDIBLES

Some of you may remember that I felt poo-pooed when a big green ogre and his best-donkey-buddy took home the people's choice for best animated feature film a month ago (or something like that) and I predicted at that time that the Oscars would be different. And they were. Congrats to Pixar, et al.

UCSC Engineering Building Gets an 8bit Upgrade
I thought Morgan would really like this.

DrunkenBlog: Apple Computer founder and community speak on Tiger leak defendants

EVERYONE should know about this, and be talking about it, and providing feedback to Apple about what they think.
At least read the first few paragraphs and get the quote from Woz.

Numa Numa Dance - presented by Newgrounds.com

For those interwebbers among you who don't know what I'm referring to when I say "Numa Numa", go watch this video. It won't improve your life in any way, and you'll probably feel strange about the direction of humanity when it's over, but at least it will be over, and I will have successfully wasted a few minutes of your day - isn't that what the interweb is all about?

Great Pearl Jam tune that is very "contemporary Pearl Jam" but still reeks of old-skool PJ in every way possible. Especially the guitar solo (which reminds me of the "Go" guitar solo, which you all know I LOVE). Check it out when you get a chance.

Groupware Bad

Brilliant stuff. I will be reading this guy's stuff from now on for sure.

"...narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?"

iTunes Music Store (USA)
Okay everyone, the Daytona 500 is THIS WEEKEND, and to pump you up ahead of time, iTMS has released the Dale Earnhardt Jr. Playlist. Check it out and enjoy. (there's a few questionable tracks, but he has decent taste, and good on him for picking some Canadian content, including The Matthew Good Band (his old band) and Big Wreck (who are in a new incarnation called Thornley), and even some Gordon Lightfoot, if you can believe it)

I forgot to mention that I went to see a great band this weekend. I've been to see them twice now and I LOVED both shows. This one was good because they played all kinds of stuff (old and new) while the other show I saw was great because they were touring a record and I got to see all the stuff off that record played live.

Check out Tricky Woo for some great Canadian Rock (out of Montreal, no less). This time they did "I Found The Music", "Fly The Orient", and "Lady Of The Wind", among many others. (Although the show was WAY too short - maybe 45 mins long)

I think they're doing some type of reunion tour right now.

So yesterday I was having a problem figuring out what was going on with a particular bug I was dealing with.

There are two teams working on the project I work on. I went to see one of the guys on the other team to ask a couple questions and make use of their knowledge to get through the problem. I have had many good experiences with this type of approach (which I will refer to as the "Mom-as-dictionary" approach, in honour of moms (and dads, gosh darn it - it is 2005) all over the western world who patiently go about their day while their young kids repeatedly ask them and "How do you spell this?" and "How do you spell that?")

This particular visit to the other team, however, my questions were met with a cooler reception. Not harsh, but to the point - "You don't have your facts straight about this problem and I don't have time to waste doing your work". Which was totally fair.
It was sort of like when Mom gets tired of being the dictionary and says "Why don't you look it up?"

I spent some more time, slightly rattled, trying to figure out the problem on my own. It wasn't really going anywhere so I moved on to some other stuff. I came back to it this morning, dedicated to the resolution of this bug. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to be able to solve it without some confirmation from the guys on the other team (it's not really important that they're technically on another team than I am, except that they have knowledge of a part of the product that I don't - which is technically true about everyone working on the project anyway) so I set to work laying out every aspect of the problem in the most concise way possible. I've been watching a lot of police/court television lately (3 different CSIs, 3 different Law & Orders, DaVinci's Inquest... it's hard not to) and decided that I should totally go Jerry Orbach on this bug's virtual ass.

Anyway, through the process of laying out every piece of evidence on this bug for proper presentation to my counterpart on the other team, I noticed a small discrepancy in the original bug report - an errant "-" character!! It turns out this was the whole problem all along. 4 hours of work to find an errant "-".

But I've definitely grown up about this stuff. I learned more about our project, I learned more about how to properly diagnose a bug, and I learned more about what the guys on the other team need from me before they can help me out with my problems.

So, no more "Mom-as-dictionary" for me. From now on, I will put on my Jerry Orbach hat when I approach bugs. Actually a cross of Jerry and Snoopy.
"But i, somehow, some way, Keep comin up with funky ass shit like every single day"

• 1 - THIS is awesome.


• 2 - A funny thing happened to me this morning. I picked up my toothbrush (to brush my teeth) and fumbled with it groggily - before I knew it the ill-fated brush was tumbling through the air, across my bathroom, and landed squarely, brush part down, in the very center of my toilet bowl. Luckily I had a spare waiting to be called out from the bull-pen from the last time I went to the dentist. Funny eh?


posted by JD @ 2/09/2005 03:05:00 p.m.  | 0 comments |

LG begins selling thin-CRT TV - Engadget - www.engadget.com

I can't wait for these things. I think they're a great solution. Larger and lighter than ever, almost as thin as plasma models, almost as cheap as traditional CRT models, and best of all, AS bright and crisp and fast as traditional CRTs... The only thing I don't like/understand is how come these things weren't being built 5 years ago?

Play Tetris on a building in France using your cellphone - Engadget - www.engadget.com Do I really have to say any more?

"This Feels Like Crap!"
Lindsay asked Morgan a while ago about how I respond when people question my left-leaning, hippy, communist, Mac ways. Why do I like Apple's stuff better, or why would I buy an Apple when *this* and *this* and *this other thing* are pretty much known to be true...

Anyway, I've been thinking about this question for a long time, and I have much more to say on the subject than this post will allude to, but this article hints at what, I think, is the root of the idea. Which is that I feel like Apple actually cares about me. I feel like they do things just for me. I feel like when they make the iPod's headphone jack click "just so", not only did they do it on purpose, but they did it for me. I certainly don't feel like the designers had me in mind when they made the Dell QuietKey I use at work, or when they came up with the idiotic menu-hiding thing that Windows does.... I could go on for hours - with some examples from outside the realm of computing, by the way.

The point is, with Apple stuff, the experience is king, in all it entails. Kind of refreshing, don't you think.

I was just reading an interesting article, and listening to some good music, when I had an interesting idea. the article's point #9 made me think about how airlines have been really stupid the last few years.

Sales start going down. Why? Probably because people just plain old don't need to travel around as much anymore. People finally trust e-mail, and have even found ways to do it in a relatively secure way. People can chat instantly using common, free applications with a wide array of features such as file transfers and realtime AV feeds. These were pretty much all invented for people to use personally (mainly with college kids in mind I think - like Napster) but businesses are using these technologies like mad right now. Businesses don' t need to spend thousands of dollars a day to keep their people on the road because they can do more/most of their work sitting at home.

Wouldn't it have been great to see airline companies, who have been trying to convince us for the last 50 years that are not in fact "Air Transportation" companies but more like "People Connecting/Impact-Of-Geography Reducing" companies with a knack for making our business easier and more comfortable... wouldn't it have been amazing if they had seen that the rise of the internet basically would equal less air travel, and have all those airline companies start delivering on their promise of connecting people and geogrphies by building networked business applications, and providing video conferencing facilities (possibly at their gigantic airports to start), and maybe even becoming ISPs, in an effort to embrace a business problem they 'claimed' to already understand better than anyone else, rather than clinging to their old styles of operation and praying that the air-transport lasts forever.

By the way, I think this approach I'm talking about could have allowed a company like, say Air Canada to keep their traditional non-low-cost carrier model for the air business they still would have, and would have even left enough room for the low-cost carriers to grow-up in pretty much the same way they did over the past 5-10 years. (because companies like Air Canada don't really care about low-cost air travel)

I think the failure of Air Canada to even survive, and the struggling air transportation business all over the world points out the basic point that the strategy of "cling to the past and hope we're okay" is not going to cut it for airlines anymore.

The sad part is that with their gigantic businesses behind them, they could quickly and easily invent, build, and become the biggest player in this new "business liason" market. As it stands, I think for a long time this market will simply not exist, and then some tech companies will do it terribly, and then someone will do it properly. Finally. And most of the airlines will be out of business.

In addition to all the stuff from Part I, there is still the issue of backwards compatibility to think about.

And though it's never been an issue for console systems before, I think this time around it will DEFINITELY be important. This is a problem the PC industry has been dealing with for at least 10 years now. Especially in the last 5. The problem with the PC industry is, "we have all this new technology - new chips, new OS ideas, new interface paradigms, new network paradigms or implementations (IPv6 anyone?) - now how do we get everyone to forget that we just convinced them to buy a system at 200% margin LAST YEAR, and get them to throw that all away and buy all this new stuff?" All real PC people want everything to move to RISC chips, get rid of the legacy of PS/2 and parrallel ports and serial ports and floppy disks and PCI and ISA busses, move on from the original desktop metaphor, (popular) existing filesystems suck, mice suck, qwerty keyboards suck, traditional aspect ratio monitors suck (thank you Apple for stunning 16:9) but no one wants to move on.

I think it was an extremely good move for Sony to allow compatibility between their PSX games and their newer PS2 system. A brilliant move.

I think they will make the PS3 be able to play existing PS2 AND PSX games, but instead of playing them natively (as the PS2 does) it will emulate the PS2 and play the old games that way (thanks to these awesome new CELL processors).

XBox will not be backwards compatible if Microsoft can help it. As a company, it goes against the very core of their business philosophy. Never give away something for nothing - I will expect them to do something like selling an "XBox Classic" in a smaller case (like the PSOne).

Nintendo has NEVER done backwards compatibility before. Until GBA, that is. I love that the cube's games are on 3-inch discs instead of 6-inchers. I think it would be a really really big mistake for Nintendo to go ahead with the Revolution and have it NOT play GameCube games. A BIG mistake. As in, it could be something that Nintendo could never truly recover from if it turns out that they make the wrong move on this issue.

Don't get me wrong here though, folks. I think that pretty much the only thing holding the PS2 in there right now is that it got such a head start by being PSX compatible. The XBox would be pretty much dead if it weren't for a few hits (Halo anyone?) and it's amazing XBox-Live setup. The real innovation in the market right now is almost entirely all in Nintendo's platform, and it's mainly in the GBA arena, though GameCube is having some great stuff come out too. Most of which is being built by Nintendo themselves.

Again, don't get me wrong - I think they're all great systems that do their own things very well. That's what's kept them all alive for the past three years - they found three unique approaches to gaming that all had fairly large audiences. I just hope they can all three carve out thier own niche in this next round as well and keep the competition going.

So last night I had a chat with my woman about video games - and it allowed me to sort out some of my thoughts leading up to E3 (which I think is in May - pardon my ignorance)

Anyway, here's what's up.

Nintendo has been saying for quite some time now that they are going to be at E3 with their a new console system - rumored to be called the "Revolution".

Recently Sony committed to showcasing their new system, the PlayStation 3 at E3 this year as well. Not to be outdone, Microsoft followed suit the same day.

So now we've got all three major players in the next round of console gaming showing up at E3 THIS YEAR.

While this may not seem significant (after all, these things seem to happen in "generations" with all systems being of approx equal power and being available at approx the same time) I think this will be a very significant happening.

What's most notable from the outside is the technology. Sony's intent with the PS2 was to create a machine that would not be surpassed in power for quite some time, so that it could enjoy the same type of longevity it did with the PSX. I forgot what the interval was, but in something like a year after the PS2 was released, the XBox came out, essentially bringing PC gaming (hard drive saving and memory swapping, PC style busses and memory architectures and graphics systems) making development fast (because let's face it, these things are developed using PCs, so it makes sense that the closer to PCs you make your system, the less work there is in "transcribing" it, whatever form that might take) and making the PS2 old news in terms of capabilities.
So now Sony's pissed. They very quickly got something going with IBM and Toshiba and created the Cell Processor to make every other type of console technology obsolete, and make Sony the crown jewel of gaming technology once again.

And then Microsoft signed up to buy ~50 million of them (Cell processors). As I understand it.

So the XBox Next and the PS3 are both going to be based on this new Cell technology, which has the potential to not only change gaming technology (which it will surely do) but also to change many other types of technology as well. (the article linked to above suggests that it may take over as the dominant PC processor - scary!)

Meanwhile, Nintendo says that Sony and Microsoft are going at this the wrong way. They say that more/faster processing and greater capability is not the way to add value to the gaming experience (which is pretty much what Sony is up to, and DEFINITELY what the XBox guys are going for)

Nintendo says that the future of gaming is all about incorportating NEW elements to the experience, not simply making the same experience we've already got go faster and look more real. That is the philosophy that begat the second screen on the DS that is also a touch screen - that thing will have many many uses, and is a great example of incorporating existing technology into the gaming experience in ways that haven't been explored before. One of the things I've heard about the revolution is that the controllers will be motion sensitive!