venomous porridge

“MOM! BETHANY WON’T LET ME PLAY DOODLE...

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:20:39 -0400

“MOM! BETHANY WON’T LET ME PLAY DOODLE JUMP!”

“Play your own games, Bradley. And let your sister finish her homework.”

Bradley kicked at the banister railing at the top of the stairs and stomped off to his room, flung himself onto his bed. So unfair, he fumed. Bethany gets all the cool games. Bethany gets to have an iPhone 4 and all I get is a stupid iPod touch which doesn’t even have a Retina Display or a three-axis solid-state gyroscope. Bradley had a tendency to memorize WWDC keynotes.

He kicked off his sneakers and stared at the wall, frustration turning acid in his mouth. If only his dad hadn’t used Restrictions to disable purchases on his iPod. If only he hadn’t gotten in trouble for buying that thousand-dollar “I Am Rich” app two years ago when Tony from across the street had dared him to. If only Doodle Jump were free. So many if-onlies.

Wait. Bradley sat up straight, his nine-year-old mind just clutching at the edge of an idea. A moment later he was down the hall, banging on Bethany’s door.

“I already said no, Bradley. Go away.”

“I’m scared.”

There was a pause, then he heard his sister getting up and walking to the door. A moment later she was looking down at him. “What are you scared of, Bradley?”

“I’m scared that Mom and Dad are going to die someday.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes, but she opened the door all the way. “Come sit down.” He ran in and climbed onto her desk chair. His legs dangled.

“What brought this on?” she asked, sitting on the bed.

He glanced over her desk, noticing the open math book and the iPhone next to it, running what looked like PCalc. “I dunno. I was just thinking about stuff, and remember how Mr. Pauletti had that scuba diving accident last year and now Tony doesn’t have a dad? I don’t want that to happen to us.”

His sister looked at the floor. Uh oh. I went too far. “Well, Mr. Pauletti wasn’t being careful, remember? He antagonized that stingray. Everybody knows you’re not supposed to antagonize stingrays. Dad taught us that at the aquarium, remember? So you don’t have to worry about him.”

“I guess.” He looked over at Bethany’s iPhone again. On TV the good guy always waits for just the right moment to grab the bad guy’s gun and bend his arm behind his back. But how does he know when it’s the right moment?

“And Mom is never going to let him go scuba diving anyway. Not now.”

“But what if Mom dies?” He pulled the chair a little closer to the desk.

“Mom’s not going to die.”

“But she might, and then there won’t be anyone to tell Dad that he shouldn’t go scuba—”

“MOM’S NOT GOING TO DIE, OKAY?” Bethany was crying. When did she start crying? She buried her face in her sleeve.

Now.

Bradley pounced on the iPhone and fled the room, earbuds trailing behind him, barely noticing his sister’s startled yelp. He made it back to his own room and locked the door just in time.

“BRADLEY! OPEN THIS DOOR!” She was still crying as she pounded.

Quickly he turned his attention to the purloined iPhone 4, taking only a moment to marvel for the dozenth time at the precision of its construction. Steve was right: it’s just like an old Leica camera. Home key, App Store, Search. Come on… there it is. Write A Review.

“BRADLEY! I’M NOT KIDDING!”

His thumbs danced across the onscreen keyboard, paying no attention to spelling — there was AutoCorrect for that — or proper capitalization. This was his one chance. “Make it count,” he said aloud as he typed out the exclamation point, the question mark, the second exclamation point, the second question mark, the third, the fourth, the fifth. No. That’s too many. Backspace. Just right.

The hallway was quiet. Had she given up? He listened for a moment, then heard what he had feared: two pairs of footsteps coming up the stairs. Bethany’s and… Mom’s? Worse: Dad’s. Oh no.

He had just enough time to add a postscript. But there was still something missing. Of course: a cute animal emoji. But which one?

The footsteps rounded the landing. They were almost at his door. No time to choose. All of them.

He heard the doorknob rattle, followed by a muffled swear. Then a scraping sound, which must have been his father feeling for the emergency key they kept on the molding above the door.

Octopus. Fish. The key sliding into the keyhole. Another fish. Whale. A soft click. Dolphin. Send.

It was done.

The door flew open. The rage was plain in his father’s eyes. Shaking, Bradley handed over Bethany’s iPhone. The door closed again. He was alone.

Whatever punishment was coming, it could never be as awful as the silence that preceded it.

But this time, he didn’t mind. In a few days, Doodle Jump will be free.

And so will I.

(via @stroughtonsmith)

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:32:01 -0400

(via @stroughtonsmith)

merlin: Them - “Gloria” (1966) By age 21, Van Morrison...

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:53:58 -0400

merlin:

Them - “Gloria” (1966)

By age 21, Van Morrison already looked permanently angry and 50.

I’m no Robert Christgau or anything, but this seems relevant.

QUIZ: Can you put off trimming your beard for another day?

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:19:12 -0400

Do you work exclusively from home?
A. No
B. Yes

SCORE YOURSELF

If you answered A. to Question 1: Ha ha ha ha ha maybe.
If you answered B. to Question 1: LIVE FREE, NOBLE SAVAGE

Photo

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:03:10 -0400

I posted this photo here over a year ago, but that was in the...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:09:37 -0400

I posted this photo here over a year ago, but that was in the dark days before Pic Pick. So for “Panorama,” here’s a panorama I shot of the Wake Forest University campus, merged from 26 exposures and rendered in polar coordinates.

“Social Media Marketing Consultant” Connects Blog to...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:00:00 -0400

“Social Media Marketing Consultant” Connects Blog to Twitter, Twitter to Blog, Inadvertently Creates Reputation-Destroying Black Hole
Webcock Sucked into Vortex from Which No Credibility Escapes

(via Mark Dalrymple)

I have a sister and she thinks she’s funny.

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:26:20 -0400

I have a sister and she thinks she’s funny.

Can someone explain this to me? Use small words because I...

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:44:00 -0400

Can someone explain this to me? Use small words because I don’t understand things.

Louie is a fantastic show, and I want to do everything I can to help it. But if I watch Louie on TV, which I can’t do because I don’t have cable but never mind, if I watch it the normal way, no one finds out, right? I’m not a Nielsen family. I’m not helping keep the show on the air.

But if I TiVo it, TiVo gets to report that fact — not to mention whether and when I watched it, and how many times — in their aggregate viewership statistics. If I Hulu it, Hulu and the network both get paid, royalties and ad revenue change hands, and I count as one more viewer on that medium. If I buy a season pass from iTunes, there’s no way that’s not getting counted somewhere because hell, I’m paying for it.

Can it really be true that none of that makes any difference? Do people who demonstrate the most affection for a show by buying it directly — or even just by recording every episode so they can’t possibly miss one — do those people’s opinions count the least, just because they aren’t tuning in live and filling out stupid mail-in surveys with dopey No. 2 pencils?

Or have I got it all wrong, and the television industry is actually not as fucked up as this tweet makes it seem?

When you got up this morning, you had no idea that today would...

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:00:47 -0400

When you got up this morning, you had no idea that today would be the day you finally stopped wondering what it would look like if a four-dimensional dude chucked a pineapple at you.

(source: Inside insides)

In response to my latest screed about Steam, Faruk Ateş...

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:16:32 -0400

In response to my latest screed about Steam, Faruk Ateş wrote:

On the other hand, Valve’s first data from having Steam on Mac showed that it was already 5x as stable as Windows for Steam. Seems this is just early-stage growing pains; just make sure to bug-report it and give them some time, I’d say.

Well, that’s a possibility. But I think a stronger possibility is that this problem and all the others I’ve written about are an inevitable result of Valve having used a compatibility layer to develop Steam for Mac.

The job of a compatibility layer is to abstract the underlying system so that it’s less work to write code that runs on more than one platform. Your code says to the layer, for example, “Show an alert,” and the layer translates that request into the platform-specific code that displays an alert on whichever system it happens to be running on. Ideally.

But Steam’s compatibility layer seems to operate on a different level of abstraction from that. Instead of using OS X’s native alerts, menus, buttons, and so forth, it’s drawing them all on its own, and handling all the user interaction outside of the facilities the OS provides. Steam for Mac’s alerts aren’t normal OS X alerts; they’re just windows. Rather than allowing OS X to handle the modal behavior — which would automatically work right when, for example, a backgrounded app displays an alert — Steam’s compatibility layer just creates a window and then tries to enforce the modality on its own, which it does poorly.

What’s potentially worse is that this “faked” user interface can’t take advantage of any of the features real UIs on the Mac get for free, and which experienced users have come to expect. For example, the standard keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor in a Mac OS text field don’t work, because Steam isn’t using standard text fields. And in other Mac apps, every word in every window is automatically accessible to vision-impaired users by way of VoiceOver, a text-to-speech tool built into OS X. But with Steam’s fake alerts, this fails, because VoiceOver can’t access the text. Play the above audio clip to hear VoiceOver trying to make sense of one of Steam’s error messages.

Compatibility layers are flawed precisely because of the abstraction that makes them appealing. Because they’re cross-platform, they can support only the bare-minimum subset of features that are common to each platform. They can’t provide the same level of control and sophistication that you could achieve by writing native code because the whole point is to keep you from having to write native code. But it’s precisely in that native code that good software excels. So by choosing to use a compatibility layer, you’re signing up to write mediocre software.

The process of building good software is that of making a million tiny decisions. Any reasonably sophisticated app will contain custom user interface elements; the challenge is integrating those custom elements in a sensible way with the rest of the platform. It’s a delicate balance between creating a powerful UI and one that doesn’t defy user expectation, and to achieve that there are no shortcuts. You need experience with the platform, and you need a kind of empathy that can’t be achieved by a piece of generic middleware.

That’s where Steam falls down, and I don’t see it getting up again anytime soon.

I try not to be negative all the time. On this blog I try for a...

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:13:17 -0400

I try not to be negative all the time. On this blog I try for a ratio of something like 60% negativity, 30% nerdiness, 10% erotic Bratz fanfiction.¹ And I’ve already harped on the deficiencies of Steam for Mac. But I’ve just had one of the most astoundingly bad software experiences I can remember, so indulge me.

I decided to terminate some unneeded applications to free up memory on my MacBook Pro. Steam was running, hidden, so I right-clicked its Dock icon and chose Quit. But I had forgotten that Loom was also running, its window also hidden.

Apparently it’s a no-no to quit Steam while a game is running. But it also turns out that Steam is unprepared for the possibility that it might receive a Quit command while in the background. Here’s what happened next:

Steam un-hid itself and (I soon discovered) displayed a modal alert reminding me to exit Loom first.
However, Steam failed to come to the foreground so I could see or click that alert.
Clicking on the piece of the Steam window that was peeking out from behind other windows failed to bring Steam to the front, presumably because the modal alert was blocking all other clicks on Steam’s UI.
Meanwhile, Steam began playing a chime — not the beep that I had selected in my system preferences, but its own alert sound — continuously and at full volume.
I finally moved the other windows out of the way and found the modal alert, but its OK button wouldn’t respond to clicks.
Neither would Loom.
Steam crashed.

Awesome, right? There’s more. I quit Loom manually, then relaunched Steam just to make sure everything was OK. But since Steam had crashed, it wasn’t running when I quit Loom, so it thought Loom was still running. From then on, whenever I tried to launch a game — any game — it would instead show the alert pictured above.

Rebooting fixed it. But that’s an unacceptable solution. Normal interaction should never cause good software to destabilize itself to the point of requiring a reboot.

It’s clear by this point that Steam is not good software. Until today, I had put up with its problems because Valve’s games were so worthwhile. But I think this experience has crossed a line with me, and now I feel like a fool for ever supporting them.

Premium content: subscribe today! ↩

Now cough. (via awkwardstockphotos)

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 12:31:18 -0400

Now cough.

(via awkwardstockphotos)

Apple Offers Free Cat Sweaters to Address iPad Issue

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:40:00 -0400

CUPERTINO , Calif. — Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Apple, acknowledged Friday that the company’s iPad 3G posed some health risks for cats when users placed the device on top of their cats and then sat on the device, but said the same problems affected all tablet computers and had been widely exaggerated by the media.

“This has been blown so out of proportion that it is incredible,” Mr. Jobs said at a veterinary conference at the company’s headquarters.

In the past weeks, reports emerged that some cat owners had experienced diminished life-expectancy of their pets when using the iPad in certain positions, most notably the “feline death squat.” Isolated incidents of furniture stains and thigh lacerations were also reported, prompting a “Don’t Buy” recommendation from Cat Fancy, despite the magazine’s earlier endorsement of the touchscreen device as the top-rated feline seating accessory currently on the market.

Only one in 200 buyers has called the company to complain about squashed cat issues, Mr. Jobs said, adding “and presumably those users live in an area of low feline skeletal integrity. Or they’re just fat.”

Mr. Jobs said that to put the problems behind it, Apple would give free Teflon-coated sweaters — cases that wrap around the cat’s body and make it easier for the animal to slip out from underneath — to all iPad buyers who want them. But critics are skeptical, observing that the sweaters make it difficult to hold or stroke their pets, and some have reported mixed results when trying to fry eggs on the non-stick surface of a besweatered cat.

Mr. Jobs conceded that the iPad 3G had a slight increase in flattened cats over the iPad Wi-Fi, but said that the increase was minimal and that he believed it was because of the added weight due to the 3G radio. Wrapping the cat in a sweater solves the problem.

“The data supports the fact that the iPad is magical and revolutionary,” Mr. Jobs said. “And there is no ‘Cuddlesgate.’ There is a challenge to the entire industry to improve cat-flattening performance.”

Pianotable. Pianotable? Yes, pianotable. Some people might say...

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:48:01 -0400

Pianotable.

Pianotable? Yes, pianotable.

Some people might say this is a terrible piano because it doesn’t have pedals, or that it will sound awful because it lacks exposed speakers (yeah it’s digital), or that you won’t be sitting at the right height to play it comfortably when you’re at the right height to eat off of it, so you’ll have to buy adjustable dining chairs.

Some other people might say that it’s a terrible table because it requires you to drape a power cord across your dining room floor, and because you can’t spill anything on it ever.

Those people can all suck it. For just triple the price of a good piano plus a good table, you can get both a terrible table and a terrible piano in one. Why? Because shut up. It’s design!

Oh for chrissakes.

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:27:00 -0400

Oh for chrissakes.

I just noticed that today’s Pic Pick theme is...

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:12:04 -0400

I just noticed that today’s Pic Pick theme is “Furry!” so here’s a woolly aphid.

strutting: via Chockenberry, the damage record companies have...

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:16:33 -0400

strutting:

via Chockenberry, the damage record companies have wrought on the Rolling Stones masterpiece Exile on Main Street. LET’S MAKE EVERYTHING LOUDER YEAH THATLL SOUND GREAT …

… buncha jerks.

Wow.

What’s going on here is that in remastering (top soundwave), the audio has been distorted (via compression and amplification) so much that basically everything is the same volume. There’s no dynamic range; every instant of sound is now at peak loudness. One of the greatest recordings of all time has been made harsh, dull, and tiring to listen to because record company executives want it to sound “loud.”

It’s hard to tell from this graphic, but it looks like there may even be some clipping going on. See where the waveform is flattened against the top and bottom of the window? That’s audio data being amplified to the point of becoming indistinguishable noise. Normally when this happens, it’s a mistake: some piece of equipment is turned up too loud, overdriving the thing it’s plugged into. You turn it down, the clipping goes away. But when the clipping is part of the recording, it just sounds like dogshit at every volume level, forever.¹

I’ll be keeping my non-remastered, non-ruined copy, thanks.

Wayback Machine link because the original, classic Rip Rowan article seems to have disappeared. ↩

Judge OKs iPhone class action against Apple, AT&T

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:16:00 -0400

Judge OKs iPhone class action against Apple, AT&T:

marco:

[many excellent points snipped]

How did this suit get past a judge?

It’s important to understand that the judge hasn’t ruled on the merits of any of the plaintiffs’ claims. That will happen later, when the motion for summary judgment is litigated. This step is called class certification.

All that’s happened so far is a judge has agreed with the plaintiff that:

if their claims are true, they have a case and the firm representing them is capable of prosecuting it,
the case would be best handled as a class action, and
the named plaintiffs — the individuals who actually brought the suit — are sufficiently representative of the proposed class.

One of the next steps will be a motion for summary judgment, in which the plaintiffs actually will have to show that their case isn’t full of baloney, and that it should proceed to a full trial. This will probably take months, but if their claims are all as empty as Marco suggests, then the case will likely not survive that motion. But the class had to be certified first, because according to this ruling my amazing wife found in about 30 seconds (PDF link):

In the Ninth circuit, “district courts generally do not grant summary judgment on the merits of a class action until the class has been properly certified and notified.” Schwarzschild v. Tse, 69 F.3d 293, 295 (9th Cir. 1995)

It’s also worth mentioning that while, as Marco points out, many of the claims concern things that all U.S. carriers or manufacturers are guilty of, that’s not necessarily relevant. Has anyone in this jurisdiction sued a phone manufacturer over carrier locking before, or a carrier over hardware exclusivity? Given the opportunity, a court may very well find those acts to be in violation of antitrust law. But someone has to bring a case before we can know, and this just might be that case.

OK, actually that is pretty clever.

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:45:00 -0400

OK, actually that is pretty clever.