Author Archives: daniel

New iTunes stores

iPod (from apple.com)Apple has opened new iTunes stores in… Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with a free track for every Swiss citizen. (Großmutter! Schnell! Was ist Ihr voller Name und Geburtsdatum?)

And Australia? Well The Register says It was claimed this week that only major label troubles prevented the company from opening ITMS Australia last month as planned. Damn labels.

Meanwhile Apple continues to dominate in sales of music players, with new stats showing the iPod Shuffle has more than half of the US flash player market, and iTunes recently sold its 350 millionth song download.

All this is good news for the continued availability of non-copy-protected music. While Apple continues to sell and support MP3, but not WMA, and remains dominant in sales of hardware, MP3 will remain strong.

I don’t want a music format that’s copy protected. I don’t want to pay for music and have it die with my player. Like CDs, it has to last (I’ve got 17 year old discs that are still going strong) and be copyable, so I can move the music onto whatever the Next Great Device for my music is — whether it be a replacement iPod when my battery eventually gives up, or some other new and shiny device in a few years when the iPod seems old and clunky.

Though of course, in Australia at present, even just ripping your CDs to MP3 is illegal.

PS. 11pm. Actually I should probably use iTunes Store before blessing Apple too much, since there seems to be a lot of rumbling about whatever DRM they use.

Firefox critical vulnerability

Firefox - Safer, faster, betterWith Firefox trumpeting itself as “Safer, faster, better” it’s fashionable to think of the product as being inherently safer than its opposition (primarily IE). It’s not. Mozilla has acknowledged a major vulnerability in Firefox, and with no fix available, is saying that the workaround is to switch off Javascript, and disable software installation.

Switching off Javascript renders a large chunk of the web unusable. Yeah, you can manually turn it back on for sites you trust… but who has the time to do that? And among the general non-geek populace, who has the knowledge to do it?

Of course, the likelihood of actually falling victim to this problem is pretty small. But if you’re tempted to switch back to IE, make sure it’s securely set up. One option is to use a security lockdown registry hack.

Meanwhile the neato Tiger Dashboard widgets facility that Andy’s been talking about appears to have its weaknesses too. Whoops.

Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t be so critical, especially since the stuff I code isn’t necessarily miraculously vulnerability-free. But then, I’m not coding browsers installed on millions of desktops.

Dan Bricklin on the pod

Back in 1979, a couple of guys called Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston wrote the first spreadsheet program, Visicalc, which almost single-handedly launched the mass sales of microcomputers (in particular the Apple II) into businesses and onto people’s desks.

Dan has gone on to more innovative computer stuff, including one prototyping product I remember from my interface designing course days at university, called Demo.

Bob Frankston has an article about how he wrote Visicalc: One of the early applications for VisiCalc was my 1979 tax form. I created @lookup for that purpose.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post, Cam and Mick at G’day World have wangled an interview with Dan Bricklin. Some of the topics include Visicalc, podcasting and video blogging, tablet PCs, and software (and data) that should last 200 years.

Check it out.

Spoiling for a blogosophere rumble!

Cameron Reilly vs Charles Wright.

In summary:

Cam: We’re doing podcasts. We’ve got a bunch of mates to help, and people seem to like them.

Charles: Your podcasts are amateurish and I don’t like them.

Cam: So?

Charles: I don’t like them. You swear too much.

Cam: So?

…and so on. You know, I enjoy listening to Cam’s podcasts and reading Charles’ columns. But I’ll tell ya, from what I’ve seen, Charles doesn’t take disagreement with his opinions very well.

Fact is it doesn’t matter if he personally doesn’t like it. It would matter if nobody liked it, but this plainly isn’t the case.

(And that bloody use of the plural personal pronoun is stupid, unless he’s had himself cloned.)

Mums prefer

Tandy catalogue: Mums Tandy to CandyI was browsing through the junk mail the other day and came across a Tandy catalogue, selling stuff for Mother’s Day, with the slogans such as “Mums prefer Tandy to Candy” and “Mums prefer MP3 players” and “Mums prefer printers”.

Now hear this, all geeks. Just in case you thought Mother’s Day was a great excuse to go out gizmo shopping: This is bollocks. Mums don’t prefer electronic toys. Mums do not prefer them to chocolates. My mum would find an MP3 player overwhelmingly useless. She’d know what it was, but she wouldn’t want it. She would not want a printer. In fact I don’t think there’s anything in that catalogue that she’d want.

Okay so there’s probably some hip young groovy mums who might like a new camera phone, but reality is most would consider a new gizmo to be in the same league as the bowling ball Homer Simpson bought Marge for her birthday.

Google tests RSS adverts

Google is testing ads in RSS.

I was reluctant at first to switch geekrant.org to providing full RSS feeds (entire posts, not just extracts), as it would reduce the already-paltry revenue from Adsense. But really, any revenue from Adsense is a bonus in this game, it’s not the end game unless you’re racking up a gazillion hits a day. The main point is to get your blogs read.

This however has the potential of re-gaining some of that advert revenue, even if readers are getting to you via an RSS aggregator. Question is, would people find it too annoying to find adverts mid-feed? If I personally found it too annoying, could I bring myself to include ads in my feeds?

Here we get about 4 times as many hits on the RSS feed as on the home page. But of course we have no idea how many people read that RSS feed, since it goes to places like Newsgator which might get it seen by hundreds of people.

It’ll be something to watch, anyway.

PS. Friday 8am. Dave Winer on RSS ads: “If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads.”

More on iTunes AU, CH, SE, NO, DK

Country flagsAppleInsider has found the icons for the new iTunes countries, thereby confirming iTunes is about to start in Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Not before time for those AU-ers among us. I’m seeing more and more of those white earplugs on the train to work.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. So far all the Australian online music stores have concentrated on selling protected WMA files. These haven’t been setting the world alight, partly of course because the files are useless for legions of iPod owners, and from observations, there are hardly any non-iPod portable music players out there in userland. And for myself, I’d refuse to buy files that won’t live beyond the (hopefully long but inevitably limited) life of my player.

Record companies must surely be waking up to it by now. They can’t copy-protect conventional CDs properly — it either breaks the Red Book standard (and thus compatibility) or it doesn’t work. Anything they try is either useless or has been hacked. So you might as well just sell MP3s. They’re no more vulnerable than CDs. And it’s better to be selling copyable songs than no songs at all.

And the reported Apple price of A$1.80 per track is competitive. A quick scout of some WMA-selling stores showed a typical price of A$1.89 per track, with top ten hits at A$0.99.

The other thing this week for Apple fans is the OS X “Tiger” release, though I’m sure they all already know that.

Win2K support go bye-bye

If like me you’re still clinging to Windows 2000 as the best balance between performance on older machines and the functionality of a newish operating system, you may like to take note that Win2K finishes mainstream support from June 30th.

Yep, only six months after NT4 mainstream finished — hardly seems fair, does it? Yeah okay so it’s almost six years since Win2K was released, but NT4 dates back to… what… 1996?

Personally I reckon it would have been nice to have had an all-encompassing final service pack to wrap things up. Makes things easier when rebuilding machines, you know. Instead Win2K will get a “security rollup” which seems to be code for “we can’t be arsed doing an SP” or possibly “sorry, we’re too busy building Longhorn.”

Old game remakes

Gyruss (the original)All the joys of nostalgic old video games without the guilt of not really owning those MAME ROMs you’ve downloaded: www.remakes.org. New versions of all the classics from your childhood: Elite, Lode Runner, Gyruss, Lemmings, egads even Lazy Jones.

You know, it always puzzled me why they didn’t just let us play MULE in high school to learn about economics.

Damn. No Frak!

What next? MyGoogle?

Google has announced search history, and unlike your browser’s field history, it’s attached to your Google account, so it’ll follow you around between computers.

So, let’s see, we’ve got email via Gmail, news headlines from Google News (including personalised news alerts), discussions in Google Groups and now your own search history. How long before a fully-fledged portal brings them all together onto one page? They could call it MyGoogle. (Whoops, they’ve already registered it…)

Queries in OLEDB: keep your parameters in order

If like me you earn your keep writing code to interrogate databases, you’re probably familiar with parameterised queries. If not, take a look here — they offer a way of passing parameters into queries without all that mucking about with formatting for different data types and so on. They also offer (so I’m led to believe) performance gains from the database server. And OLEDB makes it pretty easy to do it, too. So throw away those horrible old queries and switch to parameter queries today!

One thing not often mentioned however is that the parameters have to be in order. Because in the SQL you identify them only as question marks:

SELECT FIELD1 FROM TABLENAME WHERE CRITERIA1 = ? AND CRITERIA2 = ?

they have to be added in the correct order. If you add CRITERIA2 then CRITERIA1 to your parameters, then you’ll get unexpected results. The parameter names don’t actually match up to your SQL by name, only by position. This is kinda logical, because if you wanted:

SELECT FIELD1 FROM TABLENAME WHERE CRITERIA1 > ? AND CRITERIA1 < ?

both your parameters couldn’t be named CRITERIA1.

For some of my code, I build an INSERT or an UPDATE depending on whether I have a new or updated record to write. To avoid two sets of code, I’ll build the parameter list with the key field last, and though it may seem counter-intuitive, I build the INSERT statement to match. Bad semi-VB pseudocode follows:

If (new record) Then
  SQL = "INSERT INTO TABLENAME (FIELD1, FIELD2, KEYFIELD) VALUES (?, ?, ?)"
Else (updating record)
  SQL = "UPDATE TABLENAME SET FIELD1 = ?, FIELD2 = ? WHERE KEYFIELD = ?"
End If

…then add my parameters FIELD1, FIELD2 and KEYFIELD in that order. Easy.