Category: Uncategorized

Jared writes

The problems I have with Staines/Fawkes are:

1. Pointless anonymity – if you’ve got a point to make, then make it. Don’t hide behind a pseudonym. Especially with the ego-fellatio that went on with sitting in shadow and keeping his identity secret while being on Newsnight.
2. You’re not really a whistle blower if you work for the other side. Wonder what he’ll do when the Tories get back in. This kind of Political agenda-wankery just bores the shite out of me. I’ve yet to see him dog the shit out of a Tory but am willing to be proved wrong here.
3. I’m yet to meet a card carrying preaching Libertarian that I didn’t think was an arsehole. This is not to say they all are arseholes. Just most of them. And yes, there are shades of grey but for the most part, the movement attracts wankers.

To be honest, I think most politicians are arseholes and wholly unsuited to running a country.

I’m going on a 12 day holiday in August which will involve visiting Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Germany and Denmark as well as time on the open seas.

Anyone know any options that would cover me for data and not require £7.50 a megabyte?

ENN.ie describes itself as “Irelands IT Newswire” which is why I subscribe to their feed. But like all modern technology journalism, it’s a load of bollocks.. Their contributor, Ciara O’Brien, just made some stuff up and posted it to ENN.ie as news. In her article she describes the iPhone as a ‘slow burn’ yet in the same month ENN.ie has Emmet Ryan claiming “So far sales have been phenomenal. We receive updates every 30 minutes and each half hour the sales are greater than the previous half hour,” Stephen Mackarel, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse told ENN.”

Ciara O’Brien writes:

When it was first launched, the iPhone was locked down tight. Apple, and only Apple, could produce software for the music player/phone hybrid. Hackers soon circumvented the iPhone’s controls, creating their own applications for instant messaging, voice over IP and anything else they felt Apple had overlooked.

Apple has rethought its position, and a software developer kit (SDK) for the iPhone is now available. This will allow third party developers to produce applications for the iPhone without taking advantage of flaws in the operating system and risking their iPhone being “bricked” — rendered useless — as happened to some users who had hacked their iPhones when they installed a software update pushed out by Apple.

Emphasis mine.

Apple didn’t rethink anything. It’s evident from using the SDK that they were spending the months building an SDK and writing documentation so they could hand something to developers that they could attempt to stand behind.

Honest to god, is a journalism degree nothing more than half a dozen creative writing classes? What happened to proper journalism? Investigative reporting. At the moment all I see is people being paid to quote off other people’s blogs.

A bit of a gem for those of us who like to spot self-entitlement whores.

Apple is offering employees in Cork a free iPhone if they:

1. Don’t sell it, jailbreak it or allow it to be jailbroken
2. No…there is no step 2….

Seems fair enough. It’s a choice for the individual not something they’re forced into. Accept it and the conditions, or don’t. But this didn’t stop a few calling Pat Phelan “panicking about a note they received this morning”.

This has caused a wave of self-entitlement outrage with headlines using the word “blackmail” on Pat Phelan’s blog.

It’s a free iPhone. It’s a choice. If you want the free iPhone, you have to play by the rules. If that’s not something you want to do, then don’t accept the free iPhone.

Self-entitlement whores want the whole cake, of course. I want the free thing but I don’t want to sign up to the conditions that make it free. No fair. Wahhh. You’re given a computer in work but you can’t install Bioshock on it? Wahhh. You get your Sky box for free but you have to pay the monthly fee for a contract in order to get movies and channels? Wahhh. You got a free car but you have to pay for petrol to make it go? Wahhh. You’re a pack of ungrateful wretches the lot of you.

Grow the fuck up. Nothing spoils a Friday more than a pack of whining bitches.

From iPhoneDevelopment by Jeff LaMarche:

Third rule: insulate your team from corporate silliness to the fullest extent of your power. Nothing will make these people leave your employ faster than making them sit in unproductive, boring meetings that don’t directly further the project. The kind of person you want, wants to be sitting in front of a Mac furiously coding away. Anything you make them do that’s not that, is counterproductive and damaging to your project.

Seems obvious.

Content theft in the age of RSS and aggregation happens every day. I delete a dozen spam links every day which have scooped my content and used it to attract visitors to their site.

Something.ie has done this to Damien Mulley. Mulley, remember him, he’s an amiable loudmouth from Cork. It makes me shake my head to read on something.ie:

Brian takes a look at syndication and wonders why Maman Poulet and Damien Mulley accuse us of stealing content. Then we discover that Damien has been stealing our content.

Something.ie, as far as I can see, nicks an extract from web sites like mulley.net and siliconrepublic and republishes them with an attribution link.

As can be seen here and here there’s virtually no content added. This is the difference I see and why I can see no difference between the actions of something.ie (who are trying to get google hits by linking extract content to poipular blogs) to the spammers that I delete daily. Create the content, guys, don’t just regurgitate the headline and post a link. Dammit. Have something to say and don’t just point at what other people are saying (or, if you must link-whore, then please keep it within your own back yard – you own something.ie subscribers.

This is going to shape up into some sort of ugly blogfight. I’m selling popcorn.

Much more interesting is jazzbiscuit reporting that Burger King’s Profits are down 13%. That would be because the only thing worth buying in there are the onion rings. Ooooh, boy, that’s another artery clogged…

McBarCamp is an idea by Fraser Speirs to have a Mac/iPhone/Cocoa Development Camp thing somewhere near Glasgow during the summer months.

Apart from the wee detail about getting married, I’m game for a laugh.

David Owen in the New Yorker wrote: “In 1940, an average one-pound loaf of bread sold for eight cents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That means that a penny in those days bought enough bread to make a good-sized sandwich. These days, a penny doesn’t buy much more than a bit of crust.”

John Gruber writes:

“I’ve been throwing pennies away for years.”

Her indoors would throw coppers away but I think we need to start being rational about this. I’m not saying we should start to hoard our pennies (though saving them and putting them in charity boxes is a good use of them) but rather making some sort of statement about the number of retail outlets that still price with a .99 suffix. Is there any reason for it these days? Is anyone really going to balk at paying £5 for something that yesterday was £4.99?

The easy way to resolve the .99 thing is to stop using cash – only accept credit, debit and ‘voucher’ cards. Totally. If you stop producing pennies and take existing pennies out of circulation then you’ll have the same issue with .95 pricing as the 5 cent or 5 pence coin becomes the new common denominator. Switch to electronic cash and it won’t matter.