Another pointless IP war - the phone front

So, there is a new front in the great war of the traditional media rightsholders. We have been hearing for some years, now, how terrible and awful it is that the iPhone lacks Flash, and how no-one will ever buy an iPhone because the iPhone has no Flash, and how Steve Jobs is worse than Hitler, oppressing the poor Flash faithful for fun, or alternately how it's all a terrible plot to make people download free games on the App Store instead of playing free Flash games, because clearly Apple makes billions on those.

However, the sad fact of the matter was that, while indeed the iPhone, cursed as it was by Jobs, lacked Flash, well, so did all other smartphones. Except a couple had Flash Lite, which does not in fact do anything and certainly doesn't work with popular content, and this hardly counts. All of this, however, is about to change, for Google have announced their newest dessert-themed Android edition, 2.2 (Froyo, which stands for frozen yoghurt, presumably non-fat). And Froyo supports Flash!

A few lucky Android users have already got 2.2, primarily users of Google's own Nexus One phone. Because of the way that Google releases Android, it'll be some time before a majority, or even significant number of Android phones have 2.2, and some will never have it; updates are not generally distributed by Google themselves, but are released at the pleasure of the manufacturers and operators, meaning often years late - phones running 1.6, three versions ago, are still being released. But the thing is, Flash is finally coming to phones, some three years after Adobe started going on about it.

The only application of Flash that anyone really, really cares all that much about on mobiles, of course, is video. There are Flash games, but do people really want to play Farmville on their phones all that much? I doubt it. And then there are awful Flash-based websites, but I'm pretty sure that the only people who love those are the people who make them.

In the world of Flash-less mobiles, there have been three approaches to providing video. The first, adapted by, for instance, BBC iPlayer, is to provide the video as H264, which most phones can play quite happily. The second, which is rarer than you'd expect, is the use of custom applications. Netflix, a US company who does streaming of video rentals, does this. The third, an approach taken by, amongst others, Channel 4 and the popular US streaming site Hulu, is not to provide them at all. It is normally claimed that this is because only Flash can provide the necessary security for the highly important TV shows.

The truth, as it turns out, may be a little different. You see, there are now phones which can play Flash... but they can't watch Hulu videos. The Android phones are told that they are unsupported devices, and to bugger off. People briefly got around this by telling their browsers to lie about their identity, but that seems to have been fixed now. The reason, it seems, is that these sites are not really horribly worried about people stealing the precious TV shows; if they wanted to record those, then they'd probably just download a torrent anyway. The reason is that the media rightsholders simply do not care for mobile phones, at least not on the same contracts as they do PC streaming. Because a mobile and a computer are fundamentally different, you see.

Hulu will win this particular battle, as will Channel 4 and anyone else who cares to. All they have to do is to have their player ask the Flash plugin what version it is. The Flash plugin could probably be told to lie through disassembly and binary modification, but this would be rather a lot of work, and it would be illegal to distribute such a modified Flash player. So, in practice, the vast majority of phone users will be unable to view Hulu videos. Hulu wins.

Or... does it? All of this trying to keep media away from paying, or at least ad-viewing, customers because they are using the wrong form-factor is simply... not sensible. What do they hope to gain from it? I suspect that it's just a repeat of the days when one couldn't buy DRM-free music, because obviously people would rip it off and there's no way they could find anywhere else, such as a CD, to rip it off from. The people who hold the rights on this stuff are control freaks, even when it is not in their interests to be so. The games companies appear to be busy destroying PC gaming by making the anti-piracy stuff so onerous that it is probably easier to just pirate the damn things than to use a legitimate copy. Microsoft did the same with Windows, of course.

I wonder which camp will be next to give in to the inevitable and just sell their stuff sensibly, as the music people did?

Stress

Ever find yourself stressed out of your mind about totally silly things which really do not matter?

This week, for instance, I am stressed about a washing machine. And I know full well that it's silly, but I can't help it. Argh!

Android people getting hilarious

There have now been a number of reviews of the HTC Evo, a '4G' (actually WiMAX, not LTE) Android phone for Sprint, as US network which is rolling out WiMAX branded as 4G. Not all of them were universally complementary, some pointing out things like terrible battery life, excessive size, the unpleasantness of the HTC Sense UI that HTC insists on putting on its phones, or the fact that it's shipping with Android 2.1 (the previous version), with upgrades at HTC's pleasure.

And the commenters went mad, and accused any reviewer who pointed out any problem of being a Steve Jobs follower, or whatever. Increasingly, the Apple fans have nothing on the Android people; some Android users appear to have elevated the whole thing to a sort of a theological debate. One of the angry, loud ones, with Crusades.

Real-world speedups from PyPy!

On a real Python thing which I'm working on right now, Python with Psyco is roughly twice as fast as conventional Python. And PyPy is 13% faster (than conventional Python)! Impressive progress, really.

Truth in corporate slogans

Well, this is an unusually obvious lie.

(NPO Energomash is a Russian company which inherited most of the Soviet Union's rocket IP, and is clearly not named after Glushko).

Twitter's unfortunate dealings with Tweetie

Twitter, apparently in need of its very own iPhone client, recently bought Tweetie, a pre-existing iPhone Twitter client which used to cost 2 euro. I've had Tweetie for some time, and liked it very much.

So, the other day, Twitter finally released the newest version of Tweetie. The first difference; re-branding. It's now called Twitter, and has a new icon. Difference the second... When I started it up, it immediately crashed, and kept doing so. I had to delete it, download it again, and re-enter my details, before it would work.

In the scheme of things, this wasn't a huge deal, for me. I assume that they simply didn't bother testing thoroughly enough; I suspect that my problem may have been that I had a tweet half-written when I upgraded, and they hadn't tested for people upgrading and resuming in that state. For the average non-technical user, though, who had paid for this app and now had it broken... Well, they can't have been too happy. Many might also not think of uninstalling and re-installing as a solution; one rarely has to do that sort of thing with iPhone apps.

And then there's this:

I want to post an image. How would I do that?

Why, I'd tap the character counter, obviously. This is highly non-obvious, and very strange UI design, and I'm pretty sure it's new in the Twitter version.

Overall, not a great start for Twitter's stewardship of their iPhone app. This perhaps shouldn't be a great surprise; Twitter have never been any good at user interfaces, as you can see if you look at their web posting interface. Most of their success can be attributed to the fact that everyone uses third-party clients.

See? See?!

Hung Parliament, a new pornographic sitcom from the BBC.

A beautiful example of how HTML5 can beat Flash

Look at this! Normally, if I find something that I want to look at on Scribd, I tend not to bother and keep looking elsewhere; its Flash interface is just so broken! But this new HTML5 version is actually perfectly usable!

Note how critical they are of Flash, by the way; everyone's piling onto poor old Adobe...

Hung Parliament

A very, very bad porno title. Featuring Margaret Thatcher, with Tony Blair as The Woman.

Neil Kinnock, noted leader of the Liberal Democrats

BBC:

Yes, okay, then.

ANSWER ME, HOMOPHOBES!

So, I wrote a tweet:

The anti-gay preacher and the rent boy:http://bit.ly/9UD8i8 - Honestly, homophobes, are any of you NOT raging closet cases?

And it got retweeted a number of times, causing my phone to buzz repeatedly and alarmingly, something which only normally happens when I am the recipient of Important Emails. Nothing special; just pointing out that yet another pillar of hatred-based society turns out to be cavorting with youthful prostitutes.

From the linked article:

 The profile touts [the rent-boy's] "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" — as long you ask first. 

...

Rekers [the homophobic preacher] said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. "I had surgery," Rekers said, "and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him."

Well, that's perfectly normal. As we all know, people with smaller naughty bits are no good with luggage, and anyway 'up for anything' presumably includes carrying bags. As an aside, a "perfectly built 8 inch cock"? Are penises built? Bizarre phrasing.

Anyway, with all the retweeting, I had no answers to my question! How can it be that my perfectly clear and simple question did not reach any homophobes? Now, before you point out the obvious, I do realise that most homophobes cannot read. I also realise that Twitter, with its cute little bird logos:

is perhaps offputting to the proud, manly, ubermenschen who can hardly bear to think about us terrifying gays; they would prefer something with a logo more appropriate to their interests, such as a fierce bald eagle, or Adolf Hitler in an extra-butch SS uniform. But that, surely, cannot explain it all!

Perhaps it's simply that they are afraid that if they engage with the gays they will be buggered to death, or have their eardrums burst by synchronised singing of showtunes, or whatever it is that makes them so very, very frightened of us? Don't worry, homophobes! I won't bite! Is there even one of you who will stand up proud and declare that you don't habitually have sex with men? Anyone?

(Being slightly more serious, I don't really buy into the popular idea that all homophobes are just really severe closet cases, but really, an awful lot of them do get caught shagging men...)

Oh, some fun quotes from the article:

"I'd like to propose another trip to Rome, Italy, for a week or more," Rekers wrote in an email dated March 21 obtained by New Times. "This is so exciting to have a nice Travel Assistant and traveling companion! Wow! I'm so glad I met you."

Is it just me, or do the extreme right-wing use weirder capitalisation than the rest of us? Just see the comments on any news article about scary subjects like gay people or brown people or the world being more than 6000 years old or whatever to see what I mean.

"Now that I'm packed, tomorrow I'll work on completing my income tax return," Rekers wrote two days later. "Not fun... But I'll just remind myself that the fun trip is coming soon."

Worst. Fetish. Ever.

Neither Google nor any other search engine picks up individual Rentboy.com profiles, any more than they pick up individual profiles on eHarmony or Match.com. You cannot just happen upon one.

Read that aloud, in the tones of, say, Aunt Augusta from The Importance of Being Earnest, for full effect.

He then would have been transported to a front page covered with images of naked, tumescent men busily sodomizing each other.

One hardly ever sees that word in news articles. But, then again, how would they sodomise if they weren't?

If Rekers searched for a rent boy in Miami, he would have found approximately 80 likely candidates. He must have scrolled down the first page, past the shirtless bears and desperate ex-models, and on to page 2. There, at last, was Lucien.

Is this a newspaper article, or a bad piece of chick-lit?

As a favor to Rekers, Lucien recently removed any wanton sexual descriptors from his Rentboy profile.

Another word we don't see enough of in newspaper articles from this century, or the previous one.

Lucien is protective of his erstwhile client. He describes Rekers primarily as a family man — one whose passion for oppressing homosexuals is dwarfed by his desire to help children.

*Must not make joke about this* (Please note that the rent boy is now 20; Reckers is 62.)

By the way, I missed this the first time:

On April 13, the "rent boy" (whom we'll call Lucien) arrived at Miami International Airport on Iberian Airlines Flight 6123, after a ten-day, fully subsidized trip to Europe.

Whom we'll call Lucien. Based on this, and the rest of the language used in the piece, I suspect that the author is... THIS MAN!

Oh, and then there's George Rekers' website, professorgeorge.com. Where he has a podcast called the profcast - wow, this is one insecure little bigot. He also apparently owns a website called teensextoday.com; I have not the words. Top story: "Teen girl agrees to have sex for $50, then gets the surprise of her life". Erm, right-oh, then. Quote:

It never makes sense to have sex for money. Prostitution not only is illegal, it is stupid to sell the preciousness of your body for money. Taking the risk of sexually-transmitted disease, the risk of emotional revulsion afterwards, the risk of pregnancy, or the risk of guilt or regret afterwards is not worth the money.

Yeah.

The secret to a popular programming blog

Is, (a) not to write it about programming, or (b) to demonstrate that you are either a beginner or intermediate programmer.

StackOverflow is a popular programming help site, and is actually quite handy. The project was initiated by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, who each have extremely popular 'programming' blogs. And why are these blogs so popular? Because, no doubt, of the amazing insights into programming shared, and the clear talent of the authors! Well, no.

Spolsky's blog isn't really about programming at all. It's closer, really, to being about software as a business, about dealing with people and about certain high level concepts and so forth. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, and there have certainly been exceptions (notably his very good post on Unicode), but for whatever reason it is usually, generally incorrectly, labeled as a programming blog.

Atwood's blog, Coding Horror, is a little different. It's essentially a mixture of three different types of posts; posts which aren't really about programming at all, a la Spolsky, posts about absolute beginner stuff, such as the fact that there are different line endings (though Atwood is a Microsoft-ecosystem programmer, where such things are apparently treated as at least a little surprising and outside the normal experience), and posts which are written in an authoritative vein, about not-terribly-complex things, which sometimes demonstrate fundamental misunderstanding, especially when dealing with SQL. This is a guy who is apparently proud of not knowing C (I wouldn't suggest that most people, these days, should actually use C for much practical, but I would have thought it was a very important thing to know from a fundamental understanding point of view) and tweets crap like this. And yet, according to Feedburner, his blog has 108,000 readers. I'm not saying he's an idiot, or anything, but he is hardly a master programmer.

And I wonder if this isn't why he's so successful. Perhaps, people are comforted when they see posts from someone who is, while dramatically popular, only about the same skill level that they are. You see this again and again; very few of the popular programming blogs are by really good programmers. I tend to wonder is this also the case with popular blogs about things where I don't know enough to identify that the author isn't exactly a leader in his or her field...

And many chairs were thrown today...

Microsoft has cancelled its Courier vapourware tablet-with-stylus thingy. Meanwhile, it appears that HP has probably also cancelled the much-hyped 'Slate' Windows 7 tablet shown off by Ballmer earlier in the year in an attempt to preempt the iPad.

This seems to be an unusually clear example of introducing fictional products in an attempt to derail the competition...