I updated my iPhone to the latest software version (v2.2) the other week. Others have been impressed by the Google Street View, directions for walking routes and public transport, location actions (share, add to contact and bookmark) and one button return to your favourite apps but the best thing about this update for me are the podcast related updates.
Yes, that was “updates” – plural. Not only can you download podcasts over wifi but there has also been a subtle change to the listing order: newer ones are at the bottom of the list instead of the list being ordered by date descending. Now this might not make a lot of sense straight away but if you have missed several episodes then you can play them all in order, one after the other.
Unlike others, I am not clamouring for cut and paste. MMS and a fully functional SMS are at the top of my list of missing features.
It bugs me every single year. Christmas decorations, music and advertising campaigns all seem to commence somewhere around the end of October. I usually allow myself to start feeling festive somewhere between Thanksgiving in the USA (today) and St. Andrew’s Day (this coming Sunday).
On the subject of Thanksgiving – just when you thought it was safe to go back to Alaska. Saturday Night Live should so offer her a writing position:
I’m sorry but she does make fun poking a little too easy sometimes. I recently heard the comedian Paul Sinha link the futures of Sarah Palin and the athlete Paula Radcliffe: rumour has it that they both fancy running in 2012 but will probably both be beaten by a Kenyan again.
The prequel to 24 Day 7 aired on Sky One here in the UK last night. The two hour teaser was a result of the writers’ strike in the USA last year which I hope gave Joel Surnow et al. some time to properly think through the new season. The delay also worked out well in that it gave Sky and Virgin Media to grow up and stop acting like spoilt children.
It didn’t really matter which TV show it was. It could have been a new series of Lost, Heroes or Ugly Betty. The big news for me is that this was broadcast only a day after it was shown in the States. Have TV execs finally cottened on to the fact that fans don’t want to wait six months to see their favourite programmes and will just download episodes from the Internet instead?
Watch out Dr Kawashima, I fully expect Microsoft to stake a claim to have invented brain training programs in the near future. The hoops that web developers are forced to jump through to get things working in Internet Explorer are sometimes awe-inspiring in their deviousness.
It almost seems like Microsoft will never care about totally supporting standards. To try and build an accessible website is far harder than it should be when working with .NET – no matter how hard I try to ignore it, I just know that if anyone viewed the source they would find a crapload of godawful CSS, JavaScript and a multitude of hidden form fields (like CLIENTSTATE) populated with strings so long that they could potentially map every atom in the solar system. It sometimes actually makes me feel unclean.
Microsoft are not alone. A colleague recently pointed out that out of the seven lines of tracking code he had been supplied, not a single one of them was as it should have been. The abundance of supposedly professionally produced sites that have been built with WYSIWYG editors is testament to the fact that not everybody is bothered about doing things properly. It’s not like hand-coding takes that much longer or is that painful but you have to understand how things work and know what you’re doing – which is surely no bad thing. With this in mind it was refreshing to find out that this is what a big media organisation like The New York Times does.
Thanks to me living in Scotland, I was unable to watch the Germany vs. England football match on television last night. The game was broadcast south of the border on ITV1 but STV had to go with a repeat showing of Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis instead for some reason or other. Scotland played Argentina but this was shown on Sky Sports satellite channel, which my flatmate and I decided was too extortionate many months ago.
I was about to switch on the radio and listen to the game on BBC Radio Five Live when I remembered about Zattoo. This allows you to watch a selection of TV stations on your computer in several European countries for free and – most importantly last night – included in these channels is ITV1 London.
Yesterday the BBC announced that their main channels will be simulcast online from next week. This is simply massive news and will no doubt cause UK ISPs some major headaches with the inevitable increase in traffic this will bring.
Cool as this is, I do have worries about the implications this has for the television license here in the UK. Previously you were usually okay if you didn’t own a television set but with more channels being online it will soon be assumed that you must be watching tv programmes if you own a computer and no doubt it will be up to you to prove otherwise.
I’ve mocked Twitter whenever it has been mentioned at the weekly Edinburgh Coffee Morning – and it’s mentioned quite often with people like Mike Coulter in attendance. I think my main mistake in the past has been relying on my FriendFeed as a hub for all my updates. You simply just don’t get the interactive conversation element of Twitter and it’s only now that I’ve happened across a lot of my @replies that I missed months ago. I’m now all set with Twhirl and Twinkle so I don’t miss anything again.
I decided to give Twitter another shot last week. Within minutes, 10 Downing Street and the geek luminaries zefrank, Chris Pirillo and Jason Calacanis were following me too. This is probably down to them using TweetLater or something similar rather than a manual process (unlike Steven Fry who added me after a couple of days, although I’m led to believe that it’s his PA who adds his followers).
Things are going crazy at the moment. The staggering milestone of one billion Tweets was reached last week. This may have something to do with Barack Obama making heavy use of the micro-messaging format.
Update: since posting this, Twitter had been up and down like a kangaroo on a tramampoline. Database upgrades several times per day? Come on, don’t play us for fools!
You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much here recently. One of the busiest times of the year is just around the corner and as such I’ve spent some time trying to build up a buffer of posts that will appear in the weeks ahead while I’m otherwise engaged in finishing sifting through my RSS clippings that accrued over the last 11 and a bit months, doing research on my predictions for 2009, planning my various December travels and furiously trying to think of Christmas presents.
After what feels like forever, the next US President will finally be decided upon at the polls tomorrow. Obama is the clear favourite but his victory is not guaranteed by any means. There’s the Bradley effect to take into consideration for a start.
A more tangible effect will be observed by the use of the voting machines. Since 2001, $3.9 billion has been spent on solving this non-problem. Non only do these machines not have any verifiable auditing process, they are expensive, insecure and inaccurate. I’m not just talking about the hanging chads fiasco but actual vote switching. I’m far from being alone in thinking that this is a serious issue.
I’m usually all for throwing technology at things but only if it actually improves a process. The voting process in the United States is overly complicated compared to the UK or Canada (as covered by Robert X. Cringely in 2003). Earlier this year, the Dutch governement de-certified voting machines and reverted to a pencil and paper based system (Google translation).
It reminds me of the story of the Fisher Space Pen for NASA. There was apparently an investment of $1 million by Fisher to research and develop these special pens.
