Slumdog Millionaire

Got a Camcorder!

After the snow storm cleared up, I headed to Houston for Christmas and didn't really get a chance to sit down and blog about the news I had marked (you can blame a House marathon), and I don't want to talk about month-old stories so I'm going to fill this short post with original content and do a normal post next week. My coolest Christmas gift was this baby to the right here (in black): the Flip Mino HD camcorder. It's a pretty sweet pocket-sized camcorder that shoots in 720p HD, and I love it so far. I want to keep playing around with it and do a full review probably before the end of this month. I didn't post last week because I was skiing in Whistler, B.C. with my brother and his wife, but I took plenty of video so I'll try to post one big video with all that footage stitched together next week - all shot with my Mino HD. I'm trying to see if I can put it together for free using Avidemux and Windows Movie Maker, but we'll see how that works out in the days to come. I'm also going to be getting the tripod for it soon, so hopefully I'll be able to do more video content on this blog, which is the most exciting thing to happen to my little corner of the web since I got a digital camera a couple of years ago.

Who Wants to be a Slumdog Millionaire?

Rather than try to set up the plot of this movie, I think I'll just show you the trailer:



The trailer may even give you more information than it should, but if it motivates you to go see this movie then I'd say it was worth it. Essentially: it's about a bum who rises to become a millionaire through a famous TV show that was all the craze in India shortly after it was big in the US. Other than being set in India, I never felt compelled to see this film, especially after the Totally Rad Show's verdict was not to seek it out, but my sister-in-law loved it enough to convince us, and it was definitely a pleasant surprise.

Though the director isn't Indian so technically this isn't a Bollywood movie, I really wish that we had more Bollywood movies like this. A movie like this could definitely make an Indian man feel more proud about his country's cinema. I understand that Bollywood musicals have their place and I'm fine with that, I just wish it would produce films like this that cast India in this light that the world doesn't see: ugliness and beauty all at once permeating the streets. Any scenes that were set on the streets definitely gave me that vibe, and the cinematography was a big part of that. I didn't like how often the camera tried to give the audience a vertigo effect, but other than that it was quite impressive. The casting choices reminded me of Pan Labyrinth in that each one seemed to fit perfectly since these are actors/actresses you've never seen before and they do such a great job of portraying these characters that you don't imagine them in a world outside this movie. The music in this movie was also something that stood out to me: every song really held its own and they've since been stuck in my head at random times because their poignancy really resonated with me.

If all those things weren't enough, it was one of those movies where we were talking about it long after we left the theater and debating motivations and plot points and such. Even though it can try to be too obvious at times with themes and symbols, you can forgive it because it tells the story so well. I was worried that parts of the movie would feel contrived, but I thought that things flowed rather smoothly. If I had one complaint about this film, it would probably be that the pacing felt a bit off. It definitely felt like a long movie, and it was only 2 hours long. I strongly recommend running out and catching this movie if it's playing in your city, or keeping it in mind to rent later this year if you can't see it now. I give it an A+ and say that it's worth seeking out because I feel like it tells a very unique story in a great way and it does suspense so well that I'd compare that element of it to the likes of 24.

The Dark Knight Live Chat

I mentioned a while ago that The Dark Knight blu-ray had a special live chat for 100,000 people with director Christopher Nolan, and I did, indeed, attend it. I was pretty satisfied with it overall.

It was text only, not video. At first I was disappointed, but actually text chat lets you enjoy the movie fully and only tune in to what Nolan is saying when/if you want. It's actually a text box at the top of the screen that's readable without being too big and has a somewhat transparent background so that you can see whatever part of the movie it covers. We asked questions on the WB BD Live site (you had to be logged in, so only people in the chat could ask questions), and Nolan (or perhaps a third-party moderator) goes through and asks as many of the best as quickly as possibly.

Sometimes, he picked ones that I thought were kind of dumb or already answered in other features on the disc, but there were a lot of insightful questions answered about the casting, nuances of the story, origins and inspirations, etc. I didn't get any of mine answered, unfortunately, but the event could only support 100,000 people and with 600,000 copies sold on the first day alone (I imagine a significant number from pre-orders), I imagine a number of people were excited about this event a week afterwards.

I don't know how often they're going to be doing this, but it was cool. It was the only BD Live feature that I thought was creative and on par with some of the stuff Disney is trying out. I'd love to see them do more live events with actors from the film or even Batman comic experts.

For the curious, some have posted rough transcripts of the chat, but here are my highlights (beware of spoilers if you haven't seen the movie):

-Heath Ledger improvised certain voice qualities and gestures (like clapping for Gordon's promotion).
-The Hong Kong tanker plane was real.
-Nolan admitted that Rex Reed is his worst critic.
-The joker card in the judge's papers is how the Joker sources her DNA (this was a big mystery to me).
-The Long halloween and Batman Year One are Nolan's favorite Batman comics
-The assassination sequences were inspired by the Godfather
-Nolan's favorite scene was the very last one
-He took some funny questions, telling "spencer, [to] get over floren", and admitting that "it’s a 2-pee movie - I gotta make a shorter film next time".
-Someone proposed during the chat (and it worked)!
-A lot of people asked about casting choices and how good they were.
-Two face is dead.
-Dent killing 5 ppl (aside from the 2 cops) is still a mystery.

Prince of Persia First Impressions

I just wanted to real briefly talk about Prince of Persia since it's a new game that has probably been lost amidst all the December releases. I really like it so far. I've only past the prologue and healed one area, but the game is gorgeous and the animation is wonderful. I'm also impressed by the short load times. I have to admit that the game mechanics take some getting used to because action-adventure fans, including those of previous games in the 3-D leg of this franchise, will probably hit jump twice and end up jumping three times, for example. Once you get used to them though, the game feels like a ballet of parkour and stylized fight sequences. The fighting may not be very difficult or very varied, but I liked that the focus is on exploration and puzzles rather than fighting because I see it as more of a platformer/adventure title, and adventure games that rely too much on combat end up failing in that regard. This game definitely isn't for everyone, but if you can appreciate the finer points then you'll probably enjoy it. We'll see if my opinion changes as I get farther in the game.

Randomness

And now for some random last notes:

I finally created a Listmania list of my top 10 favorite movies of all time, which typically changes a couple of times a year so this ought to be a good, central place to keep it. This is not the 10 best movies of all time, just the 10 that I enjoyed the most. A movie's quality is subjective anyway, so I judged them for my list just based on watchability rather than technical quality. For example: Traffic is an awesome movie that I never want to see again because it's too depressing.

Has anyone heard of a site called Honeyshed? I saw a commercial for it on TV and was disturbed when I finally visited it. It's a digital home shopping network targeted at teenage hipsters that seems like a giant joke. It is a real site, unfortunately. I can't imagine how it got funding to be created, but I'll give it credit for being somewhat polished.

Now that Konami is releasing Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid for the iPhone, I have to admit that it's actually trying to compete with the PSP and the DS, because now it's going past the standard cell phone game fare. By the way, has anyone played the Metal Gear Solid pack for Little Big Planet? I'm thinking of downloading it.

VHS is dead, but will not be missed. Well, not by me, anyway. I never bought stuff on VHS because I never saw the point in it, but I remember being convinced by DVD because of the quality and extras. It's kind of funny how times change like that.

I didn't want to mention this, but I feel compelled to since everyone else has been: Apple will no longer be at Macworld after this year, and it's because they always wanted to, not because Jobs is retiring. I thought that making accusations like was irresponsible on the media's part. Jobs is obviously going to retire in the coming years, but that doesn't mean in the next couple of months just because this is his last Macworld.

Hope you all have a good, snow-free week (it snowed a bit tonight in Seattle)!

The Dark Knight on Blu-ray

The Dark Knight Goes Blu

Sorry, that was kind of a lame heading, but this movie definitely is not. If you're one of the five people who haven't seen it, I wrote a pretty detailed review when it came out so I won't go into too much detail about it here, but I will give a brief rundown of my thoughts on second viewing before I talk about the Blu-ray set specifically.

I'm convinced that The Dark Knight is my second favorite movie of all time, beat only by Kill Bill and probably followed by Pulp Fiction. By the way, I rank my movies on how much I enjoy them and enjoy watching them again and again. I may have seen better movies, but that doesn't mean they entertained me as much. Anyway, Batman is back to take on the Joker, who is equally as meticulous as Batman but for crime, and hopes to hand the reigns of Gotham City to ambitious District Attorney Harvey Dent, Gotham's white knight. While it doesn't sound like much, the story is liable to keep you on the edge of your seat once it gets going, and the acting and writing are pretty much spot-on. Despite being as long as it is and having seen it before, I had no problem staying interested for the whole thing the second time around and was actually ready to watch it again later this week. The cinematography is not to be overlooked either with gorgeous city shots and plenty of mayhem shot in both IMAX and on standard film. It's pretty hard not to love this movie when it does so much right. I know people hate the comparisons to Heat, but I think that the on screen dynamics between Batman and The Joker are even better than between Pacino and DeNiro. Anyway, enough about the movie itself: it's superb.

Does it look every bit as good on Blu-ray as it did on the big screen? For the most part, yes. I think that when you watch a movie with as dark as palette as this one the scenes with a lot of black don't look as good as you may remember on the big screen. The IMAX scenes are pretty much breathtaking. I was a little disappointed with how they enforced the IMAX aspect ratio: the IMAX shots will take up your whole screen whereas the rest of the movie will have black bars at the top and bottom. Since my other Blu-ray movies don't do that, it makes me feel a little cheated. Still, they're fairly thin bars and the quality is pretty amazing for the rest of the movie also. The only flaws you're really going to find in the other scenes in the movie are just noise in the backgrounds occasionally, but you pretty much have to walk right up to your TV (which I hope is HD if you buy this on Blu-ray) to notice this noise. The edges are razor sharp all around and I can't recall seeing any artifacts. I think it doesn't look as good as Wall-E simply because the colors in the movie itself aren't as vivid, but they're definitely crystal clear and ensure that you won't miss a single detail in a single frame. So don't buy too much into what some critics are saying, I still think it's worth your money video quality-wise (I can't speak for the DVD version though because I haven't seen it). The sound is even better though. Even on my simulated surround sound, it never comes close to disappointing. It gives you that true movie theater experience with explosions you can almost smell and gunfire that's almost too realistic. The score shines pretty well also.

Now for the weakest part of this set, if you can even call it that: the extras. I didn't try out the digital copy, but I did try out BD Live and perused the other extras on both discs. The BD Live content is nothing particularly exciting. You can create and watch video commentary, which I think is kind of a gimmicky. You can also do live chats, and there's actually a live video chat with Christopher Nolan this Thursday that I'm going to see if I can join. The other main feature is the ability to watch movie trailers and other video content that should've been on the disc but wasn't because it wasn't good enough. There were a couple of videos that I was kind of peeved didn't make it on the Blu-ray because they were actually interesting, but the others were animated shorts that added audio to frames of a comic book that was created for the movies. I only watched a couple, and they were terrible. The artwork was just fine, but the dialogue did not sound like Batman at all (I mean the writing, not the voice acting). What's worse about this stuff is that the video size is only a quarter of your screen, are lacking in quality, and buffer terribly. It's best to start playing one, pause it immediately, and then go make yourself hot cocoa while it buffers the video so that you can actually watch it continuously. My cable Internet isn't the bad, but I can stream videos just fine on my laptop. I would've liked to have seen a trivia game or something else on BD Live.

The other features are pretty good though. There's no commentary track, which I didn't mind because I rarely listen to those, but you can trigger featurettes at various parts of the movie when you see the appropriate icon, or watch them all entirely outside of the movie. There's about 90 minutes worth of that stuff, and they're pretty fascinating overall. I had never seen an IMAX camera before watching the featurette on it, and it's incredible to imagine how they filmed any action on that thing. On disc 2 you'll find a couple of documentaries that no one has seemed to point out originally aired on the History Channel in the weeks leading up to the release of The Dark Knight: Batman Tech and Batman Unmasked. So when you read reviewers talk about how strange it was that neither of these documentaries include non-trailer scenes from The Dark Knight and only scenes from Batman Begins, you can be a smartass and correct them. I thought that they were pretty well-done and great ways to lend another level of realism to this character and world on top of what the movie has to blot out the abominations of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. I especially liked the Unmasked one, a psychological analysis of Batman, because part of what I always liked about him was how dark and gritty and real he would always feel and that he was even thrown into Arkham himself once. There are also some episodes of a Gotham news program that were movie cheesy, but still useful addition in that they help ground the film in what feels like reality. They're almost like deleted scenes, in a way. The other features you have is a smattering of photographs and concept art, and all the trailers and TV spots, which I always love to have to watch long after a movie was released and I'm always bothered when DVDs don't include them. The concept art is pretty awesome, and I really wish that had taken the initiative to let you view them picture-in-picture with the film as an optional layer.

Overall, this is definitely something worth buying. Even though it's not a monstrous amalgamation of special features, it's a pretty healthy amount that will take even longer than the movie itself to go through, and the quality of everything (besides the BD Live content) was excellent.

The Security Scoop

Was there always this much security news? I don't know why they've been appearing so much lately. Anyhow, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (which is a really ambiguous name for a center, in my opinion) is proposing that Obama appoint a special office for a czar of cybersecurity. Rather than be a part of Homeland Security, which is already ripe with bureaucracy, they feel that cybersecurity is critical enough to warrant a direct line to the president. While I would agree with them, I think that this office should lie underneath the CTO he's already going to appoint, who would have the direct line to the president to talk about issues like Internet penetration and security. I think that having a Chief Cyber Security Officer would be too long of an acronym and be overkill. Still, it's a good debate to have. We are entering a world where technology can be as much a weapon as guns or nuclear physics or biology or chemistry. Except for guns, all of those have genuinely good purposes, but we have to be vigilant of when they're in the wrong hands. I'm not dissing guns, but I don't think you can use guns to cure cancer or power a city.

A random security firm called Bit9 has released a list of what it believes are the top applications with the most vulnerabilities, which I believe are ranked by popularity and number of security holes in unpatched and patched versions. The fact that Firefox and Adobe Flash top the list may be a little scary, but that's because of how many new versions they have. The lesson here is not to use a whitelist, it's to keep your systems patched and use a firewall.

One of the most creative viruses I have seen in a long while is probably one that you've now heard about: Koobface. Yeah, it's a pretty dumb name for a virus (shouldn't it be koobecaf?). Anyway, infected users post comments and send users messages that are super convincing that they're in some random video, and since you generally are interested in what your friends send you and don't think it's spam since you haven't gotten spam on Facebook, you gladly click through. It takes you to a Yuotube video that requires you to upgrade your Flash player, and this is exactly why you should always go straight to vendors' websites to get new versions of their software. Anyhow, if you agree then congratulations: you just got screwed. Your prize is a flurry of click fraud (to generate false ad revenue), phishing attacks (trying to steal your personal information), and search results will take you to shady sites. Best of all, it's the gift that keeps on giving, so you have a good shot of infecting one of your friends, as well. As much as I think these guys are pricks, I have to give props for taking social engineering to a scary and innovative new level. That being said, this is terrible. Experts would always tell people to never open e-mail from people they didn't know, but they didn't warn about opening social networking messages from your real friends with convincing text. Of course, when you click through it should be fairly obvious that the site isn't legitimate, and you shouldn't be installing random software on the Internet anyhow. How do you protect yourself? Well, Facebook has added pages that will warn you before you click a link going to an external site showing you the URL, so make sure the URL makes sense. Google the domain name if you're concerned and do a whois on the domain. More importantly, install NoScript and SpyBot, which would prevent something like this from getting very far unless you're naive enough to ignore all the warnings they give you. If something looks shady, it probably is. Just stay alert. By the way, this has also been sighted on other social networking sites.

This last one is not all that interesting, but still noteworthy. Microsoft has uncovered what almost sounds like a buffer overflow vulnerability via function pointer that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code when you close any version of Internet Explorer. Given that they don't have a fix out yet, you may want to keep with Firefox if you're an avid IE user, at least for a while (who know, you might even stick around).

Software as a Service

Before I get into the article, I should define this terribly worded term. Software as a service refers to software that provides a service to you remotely as opposed to living on your computer. In a general sense, you could consider the Internet itself as software as a service since you send URLs to your ISP (I'm abstracting a lot out here) and they provide you the service of streaming you what's on that page. More specifically though, it refers to sites like Gmail and Twitter that live in the clouds rather than your machine and provide some sort of service to you: like e-mail service or microblogging or word processing. Generally, they're "freemium" services (I know, really stupid term), so they're free unless you pay extra for the premium version, which often doesn't work out too well unless you really have a killer application or you provide ads on the free version of your site.

Anyway, there are obvious pros and cons to this. Not having to maintain the application locally means that you can use it from where ever and you can wipe your hard drive without losing it. The biggest con is the lack of control: the idea that one day the site could disappear and you'd lose everything on it. The article argues that this makes it terrible for businesses, but I have to disagree. Sorry to pimp Amazon Web Services, but I think it's a great example of well-established software to help you run your websites without having to buy and maintain your own hardware. If the price is right and the company is reputable, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. If it's like a photo sharing site though, then there's obviously no telling what will happen, but something like Google Docs isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and they're not likely to pack up without an easy way for you to get your stuff back. It's better to use software as a service rather than reinvent the wheel, you just have to be smart about it.

Frostwire Promotes Artist

Frostwire is the spiritual successor to Limewire as a P2P application that's surprisingly still around and working well, and it's trying to take a stab at proving its legitimacy by promoting artists with free downloads of their music. I'm glad that someone is finally trying this out because I really want to find out how it turns out. I personally have high hopes for it. It may seem like a shot in the dark, but I think it's always a leap of faith to buy an album without hearing all of it so this is a venue that would be excellent for independent artists.

The iPhone Comes to Wal-mart

I never talked about this when it was a rumor, but it's a real story now: the iPhone is coming to Wal-mart as early as this week for $199 and $299 (8GB and 16GB, respectively), probably with an AT&T contract. I'm pretty shocked by this and wrote off the rumors as rubbish since Apple is so protective of its brand. I don't get the logic behind this. They're already selling ridiculous numbers of this thing online and through AT&T and Apple stores, so they're going to cheapen the brand by offering it at a retailer like Wal-mart? I'm not opposed to cheap Apple products, but why not sell a cheaper laptop then? Do they want the iPhone to be an everyman kind of product?

Google News Galore

I'm not sure why there was so much Google news last week, but let's see how fast I can run through it all. They've decided to start selling $400 developer G1 phones, which are unlocked and make testing easier, but man is that expensive. Still, it's a nice option to offer to those who can afford it. Also in G1 news: they've started AdWords for Android and the iPhone, which basically means that when you advertise with them you're more likely to be properly viewed on those platforms. Isn't that kind of a small subsection of the overall market? Yahoo really needs to strike in mobile ads.

You may start seeing AdWords serve up advertisements for alcohol. I guess that Google figures the best way for you to go through a recession is wasted? I wonder how we'll they'll fine tune serving these ads because it would suck if a kid searching for barbie was treated to an ad selling the Jack Daniels brand.

In case you care: their zeitgeist with the top terms of 2008 is up.

I think it's pretty cool that you can now send SMS messages straight from Google Talk in Gmail. Just enabled it in Google Labs. Just be sensitive to your friends' text messaging plans.

Google Chrome is no longer in beta, but is anyone really still using it? Other than bug fixes and supposed stability improvements, it doesn't look like there's much else separating it from the beta. I'm not saying it's a bad browser, but I'm still not convinced that it's better than Firefox.

Lastly, Google Book Search now includes magazines. I know you've been on that for a long time, so try to contain your excitement.

The Rest

I'm sick and tired, time to sum up the rest of the news in a lightning round.

Rather than release mobile applications to help you read books on your phone (albeit, in big text) or engage in book groups online, book publishers have decided to release an iPhone application to inundate you with marketing. Awesome. Why don't they just hand over more market share to Audible on a silver platter?

If you want to develop Internet applications in Java that feel like Flash or Silverlight without the cruddy aftertaste of Java applets, you may want to invest some time investigating JavaFX. It sounds like a cool framework I wish I could go into more deeply, but it's aiming to really be an integral part of not only your online experience via computer, but also via embedded platforms (like your cell phone).

Sandia has determined that 16 cores (2 to the power of 4 is where that comes from, by the way; think binary: 10000) is the maximum to which you're going to see performance improvements. Past that point, these cores on your processor die don't have the memory bandwidth to give you much of a gain, which is like having the world's strongest man help you carry your groceries rather than lift a car for someone who was in an accident. The solution: stack your chips. Didn't Texas already think of this?

You're running out of time for holiday shopping! Amazon free super saver shipping ends in a couple of days, but you can still get two-day shipping from Amazon and many other sites to suit your shopping needs. You really only need Amazon though ;)

Lastly, Gizmodo has an awesome article explaining everything you ever wanted to know about hard drives and how they work. If you were ever curious about how terrible they are, you should really ready this and watch the fun videos. The lesson to be learned from it is to backup your data constantly. You should count yourself lucky if your hard drive hasn't crashed yet, but keep in mind that it's like a ticking time bomb: there's a 99% chance that it will eventually.

Time for some TheraFlu and sack time. Seattle really knows how to bring the cold, and I'll try to snap some shots of the snow to share next week, but here's a couple of shots to remember the fall by:

Facebook Past its Prime

Random Musings

It seems like every week there's more and more stuff to talk about, even on a holiday week like last week! I hope you all survived shopping this weekend as I bought more DVD/Blu-ray discs than you can shake a stick at, but also got some useful stuff: like a small Christmas tree with decor with some new jeans (finally!). By the way, any other Seattlites notice all the cool Holiday decor around the city? I love the giant star on the Macy's that's on Pike Street. Anyway, I think I'll be getting Prince of Persia this week though, so hopefully I can post some impressions of it next week. I think I'm also going to be getting Iron Man and Wall-E on Blu-ray, my 3rd and 4th Blu-ray purchases ever, but I may delay that to two weeks from now depending on how much time I get to watch them. Without further ado though, let's get to the news.

Oh, and for the record, I really hate the BCS system. I also hate the Big 12 for subscribing to the BCS's nonsense in breaking ties. I can't believe that OU is going to play Mizzou in the Big 12 Championship Game when UT has beaten both teams before in the regular season! It's really sad that we obliterated A&M last week whereas OU struggled against Oklahoma State but we drop a spot in the rankings and they go up one. I know that Texas Tech beat us and OU beat Tech, but Texas Tech also almost lost to Baylor, a team that we beat 45-21. We only lost to Tech because we were exhausted from having to play so many ranked teams in a row, we had a much harder schedule than OU! Anyway, as great as OU is this season I still hold that Texas is a better team and would do much better in the national championship game against Alabama. Oh well, hopefully we'll get a good consolation bowl and whoop whoever we have to play with a vengeance.

Facebook Fails to Acquire Twitter

Last week, Facebook offered $500 million of stock in itself in exchange for ownership of Twitter, but Twitter's board wisely refused. First of all, this offer is probably more like $150 million given Facebook's valuation, but it would be crazy for Twitter to accept strictly stock from a company with an uncertain future that has had trouble trying to monetize its own business, let alone Twitter's. More importantly, Twitter is fairly young. I think it made sense for them to hold out for a while and try to improve and figure out a good business model.

I think that the move made Twitter look stronger and Facebook look weaker since they could not muster up a cash offer, something that Twitter supposedly inquired about and could only get $100 million. The reason I think that Facebook is a little past its expiration date though is not because of this, but because they're still experimenting with ad revenue models and not getting a lot of traction. We're in an economy where business are cutting their advertising budgets, and while they're not cutting so much from their online budgets they haven't been excited about Facebook so far. Big media companies, likes of Fox, Comedy Central, NBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and MTV, have done little more than dabble in Facebook and haven't really shown an interest to do much more. The whole "digg" concept of Facebook's right sidebar of ads is not that impressive, in my opinion. It just exposes their customers to the fact that they're not sure what advertising works, so they want to crowdsource that responsibility. Sometimes their ads are downright insulting, with divorce ads for people who are listed as being married on their profile.

Then there's the fiasco of their decision to offer the option of having your application "verified" by Facebook for an annual fee of $375 that it is trustworthy and useful. This has the effect of giving an advantage to developers with deep pockets, not those with great applications. This is on par with the concept of net neutrality: it sidles out innovation in favor of greed. I don't think that this is the way to address having a sea of applications, many of which are crappy. Of course, developers could start charging people to use their applications to help subsidize this fee, but why would anyone pay for a Facebook application anyway? Which leads to my next point: a lot of them are irritating at this point (less so than before, albeit, thanks to the UI re-design), so what was the point of creating that platform? To create an app store like the iPhone one? The only real use I could see is just keeping people on the site as their main portal for the Internet so that they garner more eyeballs for advertisers, but I can't see them realistically doing that. I only use Facebook maybe once a week nowadays whereas I used to use it all the time in college. It has started to lose its appeal to me, and if that's a trend for people who graduate from college (I've personally seen it a lot just anecdotally) then they lose the buying power of an audience with real disposable income as opposed to college students who scrounge for money to pay tuition.

I'm not saying that Facebook is done for, but I think that they're past their heyday and really need to innovate and be smart if they intend to really make money. Winning a lawsuit against a spammer is a great way to help start a war against spammers, and maybe that'll make people feel better about using Facebook if it has less spam, but that doesn't stop frightening social engineering scams involving names of someone's actual friends for a dash of false legitimacy. This economic downturn is a great time for them to step back from being the Web 2.0 darling and really figure out a game plan because what they've been doing over the past couple of years really hasn't been cutting it.

UK Doesn't Fancy the iPhone 3G Ad

Remember a while ago when I railed on the iPhone's 3G ad for being misleading regarding the speed of the actual iPhone 3G? No? Ok, well I promise I wrote it. Anyway, the Brits have also taken notice by banning the ad. A California resident noticed also and slapped a verbose $5 million lawsuit on Apple and AT&T for the misleading advertising, including the fact that 3G is only available a fraction of the time. The cornerstone of Apple is its marketing machine, so it should be no surprise that people get frustrated when they release ads fraught with lies. I don't think that anyone will sue for the "I'm a Mac" ads because they don't result in products that don't deliver, but I think it's a real concern. Apple is no longer the little guy in the corner. It's time for them to answer for these claims they continue to make to ship units quicker. I know that it may not be as unfair as some of the anti-competitive practices that Microsoft has engaged in, but they got heavily burned for that so I think it's definitely Apple's turn now.

Joost on the iPhone

While YouTube quietly rolled out a widescreen player for its content, semi-competitor Joost had something else in mind. They released a free application for the iPhone to enjoy Joost content on your iPhone as long as you're on WiFi. I know, it sucks that you can't do it on 3G but that's the fault of AT&T's rules and not of Joost, so don't blame them for it. I talked about Joost a long time ago when it was in beta and how I was excited about what it could do to marry old media and new media by providing an easy way to watch streaming TV on your own time without compromising on video quality, but the standalone application you had to use was really clunky and though they're now running out of your browser they still lacking in quality content. I think a great move is to be able to have this mobile application (and hopefully an Android one, eventually) to make their content more ubiquitous and put itself in better competition with YouTube. In an ideal situation (i.e. a city blanketed in free or cheap WiFi), I'd love to be able to start watching a movie or TV show on the bus with Joost and then come home to resume it from where I left off on my computer or home media PC. I hope that Joost continues to survive, I really am pulling for them.

Shaky Security

It looks like there's never a lack of interesting security news! This week I want to start out with airport WiFi, which is even less secure than you may have previously thought. A white hat hacker (i.e. a hacker who hacks to test the security of systems for further improvement) has visited some of the nation's biggest airports and discovered glaring flaws. For one thing, the networks on which vital airport functions were open and poorly secure. So I can't bring hair gel on my carry-on but I can log on to an airport wireless network and compromise their systems? He also logged into an American Airlines flight's WiFi and could access the data of other passengers. Then there's the fake hot spots set up in these airports by phishers hoping to find a patsy. How about the Department of Homeland Security does something useful and get cracking on this?

Another strange prospect to me is that Lenovo has a service that will allow you to disable your laptop with a single text message. My first hunch was that someone could send the message maliciously just to screw with you, but I think that more harmful is the false sense of security. While it may successfully lock down the computer, couldn't a hacker either wipe it clean for re-use or steal un-encrypted data from the hard drive if this security feature is in the BIOS (software installed directly on the processor)?

The last article I have to scare you is that anti-virus software is ineffectual against botnets. I guess this isn't really surprising, but it's still noteworthy. A botnet, as I've mentioned before, is a network of machines infected with the same worm that gives a third-party the ability to force them to execute certain commands, as in spamming or helping bring down a web server for extortion. Apparently, only 40% of current security software can detect the problem by the time it peaks in danger to the host machine and other computers. If its discovered after that point then what does it matter? The machine will be discarded and the hacker will already have moved on to new infected bots. So how can you stay safe? Anti-spyware solutions like SpyBot and Ad-Aware will help keep you clean (especially with SpyBot's immunizations), but having a hardware firewall (a router with WPA2 security enabled) and a software one (like ZoneAlarm) will really go a long way for attacks that just scan ports on random IPs to look for a way in.

The Exploding Offer

Joel Spolsky has a great post about the infamous exploding offer, and since I've come in contact with it (and fallen for it), I feel obligated to speak to it. This offer is named as such because much like the messages in the Mission: Impossible movies they are purported to disappear if you don't act fast enough. This is just like those stupid infomercials on TV except that you're playing with your career instead of Grandma's cash birthday gift. I took an offer with Texas Instruments my sophomore year of college in January because I was afraid I wasn't going to get any better offers since I had no previous technical experience, which won't get you in the door at a lot of companies and they were a big name. I didn't push them on their time line (that I remember) so I fell for the trap.

I don't think it's unethical for a company to tell you when they'd like to know your response on an offer by, but it's worse when they refuse to budge on it. Read this again and again: any company that tries to strongarm you into an offer does not truly value you. It's important to be humble while in the interviewing process with an air of confidence for selling yourself, but it's also important to realize that your career is worth much more than the commission they get for recruiting you or the feeling that you didn't disappoint them. They may sound pissed when you turn them down, or ask them for more time, but they're not your hiring manager. If they are your hiring manager, then you don't want to work for anyone who doesn't value you enough to let you make an educated decision and it shows that they're not confident that they're better than their competitors. That's a really bad sign. That means that they either can't afford you or they're just cheap and want to pay as little as possible for you.

I'm not saying you should be crazy and turn down companies left and right because they won't extend their decision deadlines, but it's not terribly unethical to turn the tables and use their weapon against them. Accept verbally and then just renege later if a better deal comes along. Yes, it does suck and you may be burning a bridge with them, but it's not a particularly good bridge if they can't give you a reasonable amount of time to explore your options. If they really had something good to offer, they'd be ethical about it and they wouldn't have to worry about other companies being better workplaces.

Holiday Shopping

I know that Black Friday is over but that only means that Holiday shopping has just begun! Read Write web has a great roundup of gift ideas for nerdy kids, and I think even nerdy adults, to be honest. I wouldn't care about brewing my own root beer or perfume, but who wouldn't want this programmable robot?



Some people may need new computers and consider buying one in the midst of deals trying to clear out inventory for next year's hottest models, but there's an important distinction to be made between notebooks and netbooks. A netbook is a small (like 8 or 10-inch small) computer designed for quick and easy Internet and e-mail usage and is not very powerful. So other than sites like YouTube, you won't be watching a whole lot of video on it. Plus, the computer will struggle to render Flash-heavy sites. However, they handle word-processing quite well with cheap or free alternatives to Microsoft Office and can be a great way to get work done without your work computer. And while you can't really edit video on a netbook, you can do your day-to-day photo editing just fine. It's a great and exciting new sector of the computer market for when you're on-the-go (maybe to a Cafe or a book store or something) or for when you're in the kitchen waiting on some water to boil, but it definitely doesn't supplement a standard notebook or desktop computer. What it lacks in processing power it makes up for in portability and price, but it probably won't meet all your needs. So keep around your normal computer if you decide to buy one and realize its shortcomings before you impulsively offer up your credit card.

Gizmodo has a really great article about gadgets you shouldn't skimp on that may be a bit pricey, but how you can save money elsewhere. For example, don't fall for crazy price cuts on third-rate GPS devices when the best ones on the market belong to the Garmin nuvi series. My nüvi 660 has its shortcomings, but it navigates like a pro even optimizing well around traffic. They also have a really excellent article explaining what the different types of HD TVs are all about and what to look for when buying one of your own. By the way, don't skimp on buying your HD TV. If you're going to buy one, go for quality and realize that its cost should be amortized over the 10+ years you use it for. I love my 40" Samsung and don't regret buying it in the face of Black Friday deals because it serves me so well. The quality is only bested by larger Samsung LCD TVs, in my opinion.

The Rest

Per usual, there's a number of articles I don't have time to talk to in depth, so I'm just going to spit them all out here real quick.

Tech Crunch questions eBay's acquisition of BillMeLater in the face of an economy reduced to shambles from a credit crisis, and I agree. The company seems to only supplant credit cards for people who have terrible credit, so this is like giving a slot machine to a gambler rather than getting him into rehab.

Virgin now has WiFi on its flights without censorship, though there is traffic shaping so that you can't hog bandwidth unless no one else is using it on your flight.

If you buy The Dark Knight from Amazon, you can watch it at Amazon Video on Demand for free! This means that you have an online streaming version of the movie that you can watch whenever, wherever. The digital copy on the 3-disc edition isn't really necessary since Video on Demand videos are hosted by Amazon and just associated with your account. This is really cool and I could totally see it being a trend with movie studios promoting pre-orders of movies with codes for free digital copies.

Computer World has a cute editorial about a Firefox man and his fling with Chrome. It's a funny read if you're like me and tried Chrome only to come running back to Firefox with arms wide open.

I usually don't post about lists of cool images, but I really enjoyed this one of optical illusions via street art and strange architecture. I mean how unbelievably cool is this one?



Time for bed (finally)! Have a great week everyone and Happy December!

Is There a Tech Slump?

The Economy and Technology

I was kind of dreading addressing this topic because I'm not sure what to make of it. The New York Times put out an article that the slump in the national economy has finally hit technology, so I think it warrants some discussion.

I think it's no secret that every aspect of the economy was going to be affected by the housing marketing crisis and the bank failures and the stock market faltering and all that stuff. If you have low investor confidence then it leads to low consumer confidence and people don't spend as much when they hear about layoffs in the news and, perhaps without a valid reason, fear for their own jobs. I feel like we shouldn't look at this as damaging technology companies and causing layoffs so much as a time for growth and evolution in the industry. It's a time for everyone to take another look at their products and their operations and optimize them. This is a very good thing. Just because there are some short term casualties does not mean that these jobs won't come back in the very near future, hopefully better than before and with greater value for consumers. Times like these force real innovation because you can't re-package something and expect people to buy them. It's actually a really great time to start a company because you can pioneer an industry with little to no competition as long as your idea rests on solid foundations.

Anyway, the point is that I think that the tech sector will be ok. If you're really concerned and work in the industry, Infoworld has a neat little survival guide that features the skills that are hot right now so that you know what to read in your spare time. I'm going to start reading Effective Java next month (I'm trying to finish up The Namesake
right now) myself. I wouldn't get too depressed reading all these articles and hearing about layoffs and all that stuff, just play it smart. Keep putting $15,500 a year into your 401(k), put away at least 25% of your take-home salary into savings, and keep reading books about technologies and concepts that interest you. Don't let the learning stop at college because the people who are the most passionate are more likely to weather better in times like these, so just don't panic.

Google Talk Does Video

Google has finally added video chat to Google Talk from right within your Gmail if you just install their plug-in. I've personally been looking for a good alternative to Skype and this is definitely a cool competitor since it doesn't require the installation of an actual software application, just a browser plug-in. Plus, I know barely anyone on Skype vs. Google Talk. Since it isn't run on Flash (though it apparently uses Flash in some form) or Silverlight, some think that this is the start of Google's own homegrown competitor to the two platforms, and that's definitely a possibility. Could this new plug-in allow you to start a video blog on Blogger? Might it provide for video chat straight from your Android-enabled phone? Is it loaded with functionality to make it easier for future Google Labs applications run without making you close your browser to install something? Details are still scarce, but I'm game to find out more. I'm not sure that it'll be anything revolutionary per se, but I'm more interested to see if, since this is already cross-platform between Mac and PC, it could be the start of applications that are cross-compatible between your phone and your PC from within your browser.

First TDK Review and Blu-ray Ripper

There were a couple of firsts for blu-ray last week! Well, the first one is kind of cheating I guess: it's what I believe to be the first review of The Dark Knight on Blu-ray, which stands to be the best-selling release for Blu-ray to date on launch. When you think about it, it took a few solid releases for DVD to be a desirable format, could a smattering of Iron Man, Hellboy II, The Dark Knight, and Wall-E being available this holiday season boost Blu-ray as people see what it's capable of doing for visually astounding movies? Anyway, the review is very positive, but the only special feature that seems to be unique to Blu-ray as opposed to DVD is that rather than audio commentary you have "seamless" branches into behind-the-scenes features. They don't know what the BD Live feature(s) will be, but probably just updated trailers and being able to watch the movie in sync with someone else and text chatting during the movie. Still, the picture and sound quality are probably enough to sell it, and they both sound quite impressive from this early review. Plus, the price is very close to DVD, so I think that Blu-ray definitely has a chance to get a boost this holiday season, but price drops for the 2009 holiday season on old Blu-ray releases would really help seal the deal for the format.

You can't have a successful new format without an illegal ripper, and we finally have that for Blu-ray. Well, we technically had it before but a recent update unlocks data that seems to be necessary to access BD Live content, which really makes it a fully-functional ripper for the format. I personally do believe that rippers are important for the purpose of backing up your content. It's nice to have a hard drive dedicated to your media so that you can access your movies when you're on the road or just in case you scratch a disc (though I've heard that Blu-ray discs are harder to get accidentally scratched up, can anyone confirm that?).

WPA Gets Cracked

Hacking news is usually pretty standard, but when you manage to compromise a widely used WiFi security protocol, it's kind of a big deal. A couple of researchers have essentially figured out how to spoof data going to your computer as if it came securely from your router and read the data going from your router to your computer in under 15 minutes. The details will be revealed very soon, but sounds intense since it comes out of a "mathematical breakthrough' WPA2 is supposedly safe from the attack, but WPA2 routers support WPA so I wonder if your computer told the router that you only supported WPA if it would then be susceptible to the attack. That was a flaw in one of the older standards, and maybe it's a standing issue. This is going to affect a lot of people because I doubt that everyone on WPA2 given how new it is, but I think that having a pretty long passkey will help. It is a scary thing to have your router compromised though because if it looks like data from your bank is coming from your bank, how would you know if it was a fake site? Fortunately, without them setting up such a site they can't get to your sensitive data, but until we have details it's hard to say what you can do to protect yourself other than WPA2. Unfortunately, that's just the insecure world we live in.

USB 3.0

The final spec for USB 3.0 has finally arrived with blazing speeds. It can transfer 27 GB in 70 seconds, which is about a tenth as long as USB 2.0. It'll also have greater power efficiency and power output, but I don't see how those are complementary. Anyway, rather than having the computer constantly poll the device as it does right now in 2.0, 3.0 will be interrupt-based so that it'll just tell the computer when it's going to do something. I know it may seem dumb that they didn't do that in the first place, but my understanding of interrupts is that they're a lot more complicated than polling, so it makes sense that it would be an evolutionary step. The article points out that it's the death knoll for Firewire, but it's amazing that anyone is still using Firewire nowadays because it's so hard to find a computer with Firewire ports. Anyway, I just like seeing cables standardized and simple like USB and HDMI. They really do make life easier than in the days of serial cables and component cables and the like.

The Remainder

I really don't have a lot to say about a number of items from last week. I think they're noteworthy, but there's simply not a whole lot to add to them. You'll see what I mean here.

Amazon has announced the finalists for their contest for the best startup using AWS technologies, for which the grand prize is $100,000. Almost all of them are pretty cool products, especially MedCommons, which will need boat loads of security and privacy but I think is a good idea.

Windows 7 will have 3 stickers from readiness down from 4 for Vista: Windows 7 Capable, Windows 7 Touch-Capable, and Windows 7 Media Center Capable. 3 is better than 4, but what's the point of the last one except to confuse people?

This is a funny article on how to waste time at work secretly. It may be a bit disingenuous, but they get points for creativity.

Intel demoed their wireless power technology which, I kid you not, I predicted about 6 years ago in a dumb short story I wrote that took place in like 2010. It uses magnetic fields, creepily just as I predicted, but I wonder how it'll affect pacemakers and stuff?

Programmers should take note in this rundown of free text editors. If you're like me and do most of your development on Linux, it's nice to have something on the side on your Windows/Mac machine, or even something else for your Linux box outside of your primary IDE just to quickly browse source code.

Lastly, I found this article with over 30 re-brands fun to browse, maybe you will, too. This was one of my favorites:



Oh, and I pre-ordered Prince of Persia so it looks like I'll have thoughts on that in early December. I'll try to get a review of LittleBigPlanet out before then though. Enjoy your week, everyone!

Texas is #1

I really didn't have a better title for this post. Heck, even if I did, it probably wouldn't have mattered.

Texas Beat OU



I don't usually talk football, but this game warrants a very brief aside. #5 Texas beat #1 OU on Saturday, 45-35. It was the best football game I've seen since Texas beat USC in the Rose Bowl. There's no doubt that I hate OU, but they played an excellent game. I have to give props to them for preparing as well as they did. they were coming at us with the best shots to our offense, but we had some tricks up our sleeves and got the job done. Texas has always been an underdog. No matter how good we are, no sports commentators want to believe. It's really nice for UT to get national recognition as the #1 team in the country. I just hope that it doesn't go to the team's heads because we have a grueling season ahead of us, and Mizzou is coming out of a heartbreaking loss so they won't want to lose 2 weeks in a row. You know it was a crazy weekend though when 3 of the top 5 teams lose.

The Dark Knight Pre-order Rush

I can't believe that I'm actually dedicating a whole section to this, but I did so much digging around about it that I feel like I'm cheating myself to not deliver my findings. I got an e-mail yesterday morning from Amazon that The Dark Knight was available for pre-order The Dark Knight and on Blu-ray right now, and it'll be released on December 9. It's already #1 on Amazon in Movies and TV Shows, which is no small feat for a movie months before it comes out. The DVD is only a couple of bucks cheaper than the Blu-ray edition so it's a pretty easy choice for Blu-ray player owners. I think that both editions have a similar arsenal of features including a couple of History Channel features, a digital copy of the movie for your computer and/or portable media device(s), and episodes of a Gotham City news program. Some of the features are actually in HD for the Blu-ray disc, so that's pretty neat. I'm hoping for special Blu-ray extras, supposedly it's a BD Live disc. What does that mean? Well I looked into it and apparently it means that it can download special content from the Internet and possibly interact with other people watching the movies, what they're going to specifically do for this movie is unclear. Also interesting is that the aspect ratio is going to be a shifted IMAX ratio for the Blu-ray release, which apparently used to make things look more epic. Hopefully we'll see the difference for the better in November! Until then, we have to just enjoy the cover art. I'm super excited for this release and already have my pre-order in!




Obama and McCain on Net Neutrality

Popular Mechanics has a great thorough look at net neutrality and how the two presidential candidates feel about it. It's more of just a great low-level explanation of what the issue is all about since neither candidate is willing to talk about the issue much at length right now, but I implore you to take this issue under consideration when you vote.

On Open-sourcing Skype

Linux Journal thinks that Skype should be open sourced, and I read their article and thought about it some but I just can't get behind that. Besides that, there's no way that they'd do it. Skype's codebase has been heavily obfuscated as it is and it is as such as a security. To be clear: this is the worst method of security for software. There have been research papers written in which they try to figure out what's going on beneath the covers, but only so much has been known. We know that it always encrypts data, but it also doesn't control user registration, trusts anyone else who speaks its protocol, has a weak privacy policy, and we have no idea what vulnerabilities really exist because of the code obfuscation. Of course, once someone figure it out then it could be very dangerous. Heck, they could even be listening in on your calls.

Anyway, with these kinds of practices in place, I think it's pretty clear that they wouldn't entertain the idea of open sourcing what they have. Here's what I'd prefer: an open source alternative built from the ground up with the right principles in mind and without any details hidden behind stone walls. What I'd prefer from Skype is a premium VoIP service with better customer service, superior call quality, and clearer security ideas in place. What I'd want from the community is a simple, totally free, service that draws on wisdom from the crowd and grows to be without restrictions despite foreign governments and without the threat of someone watching over what you do - it has to be transparent.

We'll see what happens, I imagine that this is a decently big priority for the open source development community.

Quick Notes

Apple is having a press event on Tuesday to talk about a refresh on their line of laptops. I don't foresee anything spectacular, just them keeping up with the current market.

MakeUseOf has a post of 5 Gmail Labs things that you probably haven't heard of but are super nifty, like signature tweaks or a way to keep you from sending drunk e-mails. No solution to getting locked out of your e-mail due to security measures.

If I had more time, I would've talked about this list of common online blunders that make your online interactions insecure. Clicking on pop-up ads that are misleading is more common than you think.

I don't think that I'll be able to post next Sunday, but I'll try to post later in the week, like maybe Wednesday or Thursday. I have a long week of work ahead of me, but I'm looking forward to the weekend. I hope you all have a great week!

Google's Chromed Crusader

Random Musings

I spent half the week recovering from my PAX hangover (of awesomeness, not booze), but I think I'm ready to get back to the normal news now. Speaking of which, if you were interested in the games I talked about last time but don't have a console, I got a request to plug a contest where you design a shirt for the chance to win an Xbox 360 or a PS3. It's worth a try because I love my PS3 and I'm sure that Xbox 360 owners feel the same (except for that they can't play Blu-ray movies or LittleBigPlanet).

I just finished watching This Film Is Not Yet Rated, by the way, and it's excellent. I highly recommend giving it a rent sometime. I mistakenly switched from that to the MTV Video Music Awards, which I could not take more than 10 minutes of. I mean wow, how could the dialogue get any worse? Anyway, I wanted to mention this last week, but Amazon is finally listing The Dark Knight [Blu-ray] (for Blu-ray and DVD), but they don't have a release date yet. You can sign up to get updated on when it's available, but the rumors point to very early December. They'd be stupid to not release it before Christmas. I'm definitely going to pre-order it, and Amazon guarantees the lowest price from when you place your order to when it ships so I don't understand when people pre-order at Best Buy. Oh, Amazon also has the exclusive Blu-ray set for my favorite movie of all time: Kill Bill. I didn't mean to talk about so much amazon stuff, but I don't think the fabled uncut Whole Bloody Affair set is coming stateside so I'm settling for this. The DVD transfer wasn't very good, so I have high hopes for this release (it comes out this Tuesday) (UPDATE: reviews here and here; PCM 5.1 for the win!). One more thing I wanted to bring up was the red band trailer for Zach and Miri Make a Porno. I think it's a quirky, funny trailer, but I feel ambivalent about it. Kevin Smith tries real hard with his comedies though, and I think the premise (a couple out of money who make a porno to raise some money) as well as some of the dialogue from the trailer was great. I'll post it here if I find it again.

The Chrome Craze

In case you haven't heard that Google has released a new browser called Google Chrome, then you must've been under a rock somewhere last week. Literally everywhere I turned was giving their own spin on the browser. So, naturally, I do, too. ;) Sorry, but it was a big deal and I have to talk about it. If you're a real nerd and you just have to know all the details, Google has an infinitely long comic book about it. It's based on the open source Webkit initiative (the same technology used for Android's browser). and what's cool is that it makes each tab you have its own process to make the browser easier on a multi-core processor and to allow you to kill a hung tab without losing your browser. Not only that, but you can see which tabs are taking up more memory and what plug-ins are consuming more resources. It adds a lot of transparency to the classic memory leak issues in Firefox that leave people scratching their head at who to point the finger at. Another benefit is that Chrome seems to handle Javascript better so it's a lot faster on Web 2.0-like sites, but Mozilla claims that the next Firefox release will be more on par with the speeds you see in Chrome (supposedly even faster). Supposedly, it's more secure because it runs in a sandbox environment, but I can't verify that and I'm awaiting more confirmation on that. Apparently, it is susceptible to a social engineering attack though known as carpet bombing that tricks you into opening an automatically downloaded file, which you would fall for if you're not familiar with Chrome's interface.

The browser has a lot of great features, but the bottom line is that it doesn't have a terrible amount more than Firefox except for the process management thing. Firefox has a great base of plug-ins that can do most of Chrome's niche features, and why would its developers turn to Google Chrome instead? The Mozilla Foundation is truly all about open source whereas Google's main purpose is always going to be to drive the Google brand and fuel traffic to their services. Their EULA showed signs of this with language presuming to own any content you transmit using Chrome, but this was later revised. Their omnibar, a knockoff of Firefox 3's awesome bar, is rumored to be transmitting data to Google (UPDATE: source). This means that no large company can possibly trust Google Chrome. Sure, they could add in some options to disable this kind of stuff (I think they already have a couple of the sort), but Google does not have the best track record when it comes to privacy. Why trust them when Firefox works just great and Internet Explorer already has a majority share of the market? They'll just have employees stick to IE and Firefox, it's not like people are going to revolt over this. Let's face it, people spent most of their time at work so if you lose that market then things kind of suck for you.

I give props to Google for trying something new though with this browser. My sources tell me that it's been used internally for quite a while so it should be relatively stable and who knows, it could become their platform (their operating system) that people have been buzzing about for years. Don't buy into the hype too much though that it's going to cure cancer or anything, but try it out for yourself and give it a fair shake (strangely, it's only out for Windows with the promise of Mac and Linux releases down the road).

Apple Event Tuesday

Apple announced last week that they're having a press event on Tuesday at 10 AM (PST) with the theme "Let's Rock." Hmm, I wonder if that's an obvious tip of it involving updates to iTunes and/or the iPod line? I'll post links here on Tuesday morning (or Monday night) with who's live blogging it. Of course, a video of it will most likely go up Tuesday evening. I don't want to get too caught up in predicting what they're going to announce, but I'm almost positive that we'll see an iTunes update and a new iPod of some sort (most likely a new Nano, it's been a while since its last update). I think they'd be crazy to not release, or announce the exact day of release of, an iPhone update. I wonder how Jobs will counter the bad PR the iPhone 3G has been getting recently from fans? Several geek celebrities have written off their iPhone 3G, including Attack of the Show host Kevin Pereira.

Rather than take advantage of Apple's recent PR issues, Microsoft has released a stupid, long ad with Jerry Seinfeld that doesn't promote Vista at all. I mean come on, a 1:30 spot about Bill Gates buying shoes? Is this some sort of sick joke? Supposedly, it's the 'teaser' to the ad campaign, but since when did people anticipate an advertising campaign to the point where you need a teaser for it? I hope the next ad turns out better.

Comcast's 250GB Cap

It's not a particularly big secret that Comcast has always had a bandwidth cap for their customers, which means that they can only use their Internet to transfer a certain amount of data. Several people have reported it. Now Comcast has decided to come clean about it (probably because of the recent FCC ruling against their secretly throttling of torrents) and enforce a 250 GB bandwidth cap. If you reach this cap then you can't pay for more bandwidth, you just don't have access to the Internet for the rest of that month. Is that not completely ludicrous?

It's nice that they're not hiding it anymore, and I know that a lot of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in other countries have much tighter caps, but they usually throttle you after that point rather than cut you off. Why don't they just let you pay for more bandwidth? Wouldn't they make more money that way? I believe that this is just the first step towards having to pay for different tiers of Internet service where you pay by how much data you use. This is still a net neutral policy, but it can screw the consumer depending on how they handle the pricing, and it can screw online media (often called "new media") because people won't be so inclined to turn to online news sites for video clips and podcasts and such if their Internet costs would go up. I wish I could say that since most people don't consume a lot of content that they'd save money, but I know that the ISPs are typically super greedy so they'll probably pay the same as now while the rest of us pay more, and as the Internet gets bigger and new media becomes more prominent we'll be paying for $200 cable tv/Internet packages. I wish these stupid telecom monopolies could implode and form more reasonably sized, competitive firms.

Closing Thoughts

It's almost bed time, so I have to wrap this up. I just had a few more stories to go:

Google put out a beta of Picasa 3 that does smart tagging of people's faces (it's as cool as it sounds), adds more editing features, and has some great syncing capabilities with Google Web Albums. This will probably help them sell some premium accounts (I think that Web Albums is a great product, right up there with SmugMug, which is backed by Amazon S3).

Smashing Magazine has an incredible article about the importance of simple web design that I highly recommend checking out if you have any interest whatsoever in web development. You'll learn a lot about great design that you probably knew but didn't even realize it. They pick out some really nice examples, too.

Last, but not least, this is a fun little read on using ASCII art to subvert spam filters. It's definitely clever, but slimy, nonetheless. Spammers are a sickening breed, but I have to admit that they're often rather clever.

Have a great week everyone!

X-Files and My Semi-Glorious Return

I'm back to blogging! I meant to write this post yesterday, but opted for Rock Band instead (sorry). I should be posting at least weekly, but I'll shoot for bi-weekly. I'm still getting adjusted to living in Seattle, and I am a bit homesick, but I am enjoying the scenery out here.

X-Files: I Want to Believe

Full disclosure: I can't remember the last episode of this show that I saw, but it was probably the only one I've seen. This show was on when I was pretty easily scared of stuff in general so I never got into it. I'm sure it was a good show, it just wasn't my cup of tea and now I'm on to bigger and better shows (Burn Notice is currently rocking my socks).

The movie revolves around one big missing persons mystery (an FBI agent) and a psychic, so given the psychic's involvement the FBI have called on Dana Scully to call in Fox Mulder, who requires her to help if he's going to help. They've basically been going on with their own lives (Mulder's being as a recluse) so this is kind of a major reunion for them. The more I think about the story though, the more I have problems with it. I walked out of the theater feeling no better or worse than when I walked in, and the movie seemed pretty good but not amazing.

Let me start out with my issues. They had a psychic helping them and they called in Mulder because they were stuck. Anyone see a problem with that? They have a psychic, which is hard for them to believe naturally, but why does this mean they need to call on Mulder? It seems like he's been estranged by the FBI, so I don't see why they require his help. Even if you're ok with that though, I just never believe the chemistry between Mulder and Scully. Their reunion in the movie seems to have been after a long time and yet they weren't very affected by it. Their love story progression seemed like an after thought they clumsily wove into the movie, which is strange because I had heard in an interview that the movie was supposed to center on them. I also hate that we never connect with the antagonists at all, and the motive involved isn't all that compelling.



I don't know if fans really loved this movie. It seemed to drag on a bit. There wasn't a whole lot of thrill moments or action, and I never really got pulled in. Granted, I had no investment in this series and only went to see this movie in the first place because a friend wanted to, but I figured that it would be good. It could be that I'm dealing with a hangover from The Dark Knight and any movie I see will pale in comparison, but I watched Ratatouille the other night and still managed to enjoy it.

I definitely wouldn't say that the movie is bad though. I think it could've explained things better and tightening itself up a bit on time, but it was still entertaining. I think you should rent it if you're at all intrigued by the series or murder mysteries. It's definitely nothing out of the ordinary though (if you really want a great murder mystery just go rent Mystic River), and there are certainly better movies out there right now (obviously The Dark Knight, but I loved Wall-E and I've seen good reviews for Mamma Mia and Step Brothers). I give this movie a C-, because I can tell that they were trying to reach out to fans rather than people's wallets, but I think that they've probably just run out of ideas. It probably would've benefited from not being released right in the middle of a competitive summer for films.

The Dark Knight's $300m Dash

I counted on Box Office Mojo that The Dark Knight had topped 23 of their charts including biggest opening weekend ever, biggest second weekend ever, and biggest opening day gross. The one everyone is focusing on now though is that it is the fastest movie to hit $300 million (it's already at $315 million domestically, but over $350 million worldwide) with a record of 10 days. The third Pirates of the Caribbean movie had the title before at 16 days, and now people are predicting that The Dark Knight may beat Titanic's $600 million record for biggest total gross. I think that it can probably pull it off since it is past halfway there in its 2nd weekend. By the way, how the Hell did that movie make so much money? It wasn't a bad movie, but I saw it once and never want to see it again because it was so heavy and depressing. Anyway, this movie deserves the massive amount of money they're making. It seriously is a good time to be a nerd when something this phenomenal comes out that literally must seem like to many people, including myself, that it's straight out of their childhood fantasies. (I wasn't that dark as a child, but darkness always intrigued me)

Up-marketing Vista

In case you haven't noticed, Windows Vista has been taking a beating as far as publicity goes ever since its released because it didn't deliver on several of the promises that was made of it early in its development (always a fatal mistake). It took Microsoft far too long, but they're finally gearing up some positive marketing for Vista. They tested the waters by showing a "new OS" to people called Mojave and seeing how they liked it. In the end, it turned out that Mojave was Vista with the "Vista" name stripped from it and people were pretty shocked because most (or all) of them had the impression that Vista sucked. I'm personally glad about this because I'm freaking tired of having to defend my computer: it's a great machine and Vista works very well on it. It is no worse than XP and I admit that it sucks that you need a good computer to run it but if you do then the extra features (including the massively re-vamped search functionality) are pretty cool. The only problem I've had is that my downloading can sometimes impact my computer's overall performance, but I don't think that's necessarily Vista.

That's just one component for their response to Apple's smarmy Mac vs. PC ads. They're not going to do the same thing in reverse to attack Apple, but they're going to stop being such a sleepy giant and try a pro-Vista message. Some have seen the ads and are already excited about it, but they have not yet been made public. For the record: I don't hate Apple or Microsoft, but I do hate Apple taking advantage of its underdog status to continually take low-blows at Microsoft. Their ads are often unfair and prey on stereotypes, which bothers me. I'll admit that they're clever, but they've gone on far too long.

Open Xbox

One more quick piece of Microsoft news: they've decided to open up the 360 platform! That means that you don't have to be a big studio to write your own Xbox 360 game and put it out on Live. Not everyone will be allowed to put their game on Live, but the fact that they're encouraging this is just a massive step in the right direction. I wish that Sony would do the same. It's just going to breed more competition and produce higher quality of games that rely more on just flashy graphics and big budgets to attract attentions.

Yahoo! Music Store Folds

In another giant stab to DRM, Yahoo has closed up shop in the digital music game. They are the second DRM music service to go down this year (MSN was first), but the difference is that in a couple of months their key servers are going offline! What does that mean? The what DRM music often works is that they're locked by a key (in the case of subscription based services, these keys usually need to be renewed monthly) and you need these keys to be able to open these tracks. If you transfer them to another computer, this computer asks the server for the appropriate keys using your login information and it obliges, but in Yahoo's case you can't move your songs to another computer so if your computer dies then so does your music. Lame, huh? That's why you should use Amazon MP3: I still personally thing that it's the best digital music around and something like this would never happen to its customers. I wonder if enough people used the service for this to impact Yahoo's image? I kind of hope so, because it's a pretty raw deal (MSN's key servers will only be up until 2011, so they're not much better).

Comments and CS Concepts

I just wanted to briefly mention a couple of articles that I liked. The first one is concise and talks about why comments in code are appropriate and why. It's a great read, even if you do use comments in your code.

The other one is a list of the top 10 concepts that all software engineers should know. With the exception maybe of layering, I think that your success in the IT industry is doomed without an understanding of these ideas and a willingness to flesh them out throughout your career.

Streaming Torrents

EZTV, a huge group for trafficking torrents, has started putting up content that can be streamed using Swarmplayer, which streams content using bittorrent technology to distribute it. This is an excellent idea and I think could seriously revolutionize how we stream multimedia online, if it's harnessed in legal uses. This would really cut a lot of overhead out of putting things like TV shows online because a media company would no longer need to keep them on a centralized server and pay for the bandwidth to deliver it but rather could just seed a show well (i.e. have a few powerful machines dedicated to serving up the shows) and let everyone watching the show upload the show to others as they watch it. Couldn't someone compete with Hulu if they harnessed this technology? I imagine that you could put out HD-quality content with this sort of infrastructure. Only time will tell (assuming that this technology does get picked up by someone big).

One-Liners

I have a couple more articles that I want to talk about but they're just one-liners:

Legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick was part of a panel recently at a hacking convention and told some great stories (including a live prank). He's probably the father of social engineering attacks (tricking you into giving up sensitive information or making yourself vulnerable).

CNN has a pretty good article on how to prepare yourself for the transition to digital TV. If you're on cable or satellite, then you're ok. Otherwise, read that article.

Rock Band

I just wanted to conclude by proclaiming that Rock Band is an incredible video game. As expensive as my 80 GB PS3 was, I'm really glad I got it. I'm excited to start buying Blu-ray movies (especially Iron Man and The Dark Knight), Metal Gear Solid 4 is beautiful, the Playstation Network store is just how things should've been on the PS2, and Rock Band is by far one of the coolest games I've played.

I never thought I'd like it that much because I never got into Guitar Hero, but it's definitely worth checking out. The closest any game has come to replicating the kind of co-operative play you get from this game is probably Wii Sports, but this game tops that. You really do feel like you're part of a band because when you play hard song it's rewarding and you start patting each other on the back and stuff. Also impressives are the nuances: the presentation is flawless. They had my band name (Elton and the Fun King Band) on a tour bus, on CD album covers, and in neon in the World Tour mode! Plus, the load screens are customized with your band! Any musicians will really be impressed with this game (or non-musicians), because I think that it handles guitar a lot better, as well.

*deep breath* Ok, enough of that. I'm going to go read Salem's Lot for a bit. Have a great week, everyone!