Rants from Vas

Well, John Gruber is at it again. This time, he’s calling MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan a jackass over this article about the iPhone’s battery performance. It all stems from this fragment in the iPhone specs:

A properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs.

Now Sullivan has decided that this means the battery becomes completely unusable after 400 cycles, and written a whole article about it. So yes, he’s guilty of spreading FUD, and I guess you can call him a jackass for that.

But Gruber has gone to the opposite extreme. Notice the use of “properly maintained,” “designed to” and “up to” in that quote. Gruber seems to think that this means the iPhone battery will hold 80% of its original capacity after 400 cycles. It doesn’t say that at all. It also doesn’t say how much of the 80% capacity that’s retained might actually be usable. Remember, too, that because we carry our phones around with us, we just charge them when we can. None of us are really in a position to “properly maintain” their batteries. In this case, it would appear that Gruber is spreading fanboyism.

Is the built-in battery really such a big deal? To me it is. I like to be able to carry a fully charged spare battery and swap it in. I wouldn’t be able to do that with an iPhone. But it’s a well-known fact that iPhone batteries are non-removable, and the performance figures and price don’t really look that much worse than the competition. So for people all the people who only use one phone battery anyway (I imagine this is the majority case), it probably isn’t an issue.

As you probably didn’t notice, I’ve moved this site from a data center in the US to a data centre in Brisbane. To my surprise, the operation was completely painless. I had everything back up in a couple of minutes. The Internet really is becoming simpler and more accessible to non-technical users. I guess it’s a testament to how bad things used to be that I was expecting things to be difficult.

While I’m on the topic, I’ll put in a plug for my hosting provider Selpaw Services in Perth. Their support is always speedy and first-rate. Thanks for everything, Luke.

Localising a software product is a painful, time-consuming process. After much thought, I think there is just no simple way. If you ever plan to tackle the process, be prepared to sink a lot of time and effort into it. Then when you’re coming up to the next release, be prepared to go through it all again.

Read the rest of this entry »

So Imus has been sacked by CBS for referring to some women of African descent as “nappy-headed hos” on air. Now I’m not a fan of shock jocks, and I don’t make a habit of listening to them, but this strikes me as ridiculous. Hello! What’s a shock jock suppose to do? Say things that upset people on air, perhaps? And he’s been sacked for, guess what – doing his job and saying something that upset someone.

But besides the obvious irony, does anyone else see the glaring double standard that’s applied? It’s OK for all the gangsta rappers to talk like this, but as soon as a white shock jock says it, then it’s racist and degrading to women. Or should we look at it another way. Is this a different kind of racism at work? Is it OK for black guys to call women hos, because we know all black guys are a bunch of dirty bastards, anyway, but higher standards apply to decent white guys? Either way, something’s seriously wrong.

Is it OK to call women hos? How would you like it if someone called your sister (substitute mother, daughter or girlfriend if that works better for you) a whore? I wouldn’t refer to women as hos. But then I do know people who address each other as “гадна пичка” in a perfectly friendly manner (if you don’t know what that means, ask a Serb or Croat – suffice to say it doesn’t sound nice).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be honest. When I first heard good things about the movie Ten Canoes, I was sceptical. I wondered if it really was good, or it was just politically correct to give it good reviews. I didn’t see it at the cinema, but I did watch the DVD yesterday (a legitimate, hired copy — not a dodgy pirate or bootleg disc). What did I think? It was really good, and I would happily recommend it.

Ten Canoes is a dramatisation of a native Australian folk story/legend or whatever you want to call it. It’s slow paced, interesting and humorous at times. It opens a window on the indigenous culture and way of life in what’s now the Northern Territory. On top of that, it’s well produced, with good locations, acting and camerawork.

So if you’ve got the time, and you want to watch something slow, rent a copy of it. You won’t be disappointed.

The other day, I felt like playing Ghouls’n Ghosts (also known as 大魔界村). Now I have warm, fuzzy memories of this game. When I was much younger, the was one of them at the Rockdale bus stop. I didn’t know that the protagonist’s name was Arthur, so I called him “Silly Billy”, because you’d have to be pretty stupid to take on all those monsters. When he lost his armour, I referred to him as “Undies Man”.

Playing it now, I like it more than ever. The game is a true work of art. It doesn’t have high-definition video, it doesn’t have three dimensional graphics, it doesn’t even have stereo sound, and yet it still provides a better experience than many of today’s latest and greatest. The music is creepy, and the graphics have a superbly implemented Gothic theme. You shiver playing this thing.

Back when hardware was limited, the game developers put more effort into artistry. There were about 80,000 pixels on the screen, and they made every one of them count. They made sure everything fit together, and provided the gamer with a true experience. Now it seems they just try to blow the gamer away with big, flashy graphics and little or no substance.

What happened to the people who developed games twenty years ago? Did they become corrupted by having access to more powerful hardware? Were they replaced with a younger generation that doesn’t understand? I want them back! I want to see what real games would be like with today’s hardware.

With all the talk that goes on about how and why Macs are or aren’t as secure as any other computers, I thought I’d weigh in. Now I’m not a professional security expert. I’m just a regular software developer, although I do put on the “white hat” regularly and try to find exploits in the products I build. My theory on the conspicuous absence of OS X malware is that the scale just isn’t big enough. Sure, there are plenty of Macs in use, but bot herders need massive scales to achieve their goals.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve gone and got myself a new MacBook. Not a MacBook Pro, just the plain old white MacBook. I’ve been using it for long enough to form some opinions, and overall I’m satisfied with it. But it definitely isn’t the perfect notebook computer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve been doing some programming in my spare time, and working on putting the proverbial polish on some applications. Among other things, I’ve been using Shark to profile applications and look for hot spots to optimise.

Now before I say anything else, I just have to say that if you develop for OS X and you haven’t used Shark, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s performance profiling how it should be done: simple to use and easy to understand the output. Any non-trivial application could do with optimisation. Even if CPUs are fast enough to run slow code at acceptable speeds, users appreciate snappy applications. And what’s to say they don’t want to use spare cycles for something else? I’m compiling SDLMAME in the background while I blog, for example. And CPUs use less power when idle, so notebook batteries last longer with more optimised applications.

Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand, using Shark was a very interesting experience. I was quite surprised at some of my findings.

Read the rest of this entry »

This kind of thing really annoys me. Not the whole strip – just the last panel. To suggest that there’s such a thing as “normal-sized” girls is ridiculous. Girls come in all sizes, and the real problem is that shops only carry clothes for “normal-sized” girls.

Read the rest of this entry »