iPod
Annoyances
Following
Joshua's lead instead of boring you with
effusive praise for the iPod (of which I have lots)
I have decided to list the things that have bugged
me since I started using it- The
MusicMatch software that comes with the iPod
for organizing your music sucks, a lot. After
wasting about 30 minutes trying to get it to
recognize my iPod I jumped on Google, found out
about Ephod
and became a happy camper.
- The backlight can only be switched on
via the iPod menu. This is phenomenally stupid.
The reason I want the backlight is on is because
I can't see the menu but I need to navigate the
menu to turn on the backlight? Whatever.
- The automatic shutoff feature turns of
the iPod while I'm listening to it quite
often.
- The iPod doesn't get charged if it is
docked and connected to a PC via a USB connector.
This wouldn't be so bad if not that managing the
MP3s on the iPod uses up a lot of battery
life.
#Soul
Calibur 2 Bug?
This post was originally going to be a bug report
about the fact that although I remember unlocking
the Assasin character in Soul Cal 2 I couldn't use
the him. Well a quick Googling led me to
the Game Winners Soul Calibur page where I
learned that I can only use Assassin during two
player games. So I checked and Yes, Assassin is
selectable if I am in 2 versus mode. That sucks,
Assassin is the Hwang character from the original
Soul Calibur who was my favorite character and now
I don't get to use him most of the time.
#A Legacy
of Embrace and Extend
It is interesting yet unsurprising how much people
refuse to believe that Microsoft can use XML and
related technologies in a standards complaint
manner. The recent article on Slashdot entitled
Gates Embraces Web Service Interoperability led
to
this thread where my response to someone who
implies that Microsoft embraced and extended
XML in Office 2003 leads to dozens of posts
from Doubting Thomases who refuse to accept that
Microsoft is not only behaving in a standards
compliant manner but is also making it easy for
people to manipulate their XML vocabularies by
providing schemas and stylesheets.
Of course, that doesn't take the cake as
Joi Ito's paranoid claim from earlier today
that it's just a matter of time before Microsoft
embraces and extends blogging related standards to
somehow foil Google. This is a particular
impressive feat of paranoia which also makes little
technical sense. I guess if all the web pages on
the Internet turned into RSS feeds that were
generated from Microsoft products this would be
possible. Then again, given that Google can make
such a kickass search engine from parsing tag soup
on the Internet imagine how fucking awesome their
search engine would be if they actually had
structured metadata-rich XML documents as their
data source.
If Joi Ito's paranoid raving actually becomes
reality it is more likely that the Google folks
would praise Microsoft and anybody involved than it
somehow foiling their status as the king of
search.
#What's the
Deal with "Office 11"?
In a recent blog post
Tim Bray where he complains about his quote being
altered for a press release
Anyhow, in October 2002, Jean Paoli, the original
XML guy at Microsoft, with whom I go back a long
way, asked me if I could provide a nice quote for
the big Office 11 announcement with all the cool
XML stuff.
...
Now this is interesting. I guess changing "/" to
"and" is OK, and I think noting that my employer
is incorporated is actually legally required in
certain contexts. Putting quotes on `Office
11'--huh?
I can answer the question about "Office 11" since
this is standard Microsoft practice. Since "Office
11" is not a product name but was instead a working
name until the official name of the product was
decided upon (in this case
Office 2003) the PR folks prefer that people
writing about the products indicate this in someway
and they settled on quotes around the codename (as
opposed to always using the phrase "the project
codenamed XXX"). The same is true of any writings
about other Microsoft products with code names such
as "Yukon", "Whidbey" or "LongHorn" that have been
through the proper editorial filters. So it is
unlikely you'll see the quotes in off-the-cuff
mentions in the various b0rg blogs but they should
be predominant in articles found on
the Microsoft
website.
#RSS Bandit
on MSDN
My article
Revamping the RSS Bandit Application has
finally showed up on MSDN. The article describes
the overall architecture of RSS Bandit and goes
into some detail about how a couple of its features
work. The installer that comes with the article not
only installs the RSS Bandit executable but also
drops the source code as well.
#
--
Get yourself a
News Aggregator and subscribe to my
RSSfeedDisclaimer:
The above comments do not
represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or
strategies of my employer. They are solely my
opinion.