I was at Sam Goody again this past weekend where I picked up the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Ninja Scroll and where'll I'll probably soon be returning to once they get the Ninja Scroll Series. I couldn't help but notice the disparity in the way entertainment media like console games and movies are sold compared to music CDs. Sam Goody had an "under $10" rack where one could buy big budget movies from a few years ago for less than half their original price at the time they were first released. Similarly various video games were being sold at half price because they were "platinum sellers". On the other hand I still have to fork over $20 after taxes if I want to pick up a CD over a decade old like NWA's second album. What seemed quite absurd was that it was possible  to buy a DVD for half the price one would have paid for its accompanying soundtrack on CD. There is clearly a problem here yet the RIAA continues to act like the problem is with music fans and not with them. Being blinded by greed is an unfortunate thing.

Phil Greenspun has a post entitled RIAA, friendship and prostitution where he states

In the bad old days of Napster you kept your MP3 collection on your desktop.  Today, however, an MP3 jukebox with enormous capacity can be purchased for $200.  It won't be long now before average people carry around their entire music collections on their cell phones.

Consider this scenario.  You are sitting at Starbucks and see a friend.  He is not inside your Starbucks but across the street in the other Starbucks.  You walk across the street.  Both of you happen to have your MP3 jukeboxes your pockets.  He says "Have you heard the latest Britney Spears song?  It reminds me so much of the late Beethoven Quartets with some of Stravinsky's innovative tonality."  You haven't?  Just click your MP3 jukeboxes together and sync them up.  Any tracks that he had and you didn't you now have.  You're using a digital audio recorder; the device won't do anything except record music.  You're not paying each other so it is noncommercial.  Under Section 1008 what you're doing is perfectly legal in the United States.

<snip />

What is the point of Internet file sharing when people can, perfectly legally, copy as much music from each other as they could reasonably want?  Only a person with zero friends would want to bother with file sharing.

This is an interesting point and one I've heard expressed before by one of my friends who owns an iPod. It takes about 10-15 minutes to push an  album's worth of songs to an iPod. Nowadays when someone tells him about a good album they just bought, he doesn't even have to borrow it for more than 15 minutes to have all the music on his iPod. The problem for RIAA is that unlike listening to music on your PC which could be considered "try before you buy" since the PC is not the main music device of a large number of the population, an iPod is likely to be the main music player of a lot of people and once music is on it there is little incentive to go out and buy it.

Once the next generation of iPods (and other hard drive based digital music players) show up with wireless file sharing (just beam that song Scotty) this trend will be significantly accelerated.

Personally, I hope the music industry adapts but I definitely hope that during the adaptation process we lose the RIAA.

 

I finally decided to take the plunge and install dasBlog. It definitely wasn't a straightforward experience. Click below to read about the issues I faced.
 

Recently on the atom-syntax list someone posted a link to Jeremy Allaire's RSS-Data Proposal which to myself, Tim Bray, and Bill De Hora looked like an idea without much merit. The proposal is yet another iteration of the argument of how to embed extra information within an RSS feed besides the traditional elements representing the publication date, author and description of the news item. Jeremy Allaire's proposal not only attempts to solve the problem in a way that is less flexible and less useful than the current way the problem is solved in RSS feeds today (via namespaced vocabularies) but also does not take into account current industry practices for indicating datatype information in an XML document. I had originally planned to ignore the proposal along with the ensuing interest in the format that sprang up in a few weblogs but after seeing an article about RSS-Data in EWeek which attempts to legitimize what is basically a bad idea I decided to go ahead and post a critique of the proposal.

Below is a detailed look at the problems with the RSS-Data proposal and how some of its idiosyncracies can be improved.

 

 

Jeremy Cowles has produced some kickass XSLT themes for RSS Bandit such as DOS (my new favorite), Halloween and Unwise Terminal. RSS Bandit 1.1.0.36 is now available and contains six new themes, download it from here. The details of the changes since version 1.1.0.29 are contained below.

As part of my ongoing effort to document the thinking process behind the work we've been doing on the XML APIs for the next version of the .NET Framework I wrote an article entitled Can One Size Fit All: Exploring the Possibility of One API for XML Processing which appears in the current issue of XML Journal. The article can be considered a followup to my previous article on XML.com, A Survey of APIs and Techniques for Processing XML

More below on the trojan I mentioned yesterday, why I decided to specialize in computer systems instead of software engineering while in school, hip hop feuds, and release notes for RSS Bandit.

 

 

My machine was acting weird this morning, I seemed to have a network connection but couldn't actually access any sites on the Internet. Suspecting a problem with my ISP's DNS servers I called Comcast where I learned that my machine was infected with the Qhosts trojan. It seems I browsed some malicious website (or received some malicious HTML spam) which allowed my machine to get 0wn3d. It seems a similar exploit and trojan are behind the Half Life 2 source code leak. I hate this shit.

More below on the W3C 's recent Workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Item Sets (aka the binary XML workshop), developer and user communities, the future of BlogX, and really cool software for the iPod.

 

 

One thing I can't stand is food that has undecipherable expiration dates. I have a cupboard full of Van Camp's Pork and Beans which I keep filling every time I go to the grocery store which now has cans that are anything from a week old to a year old. I recently had an upset stomach and suspected that it was from eating a can of beans that was past its due date so this morning I wanted to make sure I didn't make the same mistake. You can't imagine my irritation when I discovered that there isn't a traditional "Best Before" date on the cans but instead indecipherable gobbly-gook like "N3154 PB" and "09:51-41". WTF? I'm going to have to throw out all the cans I have just to be on the safe side.

Posts below on the The Impedance Imperative Tuples + Objects + Infosets =Too Much Stuff! article in the Journal of Object Technology, Fumiaki Yoshimatsu's post on being careful to not get overexcited about announcements that may occur at this year's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, and the Greatest IPO Ever.

 

 

I saw two interesting pieces of news from back home this past week that made me hanker to talk to my dad. The first is that sanity has prevailed and Amina Lawal isn't going to be killed which is one dark cloud hanging over the country that I'm glad is being lifted. The second is that " a Nigerian satellite blasted into orbit Saturday aboard a Russian rocket. It seems folks back home are basically of two minds about it, there are those who see it as us "entering the Space Age" while others see it as a waste of money which shows a lack of priorities. I especially like this quote from the ABC article

"The satellite is a waste of money," said 21-year-old Gabriel Mordi, selling mobile phone cards on a dusty street in Lagos, a city that seen from above is a colossal sprawl of millions of rusting tin-roof shacks and palm trees.

More below on US presidential candidates, Tim Bray on XML & Microsoft, and an opinion on Davd Stutz's recent writings on the failure of shrinkwrap software.

 

 

I'm trying to get my hands on a download for Emacs 21. Since the GNU Project server got hacked there doesn't seem to be a public FTP site where I can grab the bits from. This is a shame since James Clark's excellent nXML is only available for Emacs 21.

More below on me trying to broaden my horizons by attending a rave, T-shirts that get you in trouble with members of the opposite sex, more discussion on the exception issue from my last post, GTA on XBox and more.

 

 

One of the most frustrating things about working on software is that programmers tend to treat guidelines and best practices as if they were written in stone and handed down by a diety from above. In the .NET Framework developers are encouraged to use exceptions for signalling errors while error codes are frowned upon. On the surface, it sounds like a great idea to get rid of error codes until you create an application or API where lots of different errors could occur. For example, if you are writing an XML parser or a W3C XML Schema validator then avoiding error codes makes it difficult for users of your API to target certain classes of exceptions.

Last night I fixed a bug in RSS Bandit that had to do with invalid characters in XML feeds where I realized the only way to tell that such an exception had been thrown by the application was to write

if((e is XmlException) && (e.Message.IndexOf("invalid character")!= -1)){
msg = e.Message.Substring(5);
}

the above is dumb code. The fact that it is hard to internationalize is quite a problem and one that wouldn't exist if the XmlException class had an error code. Chalk up another one to religious adherrence to software design guidelines.

More below on iPod annoyances, quirky behavior in Soul Calibur 2 on XBox, slashbots on XML in Microsoft Office, and RSS Bandit on MSDN again and a bunch of other random stuff.

 

 

The table of contents of A First Look at ADO.NET and System.Xml v 2.0 is available online. This basically lists what I've been working on for the past year and a half. Last year I was testing the stuff described in Chapter 8 while most of this year I've been involved in design work for the stuff described in Chapter 6 (and some of chapter 5). My boss wrote a few of the chapters in the book so I'm definitely going to pick up a copy and display it prominently in my office to score some suckup points. :)

I saw an episode of the Yu-Gi-Oh a few days ago and was struck by how blatantly the cartoon is just a 30 minute advertisment for the Yu-Gi-Oh card game. I guess this is how my mom would have felt if she had ever watched an episode of Transformers during the eighties.

Favorite Pokemon ripoff cartoon?