Twilight Universe

If you haven’t been following the news: Paris has been exploding with riots, sparked after protests about unfair employment laws. It’s all rather messy. My cousin is currently at University there (though will be going to London College of Fashion next year), and she was reporting live on the BBC about it.

There’s a lot of self-serving masturbation about what the internet is, but at its heart its a communication tool. This is exactly what makes its good in my opinion. Well done Louise for getting the story on the ground out there.

Please don’t blame browsers for your sloppy coding.

Just because your software fails horribly when it can’t find what it wants from my request, because it doesn’t check to see if a REQUEST variable has been set before trying to use it, doesn’t make it my problem. It’s your poor software design. Something which seems to be synonymous with using Python I might add*

Saying “If you’re using Safari you’ll see that a lot” isn’t a good response. Not just because I’m using Firefox, and not on a Mac, but because you are basically saying to me “Yeah, we’ve known our software is poorly done for a while, but we’d rather try to shift the blame than fix it.”

Frankly, while you offer a good service generally, your control panel lets you down. It’s generally poor, low on features, and isn’t stable. This software is what I see most of you. It’s not a good advert for you. Fix it or start losing customers, starting with this one right here.

No love, but perhaps a little understanding, me.

* I know Python is a nice language but, like all easy to pick up languages, it seems to have more than its fair share of awful, memory hungry, unstable applications. This might be perceptual though, because when you see a whole screen of Python Errors it starts to feel like it doesn’t like you much…

Remember kids it’s funny until it’s your religion, then it’s bigotry. Isaac needs to grow up, and smell what he’s shovelling. As Trey Parker aptly put it: “He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin.” What a fool.

Yes, you can now use Google Mars. Mars! Ok, so it’s not as high resolution as it could be (yet) but damn if this isn’t cool.

The iPod, cultural icon, modern walkman, expensive hunk of metal and plastic.

Whatever your opinion on it, it’s a safe bet that you or someone you know owns one. I myself own a 5th generation iPod (the Video) and happen to think it’s really nice. The video capability is useful, but not its main purpose, and I like being able to transfer videos on there to watch on the bus or train.

Or at least I did. I can’t anymore, at least not using iTunes, because Apple has decided to try and break my iPod.

You see one nice ability of the iPod is to be able to play videos that are larger than the screen. This way I can transfer my DVD resolution copy of say, Donnie Darko, onto it and then if I want to output it to a TV from my iPod it will look really good. This means I don’t need to worry about having an iPod version of movies, just one MPEG4 video file.

However, I recently updated iTunes (to 6.0.2) and my iPod firmware (to 1.1) and video uploads stopped working. Now I got a message that “some of the songs in the iTunes library […] were not copied to the iPod because they cannot be played on this iPod”. I now had to get iTunes to “convert to ipod video” files that had been working (and transfering) properly before. What the hell…?

It wasn’t that the iPod couldn’t play the videos (far from it) it was simply that Apple had crippled the software. The iPod played them fine before. Is it iTunes, or a bugged firmware upgrade (v1.1)?

How Apple have worked out that removing useful functions of a product is a good thing I don’t know - the current version (at the time of writing anyhow) still has this problem. Great. Now I like iTunes as a music organiser, it makes uploading to my iPod simple, or did, so I’ll probably still use it. However the video problem meant I went looking for ways to make my iPod useful again. Not just for video, but in as many ways possible.

I was pleasantly surprsed.

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