ShitChat

What? – Positive of what? that he won’t be in the final?

I forsee a great future for Web Applications. Web access is becoming ever more ubiquitous, and the need for separate desktop apps is diminishing. Some would argue, ferociously, against this point, with quotes like “Google Docs will never beat MS Office”.

Suck it up, Google Docs has the functionality most office workers ever need. We could argue all day about what you can and can’t do with online apps, however, the line between the two is blurring. The Eye-Fi manager app is actually a website gui on some terminal style apps, and recently I just wrote a program to graph data from my Diabetes Blood Glucose monitor, and I chose HTML, CSS and JavaScript for it. It’s cross platform rapid development, with a consistent GUI.

Despite this I have had some reservations in the past about Standards groups, in particular the WHATWG, who started HTML5. The W3C are now involved too, but I’m not 100% on the interaction. I blogged about some problems with “this bunch” before.

Now, it seems the process has had it’s first defeat. Ian Hickson, the man behind it all, just emailed contributors (and former contributors like myself) a note indicating that the new <video> tag will have no cross-browser, cross-platform default, as the vendors cannot agree, again.

Essentially Apple are sticking behind H.264, because they have invested a lot of money in it (think iPhone HW decoders), and the others won’t do that. Some of the others will do Theora Ogg, but Apple won’t, and it looks crap anyway.

So, there we have it, browser makers rule, and when they can’t agree, the developers and users suffer. Again.

The real problem though, is the idea that HTML is a good way to build an application. It isn’t. However, it is open, where Flash, Silverlight, Air, et al are not. My question is, why are people, in 2009 still using a document markup language with poor add-ons as the basis for applications? It’s like you have carved a statue and at the end of it think, “hmm, i need storage”, and butcher the statue to make it a cupboard.

It’s a farce, but the browser makers will always have the upper hand and developers, and even the great Hixie is powerless in the face of market share politics.

One last thing, bring back HyperCard and stick it on the web.

Entries caught so far

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HMS_Quorn&oldid=299581146
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chris_Evans_(presenter)&oldid=299656856#Personal_life
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chuckle_Brothers&oldid=299605147#Stage
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Royal_Navy&oldid=299855871

There are still entries in active play, remember, the more obscure-yet-plausible (or with external references) the more likely it is to stick.

Some may remember the great post competition of 2002 – where shitchat readers flocked in their … ones … to post anything they could to me. The rules, 2nd class postage, and no envelopes.

Some entrants :-

Block of foam

Floppy disk

The winner was Jan with the golf ball :-

Golf Ball

Now we have a new competition.

We all know Wikipedia is full of shit, so let’s fill it with a little more. We want to see the most obscure, silly, but yet plausible, reference to Flash, shoe-horned into Wikipedia.

The rules :-

You have to place your entry on an existing article, it must feature the use of Flash as a person, and you must email a link to me at the address competition @ this website.

Do not post your link in public – it will be too easy for others to destroy. I will monitor them, if they go, I will post a link to an archived version. The winner will be the person who gets an entry on there for the longest amount of time.

There will be a prize.

Get vandalising people.

Chief bampot Blatter has spoken of his worries of Foreign club ownership in the EPL.

No, he’s worried that with all the worlds cash being ploughed into one league, it will gain the dominant power, and FIFA will lose out.

This is a half finished draft of an article I saved ages ago, maybe interesting to some :-

Over the years I have participated in “The Great OS Wars™”, firmly in the Macintosh camp. Since the arrival of Macintosh OS X – now called simply OS X – I have been less inclined to march to war on the old foes Windoze, or the alternate foe of Linuxes.

First of all, Operating System doesn’t really matter. Well, of course it does, but only in the sense that it is there to enable you to work. If it hinders your workflow, the OS doesn’t suit you. The argument, of course, takes a turn here, not all OSes are equal when it comes to modifications. I personally rate OSX as the least customisable, followed by windows and with Linux being the most customisable. So if no OS supports your needs, chances are Linux will have a way of allowing you to work – though its far from guaranteed.

The second stage of my reasoning change, especially with the explosion of the internet, and the vast numbers of people adopting computers, the argument has got diluted some-what. The number of computer users who have actually used three or more OSes is small. I will stand by this by saying, a lot of users think they have used an OS simply by turning it on, having a look at the default setup and declaring they “don’t like it”. That’s not use, not by a long shot. As a software developer, I have developed for C# on Windows with Visual Studio, C/C++ on Linux with Eclipse, and C/Obj-C with TextMate/Xcode on OSX. I’ve actually used each OS for long periods each day while on these separate projects, and had to live with every little nuance of each OS. I feel I can give a better, still subjective, argument than a fan-boy.

If you type all day long, and some would argue coders aren’t supposed to, the text selection and cursor movement systems come into play, and switching from your ‘native’ method to that of another OS can be a frustrating experience, Mac and Windows won’t exactly help out of the box, but Linux will – albeit a quite technical task.

Which comes to another point, OS choice depends on technical level. If you aren’t hindered by wanting to explore the underbelly of the workings of the OS, go for Linux, you’ll be able to tinker with just about anything. If you are a technophobe, I would argue that MacOS is the choice for you. I know of many people who have struggled with “computers” (meaning Windows) but been converted by Macintoshes.

Don’t be constrained by what software is available where – the old games argument no longer washes, Macs have plenty of games, and if you want to play games you really should be buying a console anyway. Other than games, all software is much of a muchness, with the glaring miss of Adobe software on Linux.

Try all, even learn them all if you want, but don’t tell others what to do.

Linux is oft described as the pancea of computing, all that is good, free for all.

If I wasn’t such a long term Mac head, I certainly would have switched by now. There has been recent criticsm that OpenSource and Free software suffers from an unfinished image, which is only combatted by making projects the paid work of individuals.

I suppose that can be said, however, there are plenty of paid projects, WebKit, OpenOffice, Ubuntu, etc to make it work.

No, the main problem with Linux is that it is always looking at what it isn’t. It isn’t Windows or MacOS, yet thousands of hours are spent seeking interoperability with proprietary software in a bid to win users over.

I don’t believe that is a winning strategy. Linux should be looking to innovate, not immitate. Yet the bulk if efforts are photocopy efforts with little functional or actual improvements.

Ubuntu, trying to “look & feel” like Windows, Samba, duplicating the dire SMB protocol, OpenOffice, matching MS office bloat for bloat. Just some examples.

Some would argue that Apple and MS would simply ignore any Linuxy inovations or bury them with feature compatible propriety software. That is likely true of Baldmer’s company, but Apple has a lot to thank the OS community for, CUPS, WebKit, X11 to name some prominent examples.

It’s time for Linux to shed the shackles, find it’s own direction for the OS, innovate and make Windoze and OSX play catch up, for once.

Every now and again I get asked “Did you miss growing up without brothers and sisters?”

How the fuck would I know?
I cannot possibly compare being an only child to being a sibling, and while I’m ranting, you really can’t argue the counterpoint either.

It’s even more anoying when someone acuses you of “only child syndrome” as if only children are locked away and have no social contact with peers.

Not every social trait can be derived from the absence of siblings. Sadly some stupidly arrogant twats thingk siblings make your life utopian.

Wankers!

Climate Change skeptacism hits Australia. Also, the US suppresses documents contradicting the so-called scientific consensus.

I have long argued that the, so-called Science behind the Church of Global Warming & Climate Change is not very sound. Despite this, there has begun a ferocious debate matching the levels of religious debate about the issue. As I always state, there is a trend of warming, but I remain yet to be convinced that Man is the direct cause. In fact, the science is pretty much based on causality logic, and if you look at all the theories which you can adopt in a quest for explaining the climate change, Solar activity has by far the most convincing causality evidence.

Again I ask the question, why are we wasting (English)Billions of dollars trying to combat something we know so little about? We should invest in testing the theories, investigating, and most importantly preparing for the predicted changes. After all, what we are wasting money on today is only going to delay the predicted effects by less than ten years.

It’s time to engage scientific brains rather than just accept, without question, some really poor theories. This state of mind never helped humanity in the past, look at what religion has done for faith in the word of a man.

There has been an emerging trend lately that Science and Religion are not enemies, and are not mutually exclusive. It is widely documented that I abhor religion – or at least it’s manifestations across the globe, but for the sake of argument I’ve been mulling over the Science and Religion can co-exist debate.

The films Knowing and Angels and Daemons were the two specificly that pose this hypothesis. In A&D, a religious bod makes a big speech on the very subject. In Knowing it is the selection of two children to be an Adam and Eve on a spaceship Ark bound for another world.

On the face of it, it would appear that Religion and Science can co-exist and even compliment each other. It always surprises me that well renowned scientists hold religious faith. Why? Simply because Religion has always tried to explain the unexplained with childish or outlandish stories.

Some of the early reasoning about flat worlds and heaven, knowledge trees and talking snakes spring to mind. I’m not being obtuse here, but religion has lied, deliberately so on cases, and been wrong with explaining the unexplained on lots of occasions.

So my question is this, if you are a scientist, you are trained to respect verifiable truths. If there was a source of scientific fact that continued to be wrong over and over for millenia, and tried to cover up these errors and dog their heels in to protect falsehoods, how can any scientist have faith in that?
How could you believe anything from such sources?