Symphonious

Ah Scoble, when are you going to learn?  Everytime you mention Mac and anything Microsoft related in the same sentance, a whole bunch of Mac users are going to flame you something savage.  In this case of course their completely right - Windows Media Player for Mac sucks and I don't bother watching any Channel 9 videos because it sucks so much.  I could probably use VLC which I use for anything else that Quicktime can't play but it just seems like too much hassle just to listen to a bunch of people prattle on and on instead of just reading a quick text based blog entry.

Since Microsoft don't appear to be inclined to create a good player application for Mac, what about just creating a QuickTime codec plugin to allow QuickTime to play Windows Media Format?  (Note: I believe this is possible at least to a pretty good extent but really have no idea)  That way Windows Media becomes a first class codec on Mac, Apple is lumped with all the work of creating a good UI (not that they've had that good a track record for QuickTime player UIs) and pretty much any Mac app that works with multimedia will be able to support Windows Media as long as they've coded to the QuickTime APIs instead of rolling their own decoders.  That should reduce the effort required for Microsoft, increase the market share of Windows Media by making it more accessible and satisfy Mac users because they'll have an Apple sanctioned UI (as well as a huge range of other player options they could use).

Maybe there's a bunch of stuff that can't be done as a QuickTime plugin but getting even just the basics would be a huge win for Windows Media Format adoption on Mac and it should wind up like a kind of "first one's free" effect with people accepting the format and then be more open to using the Microsoft player to access the advanced features.

Shame it'll never happen…

So iTunes 4.9 is out and the podcasting support is pretty cool.  It does pretty much what you'd expect - podcasts appear in a new "Podcasts" "special playlist" just under the "Library" icon.  It does keep track of whether or not you've listen to a particular podcast or not so you can keep track of where you're up to and has a bunch of configuration options for how to handle incoming feed entries and how long to keep stuff.

The iTunes Music Store now has a new podcasts section (not sure if it's available to impoverished countries like Australia or not - I have a US iTMS account) which has a respectable number of offerings considering it's just been released.  The biggest problem is that there doesn't seem to be a good way to browse podcasts - the "Browse" view seems a bit buggy at the moment, or at least just not intuitive - I keep winding up browsing songs to buy instead of podcasts to subscribe to.  Sadly, this seems to be a common problem with podcasts - too hard to find any good ones.

On that note, if anyone knows of any good podcasts that are nearly all music in a Motown kind of feel (not necessarily actual Motown but in that style) I'd love to hear about them.  Podcasts of people talking is just a waste of time, it's much more efficient and simpler to read a blog entry than listen to someone prattle on via audio but sadly the most common type of podcast seems to be audio blogs.

Ken Arnold talks about the complexities of generics and how he doesn't feel they provide enough benefit for the complexity they add.  I have to agree, most people probably only understand the basics of generics and not the full spec which is a recipe for great confusion and the number and type of bugs that generics prevents really doesn't give much benefit.

It's odd that there's such a push towards scripting languages with no compile time type checking at the same time the Java crowd are pushing for stricter compile time type checking.  I can honestly say that in all the perl, PHP and Ruby scripting I've done that not once have I ever had a bug caused by having the wrong type of data in a variable.  Not once.  You never should if you have clearly defined what each variable's purpose is and if you haven't done that you've got problems that extend way beyond what a compiler can help you with.

UPDATE: Whoops, forgot the link.

The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

 Interesting viewpoint…  It fails to consider what benefits were gained from the more densely populated life style that farming supported which may be the biggest advantage of agriculture even if health standards were limited.  It's good to look at things from a different angle anyway.

Recently Apple made WebKit development much more open which is great for people who develop products using WebKit as they get more control - it's great for the KHTML developers as it's easier for them to integrate Safari changes and for a bunch of people to test against.

The downside however is that people who have no business playing with development builds of WebKit just can't help being cool and running it anyway.  What's worse is that people encourage this stupidity by making prepackaged builds available.  If you can't follow the very simple instructions to build your own version of WebKit from CVS, you really, really, really shouldn't be working with a development build - you almost certainly don't have the skills required to provide a worthwhile bug report anyway.  The build instructions for WebKit are probably the most brain-dead simple instructions I've ever seen for any open source project (you thought ./configure; make; make install was difficult - try just build-webkit; run-safari).  There's even a simple script to pull the latest updates from CVS without having to know anything about CVS commands.

Why is it so bad that people run these development builds you ask? Because when you're not a developer (and often even when you are) you don't know what's a bug caused by the WebKit development build and what's a bug caused by the software you're using - you can often get very weird knock on effects.  For instance, Swing applet's can't use command-V to paste in Safari because Safari eats the keystroke and the applet never sees it yet to a user the applet has a bug.  What really hurts is when these users wind up turning to the 3rd party developer for support and you have to waste time trying to reproduce the problem only to finally discover it was a bug that existed in WebKit for a matter of hours and it just so happens this user build WebKit from CVS in that timeframe.

Here's a tip, there are no improvements in the latest CVS WebKit that are so compelling that you would want to run it instead of the tested, stable released version and deal with the inherent instability of a bleeding-edge browser.  Just don't do it.