Aching Brain

Anyone who says OpenOffice.org is rubbish due to it’s (mis)handling of tables has never used Office X 2004.

I mean really, Netscape 4 handled tables better than this. And talk about slow! Oh. My. God.

Rant over. Back to work.

Popularity: 18% [?]

So here I am on the ground floor of the Apple Store, Regents Street.

What’s most impressive (although not as impressive as the dual 2.5ghz G5 hooked up to two 30″ Cinema displays over there…) is that all the computers on display are hooked up to a massive wireless network that anyone can access - there’s a guy upstairs writing email on a HP laptop, although there are far more i/PowerBooks floating around, as you can imagine…

Hmm. This could become the most popular Internet cafe in the locale if they are not carefull…

Ettercap anyone?

Popularity: 19% [?]

Track seven, eh. Meant to be the best track on all albums ever, or so someone told me once. Let’s test this out…

With the aid of the very handy Rocklist, I had a hunt around for some of those greatest albums of all time lists. I thought we should go a bit trans-atlantic on this one, and also reader-centric. So I have for you the lists Q vs. Rolling Stone (an unfair comparison, many would argue), but this is only a bit of impromptu madness I just decided to concoct.

Let’s start with the Q’s list from 2003:

1. Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)
2. Radiohead - OK Computer (1997)
3. The Beatles - Revolver (1966)
4. Radiohead - The Bends (1995)
5. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)
6. Sex Pistols - Never Mind The Bollocks (1977)
7. The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses (1989)
8. Oasis - Definitely Maybe (1994)
9. The Strokes - Is This It (2001)
10. U2 - Achtung Baby (1991)

And onto Rolling Stone’s list from 2002:

1. The Beatles - Revolver (1966)
2. Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)
3. Beatles - Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
4. U2 - The Joshua Tree (1987)
5. The Beatles - The Beatles (aka The White Album) (1968)
6. The Beatles - Abbey Road (1969)
7. Guns n’ Roses - Appetite for Destruction (1987)
8. Radiohead - OK Computer (1997)
9. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV (1971)
10. U2 - Achtung Baby (1991)

The differences between the list, show a few things quite well. Firstly, British audiences are more likely to put faith in recent releases (I’m absolutely positive Eminem wouldn’t get a look in this year’s list). Secondly, Britpop only happened in Britain (Definately Maybe, hmm), and Guns n’ Roses definately only happened in the USA. Thirdly, a copy of The Red Album and The Blue Album would probably cover about 50% of the American list. Lastly, U2 will never be a number one kind of band (okay, maybe that’s just my opinion).

Now back to the point - track seven.

It’s official, the average person in the UK would most like the following tracks on a compilation tape/minidisc/iPod/CDR:

Nirvana - Territorial Pissings
Radiohead - Fitter Happier
The Beatles - She Said
Radiohead - Just
Eminem - Way I Am
Sex Pistols - Seventeen
The Stone Roses - Song for my Sugar Spun Sister
Oasis - Bring it on Down
The Strokes - Last Nite
U2 - Fly

And the average person in the USA would most like the following tracks on a compilation tape/minidisc/iPod/CDR:

The Beatles - She Said
Nirvana - Territorial Pissings
Beatles - Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite
U2 - In God’s Country
The Beatles - While my Guitar Gently Weeps
The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun
Guns n’ Roses - My Michelle
Radiohead - Fitter Happier
Led Zeppelin - Going to California
U2 - Fly

Based upon this incredibly slap-dashed attempt at evidence, I am not convinced by this track seven business. I’m going to need some convincing, surely there must be some better track seven’s than the above in the world? Answers on a postcard, or just as a comment below please…

Popularity: 30% [?]

On a lighter note. After that rather expansive potted history of Buckleymania, I thought something a little lighter might be in order…

The floor is open. Great song lyrics, and I will start with the Buckleymeister himself -

Lover, You Should’ve Come Over

A kingdom for a kiss upon my shoulder

And follow with another fellow teenage favourite of mine, The Lemonheads -

Alison’s Starting to Happen

She’s the puzzle piece behind the couch that makes the sky complete

That last one someone else brought to my attention, but I thought I would add it anyway. There’s hundreds more, come on folks, pick your brains… And I’ve just had a great idea for another music inspired vox populi, as inspired by the honourable Cat.

Popularity: 44% [?]

Ah, Jeff Buckley. Tragic troubadour of troubled youth, dies again next Monday. The release of The Grace Lecagy Edition on the 23rd of August brings to mind my days as a hormonal teenager, desperately trying to learn how to play his songs on the guitar, and spending hours on Napster (on a 56k connection) attempting to squeeze every single bootleg I could possibly lay my hands out of my fellow mourners.

Grace, the album, as it is, and as it was released in 1994, is so close to perfection in many ways. A string of almost half-finished sounding original pieces, tied together with some well picked, but obscure, cover versions, giving Grace a unique appeal. Indeed, listening to some of the live recordings I have of Jeff Buckley, you can tell that the album as it exists is but a mere starting point to what he wanted to achieve. His dissatisfaction, and displeasure with the release of this album is well-documented. Wrangles with Colombia music, the need for more time, and need for perfection were in his mind at the time of release. The fact that the majority of what made up his second posthumous album, Sketches for my Sweetheart the Drunk, was ready to be consigned to the scrapheap compounds the notion that it was never meant to be released.

Anyone who wants a swift relay of the issues surrounding the release of Sketches would be advised to read the well-researched biography of Buckley and his father Dream Brother by David Brown. The displeasure of Buckley’s temporarily estranged bandmates at the time of release is documented, alongside his also temporarily estranged mother’s insistence at the release going ahead. Mary Guibert (Jeff’s mother and sole executor of his estate) has fought hard to preserve Jeff’s memory in the way she believes he would have wanted to be remembered. Guibert was alongside Metallica and Eminem at the time of the first Napster court orders which banned certain search strings, trying desperately hard to stem the flow of badly recorded bootlegs that were floating about on the network.

I personally, even before starting to get a view of the issues surrounding the release of Sketches, felt uncomfortable by the album. It seemed so categorically different to Grace, despite feeling drawn to the new material, it felt wrong. Surely Jeff’s well-documented insistent perfectionism would have never allowed these tracks to be heard publicly. And so, when Mystery White Boy was announced in 2000, I felt a little better. A live performance album, with a couple of unreleased tracks, would surely be a more fitting tribute, then the, at times, painfully tacked together sound of Sketches.

At this time I was a subscriber and regular reader of the Jeff Buckley International Newsletter (put together by Guibert and Michael Tighe - Jeff’s guitarist). When news of the album arrived through this publication Guibert swore this album was to signify laying the ghost to rest. I breathed a sigh of relief, feeling that anymore releases of half-written songs and badly recorded demos or live tracks would almost constitute something close to grave-robbing. Mystery White Boy was here, a new way to hear the songs I knew line for line. I was happy.

That was until the next year, 2001. Along comes the announcement of the release of Live a L’Olympia. At this point my subsciption to the Jeff Buckley International Newsletter ends. I start to get wary of the estate’s intentions. In 2000, we were told no more, and in 2001 there was more, Guibert claiming she was pushed into this because of the incessant downloading of poor quality tracks that was still taking place across the internet. So another live album, it’s good, maybe forgivable.

My interest in the Buckley phenomena waned. But everytime I dusted down my CDs I could never resist having a quick listen of what I would term auditory porn. Distilled forever, locked in time, Grace, is the album I go back to, listen to, just a glimpse of what may have been and what never was.

Recently, whilst trawling the music press’ websites I came upon some sketchy details for a Grace Legacy Edition CD. Not being imminent in release I didn’t really look into the details. Until today, that is. The other half was looking at the iTunes Music Store, when he brought to my attention the big banner stating a new unreleased Jeff Buckley track. I looked over to find out it was none other than the song Forget Her. A much sought after and widely available track for Buckley aficionados. It was replaced, at the last minute, with So Real at the time of Grace’s release. Buckley apparently insisted he never wanted the track to be heard, despite the fact the song has “big hit” all over it like a neon sign. More instantly accessible than the other tracks on Grace, his record label could smell the money in this song. So now ten years after Grace it appears Columbia have decided to rake over Buckley’s bones one more time. Written in the wake of an acrimonious break up Buckley didn’t want to share the sentiments in this song with millions of people. However, now it seems it’s fair game. The song is currently available as a preview to the main album re-release on the iTunes Music Store. I am sure I have read Guibert saying in interviews that this track would never be released. But sure enough, as of next Monday profits from the re-release will be lining Columbia Records’ and Guibert’s designer pockets.

Now an admission. I am, or at least was, just as bad as the Columbia and the executors of Buckley’s estate. I have and have had for some time two different copies of the above track hiding on an old CDR somewhere, as I have copies of many badly recorded covers Buckley performed on various tours. I have his Meltdown Festival 1994 set, his set at his father’s memorial at St Ann’s in New York. I have had for a long time all the much touted previously unreleased tracks that have appeared on the various live albums and re-released singles that have cropped up since Buckley’s untimely death. Surely, myself and the other fans who have at one time or another maniacally collected these masterpieces are to blame. I feel bad, I do. But then again, all the stuff I have has lousy sound quality, it’s like listening to only a snatch of the song. There is a sort of ghoulish voyeurism that surrounds the idea of collecting fragments of the life of a dead person. I don’t remember how I acquired all the tracks, but I have them, I must have been some sort of sick freak to want them at some point in time. I never put a penny towards buying these tracks. Despite the fact that it was a painstaking process five years ago, it’s relatively easy now to acquire rarities. I still feel that they aren’t necessarily in the public domain. All the late night Napster sessions of my youth seemed, in some silly way, to account towards payment for the music I was acquiring. A daft, unrealistic, sentimental notion.

Am I curious? Of course. I did spend years in awe of Jeff Buckley, trying to glimpse just a little bit further by listening to scratchy recording of covers he performed on tour. Every time I got something new it was like opening a fresh box of chocolates. But for me, that ended a long time ago. I can agree with the release of the live albums, they complement Grace well. The difference between the live sound and studio sound in all of Buckley’s recordings is tangible, hence why I believe Grace can never be considered complete. I know I’ll want to own the Grace Legacy Edition. But I don’t know if I can. That scratchy live copy of Forget Her really is the only one I want to hear. I can’t agree with the release of a song that was explicitly never meant to be sold. It would appear that for now at least, for Jeff, it really is never over.

Popularity: 30% [?]

When you have a check box as part of a form, there is generally some text associated with it, like ‘Yes’ ‘No’, etc. In an operating system environment (Explorer, Finder, Gnome/KDE, etc), the text associated with a check box is usually clickable, the result of which toggles the check box.

HTML forms, on the other hand do not generally have this capability. As HTML forms by default display OS GUI widgets (similar action buttons, drop down menus and the like), this (I think) detracts from the usability of a website.

Fortunately we can use the DOM, a little bit of JavaScript and some little used (it seems) structural markup to rectify this, and make your form more semantically representative of the information it conveys to boot! Let’s get it on.

We’ll start with a basic, unstructured form in minging, dirty HTML. The kind of HTML your grandma would write:


<form action="somewhere.php" method="post">
Box 1: <input name="box1" value="some value" type="checkbox" />
Box 2: <input name="box2" value="some other value" type="checkbox" />
</form>


The first step is to turn it into XHTML while getting rid of those semantically meaningless paragraph tags and replace them with the better smelling label tag (incidentally, I just got back from France to find some rancid chicken in the fridge. That was not a nice smell, but I digress. The HTML above smells worse. See? back on topic..).


<form action="somewhere.php" method="post" id="aForm"> <label for="box1">Box 1:
<input name="box1" id="box1" value="some value" type="checkbox" /></label>
<label for="box2">Box 2:
<input name="box2" id="box2" value="some other value" type="checkbox" /></label>
</form>


O’Reilly has this to say of the label tag:

The label element defines a structure and container for the label associated with an input element. Because the rendered labels for most form controls are not part of the element’s tag, the label attribute provides a way for an author to associate the context of a label with its control.

Additionally, the ‘for’ attribute in the label tag links the label with it’s control.

If your primary audience are Mac/IE 5 users, you can stop here - for them, clicking the text next to the check box will, uh, check the box. It’s almost as if it was planned. The rest of us, unfortunately aren’t so lucky..

Using the DOM, we can find the checkboxes on the page and change their status thus:


var theBox = document.getElementById(boxid);
theBox.checked = (theBox.checked ? false : true);


And then call this JavaScript via the onclick handler thus:


<form action="somewhere.php" method="post" id="aForm"> <label for="box1" onclick="checkTheBox('box1');">Box 1:
<input name="box1" id="box1" value="some value" onclick="return false;" type="checkbox" /></label>
<label for="box2" onclick="checkTheBox('box2');">Box 2:
<input name="box2" id="box2" value="some other value" onclick="return false;" type="checkbox" /></label>
</form>


Note that a handler is placed on the checkboxes themselves that effectively disables them. This is because of a little quirk whereby in most browsers (although not Safari), if you click the checkbox, it will check the box, then run the onclick handler attached to the parent label tag, which will uncheck the box. Or the other way round. Either way, disabling the the checkbox allows the checkbox to function ‘normally’, albeit at the price of altering how forms should work…

To make the form that little bit more semantically correct (and for it to validate), we can add fieldset and an optional legend tags thus:


<form action="somewhere.php" method="post" id="aForm"> <fieldset>
<legend>Check the mofo' boxes</legend>
<label for="box1" onclick="checkTheBox('box1');">Box 1:
<input name="box1" id="box1" value="some value" onclick="return false;" type="checkbox" /></label>
<label for="box2" onclick="checkTheBox('box2');">Box 2:
<input name="box2" id="box2" value="some other value" onclick="return false;" type="checkbox" /></label>
</fieldset>
</form>


That’s it, we’re done. Check out a (mostly - I’ve just this second found that Safari doesn’t like it, but I’ll look at it again tomorrow) working example here.

Popularity: 24% [?]

franceCam

Popularity: 20% [?]

Life has changed rather rapidly in the last week for me, so I thought I would have a chat about it with the readers (all five of you) of this fine website.

I started a new job on Monday. 9.30-5.30, in Greenwich, small company, that hires out music and musicians for weddings and other assorted random events. It’s kind of tedious at times, but it’s also fun at times. There are so many things to learn and I’m having trouble remembering where everything is filed, where everything is stored on the computers and all the questions you have to ask people when they ring up. I am sure I’ll get my head round this at some point. But it is terrifying, I finally have responsabilities, I’m bound to make a whole raft load of mistakes, but ultimately I’m going to have to take the blame for all of them. Zoiks!

Then Wednesday comes, frantic text-messaging ensues amongst my group of college friends - they decide to post our exam results early! So, at 5.30 I step onto the bus back to New Cross, and sit nervously in Deptford traffic, envisaging scenes of panic around the boards, and a sense of dread wells up as I imagine not being able to find my number.

There was no one by the boards when I arrived and, despite the lack of crowding, it did take me at least five minutes to find the list of music graduates. Scanning down the list, I eventually found my number in a very pleasing position, and then checked it against my student card at least ten times before it finally sinking in. I had graduated.

Friday brought another change. I left my previous job, a moderately well-paid evening and weekends type thing in one of this cities’ great musical venues. If you made a mistake, you could blame a thousand other people, anyone but yourself. A kind of comfortable, but at times an intenslty uninteresting and unchanging type of comfortable. The evening went slowly and I was due to finish after the interval (and of course head straight to the pub for last night drinking). I asked my manager if it would be possible, since I was leaving, to sneak in at the back and just listen one last time. Better than that, she told me to leave ten minutes before the interval and then grab a ticket and sit in a prime spot in the building. I was amazed. But truly thankful. So I sat and watched, not moving for an hour and a half, entranced, slightly sad, absorbing every last drop.

I never thought I would miss the place, and I don’t think I will. The job essentially entailed being abused by members of the public, mixed in with the occassional friendlier faces. I won’t miss that. But seeing fantastic productions and hearing fanstatic music, as a regular part of your job is something that I am loathed to leave. People too I suppose, I have made some good friends there, and they’ll be missed. I know there will be some of them that I’ll still see from time to time, which will be good.

A week for moving on. I feel like I’ve left school again, or something, faces you’ll never see again dissapear, the bleak smell of most of the classrooms will never be there, and the safeness and security is all gone. Instead, I’ve just left university and started life - something which needn’t be frightening and is simply exciting.

Popularity: 25% [?]

I stopped smoking a year ago today.

Yay, go me.

[update]
6th July 2004

Okay, to be more accurate, the last cigarette i smoked was smoked a year ago today
[/update]

Popularity: 17% [?]

I am not in the market for a very sexy 20″ TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20″ TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20″ TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20″ TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20″ TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20″ TFT monitor.
I am not in the market for a very sexy 20″ TFT monitor.

Kind of nearly affordable in a 12 months interest free credit kind of way.

I mean, as they rightly point out, it does match my PowerBook…

*sighs*

Popularity: 17% [?]

Hmm, yes. Tiger. To be previewed at tomorrows World Wide Developers Conference.

I don’t really care about all the new widgets (I find it quite hard to see how they can better Panther - it addressed pretty much all my concerns with Jaguar), I just hope they fix these two incredibly irritating things:

1. Safari’s URL Autocompletion.

Should go from the smallest URL visited at the site who’s address is currently being typed to the biggest, not the other way round. Duh…

2. Page Up/Page Down/Home/End

On my PowerBook, as with most laptops, in order to page up/down or go to home/end on a line, i have to use a funky key combination due to the lack of dedicated keys. This I don’t have a problem with. No, what I have a problem is that Apple can’t seem to make their mind up whether to standardise it as fn+Arrow or Command+Arrow, instead leaving it up to individual developers it seems.

Consequently you get used to doing it one way in one application, switch to another and go flying all over the page.

Here’s to hoping…

Popularity: 19% [?]

I arrive on the edge of the solar system, the high pitched whine of the hyperdrive fading to a deep, distant hum, the central star is visible out of the left viewport while it’s lone orbiting planet is a distant disc of green.

Engaging the jump drive, the nearby stars turn into long streaks as I speed towards the planet and it’s orbiting space station.

Suddenly, the drive becomes mass locked and as I look at my nav computer, three yellow flashing blips representing pirate vessels appear and are approaching at speed. Pivoting the ship towards them, I unleash a fearsome barrage of laser fire. One Krait attack craft bursts into a fiery explosion, the tenrils of flame licking the hull of a second Krait, which decides the risk is too great and turns tail, running from the fight. The third ship, a Gecko - fast and highly maneuverable - bobs and weaves towards me with an agile, eerie grace.

It shoots past my starboard side and I brake and turn, hoping to catch it from behind. Unfortunately it is too fast and I turn and turn, eventually crashing into it (as these things seem to happen), depleting one of my four shields, but destroying the pirate vessel. I shrug. My on board computer contacts the Galactic Navy and my account is credited with the bounty offered for the pirate’s destruction.

I turn back towards the planet and once more engage the jump drive looking forward to the profit I will make on the contents of my cargo hold and making a quick mental calculation as to how many more runs will be required before I can fit that beam laser to the front gun mount.

Soon I approach the space station and expertly pilot my Cobra Mk III towards it. I approach at dead slow speed for the last hundred metres, when suddenly the businessman next to me turns the page of his overly large newspaper, nudging my arm and sending the stylus skidding over the screen of my PDA. My ship slams into the side of the space station destroying my cargo, my ship and sending another Commander Jameson to an early grave.

Shit.

I hit the pull down menu button and reload my game, hoping to be a little more fortunate this time.

My name is Alex, I have Elite on my Palm, and I no longer dislike travelling into work.

Popularity: 18% [?]

iTunes Europe (well, okay, UK, France and Germany) lauched the other day.

79p per song? Better (ie. cheaper) than Napster, but still not great. As Will pointed out to me the other day, a whole bunch of albums are only partially available which means a) you can’t but them as a whole album for £7.99, you have to buy the tracks individualy which often works out as more (getting dangerously close to CD prices) and b) it’s just going to encourage people to fire up KaZaa to find those missing tracks.

*sighs*

LemurGene? Now that’s what I’m talking about…

Popularity: 25% [?]

Fucking Amazon. While browsing around I found this story about how if you search for “Panasonic NV-GS55B Digital Camcorder” on Amazon, it seems to think that you will also be interested in “Shaven Nudists by Dieter Nagel“. Then another article surfaced (scroll down to the bottom) about how if you search for “Sennheiser HD202“, you are recommended “A Hand in the Bush: the Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting by Deborah Addington“.

After a bit of messing around, I found that the word Sennheiser threw up all sorts of bizarre recommendations when combined with the ‘Search All Products’ option - Feminine Anarchy: Girls Pissing in Public by Amanda James and Paul Compton anyone?

Unfortunately I foolishly did all this while logged in. As Amazon builds customer profiles and recommendations on your recent browsing history, my “The Page You Made” is now full of such delights as “Sexy Sports: Maximal Crazy Girls by Ralf Vulis“, “Shaven Beauty Mystery by Torsten Seidel” and perhaps rather worryingly “The Ultimate Guide to Strap on Sex: The Complete Resource for Women and Men by Karen Lotney“.

Oh well, just going to have to browse lots of electronic goods pages to counter all this pr0n…

Popularity: 20% [?]

Ah, summer balls. The dodgy marquee, the tribute band, the cheap tuxedos, the ladies in their beautiful gowns and oh so meticulously applied makeup.

All this leads to the inevitable question. It runs along the lines of..

Darling, I’m a girl and as such have no pockets and only carry this tiny little bag which is only big enough for 10 cigarettes and a lighter. Could you put this large wallet/camera/backup fag packet* in one of your many suit pockets.

Note the lack of question mark.

At the risk of sounding like a metrosexual (a word I learnt the other day refers to a straight man who preens, pouts and poses like only a gay man can), I like to think I cut a rather dashing figure in a suit and the last thing one needs is for the line of said suit to be ruined by a large object in a pocket.

The only other alternative is to wander around carrying said items and worry all night about losing one of them.

*sighs*

* = delete as applicable, or if the bag is very small, include all three.

Popularity: 19% [?]

So the traditional darling of file sharers around the world, Napster, launched it’s UK paid for service the other week, and I have to say, I’m not in the least bit impressed.

For your £9.95 a month, you get to listen to their five radio stations (it’s like ShoutCast or Live365 never happened), download as many tracks as you want, but pay 99p to burn them to cd, or £9.95 for a full album. Alternatively, you can not pay the monthly fee, only stream 30 seconds of each track and pay £1.09 per track or £9.95 per album.

£9.95 per album. There is a quote on the BBC website from Mino Russo (marketing head at ace cheapo record shop Fopp) which could almost be paraphrased as “hahahahahahaha” as their (solid, tangible, lickable) CDs (with packaging - cover art and liner notes. ARE YOU LISTENING, ONLINE MUSIC STORE PEOPLE?) start at £5. And £1.09 per song? In Yankee dollars, at the time of writing, that’s about $1.99 - compared to the iTunes Music Store’s $0.99 (can’t find the ‘cent’ symbol on my keyboard…), it doesn’t stand up too well.

Now, I don’t buy into this whole ‘Napster isn’t Apple so it must be crap’ thing that you get on some websites, but the figures speak for themselves. I get the feeling that the folks at Napster were in too much of a hurry to get the jump on rival services to negotiate a decent fee for their wares.

What really gets me is the brazen short sightedness of Napster, MyCokeMusic, OD2 and the like. By this I mean the way you can only use their services if you use Windows 2000/XP and have bent over to receive Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 9 EULA. Now, before you dismiss this as another anti Microsoft rant, consider this. My laptop does not run Windows, granted, but neither does my phone, or my PDA, or my fridge.

With a separate ring tone download chart now accompanying the singles, albums and airplay charts in Music Week (industry rag), the providing of digital music in various forms to mobile devices (although why stop there? - hence the fridge thing) is big business, and one that is only set to grow.

The major problem here is that the bandwidth available to telephones is nowhere near sufficient for transfer of files of that size, but that is set to change. Indeed, as more phones become GPRS enabled, downloads become more feasible, but the real biggie is just starting to appear on the horizon. I mean 3G. Not 3’s commendable, but ultimately misguided efforts (look, watching footy clips on your mobile might look good on paper, and in TV adverts, but how many people actually do it?), but the advent of other mobile networks 3G support. Bear in mind that pretty much every phone company bought a 3G license at great expense, they are not going to want to write it off, so it’s only a matter of time before they start to appear. Indeed, Vodafone have already launched a 3G service, although sadly only trading on the data transfer rates for laptops.

The biggest problem for 3G at the moment, is that all the handsets are crap. Every now and again, I head on over to 3’s site, and am mightily tempted by their admittedly very competitive pricing, but then I hit the ‘phones’ page and my interest starts to wane, although the handset situation is set to change later this year, with major vendors such as Sony Ericsson adding to the 3G handset line up alongside Nokia’s rather strange stab at it. But I digress.

3G networks have the capability to transmit data at up to 384kbs through EDGE (believe it or not, this stands for Enhanced Data rates for Gsm Evolution - urgh). 384kbs. Via your mobile. All it needs is support from networks and the handsets themselves. This, I feel, is the untapped potential of 3G (and probably the untapped network management nightmare, but that’s another blog). All this doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of a mobile, with it’s shitty little speaker (or headphone output, if you are lucky), but why should 3G be limited to mobile phones? Vodaphone have already proved it doesn’t need to be, so why stop at computing devices. Getting that kind of bandwidth into cars, even vending machines (you download your song at the vending machine, and then Bluetooth it to your non-3G handset/watch/or whatever, innit?) could create a wealth of opportunities to part unsuspecting punters from their readies.

But back to online music vendors. By buying into a proprietary technology, like Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (WMA) format with their proprietary DRM, they are also tying themselves to Windows Media Player. Now, Microsoft have yet to release a version of Windows Media Player that supports their own DRM scheme on any platform apart from Windows 2000/XP (not even their own ‘Media Center’ edition, I note), and never the quickest to get into a new game, are unlikely to. Even if they do, it’ll probably be tied to their bloatware PocketPC/Windows Mobile OSs.

This is great for Microsoft, because if people want to purchase music, they’ll have to do it from a Microsoft device, but the record labels will ultimately lose out, as not everyone has a Microsoft device, and at the moment, there aren’t even any 3G handsets that look remotely close to running a Microsoft operating system. At least Apple did well by using an open standard (AAC), although it is not Free, and they did bolt on their own proprietary DRM, but you can’t get everything right…

Using an open encoding standard levels the field for multiple vendors to provide playback devices and software, which prevents the vendor lock-in so inherent in the Microsoft model. If they would at least use an encoding/protection method created by a company willing to licence it out to third part developers, it would be a step in the right direction (think mp3 - playback is free, but encoding apps require a minimal fee, usually eaten by the app provider). It would allow more players to get into more devices used by more people, and after all, should the record labels not be using the Internet to reach a wider audience?

Of course, I realise that any deal done by the record labels for digital distribution is not likely to be exclusive at this point, but wouldn’t they be better off with some sort of coherent game plan rather than jumping on the back of the latest and greatest bandwagon that happens to be rumbling along at the time?

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From the geniuses who brought you ‘What? You got to go there?’..

Sloth 1: But we’re sloths - we’ve got three inch claws. What are we going to do with contact lenses?
Sloth 2: You know what man, you think to much.

Inspired…

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Sorry folks.. I managed to break a few key bits of my previous Gnu/Linux install by installing GTK2 and figured I might as well install a proper distribution rather than trying to hack the old one back in to shape..

Everything appears to be back to normal now though

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The great thing about coursework is that it has the ability to focus the mind wonderfully on the seemingly mundane. It is possible to whittle away the hours taking the utmost enjoyment in the most menial tasks while books gather dust and word processing programs containing half typed essays are swapped out of primary memory and placed in the furthest reaches of your swapfile.

Today I have been mostly drooling over The Nanode and The Tapwave Zodiac while having delusions of grandure about porting the delightful VisualBoyAdvance to either the Zodiac or the GP32 despite the fact I have absolutley no idea how to go about it. Well, I have a rough idea but currently it’s well above my ability. Roll on the summer, I say, although by then, chances are I will have lost all interest.

*trips over pile of books and is brought kicking and screaming back to reality*

Shit.

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So I was aimlessly surfing around and look what I found…

http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2004-03-07

Yeah! Like he said!

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