May Contain Nuts

There’s a rumor going around that Apple is set to announce a subscription-based music service for iTunes at their “Rock On” Super Awesome Event of Super Awesomeness next week.  It’s probably not true, but I figured I’d toss my hat into the ring of commentators on the idea.

As the sole way of acquiring music from an online distributor, subscription services suck.  They just do.  As soon as you stop paying, all of the stuff you’ve paid for suddenly goes away, and That’s Bad™.  However, such services do have the advantage of allowing you to be incredibly liberal in sampling music, because you’re more likely to spend $5/month, download 10 albums, and maybe like/keep 2 of them than you are to pay $9.99 for each of those same albums, and suddenly find yourself out $80 because you only liked 2 of them enough to keep around.  From the perspective of someone who likes to hear more than the 30-second clips on iTunes before buying a track or full album (which often aren’t very representative of the full track), a subscription service would be likely to expose me to more music that I’d be willing to pay for.

The rumored iTunes Unlimited service, while just a tad on the pricey side, would ultimately be the best of both worlds, because as I understand it, you can “rent” anything in the music store with your subscription, and then buy it outright if you really like it and want to keep it.  Theoretically if your Unlimited subscription were ever canceled, you’d still own all of the music you coughed up the extra cash for, and That’s Good™.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’d really be able to get my money’s worth out of a subscription though, so I don’t know if I’d swing for it, but of all the subscription services available, Apple’s seems like it would actually make the most sense (plus it would work with Macs and iPods, so there’s another plus…).

What I’d really like to see, though, is a Netflix-like subscription service for the video section of the store that runs on the same principle.  You pay $X each month, and get to rent whatever you want from the video store - TV shows and movies, but not music videos - to watch once.  If you really like a certain video, you can go ahead and buy it at the full or nearly-full price and own it outright.  I could easily see a tiered service being put in place with either per-month limits, limits on how many items you can have rented at a time (watching something will allow you to rent something else) with no time limits, or both (which would be the most restrictive and really suck).  Still, I’d probably end up frequenting the iTunes video store a lot more if I could pay, say, $5 or even $10 a month and be able to rent as many movies/shows as I wanted (or n movies/shows with a tiered service) for a flat fee.  Anything I’ve rented, seen once (as would be the limitation), and want to keep, I can purchase and watch an unlimited number of times with the same FairPlay restrictions as other videos from the store currently have.  With something like this, who would need cable (well, except for NBC/Universal shows, because they’re whiny little bastards)?

This brings me to my next point, which is AppleTV and Hulu.  I’m still very seriously wanting to get an AppleTV, if only because the Dell currently attached to the TV doesn’t have enough horsepower to do very smooth h.264 video playback (full-screen or windowed), and half of the stuff I own is in h.264 (this problem is especially noticable in iTunes for some reason).  The other reason, which will factor into my comments on Hulu momentarily, is that watching stuff on TV is a lot nicer than watching stuff on a computer, and while I have a computer attached to the TV, it’s not exactly a convenient experience, what with the keyboard and mouse requirements.

Now, having an AppleTV would be great, and I could (for the most part) ditch the Dell as a result, but AppleTV doesn’t support Hulu, and for as much as I swore up and down that I wasn’t going to frequent the service, it’s damned tolerable (the occasionally shoddy commercial breakpoints and tendency to run the same ad 6 times during a 1-hour show can be grating).  As I understand it, Hulu’s video is also in h.264 (since Flash supports it now), so it’s not like the AppleTV would need to break down its ivory codec tower to support it.  Of course, it would probably require Apple to make a deal with NBC/Universal, which seems unlikely to happen given the blame game they played when NBC left iTunes.  Still, I think if you’re going to have streaming web video content on your device, Hulu is a far better place to get it from than YouTube (know how many times I’ve used the YouTube app on my iPod in the past 9 months?  Probably 5, and all of them were to look up Jonathan Coulton videos).  What I’m getting at is that I would absolutely love to see a Hulu app on the AppleTV, ideally provided by Apple so I don’t have to figure out how to hack it (though I would probably be willing to pay for one that was high-quality even if it did require hacking my device).

This made me chuckle… it’s a bit dated, but then I haven’t had much time to do much reading lately.  Work deadlines suck (the life out of me).  Anyway, on with the funny.

They tell us it’s the iWay or the highway. We think that’s a sad message. Software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life.

- Brad Brooks, VP of Vista Marketing (on Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads)

The most amusing part of this is that the current screensaver du-jour on all of the retail Mac boxes I’ve seen (at least at the Mac shop in the local Best Buy, because Spokane isn’t important enough to have its own Apple store) - as well as the marketing lingo on the Get a Mac page on Apple’s website - touts the Mac as being the most compatible machine you can buy.  The fact that Microsoft, which can’t even build a completely-compatible version of Office for the Mac, is the company saying it is just icing on the cake, really.  With the exception of a .NET IDE, a version of Windows Media Player for the Mac capable of supporting WMP9 DRM (both Microsoft products, surprise surprise) and 3ds MAX, there isn’t a single application or file format that I need to use that the Mac can’t handle, and the only time I’ve run into a software incompatibility running the other direction is using Pages to build The Archiver, because obviously Pages doesn’t run in Windows (much to Narym’s regular chagrin).  Of course, Microsoft Publisher doesn’t run on the Mac either, so there’s a little bit of anti-cross-platform love from both sides in the document design/layout field (and don’t even begin to tell me I could do The Archiver in Word… I’ll kill you :P).

Really, the only category that the Mac is currently lacking in is games, which is pretty much the last bastion of the “there’s no software for the Mac” mythmongers.  Fortunately, with the exception of Sam & Max (and the Mac versions of Manhole, Myst, Riven, and Exile, all of which are all basically unplayable on modern Macs, and I personally think it’s deplorable that UbiSoft is still selling the 10th Anniversary collection for the platform without doing any sort of work to make it compatible with Leopard or systems with Intel-based processors), every game I want to play is either available on a console or has a Mac version, so that doesn’t really bother me (plus, I’ve got a Dell attached to the TV for this purpose… and watching Hulu).  Heck, I can actually play realMYST on my Mac, which is something Vista has made virtually impossible without GameTap.

To whom it may concern,

Clearly you feel that there is something seriously wrong with the way the MOUL forum is being run, otherwise you would not persist in your sarcasm-laden, poorly-veiled commentary on the moderators who run it and the posters who frequent it.  I could swear I remember stating as a matter of public record some time ago that I would be willing to discuss perceived mistreatment of members and mismanagement of the forum by the MOUL moderators privately.  Unfortunately, nobody involved in the explosion that triggered that statement has since taken me up on the offer, nor has anyone involved in the forum thread I linked to above.  Is this simply poor memory on your part, or do you feel that it is better to try and publicly stir up bad vibes and goad people into taking actions you can later use as justification for your divissive behavior?

I have been entirely honest in my offer to extend a hand in honest, open communication regarding perceived mishandling of situations on the forums by the moderators, and my offer still stands.  Vacant, public accusations of wrongdoing will get you no farther in resolving anything; I’ve learned that lesson myself.  If you have a problem with the way the forum is being run by the moderators, take it up with me directly - that’s why I made the offer I did.  If you have a problem with the behavior of a forum poster, take it up with them directly; don’t over-generalize and accuse the entire forum population of being Cyan yes-men when it’s plainly clear that that is not the case.

I look forward to working with you to resolve whatever problems you see as existing on the MOUL forums in a direct, professional, and speedy manner.

- Alahmnat
MOUL Forum Moderator

!$text$!

Before I get started here, I want to admit that I kind of suck at reviewing things, and my memory is short-circuited enough that I’m not terribly good at recalling every detail of a movie I’ve only seen once, but I wanted to pass along my thoughts for those who may be contemplating seeing either of these movies.  I’ve tried very hard not to spoil the plot of either film, but if you don’t want to know anything about them before seeing them, you may want to skip this post.

That said, in my opinion these were both well worth seeing in the theater.  I used to watch Get Smart with my parents when it was in syndication on Nick at Nite, and have recently re-watched several episodes of season 1 as part of my effort to expose Ash to all of the stuff she missed out on as a kid.  The TV show was always great fun, and the movie is very much a spiritual successor to the show.  The original creators (one of whom was Mel Brooks) were listed front and center on the end credits as being consultants for the movie, and evidently the original Agent 99 (as well as Mel Brooks) signed off on the casting of Anne Hathaway… I can only imagine that similar approval was given for Steve Carell as Max Smart.  All in all, it’s obvious that great pains were taken to make sure that the movie fit in with the TV show, and the effort is obvious in the script and characters.

The movie is set in present day, in the sort of odd ret-conning that every old TV show-turned-movie seems to undergo to be relevant while retaining the original characters, but it’s never a jarring move.  At the beginning of the movie, Max is an analyst, not an agent, and is extremely good at his job while also being something of a klutz.  The Chief – masterfully played by Alan Arkin – only reluctantly promotes him after there is a breach of security exposing all existing agents’ identities.  There’s occasional commentary on the current administration and the War on Terror, with Max intelligently stating that even though our enemies are bad guys, they’re still human beings, and if we’re ever going to defeat them, we first have to understand this fact.  The President also seems to have Bush’s incomprehensible inability to pronounce the word “nuclear” correctly, which the Chief tries to correct at one point (evoking a cheer from the audience).

The theme from the show comes out in spades with a great twist during Carell’s trip down the famous multi-doored corridor to CONTROL headquarters, and has a number of remixes for the high-action sequences as the film reaches its climax.  All of the old running gags from the show - “Would you believe…”, “Missed it by that much”, “Sorry about that Chief”, “Ah, the old [fill in the blank] trick” – and many of the old props – the shoephone, the Cone of Silence, and Max’s old car – are trotted out, but they’re never overdone, and fit into the flow of the show very well.  Overall, the comedy is very intelligent, relying a lot on the interaction between Carell and Hathaway, which is just fantastic.  That’s not to say there isn’t some more low-brow humor, but it’s spaced out pretty widely throughout the show.  The new characters, like Agent 23 (played by The Rock) are also well-written and well acted (contrary to what The Scorpion King might indicate, The Rock actually can act pretty well, and he has pretty good comedic timing).

All in all, I suspect you’d probably need to be a fan of the original show to get the most bang for your buck out of this movie, but it’s worth seeing if only for Steve Carell, who is a dead ringer for Don Adams, the original Agent 86, Maxwell Smart.

Shifting gears (oy, no pun intended, I swear), I’d also like to voice my opinion on WALL•E (but first, I’d like to thank Apple for making it so easy to type the bullet character… Option+8 = •).

GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW.  GET UP!  MOVE IT!  I’ll wait for you to get back.

…

…

Are you back?  Good, let’s continue then.

Much could (and probably has been) said about the superficial resemblance of WALL•E to everybody’s favorite malfunctioning robot: Johnny 5 from Short Circuit.  They both have the articulate eyes/eyebrows, they’ve both developed quirky, inquisitive, naïve personalities, and they both have a thing for girls.  That’s pretty much where the similarities end, though; WALL•E doesn’t have much of a vocabulary beyond what he picks up from his crush, EVE, instead speaking in R2-D2-like exclamations (which is hardly surprising, since his sound designer was also the sound designer for R2).  WALL•E’s job is also very different from Johnny 5’s original purpose.  While Johnny 5 was a weapon of war, WALL•E is essentially a trash compactor on wheels, built as one of a fleet of such robots to clean up the mess left by humans while they abandoned Earth to live on a massive luxury-liner starship called the Axiom.

For those who don’t like movies with messages in them, be warned that WALL•E might put you off with its unsurprisingly pro-environment message.  By the time WALL•E was originally built, the planet was almost entirely covered in the trash created by humans, and even space is cluttered with a halo of junked satellites.  There’s a bit of humorous commentary on the super-conglomerations of today getting even more out of hand with the obscenely cleverly-named “Buy N Large” super store, whose CEO is somehow also president of the planet.

Oddly, this latest outing from Pixar actually has live-action sequences integrated into it: BNL’s CEO is played on-camera by Fred Willard, whom many may recognize as being Vala’s dad in Stargate SG-1.  All of the commercial footage detailing humanity’s plan to evacuate Earth while the fleet of WALL•E ‘bots cleaned the place up features real people interacting with Pixar’s beautiful CG backgrounds, with the help of Pixar’s former parent company, Industrial Light & Magic.  I suspect that this odd decision was made to create a really distinct visual delineation between humans of yesteryear and their bloated, pampered, low-bone-mass, hoverchair-lounging descendants we see in the movie, and while it’s a tad jarring initially, it does work for me.  I think there was also a bit of influence on this decision due to the fact that WALL•E has an old tape of Hello Dolly that he watches through an ancient 5G iPod screen, and Pixar probably didn’t want to try re-doing Hello Dolly in CG.

Visually, WALL•E is an absolutely mind-blowing tour-de-force of the Pixar team’s inimitable talent.  The first 5 minutes of the film blow away even the most visually stunning sequences in Ratatouille, and it only goes uphill from there.  The sequences on the trash-covered, dust-caked Earth are probably some of the most intense because of all the particle effects, but the clinical futuristic look of the Axiom and its army of robotic helpers is just as impressive because it still looks real, not like some plastic-y product of crummy CG work.  There are a lot of elements that seem pulled straight from Apple’s product line, the most notable being EVE herself, who was co-designed by Apple’s chief engineer, Jonathan Ive.  WALL•E, despite being 700 years old and obviously less “cool” than the fleet of futuristic ‘bots inhabiting the Axiom, also possesses a certain Apple touch: when his solar battery is completely charged, he plays the classic Mac boot-up noise (something that surprised Ash so much that she didn’t stop laughing for a straight 3 minutes afterward).

Overall, the dialogue in this movie is pretty sparse.  Since the main characters are EVE and WALL•E, and their conversations are usually restricted to them saying each other’s names, there isn’t much room for additional dialogue.  However, there are a few other more talkative characters, including the Axiom’s captain and his robotic auto-pilot, Auto (the cleverness… when will it end?).  Pixar’s lucky charm John Ratzenberger once again makes an appearance, playing a passenger on the Axiom (who is also named John).

Even the end credits get some fabulous treatment thanks to a wonderful new song from Peter Gabriel called “Down to Earth” (which sounds like it could be a missing track from Ovo), accompanied by intricate 2D animation sequences similar to the ones that Pixar used in Ratatouille, and followed up by some downright cute pixel-art versions of the characters in the movie silently re-enacting the plot over the remaining music.

Ultimately, despite the somewhat obvious commentary on our treatment of Earth, our increasing tendency towards laziness and virtual interaction, and our reliance on robots for increasingly basic activities (all of which I tend to agree with, so it dodn’t really bug me), WALL•E is a beautiful film with surprisingly emotive main characters (none of the robots even have mouths, and except for Auto – who sounds like an evil version of Stephen Hawking’s voice synthesizer – none of them really even have a vocabulary beyond a few basic words), tons of visual spectacle, and a gorgeous soundscape and soundtrack.

GO SEE IT!

Evidently, for just $100,000 (or more), we could register the .dni domain name.

Or maybe .myst; I’ll take either ;).

Can’t say anything registered as .dni or .myst would be even remotely as clever as Marten’s Rel.to, but what’re ya gonna do?

It’s been a bit of a while since I last posted something, so I figured I ought to.  Nothing fancy, just a bit of a status report on what’s going on with me.

After months of saying I needed to do so, this month I finally started tearing through the Archive cleaning up attachments and re-tagging entries as appropriate.  I’ve got a running list of entries that need a bit more TLC (or a lot more, in some cases) that I’ll need to come back to after I finish the initial clean-up push, but so far the list is only about 30 entries long out of the 900 that currently exist (so, roughly 3% of the Archive).  I’m almost all the way through the collection of journals and notes (which are being split into 2 groups for organizational simplification), after which there’s just people, places, objects, speeches, and translations.  That may sound like a lot, but I’ve already gone through Ages, plants, animals, DRC research, and all of the D’ni culture sections (DRC Research was a bear… I think most of the really screwed up attachments were in that tag).

On a related note, is anyone having problems accessing the Archive?  I just discovered that for no apparent reason a couple of my staff members can’t see anything in the Archive… if anyone else is having this problem, PLEASE let me know!  I can’t fix it unless I know it’s broken!

I’m also hard at work on a number of game ideas.  A couple of them are a lot more advanced and will require considerable time in the modeling, texturing, and figuring out how to do stuff in the engine departments, but one of them I’m actively developing right now.  Some of you may recall my little Labyrinth project from last year’s ill-conceived attempt to enter into the Unity Top DOG competition about 3 weeks from the deadline for entries.  Well, I’ve decided to do it up proper with much better graphics, a whole slew of Labyrinth boards of varying difficulties, and way fewer bugs.  Right now I’m working on laying out all of the game boards, and trying really hard not to make them overly-difficult in the early stages.  I don’t think the game will end up being easy by any stretch of the immagination, but I’d at least like it to be somewhat challenging without making your brain explode.  The current design plan calls for 30 boards across 4 difficulty settings: 8 each of easy, medium, and hard levels, plus 6 more “tutorial” boards for practice, training, and introduction to some of the wackier elements of the game.

I’m also still working on getting a new iMac.  My G5 has been sold, but the buyer is also getting a whole mess of additional hardware and software from Mac Odyssey as well, and has yet to pick up the G5.  Since I don’t get my share of the sale until the buyer has committed to keeping the machine a couple of days after pick-up, I’m still waiting.  Fortunately, the delay may in fact work out in my favor: Mac Odyssey got wind that a number of last-gen machines that failed to sell in the education sector are being pushed into the non-Apple Store retail sector at discounted prices (this being Apple, “discounted prices” could here mean a minor reduction, but any reduction is money I don’t have to pay!), so I may be able to work out a deal on a much nicer Mac that I’d otherwise be able to afford.

Changing gears, I’ve been keeping quite busy at the job I’m actually paid to do as well.  I’ve been making continued improvements to the software I’ve developed, and am working on ways to further improve the standards-compliance and design flexibility of the HTML I generate.  I’m also teaching a two-hour-a-week “class” on XHTML and CSS, which may be the single best thing I could have done for my own understanding.  It’s one thing to teach yourself… it’s another thing entirely to teach others.  I think I’ve picked up more tricks and all-out skills since I started teaching this stuff than I have since the first couple of weeks of learning it.  I’m also continuing to make advances in what I know about ASP.NET and C#.  While I’m still rather utterly lost on some of the bigger concepts, I’ve been able to start playing within small things those concepts to start broadening my understanding.  For example, yesterday I fixed a bug in an ASP.NET control adapter that replaces the table-based layout of the standard control output with CSS-stylable DIVs and list elements.  Initially, I was unable to assign attributes to the control through the C# code-behind, which prompted a bit of research and finally a bug-fix that resolved the issue, so now my radio button list has its onclick attribute once again.  Hooray!  I still couldn’t actually write a control adapter from scratch, but I now have a bit more knowledge of how to edit an existing adapter to suit my needs.

Anyhoo, I’d best be getting back to work… plenty to do, and no time to do it in :P.

This is the most brilliant thing I think I’ve seen all year…

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

This is going to be a pseudo-live blog post; basically, I’m writing as it happens, and will just post it at the end of the event.  I’m also about an hour late in getting started, so I’ll just jump right in…

A lot of folks (including the live commentators at Engadget) have been complaining about the volume of 3rd party demos in the keynote thus far.  While I do agree that at 11:00 they seem to be continuing with no end in sight, I think it’s sort of a good move on Apple’s part to really play up the mass-adoption of the iPhone SDK and showcase as many different ways of using it as possible while the cameras are rolling.  I wouldn’t read too much into the current stock drop being indicative of anything… Apple’s stock always plummets during and after the Keynote because Jesus did not, in fact, appear on stage as predicted.

Some of these apps are pretty slick.  The games all look fabulous, and the social2.0 location-aware apps from Loopt and Associated Press sound very impressive.  The push notification service sounds impressive, though I’m sure a lot of folks will question the stability and scalability of a unified point for all service updates to the user’s iPhone… RIM’s service outages and .Mac’s occasional freak-outs come to mind as negative points here…

New features in the 2.0 software look cool: full Office and iWork document support, bulk message delete (yay!), save images from emails, scientific mode calculator (also yay) and contact search are niceties.  The parental controls aren’t really that fascinating to me, but that may be due to my lack of parentaling duties.  The $10 price point for the Touch2.0 update is also a much nicer pill to swallow than the $20 update for 1.1.3.

Mobile Me: Still not 100% sure about the name of the service, but if the stills from Engadget and MacRumors are anything to go by, this is going to totally kick .Mac’s ass in the usability and awesomeness categories.  Still $99/year, but they’ve kindly doubled the storage to 20GB.  Huzzah!  And I can finally view my calendar online!  Huzzah again!  Early July, with the iPhone software update.  Not quite as huzzah, but I’ll take it.  No mention of bookmark sync to Windows Safari though… grr…

Cheap As Free iPhones!  8GB for $199, 16GB for $299, whee!  Now, drop the price on the plan and I’ll sell my Touch ;).  Seriously, I love my Touch, but the lack of reliable Wifi around here is kind of a killer (there’s plenty in downtown Spokane, but it’s not free, and the signal is questionable… to say nothing of coverage out here in the Valley).  Just wish AT&T’s plans weren’t so damned expensive.  There’s even 3G coverage out here, so I’d be set for data, I’d just be broke at the same time.

I’ll be interested to hear what comes of the 10.6 stuff after lunch, provided any of it is allowed out of the session…

Update: After reading through Apple’s information on Mobile Me, it appears that syncing of bookmarks across platforms (and even browsers) is supported, though Firefox doesn’t appear to be included in that support.  Still, cross-platform Safari bookmark sync is something that should have been built-in from day 1 of the Windows Safari release for .Mac users, so at least that much is working now.  I still might stick with Firefox and Delicious on both platforms because bookmark tags are my new best friend, but I’ll see what Mobile Me’s sync capabilities are before making a final decision there.  I’m also interested in seeing if there are any improvements to iDisk’s performance in store for this upgrade, because that’s been a decidedly torturous experience in the past (though Comcast’s draconian upload speed certainly does nothing to help).

So my Mac has been at the local Apple reseller’s since Wednesday, to be diagnosed and spec’d for a sale on consignment.  I realize there’s more important business ahead of it, like Macs that are actually in need of repairs, but still, I miss my G5.  It’s even weirder because I still have a computer to use, so it’s not like I’m going through withdrawal or anything, I just miss my G5.  I keep trying to tell myself not to get so concerned about it, because the guys at Mac Odyssey are really good people, and all of my data is backed up on my external drive, and there’s nothing to worry about, but I can’t help but be worried.  Hopefully I’ll hear something Monday when the person in charge of consignment deals is back at the store (I called yesterday to see what the progress was, but he wasn’t there on the weekend).

God help me if I ever have a kid go off to summer camp…