Benj’s blog!

This morning I heard on the radio that BT had announced a radical new pricing strucutre. New — yes. Radical — maybe. I doubt it will affect their revenues very much, for the following reason:

Yesterday I spent over an hour chatting to an old friend, I didn’t really mind that I was calling a mobile — I hadn’t spoken to them in ages, it was “good to talk”; I also didn’t really have much idea how much it cost to call a mobile from a land line. At 17.93pence / minute to a mobile, it seems they are making their money from idiots like me who call mobiles from land lines.

So they can make crazy price cuts, and claim to be 20 times cheaper than their competitors, but will anyone really be saving money? How about reducing the cost of calling mobiles? !

Hmm, I’ve used this title for an entry before, I wonder if I buy too many toys (if that’s possible). Anyway, I bought myself a Canon Digital Ixus 400 today. It’s a great tiny digital camera and I’ll be taking lots of photos I hope.

I went out for a walk to Beeston Canal and took some pictures. There wasn’t really much worth taking, but I think the lock keeper’s house came out ok! Tomorrow, if the weather is nice I’ll take a drive somewhere more interesting!

iPhoto is a fairly decent tool for managing the photo collection, I’ve got this nasty feeling I’ll end up running out of disk space real soon ! Not needing a USB card reader makes life nice too, I wonder if IEE 1394 or USB2 will make it on to cameras any time soon!?

I’m very impressed with the camera so far, the pictures are really great! Even the digital zoom is passable (once the pictures are reduced).

I’m not sure what to make of Erik’s thoughts in NSLog(); - Software Engineers. Software is about engineering, at least it should be. Engineers strive to create and achieve amazing feats in their field. To do this they apply certain principles and techniques and where necessary redefine them.

A good engineer won’t stick to doing using the same methods, simply because standards dictate that is the way they should be done. I wonder if Erik has read The Fountainhead? Just because Howard Roark is an architect, doesn’t mean he does what most mediocre architects do and copy the work of the great masters!

Writing good software is scientific act — given a problem and some tools, construct a solution to the problem. Yes, ingenuity and creativity are required, in the same way that Newton needed them when he wrote Principia; in the same way that the guy who built that first bridge needed them. It’s these elements that make programming fun.

Taking a slightly different point of view: If we take engineer to mean ’someone who applies principles and techniques to solve problems’ then the majority of software I see these days comes from engineers. Writing in an environment like Cocoa, .NET or Java, where there are rich “frameworks” to make the programmers life easier is akin to engineers being able to refer to text books on how to solve certain problems. “What gauge steel should i use to span this bridge”.

So taking this view, “software developers” are just tool users; they don’t even need to be creative — software development is all about using lego(s)! In the same way the civil engineering is about seeing how things were done before and copying the ideas.

I suppose the points I am trying to make here are:

• All the terms (engineer, coder, etc.) are valid, but to me they are all different things. People at the cutting edge of research are scientists (and hackers?), people plugging together APIs are engineers or coders.
• Engineering doesn’t necessarily imply “red tape” but red tape isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. Take parsing for example, parsing has been totally understood for decades and if someone is going to write a parser then they ought to adhere to the standards (i.e. write a parser that works).
• The “art” that Erik speaks about, is creativity and ingenuity, and this is something the best scientists have

Today’s w3c validator tip was Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don’t change. I read through it and felt guilty because of the changes I made to the blog some while ago. I noticed some time ago Google bot had indexed about 20 of my articles with the old style URL and continued to crawl them.

Deciding to be a good netizen I wrote some rewrite rules for Apache and sent a 301 for all of the pages Google has indexed. I hope it works! I also turned on MultiViews for my new domain.

Noticed some hits in my website log with the following UserAgent :

“MicrosoftPrototypeCrawler (please report obnoxious behavior to newbiecrawler@hotmail.com)”

and whois.arin.net says it’s a valid Microsoft address! Interesting …

According to Guardian Unlimited | Life | The Essential Difference front page I have an “Extreme Type S” brain, with empathising quotient (EQ) 32 and systemising quotient (SQ) 50. That makes me fairly male!

Interesting, eh?

For once I haven’t been slacking! Done a number of things this today that I’ve been meaning to get out of the way for ages. More on those later perhaps!

For now I’ll leave you with this lovely image and the familiar phrase, new toy. Honestly, my car is in that picture …

OK so the Ferrari actually belongs to “someone” who “works” for the Ferrari F1 team, who was at the wedding where I played guitar on Saturday. I can dream though :).

Erik was expecting some big announcement today regarding AppleMusic, I was hoping for the same. After all, Apple have a history of innovation and to some extent they’ve innovated today. Unfortunately there was absolutely nothing unexpected about the announcement and I am somewhat disappointed.

• If this system has really been in development for 1.5 years as Mr Jobs claimed, one would have thought it would have had sufficient testing so that it wouldn’t fall over in the first few minutes of opening!
• Putting that aside, it would be nice if the majority of the world’s population were able to use the system (which currently is available to US credit card holders only).
• Next, they could have improved the HTTP handling in iTunes 4.0, which is currently awful, the application spends most of its time spinning (consuming CPU) waiting for responses to the HTTP requests (that never arrive).
• When they do arrive, the XML documents get parsed and rendered by something which once again is far from efficient (XML -> HTML to be rendered by KHTML?). The KHTML engine in Safari does a similar job consuming far less CPU!

If they get the performance issues resolved and enable the store in the rest of the world (with reasonable pricing), I look forward to using it. At the moment I am not impressed and a new iPod won’t be my next toy ™!

PS Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I think this will be a failure, I’m pretty sure it will be an amazing success. I’m simply saying they could do better, much, much better!

Update: The service seems to have stabilised now, I am very impressed with it. The catalogue is good! The speed is great. iTunes 4 still sucks in terms of performance though, even error messages cause “spins”.

I really hope it is available in the UK soon, I’ve seen 3 albums I would buy straight away. Having thought about it for a while, it seems licensing will be the biggest issue. Different record companies license the rights to the songs and albums out differently around the globe, I imagine it’s a legal nightmare!

“Bring a DVD over”, Steve said to me on MSN earlier, so I did. Expecting him to show me something cool about his new mouse operating a DVD player, off I went. When I walked in to his room I was in shock!

There was a huge great projection panel hanging where his window used to be and he was busy setting up something behind me. Steven must have the “highest technology per square meter index” in Beeston and I suspect it had just gone through the roof!

He’d only gone and bought an LCD projector and wide screen panel! Pat Metheny was on as soon as it was all setup, playing out in DTS and looking great! Later we tried hooking up Steve’s iBook, which was interesting to say the least. Can you imagine coding with a 70″ screen? ;). Steve (Jobs) was next for the iTunes Music Store annoucement (definately a one-time event!). Finally, we watched 1/2 of “The Ring” on DVD, which is still out in the Cinema here!

I don’t think I’ll be going to the Cinema again any time soon, now where did I put my tape measure? I think I could put one where my guitars go at the moment …