In other news, script.aculo.us becomes PoopyUrl.com. WTF? Here’s to discarding the first and/or best use of the most clever URL technique I know. I’m glad I stopped using del.icio.us four years ago.
RIT Alum Email Address
So I’m pretty anal.
I didn’t sign up for Facebook until about a year ago. I had long since graduated from RIT. Facebook started out as a social network for Harvard students, then it expanded to other colleges. For a while registration required a .edu email address. Even now, in order to identify yourself to others as a student or former student of a particular educational institution, you need to verify ownership of an email address from that school’s domain.
I’m sure I’ve written posts in the past about my RIT email address. I couldn’t wait for it to be turned off. But now that I’m on Facebook, I want that address just so I can identify myself as an RIT alum. Enter: solution.
I think saw a link that pointed to this in Gmail, but I forget, and it’s unimportant. I feel like this is way under-advertised. If you go to https://www.alumniconnections.com/olc/pub/RIT/, you can get yourself an email address @alum.rit.edu. Get it hooked up, go into Facebook, identify yourself as an RIT student, bam.
Firefox Download Day
The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Click the link, pledge to download, and you’ll receive an email when it’s available.
Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV
I thought this was worth mentioning. I paid the ten bucks.
Vista and Irony
Yesterday a Dashboard Update was released for the Xbox 360. The console now supports more file formats (i.e. Divx and Xvid) via sharing from a Windows PC.
I have a history dating back to Vista’s release of problems getting my Xbox 360 to play nice with my Dell, running Vista. However, when I installed Vista on my MacBook under Boot Camp, everything worked.
To my chagrin — but not my surprise — the Dell couldn’t even see the 360 on my network. Insistent on trying out the new features, I threw away 19 days of uptime and rebooted my MacBook into Windows.
After typing in my Windows password, I got my first surprise of the night — Windows telling me that my copy of Vista is not genuine. It offered to let me type in the product key. It didn’t work, so I even tried the product key for the Dell’s copy of Vista. No dice. Ever so kind in a black desktop, no taskbar, no Start Menu sort of way, Windows allowed me to search the Microsoft Knowledge Base for help. It turned up nothing in the 90 or so seconds I was willing to give it. I called the 1-800 number. Closed; outside normal business hours.
I decided to boot back into Mac OS X.
I opened up Firefox and jumped into Gmail, and the Web Clip at the top linked to an Engadget article about the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player’s new price drop. I clicked on it and saw a related headline: Vista SP1 kills the WGA kill switch. I even clicked on the link to press release — just to get the story directly from the horse’s mouth. Turns out, when Microsoft updates Vista to Service Pack 1, “Users whose systems are identified as counterfeit … won’t lose access to functionality or features.”
Too bad I just deleted my Windows partition.
Luke Smith and Irony
As some of you may know, Halo 3 was released on September 25, 2007. It was developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360. On October 5, 2007, Bungie announced that it would become an independent company, no longer wholly owned by Microsoft. The Internet lit up with conjecture over why such a split occurred. Some suggested that Bungie wanted to work on intellectual properties other than Halo.
Meanwhile, Bungie has produced a podcast almost weekly since July of 2007. I have followed Bungie.net pretty closely since before Halo 2 launched, mostly because of Halo 2’s integration with the Bungie website. I didn’t give the podcast a listen until shortly after I got my hands on Halo 3. I think I was working on my Halo 3 Emblem Chooser™ but didn’t want to stop soaking up Halo 3 goodness.
The podcast has three regular contributors: Frank O’Connor, Brian Jarrard, and Luke Smith. Luke is new to Bungie, having come over from 1UP.com only in April of 2007. In January 2007, Luke interviewed game developer/producer David Jaffe, who was still Creative Director of Sony Santa Monica at the time. This interview was recorded for the 1UP Show, and is still available on GameVideos.com at this link (embedding screwed up my css). I have graciously embedded the video after the break. Luke asked one question in particular caught my attention:
A lot of these guys — like look at the Bungie situation. They made Halo. Halo’s a hit. That’s all they make now. That’s all they’re making, and you have sort of — you’ve ducked out of that. Like God of War was a hit and well, you’re still — I mean — you’re still painting on top of it, but you’re not — it’s not your grind. It’s not the only thing that you get to work on, like some of those guys. How’d you swing that?
Luke starts his question at about 9:05 into the interview, if you care to skip ahead.
Halo 3 Emblem Chooser
Back in the day, I wrote a page in PHP that would allow you to try out all the permutations for Halo 2 multiplayer emblems. Since Halo 3 was released, I knew I wanted to update the emblem chooser.
The design needs some work, but I’ve put together a fully functional Halo 3 Emblem Chooser. Check it out.
Tutu: Poverty fueling terror
From the CNN.com article:
The global “war on terror” can’t be won if people are living in “desperate” conditions, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told CNN.
Read the full article here.
There’s No Flagship iPod
Two days ago, Steve Jobs unveiled updates to the entire iPod line, including the brand-new iPod Touch. Other changes include iPod Shuffle with different color choices, iPod Nano with a more squat form factor and video capabilities, and the iPod Classic, formerly called just iPod, with a new metal face and larger capacities.
iPod Classic? Do I smell New Coke? Why not just leave it with its old name of ‘iPod’? Oh, that’s right — the new device is the iPod now. Isn’t it? No, the new device is ‘iPod Touch.’
Why is it that no device gets the one-word name? It’s because no device can stand alone as the elite option. The iPod Touch is close. But 16GB of storage just isn’t enough. Doubling its capacity to 32GB would do the trick. After all, it was only three days ago that the more popular capacity choice of the flagship model was 30GB. 32GB would be enough for most consumers. (It’d be enough for my 25GB music collection.)
Apple knows that 16GB is not enough storage for a flagship device. That’s why the fifth generation iPod lives on today as the iPod Classic. More than keeping it alive, Apple has updated the capacity of the Classic. The base model has gone from 30GB to 80GB, and the upper model has jumped from 80GB to a massive 160GB.
One hundred and sixty gigabytes. That’s a lot. I’d guess that’s more than enough space to hold the entire music collection of all but a fringe group of consumers. So what to do with the remaining space? Use it as an external hard drive? Not likely. The answer? Fill it with video. But the Touch has that big, beautiful screen! In other words, one device has a holds-my-music-collection-twice-plus-several-seasons-of-tv-shows capacity, cursed to be played back on a two-year-old, small-by-Wednesday’s-new-standard screen; and one device has a big, beautiful, reorients-the-content-when-I-rotate-the-device-ninety-degrees screen with a maximum of won’t-hold-my-music-collection, don’t-even-talk-about-multiple-full-length-movies capacity.
There’s no flagship device.
In six months, Apple might release a 32GB flash-based iPod Touch. At the same time, Apple might provide video content on the iTunes WiFi Store. But who wants to wait at a hot spot while At World’s End downloads?
CyberBleh II
Caught this article over at News.com: William Gibson: ‘Cyber’ is going away. Why post about it? Because I wrote a post pleading for the world to drop the prefix back in January, 2005.
I disagree with Gibson that the term ‘digital’ is also on its way out. I like digital.