27 Jul 2005
Famed Russian spammer Vardan Kushnir was found murdered in his home in Moscow yesterday. Kushnir was apparently famous for saying "spam was what e-mails were for".
It’s unknown whether he was killed by a group of angry spam recipients, but that’s where I’d put my money if I were a betting man.
Read on →
22 Jul 2005
New version of spinvaders is out. This is primarily a bug-fix release; the main bug was that 0.0.3 and earlier could not run on Mac OS X 10.4; Now, spinvaders is much more future-proof and should continue to run “forever”.
Changes in this version:
- This version now works correctly on the latest version of Mac OS X (10.4, “Tiger”)
- Cleaned up some sprites
- Player weapon now turns partly green when it is in “supergun” mode
And here’s where to get it:
- spinvaders for Macintosh (made for Mac OS X 10.4, but probably works on 10.3 as well)
- No windows build of spinvaders 0.0.4 is available at this time
Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like.
Read on →
20 Jul 2005
Back in the mid-90’s, when I was a NeXTStep consultant, getting a job at
OmniGroup was a sort of recurring daydream to me. Like
Integrity Solutions where I worked, OmniGroup did NeXTStep consulting, but also commercial application development. Started by Wil Shipley and Ken Case and surely some other dudes whose names escape me at the moment, Omni seemed like Shangri-La compared to my job.
Browsing their website, you’d see descriptions of their work environment, which I’d contrast with mine:
at Omni |
at Integrity Solutions |
|---|
all employees worked at omni’s office in a casual, fun atmosphere |
many employees worked in windowless rooms at customer sites, crammed to the point of literally bumping elbows with one another |
employees working at the office enjoyed no-cost lunches prepared by on-site chef |
employees working at the office were supposed to pay a quarter for lousy office coffee
|
once a month, a professional masseuse came around to rub everyone’s shoulders
|
once a month, the CEO would give away a set of hand-crafted juggling bags that he made from old swimsuit fabric
|
had some sort of gaming room with (then-)state-of-the-art consoles, etc
|
juggling was encouraged
|
the drudgery of the mind-numbing consulting work was balanced out by being able to design and implement interesting commercial applications
|
the drudgery of the mind-numbing consulting work was balanced out by dreaming of going to work for a better company
|
As much as I thought about it, for some reason I never tried to get a job there. Probably partly because I didn’t want to move, and partly because I was at a stage in my life where, for reasons I don’t quite grasp now,
complaining about shit seemed like a more useful proposition than trying to actually
do something about shit.
Anyway.
At some point (I haven’t followed the twists and turns that well), Wil left the company he founded, and started
Delicious Monster, which has had a “monster hit” (yuk yuk) with
Delicious Library, an application that, to me, seems like cool technology that I would never have guessed would find an audience. Fortunately for Wil and the gang, it has found a huge audience, earning them
$250,000 in its first month, receiving awards, etc.
To top it off, Wil has started
blogging, which has been fun. One of the more interesting posts lately is about his
Student Talk from WWDC 2005, in which Wil gives newbies some advice on starting their own company. Like Wil, I once started
my own company; Unlike Wil, I didn’t really consider doing commercial app development (if you think the Mac market for commercial software in 2005 is small, try to imagine the miniscule size of the NeXTStep market in 1997!), but focused on consulting, and then let it sort of flounder after I couldn’t, on my own, find enough interesting work to do that way.
Three cheers for
Wil, the man who proves that nerdery + chutzpah == success.
Read on →
17 Jun 2005
Last week, Apple made waves when it announced that future Macintosh models, beginning next year, will contain Intel processors just like other PCs. Some people have asked me what I think about this, so here goes:
The transition to Intel is going to be a great thing.
Now, before I continue: I really don’t much care for the Intel architecture. I am a True Believer in the
RISC approach embodied in the PowerPC architecture. However, for reasons that should become clear as I continue, for most intents and purposes,
the processor doesn’t matter.
the “new” technology
I started off working life as a NeXTStep developer. For those who don’t know, NeXTStep was a product of Steve Jobs’
other computer company,
NeXT, the one he created during the “dark years” (ca 1985-1997) that he wasn’t with Apple. NeXT was a financial failure, but they created some great technology, both hardware and software. The software, in the form of the NeXTStep operating system and development environment, makes up the underpinnings of Mac OS X. I have always held the opinion that Mac OS X could more accurately be called “NeXTStep 5.0”.
Anyway, back in the early 90’s, NeXTStep ran only on NeXT’s own hardware, great beastly black boxes with Motorola 680×0 processors. The hardware was technologically similar to top-of-the-line Macs of that era, but typically with much larger screens, larger hard disks, more
RAM, and a much higher price tag. In 1993, NeXT announced that they were getting out of the hardware business entirely, and were going to focus on the NeXTStep operating system, which they had secretly ported to… Intel! Does this sound familiar to anyone?
So what was a developer to do? Well, in most cases, they could simply compile their software for Intel by clicking a single checkbox in the NeXTStep
IDE. The compiler would then compile the code for both platforms, and bundle them together into what could have been called a “universal binary”
(again, does this sound familiar?). This would then run on both Motorola-based NeXT machines and Intel-based PCs.
Not content to stop there, NeXT also ported their operation system to run on Sun
SPARC workstations and HP HP-
RISC workstations. And as a developer, all you had to do was click on the checkboxes to enable those platforms, and off you went!
But could it really be that easy? Well, in a word:
YES. If you didn’t do much low-level bit-flipping, it really was pretty much that easy. So much so that freeware developers routinely released “quad-fat applications” that ran on all four platforms,
even if they never had access to one or more of the target platforms for testing. They’d just put it out there, say “email me if it doesn’t work right on your machine”, and call it a day.
Of course, there are applications that require low-level bit-flipping, but that can usually be done with per-platform compiler macros and what have you, so you can abstract that away and off you go.
So, we jump forward twelve years in time and arrive at last week. Apple announces technology that old NeXT nerds like me have always known they’ve had, and that we know works. Hell, even people who’ve been Apple nerds since 1997 or 1998 or so should remember that the early, pre-release “Rhapsody” versions of Mac OS X ran both on old Apple G3s and Intel PCs. So really, the technology is not new and has been obviously under the covers ever since Apple acquired NeXT, who
nailed this a decade ago.
[ But of course, it wasn’t called that. It was called a “fat binary”. No one ever accused NeXT of being especially good at marketing.
hardware orphans
One concern I’ve heard thrown about is that
PPC hardware will be “orphaned”. Although this will surely happen at some point, it’s still
years away; everyone using current hardware will be able to use it several years into the future. Look at it this way:
- Currently, Mac OS X can run on every Mac released since 1998, from the very first bondi blue iMac all the way up the chain. This is millions of machines.
- The Intel version won’t be readily available until mid-2006 (Apple’s estimate) at the earliest. Many developers won’t bother shipping universal binaries until then.
- Intel won’t take over the whole line until at least late 2007 (Apple’s estimate) or, more likely, 2008.
- Therefore, Apple won’t be shipping all-Intel Macs until perhaps nearly three years from now. No developer in their right mind would ditch PPC support any time before that.
- Even when Macs are all-Intel, there will remain a huge PPC user community. Unless Mac sales go up dramatically after the Intel release (we can hope), it will take several years before the numbers of Intel Macs equal the number of PPC Macs. My guess, we’re talking at least 2010.
- Until the numbers of Intel Macs seriously overtake the number of PPC Macs, smart developers will support both platforms. So maybe 5 years from now we’ll start to see significant amounts of Intel-only software, but many developers will probably continue to ship universal binaries much longer than that, since they will keep access to the PPC users “for free”.
I believe that 5 years is a pretty good amount of time for people to think about buying some new hardware, so I really don’t think this is going to be too painful.
The only real scenarios I can see being problematic are where people are running specific
PCI hardware such as for high-end audio/video applications; If your manufacturer can’t or won’t create new drivers for MacIntel (if they’ve stopped caring about their Mac products, or have gone out of business, or whatever), you’ll probably have to buy new extra hardware for your special needs when you switch to MacIntel. But in five years time, you’d probably want to replace it anyway, since considering the march of progress, today’s “top-of-the-line” audio gear is tomorrow’s “free-with-your-subscription-to-PC-user-magazine” throwaway kit, so hey.
Read on →
14 Jun 2005
(I never thought it would come to this, but here I am: blogging about Michael Jackson. Hopefully this is the only time.)
So, the big “not guilty” judgement came down the pike yesterday. I’m not plugged-in to the 24/7 American disinfo feed (
FAUX News,
CNN, etc) so I didn’t hear this important news until this morning when I awoke to hear the TV saying “Michael Jackson blah blah king of pop blah blah” followed by my wife calling out “Michael Jackson’s
DEAD!!!” That kidder. As if.
Anyway. I caught a clip of some jurors talking about the reasons for their decision, and one of the explanations was that no sound parent would let their child attend sleepovers at Michael Jackson’s house. Let’s lay this out:
- Michael Jackson is a known freak.
- That mom let her son stay at Michael Jackson’s house.
- No good mom would allow that.
- Therefore, that’s a bad mom.
- Therefore, Michael Jackson is innocent.
Now, I know a little bit about logic, and I think that the jump from step 4 to step 5 there is a little wide. But then I’m no legal expert, and the law surely can’t be held back by something like logic.
This reminds me of the
Chewbacca defense, a Johnny Cochran parody defense in South Park, which (in extremely shortened form) goes something like this:
- Look at this picture of Chewbacca.
- Chewbacca is a Wookie.
- That makes no sense.
- Therefore, my client is innocent! You must acquit!
Read on →