Dev Dawn

Was just pointed to this article on a 500GHz chip.

It’s a short and clear article. If it’s on the money, then these supa-nerds (used in a heroic sense) have jump ahead many lightyears.

I’d like to quote the whole article, but since it’s short, here’s just two bits.

At 500 gigahertz, the technology is 250 times faster than chips in today’s cellphones, which operate at 2 gigahertz. At room temperature, the chips operate at 350 gigahertz, far faster than other chips in commercial use today.

Second, for the prediction that is sad, but most probably true:

Mr. Olds cautioned, however, that the technology was far from finding its way into commercial products any time soon, considering the performance leap it represents. Today’s performance-hungry computer buyers, for example, are buying machines operating at about three gigahertz, he said.

Not sure how to take the actual article. Sounds like a quick jotting down of facts given to a reporter. I’d like to know more, investigate a bit more, ask some questions of the people.

The Channel Nine website has had a facelift. It’s gone all Rounded and Smooth. Looks nice.

How annoying is yellow? Well, at least, that particular yellow .. the song is awesome.

The problem with the site, and it’s not going to be something they can get away from easily, is that there’s just too much on the page. I imagine they’ve got a bundle of commitments that have to be there, and these are fighting each other for the viewer’s eye.

The viewer becomes frazzled, unless they specifically ignore those elements and travel directly to their intended location .. for me, it’s pretty much always the TVGuide .. although of late i’ve been using TVGuide.com.au a lot more. Neither are perfect mind you. But that’s another lame and boring story for another far far far away time.

What’s the deal with these websites? They’re in limbo land, at least, that’s what it seems like to this black duck. Trying to make money. Make money offa the web. How to do it? Hmmm, how to, how to. And yet, they fail to miss the important points, which have dogged most sites for a long time. What is the importance of content? Too much and it’s watered down, too little .. and well, you don’t get traffic.

But is traffic the All Important Goal? And further, is our chief end to be Money, Mammon, or more appropriately, our lusting after it?

Edit:
Don’t get me wrong. Capitalism is cool, and commercial success is a fair goal. I was just in a particularly acerbic mood just now.

There’s an excellent article floating around today, Zen and the Art of Classified Advertising, where the author talks with the man behind craigslist. It’s a pretty cool look at a different thread, a group of people treading a different path. It’s not the only way, for sure, but it’s nice.

Of course, the little voice (crazy little voice) inside does whisper that perhaps there are hidden motives. But of course there are!, there usually always is. It might be a personal tragedy that drives the person on, or a collective goal to dominate a facet of the market.

I’ve been influenced today by lack of sleep .. and by zefrank and his Show.

‘Nuff Crazy Talkin

Live Coda 2006 has happened, and I only just found out about it.

For those who don’t want to follow the link ..

Teams of two, three or four programmers will compete during the evening to solve a simple task (basic input/output and array manipulation) in the shortest time possible.

With each programmer on a separate machine working on a single shared program source projected onto Loops 23 foot screen.

Prizes are awarded for fastest solution time, so team collaboration is going to be more important than pure programming ability.

Tell me that doesn’t sound like a blast. Getting to combine, not just solo, with other programmers to achieve a very time-restricted goal. It’s like an episode of 24 .. except each ep is ten minutes long.

This kind of exciting take on development is awesome. It really is. To sensationalise the world of programming. Sensationalise in a good way. I hope we see more of it.

Okay.

First off .. this is not about Development, not really. It’s just a good old fashioned gear grinding session.

Second off .. (that phrasing doesn’t really work the second time around) .. my recent influx of postings is a joy to me, because I’ve come out of some kind of lethargic stupor regarding interacting with the web.

Third off .. no. It just doesn’t work :).

Ahem.

A couple of weeks back, I had to return a WAAAY overpriced Serenity dvd (I know, I should have just kept it, but I can’t see how Joss Whedon is getting the extra money this particular store was charging for it) .. and the store didn’t do refunds (of which I’m dubious of, but don’t know the aussie law that well) .. so I got a swap. Ended up getting Family Guy Season 4.

Edit:
Can I just say, to erase any misunderstanding .. the store referred to in the previous paragraph is NOT EzyDVD.

Haven’t had any problems dealing with EzyDVD, and they do great specials.

I can remember watching the first season long time back in about 2000 when it first hit aussie screens. It was at about 10.30pm at night. Silly Aussies didn’t pick it up, or the networks didn’t want to really show it .. but the next memory comes in about 2002 (or thereabouts) when the Season 1 dvd was on sale in a Tamworth Grace Bros/Target/?? for about $16.

Bargain.

From then we bought the next two seasons as they appeared.

So, although we’ve started cooling on season 4 (it’s been on telly lately), I thought, why not. Pick it up. Watch the eps that haven’t showed yet.

As you can see from the afore-typed link (to the EzyDVD item, it’s the picture, at the top of the box), there’s a big title that says Complete Season 4 Collection.

Bollocks.

Not. Funny. At. All.

Talk about anger management issues. I opened the case.

Hmmm. No little guide as the last three have had. Okay. That’s a little off-putting but .. WAIT.

WHAT THE!!!

There’s thirteen episodes in the whole entire case. Possibly I should have been more careful and read the back of the dvd better, it does actually say something about 13 episodes.

But I can guarantee you there aren’t 13 episodes in the season.

So I do a little digging.

It seems there’s quite a bit of confusion about just what makes up Season 4.

If you check out the episode guide on the Family Guy Website (it’s flash, so you have to select it yourself, can’t link to it), there’s 30 episodes in the season (3 of which comprise the Untold Stewie Griffon Story, a dvd that was released earlier this year, so possibly that takes the tally down to 27).

EpGuides listing currently has the count at 17, which seems a little wierd. However, looking at the TV.com listing it’s got 30 episodes.

All in all, I’d say this is a money-making scheme. I’m pretty sure that the guys who actually do the show wouldn’t stoop that low. They don’t have to. It seems out of character. But there are plenty of other people in the whole creation of the dvd loop that would.

So .. a ballsup. I hope someone calls Fox, or whoever actually did this.

I’d like to get my extra 17 episodes .. so that I have the Entire Season 4 Collection.

‘Nuff Grinding .. Babbled on way too long today.

.. Or more that I can’t understand. Which is probably due, in no small quantity, to my own lack of ability to think through stuff.

But ..

What’s the deal with this.

http://www.microsoft.com/update/ .. try it out. I understand some stuff would get lost, in a website as big as theirs (it’s really a whole massive shopping complex of websites) .. but surely this could just get redirected to the actual update site.

Frictional Stu over and out

I imagine it would be easier to leave Microsoft now than it was ten, even five years ago. The cosmic forces have shifted. But not entirely. There is still a great deal of prestige and weight behind the big guru, and walking away from a high-profile job would leave behind a lot of wonderful opportunities.

Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) has left the building.

Opportunity is what he did it for though. To keep excited. There’s a great little exit-interview (Microsoft Watch) that popped up today, well, technically yesterday for us yobbos is ozland and all counterparts.

It’s good to read about a guy who has made blogging into something important in a business sense. And by that, I don’t mean breaking through and getting ten thousand dollhairs a month from Google Adsense.

I mean, he’s made businesses actually put time into researching blogging, making it part of their overall plans, their strategies, etc etc.

It’s healthy reading.

Nuff for now …

Okay. Just gonna do a generic news posting. Well, probably not generic.

Net Neutrality is a big catchphrase zooming around the internet at the moment. It’s interesting to find out about, not because I’m worried, or even pretend to know the depths of both sides to the argument (if indeed it’s just two sides). I’m interested because it could be the place where historians in a hundred years time point to as the start of something. A spread. A break. The Breaking.

Something like that.

It could be. It might not.

There’s a good article on the E-Week site, mainly focussed on Google, but it gives a good concise explanation of what Net Neutrality is about.

If you’re a dedicated Lazy Programmer (here, here, and here .. man I’m longing for the multiple-link tag, a javascript-ee menu thingy that would give you a list of links from a single a href tag .. anyway), I’ll summise.

Using a pipe analogy, Net Neutrality is about whether the companies that own the pipes can dictate what goes through them. Control. Give precendence to.

That’s my initial understanding of the matter.

Of course, the initial thought is BAM .. that’s some massive possibility for evil. You can have our nice supa-fast piece of pipe .. while you on the other hand, here’s a pile of plastic to see if you can get some water through.

That’s definately on people’s minds.

Anyway. I’m not pretending to have any insight into the matter. Just relaying the news.

It was an exciting tension. The buildup suggested that the pieces of code could either fall together or fall apart. There was the possibility of genius, laced with the reality of last year’s crushing failure.

Ha ha.

I’m talking, of course, about the first Test played by the Wallabies last night, against England.

It was a pretty cool game. We enjoyed it, although I was worried for the first half that it was going to be a game without a try. But then we came good, in the end.

The bit of programming, because this has to have something to do with development, was the actual programming of the ads. This really ground my gears, wound ‘em up tight.

I realise you have to have ads, given the way television operates. But these were programmed really, really badly. Instead of skipping looking at the crowd after a penalty was blown, the camera would pan to the crowd, and then, just before the restart, go to an ad. By the time we returned, there had been at least one play that was lost to the elements of fox and those people actually attending the match.

Perhaps it was a haphazard piece of work. Maybe they had a rookie programmer on that day. Whatever it was, it was lame.

As a once semi-almost-something Aussie TV Guy used to say, parodied.

Lame. Lame. Lame.

Two rather popular games (the franchises being very popular), Oblivion and Heroes 5 just had their first patches released.

I’ve been reading with interest the Ubisoft forums (the publishers of Heroes, Nival being the Developer), in the weeks since it was released.

Heroes 2 was the very first game I bought with my own money. $90 being the amount of money from a relative for my 21st birthday, if I recall correctly.

I’ve invested a lot of time into these games, 2, 3, 4, and now 5.

But that’s not what I’m rambling about today. It’s just building some kind of foundation.

It’s very informative to watch how both the Users and the Developers react to each other. The patch hasn’t been out for 24 hours yet, and already there are some people very annoyed on the forums. There are also people very thankful. And so far, the Developers haven’t said a word in reply. Which is good I think.

There are differences between the products we make and these. For one thing, we don’t make games (ohhhh man, what a dream life .. ha ha ha). But we still create software that will get into the hands of the User. They will still experience our creation, and most probably will have something to say about it.

To the patch.

With both games and business applications (and general applications, everything lumped in there), you would have to work hard at deciding what went into the first patch. If, that is, a patch was needed.

In my simple understanding, a patch has two distinct purposes. It has the ability to Fix Bugs, and Introduce New Bugs, ahem, I mean Add New Functionality.

As in the case of Heroes 5, deadlines being what they were, the wheels of commercial success driving onwards, you are going to release a buggy product. Buggy, and lacking in a full feature-set.

What do you put into your first patch?

I imagine it goes something like this ..

The Patch Discussion, Scene 1, Act 1

Head-Honcho, Non-Developer, Parent Publishing Company

- “Get the patch done.”

Developer, Guy Who Started In The Biz With Wonderful Dreams, Currently Crushed In Spirit

- “Okay.”

Gets the Development Team together.

Some are missing, presumed to have left the state, seeking actual life outside of the desk/chair scenario they’ve experienced for the last 2 years.

The rest are present, in body. Some have their eyes closed, Sleeping. Some, the lucky few, have their eyes open, Sleeping.

- “Okay team. We planned for this. We know what didn’t go in. We know what is going wrong.”

This last statement is partially correct. The rabid user-fan-base of a community ferreted out at untold number of bugs and missing features.

- “We have to decide what goes into the first patch.”

There are groans from the crowd/team.

A developer, who had recently lost a great deal of weight, having not eaten in 40 days, falls to the floor. He curls into a foetal position, puts his right thumb into his mouth, and starts cooing.

The Head Developer strives to ignore this, as two large men with White Coats (and Blue Hands, ha ha) appear to take the stricken Developer away.

- “I’ve put out some of the fires. The situation is as follows.”

- “We don’t have to worry about Feature #1 (eg, the Map Editor) or Feature #2 (eg, the Random Map Generator) for a while.”

There are a few feeble attempts at joy, a girl claps, and one fellow makes some kind of sound that possibly was a joyous shout of rapture. That, or a death-rattle.

- “Apart from that though, we’re in the crapper. Any ideas?”

Silence

Finis

It is never easy. This is the time when the dreams of creating something amazing would be tested. The long haul. The great ideas have already gone into the software, or they’ve been discarded by the roadside. And for those that build their dreams on these ideas, without factoring in reality, this would be a very hard learning curve.

I guess that’s why a lot of development never finishes. You don’t go in prepared. You can’t think on your feet. You don’t listen when people say it’s gonna get really, really, hard.

So I’m determined to understand that, in development, things will most definately get harder, before they get better. Or, that you can make things better, but it takes a lot of hard work.

To be ready.

I’ve been looking for something small to post lately. Just a bit of news to fire me back into regular posting.

Visiting Slashdot this morning gave me that impetus.

Go visit. Slashdot has a New Look. From my first initial impressions, it’s pretty sweet.

Again, very initial impressions.

It seems mostly cosmetic, on the front page. The format hasn’t changed, so much as the Look’N'Feel. Which is important. That old argument.

All the little widget’s they have been adding over the years finally look really nice. The polls, the extra bits of side info .. no longer square and clunky .. but round and shaded. Mmmmmm. Mmmmmmmm.

So that’s my first post back for a while. I’ve got a bunch in Drafts, but they haven’t seemed to click together.

Cheers,