iPad? More like iAd. Vertisements.

Via Slashdot, it seems soon you may be able to subscribe to newspapers on the iPad in the near future.
Sure. Why pay $10 for a paper copy of something when you can pay the same $10 for a likely-DRM'ed copy that can only be read on a $500 portable computer?

In all honesty though, instant delivery, lack of clutter, "take it anywhere", being able to archive issues indefinitely, text search... those features might be worth the money, if it was a really good newspaper/magazine.

But wait, there's more.

The Cupertino company has agreed to provide an opt-in function for subscribers to allow Apple to share with publishers their information, which includes vital data that news organizations use to attract advertisers, industry sources say.
...
While the leap into the digital tablet market comes with short-term problems for newspapers, the iPad and future tablets will provide a new digital palette for publications to create sophisticated and lucrative ads, said Needham & Co. analyst Charles Wolf.
"I would say it's a risk, but I would argue it's a short-term risk," Wolf said. "If you can put animation and multimedia into ads, that will greatly enhance reader views. I am certain of that."

So as I understand it, first I buy a $500 gadget. Then I pay for a newspaper subscription. Then a bunch of companies want me to give them personal information about myself, so they can share it amongst themselves.
 And then I have to view ads.

Animated ads.

The only thing better would be if the iPad also woke you up at 4AM and tried to sell you life insurance. Maybe Apple would let me install a free ad-blocker script for my news reader though. It is my hardware, after all... pfffft, yeah, I could't keep going with a straight face.
And thus my desire to get an iPad, kind-of sort-of building over the past couple of months, once again flatlines.

Corruption is not for amateurs

Oh dear oh dear... It appears that a taxi driver has gotten himself in trouble by trying to offer a 20 Rand bribe to a traffic cop, and now has to appear in court on charges of corruption. Tsk.

Well, and rightly so. I mean, what an idiot! Everyone knows that the going rate for traffic cop bribes is at least R100! Of course you're going to get yourself arrested when you offer the guy only R20! He's going to feel insulted and pissed off, and he's going to get all righteous all of a sudden and haul your ass to jail! What else do you expect?

To illustrate the state of justice in South Africa: metro police spokesperson Wayne Minnaar stated that "motorists who attempt to bribe officers who are not corrupt, will be arrested and have to appear in court to be charged with corruption." (Emphasis mine.) I kid you not, that's what he said. A police spokesman makes a statement on a very minor and unremarkable case, but he does feel the need to make the distinction, and apply his statement only to officers who are not corrupt. Go figure.

The message, then, is clear: you will feel the wrath of the law and be snared by the mighty arm of justice... but only if you try to bribe a cop who is not corrupt. Fortunately there's not much chance of that - they're a bit rare these days. And when you attempt to bribe one who is (which mean in the overwhelming majority of cases) then of course you're purrrrrfectly alright...

A witch! A witch!

There is no denying that the soccer worldcup games of 2010 have been a great success, especially where South Africa's new and improved image in the eyes of the world. No stone has been left unturned to keep the problems that continue to plague the country (such as crime, poverty, miserable living conditions, dysfunctional municipal and governmental services) out of sight. Soccer fans are very enthusiastic, and return home convinced that South Africa is a modern country with an infrastructure and society that are on par with the best ones found in Europe and the US.

Apart from a slight case of witchcraft, that is.

Artist Yiull Damaso, who feels that art should provoke an emotional response, has created a modern version of Rembrand's The Anatomy lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. In Damaso's version the knife is wielded by the late AIDS orphan Nkhosi Johnson, while the cadaver is that of Nelson Mandela. The onlookers are political figures such as de Klerk, Zuma, Mbeki and opposition leader Zille.

Whether or not this is within the limits of good taste is up for debate - which is not unusual for daring expressions of art. But the ANC has slammed it for entirely different reasons. Not only do they call the painting "racist" (because everything that displeases the ANC is considered racist these days) but the real problem is that we're dealing with a typical manifestation of witchcraft: "In African society it is a foreign act of ubuthakathi (witchcraft) to kill a living person..." according to the ANC's statement.

Witchcraft is not uncommon in South Africa. Every now and then people are killed because they are suspected of witchcraft. Even more people (especially children) are being killed and slaughtered for muti - a form of traditional healing that uses human organs for certain rituals and treatments, and even (if desperate measures are required) human sacrifice. Yes, we are talking about South Africa in the year 2010 - the country that currently hosts the soccer world cup.

There is even a "Witchcraft Suppression Act" in South African law. This bill states that:

6 Any person who conducts himself in the manner below shall be guilty of an offence:-

1 (a) Imputes to any other person the causing, by supernatural means, of any disease in or injury or damage to any person or thing, or who names or indicates any other person as a wizard;
(b) In circumstances indicating that he professes or pretends to use any supernatural power, witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or disappointment of any person or thing to any other person;
(c) Employs or solicits any witchdoctor, witch-finder or any other person to name or indicate any person as a wizard;
(d) Professes a knowledge of witchcraft, or the use of charms, advises any person how to bewitch, injure or damage any person or thing, or supplies any person with any pretended means of witchcraft;
(e) On the advice of any inyanga, witch-finder or other person or on the ground of any pretended knowledge of witchcraft, uses or causes to be put into operational any means or process which, in accordance with such advice or his own belief, is calculated to injure or damage any person or thing; and
(f) For gain pretends to exercise or use any supernatural powers, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment.

There is no denying that South Africa has done a brilliant PR job. It's a bit of a shame, of course, that all this money and effort has gone into hiding the country's real problems from the world, rather than solving them, but that's politics for you, I suppose...

We are safe! We have anti-virus software!

It's been one of those days. On my way to an appointment with a (hopefully future) client I got a call to let me know that said client had been rushed into hospital with acute and worrying symptoms. Planning-wise, things went downhill from there.

In an attempt to salvage at least some of my workday, I managed to pop in with another client this afternoon to discuss proposals for a company logo. Because such a thing really has to be presented and discussed, it's much easier to have them on paper. Which is fine... Except, being professionally involved with graphics, I do not have a color printer. Inkjet printers are a pain in this climate as the nozzles are virtually garantueed to terminally clog up within days, and ink is bizarrely expensive - even within the context of printer ink being ridiculously overpriced worldwide to begin with. And the budget does not (yet) allow for a color laser printer. So on my way to the client I made a stop at the local digital print shop, which normally works fine for me. But not today.

One of the guys (a new one, a pimply-faced youth with a radical hairdo who communicated mostly in grunts and mumbles) took my USB stick and plugged it into the computer. Nothing happened for a while, and then an anti-virus message popped up. "Yes, we've been having that all day long", he said. "We've been hit with a virus somehow." Nice. So I felt obliged to point out to him that, a.) his anti-virus software would work better if it weren't weeks out of date (this being a stand-alone machine) and b.) that plugging his clients' USB sticks into a machine he knows to be infected with a virus is hardly an example of good service. "No problem", he said, "the anti-virus software has stopped it before it infected your USB stick." Really? Permit me to doubt you, my friend. Anyway, all PCs in the print shop were terminally stuffed up and none would even print. So I was obliged to take my business elsewhere, which necessitated a detour past the local Postnet office - a pain because it's out of my way, it is more expensive, and the people who work there are morons.

The moron factor was once again demonstrated when I arrived, and requested some printing. The lady at the counter plugged my USB stick into a stand-alone machine first, because "We always have to do a virus check, sir". Okaaayy... So up comes a window in which Kaspersky Anti-virus starts to do a number on my USB stick. Which happened to be full of networking tools, so scanning it took forever. But guess what: the only thing with whch Kaspersky came up was the spyware in an ancient eDonkey client that was still kicking around in one of the directories and that I haven't used since the turn of the century. According to Kaspersky, everything else was fine. Uh-huh.

When she plugged my USB stick into a second machine to print the four JPEG files in the root of the stick, nothing would work. We could see the files, but not print them. So I took my stick back and plugged it into my Ubuntu laptop to see what was going on. And guess what - all JPEG files had been replaced with shortcuts to a suspicious .EXE file that never used to be there; there was an autorun.inf file that was new as well, and a whole lot of other stuff that had been modified. And Kaspersky (which was of course also way out of date because this, too, was a stand-alone machine) never noticed anything.

Great. So I reformatted the stick, copied the four JPG files onto it and, lo and behold, now they would print. Woohoo.

Anyway. The moral of the story is, once again, that the user is and will always be the weakest link in the computer security chain. Which isn't exactly news... but I wonder if they still make memory sticks with write-protect switches on them, like the first one I used to have, many years ago. With users like these, we need 'em.

Well, that was it, then...

Clementine: A triumph of Free Software

Ages ago, in the long-forgotten days of 2008, there was Amarok 1.4. And it was good. Then KDE4 came along and Amarok was rewritten, reshaped, becoming something... different. Something unsettling. Something not altogether pleasant.
Fear not. Today we have Clementine.

I consider Clementine a triumph of Free Software. A great project fell off the rails, so someone else picked up the pieces, forked it and kept the spirit alive.

Features present

Clementine embodies everything good about Amarok 1.4, in a shiny Qt4 package. The layout is eminently pleasant to use. It uses the classic "spreadsheet" playlist view that saw so much success in Amarok 1.4. If you care about cramming as much information about your music as possible onto the screen, this is as good as it gets. It's boring, and that's a good thing. It gets the job done.
Like Amaork, 1.4, in Clementine you can very quickly drill into your music collection, filter it, view recently added tracks, group songs by artist or album or year or genre or a combination of those things. Clementine also handles all of the edge cases correctly: it lists albums with Various Artists exactly how I'd want (exactly like Amarok 1.4). It correctly handles songs with non-Latin tag text.
Clementine detects additions and changes to my music collection instantly, without the massive scan-lags on startup that plague some other music players. Clementine doesn't bat an eye at my 7,000 song collection. There's no MySQL integration, but I don't need it. Clementine's SQLite backend supposedly handles 300k songs without much problem, which is good enough for me.
Clementine has Last.FM integration. It has three different styles of desktop notification. It has visualizations. It handles USB devices. It understands reply gain. It has cross-fading. It has an equalizer. It has a transcoder. It has a cover manager.
I'm tired of listing features. Let's just say it has every useful feature you'd ever want. And if you don't need a feature, it stays out of your way.
And for a program under such active development, it's rock solid. I have yet to see a crash. And speaking of active development, if you follow the activity in Clementine's SVN repo, you will find that this program is updated almost daily. How the devs find the time, I don't know, but I'm grateful. This program has gone from non-existent to awesome in record time.
Clementine can use gstreamer, so it even works cross-platform. I fired it up on Windows 7 the other day and I was amazed at how good it looked and felt. It supposedly also works on OS X.
Clementine doesn't cook your breakfast for you, but that might be in the works.

How to make a good UI

A perfect example of the polish of Clementine's UI: Tagging. How do you tag a whole album worth of music at once? You can select some songs and right click and go into a dialog, like most music players allow.
Or:

1. Edit a tag for a single song (inline) by clicking the field. Let's say you edit Artist.
2. Select multiple songs in your playlist. (Click and drag, CTRL-click, Shift-click, CTRL-A, whatever.)
3. Right click the Artist tag in the song you edited, select Set Artist to "XXXXX", and now all the songs you selected will be updated.

This is the kind of UI innovation that I like. It's simple, it's useful, and it's predictable. You can get things done without going through dialog windows, without a million clicks, without spending a minute scratching your head figuring things out.
(Meanwhile Amarok 2 is busy getting rid of the Stop button and making the volume control circular.)

Features missing

Admittedly, Clementine is missing a couple of features I wouldn't mind having. You can't skin or theme Clementine. You can't rate songs. You can't display song lyrics. You can't "queue" songs. But oh well. I can live without these features because the rest of the program is so darned good. For all I know, these features might pop up next week. I wouldn't be surprised.
The Clementine devs seem to be very friendly and responsive to feature requests and feedback, which is also great.
Clementine is also missing a few features/bloat that I'm glad to see NOT ported from Amarok. Wikipedia integration? Good riddance.

I would pay money for this program.

In November 2009 I had this to say:

(Anyone out there reading this, if you port Amarok 1.4 to Qt4 intact, I will pay you. Seriously. I will pay you money.)

The offer still stands. I will pay money for Clementine. I'm still waiting for a Donate link so I can do so. (Clementine devs, are you reading this?)
Why do I care about this so much? Because I have music playing whenever I'm using this computer, and when you add up work plus free time, I'm at this computer 8-10 hours per day. Music keeps me sane during multi-hour debug sessions. Music is an integral part of my life, and a music app is an integral part of playing music.
It's very important to me that the programs and tools I use all day are comfortable. Otherwise I become cranky. If you were a carpenter, would you want to use a hammer with a wobbly handle all day? I'm a programmer, and I want to use comfortable computer programs.
Clementine is very comfortable.

What in the world were they thinking when they made this???

Since late yesterday morning I have been working on a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ laptop computer. The problem is a minor one: the cooling fan has seized up (a common occurrence with computers of any make and model) which caused it to overheat and switch off within a minute after having been switched on. So the cooling fan either needed to be serviced or replaced. Which I set out to do. Little did I know. Ye gods, what a job.

First off, one would expect a component that is as notoriously susceptible to wear, tear and a need for service as a cooling fan to be more or less accessible to a service technician, so that it can be removed and replaced without taking the entire computer apart.

One would be wrong.

The fan is mounted inside a cut-out in the mainboard, which in turn is located between the bottom shell of the case (which is a single molded part with maintenance covers for the heat sink and memory modules only) and a central chassis plate, on which the rest of the machine has been mounted. In short, you have to strip apart the entire machine right down to the last part before reaching the fan. Literally. The only exception is that you don't have to take the lid apart (which holds the display) but you do have to remove it, of course. And the whole thing has been built with the precision of a switch watch: there are half-millimeter wires running from the WiFi module at the bottom to the WiFi antenna's in the top, and those wires run through grooves in the main chassis plate because otherwise there wouldn't be room for them. That's how compact it is.

So. The main steps to get to the cooling fan are, among other things, as follows:

Remove the battery; unscrew, disconnect and remove the keyboard; unscrew the memory cover and remove the memory modules; unscrew the heat sink cover and remove the heat sink assembly (consisting of a heat pipe, a copper die screwed onto the CPU, and a packet of cooling ribs making up the heat sink); unscrew and remove the switch and LED cover; unscrew the palm rest, disconnect the touch pad and fingerprint sensor, and remove the palm rest assembly;  unscrew the LCD grounding lug; remove the IFX board; disconnect the various LCD cables; dismount the WiFi card and remove the antenna wires; unscrew and detach the LCD screen (a.k.a. laptop lid); remove the memory stick adapter; undo all the screws in the central chassis plate the covers the mainboard; unscrew and detach the switch / LED board and speakers; unscrew and remove the plastic rear section from the case's back shell; unscrew, disconnect and remove the hard drive; unscrew, disconnect and remove the optical drive; remove some copper tape from the mainboard and undo the screws underneath; unscrew and remove various auxiliary PC boards; disconnect the CMOS battery; disconnect the PCMCIA card slot's ribbon cable; disconnect the memory adapter ribbon cable; disconnect the docking station ribbon cable; disconnect the audio and serial connectors ribbon cable (and a handful of other ribbon cables with varying degrees of inaccessibility - you get the idea); remove the screws securing the mainboard to the back shell; unscrew and remove the heat sink top cover; remove the main board and turn it over; disconnect and unscrew the fan, undo the copper tape on its side (which won't stick afterward) and break it loose from the three plastic pins molded into the base plate (meaning you'll have to glue it back later.)

I've left out a few things here and there (this is a copy-and-paste from my notes) but this is the bulk of it.

Once you have done all this, then you can start servicing or replacing the fan.

The next step is of course to put the whole Chinese puzzle back together again. Assembly is the reverse of disassembly. Except it's more difficult and involves lots of pieces of tape that won't stick anymore, and comes with a shoebox full of screws that you now have to puzzle back into the right holes - which is not all that easy even if you kept them in the positions and order in which you took them out (which I did, having been there before.) And if you forget a step, you'll have to go all the way back through the disassembly process to get to that one connector or screw that you forgot about... Ain't it fun?

So at this point I have two questions for Sony. First and foremost, obviously, is "What the f... were you thinking when you designed this????" The second one, though, is just as important: "Why, in the name of all that's holy, did you have to ship a $2000 laptop computer with a $0.20 fan????"

I mean, really... This is ridiculous to the point of almost being insulting.

I'm sure that other laptop manufacturers are more or less guilty of the same thing... but I, for one, will forever steer clear of buying a Sony laptop.

Less than halfway through disassembly, and the parts already fill most of the desk.

After almost three hours of tinkering, there's your problem: a cheap fan with the usual seized up bushing...