Atomic Ninja Labs

Number One

Brendan Borlase — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:05:36 PDT

Or, never underestimate the importance of have a lieutenant when building a community-driven project. If you don’t go down with the ship and go MIA, your number one can help pick up the pieces.

“Over the past month, a lot of concern has been expressed on the Blueprint mailing list. Olav, the project founder, has not been heard from since he updated the framework to version 0.7 in February, and the last sign of any activity from him was 2 months ago on his Twitter account.”

Sure, it’s your baby and you want complete control, but do the right thing by your community and appoint a second. A coup may solve things now, but what happens when/ if the owner returns?

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Sex Talk

Brendan Borlase — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:37:18 PDT

Richard writes of a fascinating experiment — involving a bot written in python and sex chat via IRC — the results make for a slightly unusual yet (strangely) interesting insight into the male drive to procreate.

“Weekends are boring, so today I set myself a project to stave off boredom. This is part of the result. I downloaded Pyborg, and set it up to join 6 of the most active sex-oriented IRC channels on Dalnet.”

That some persisted in trying to ‘get it on’ despite discovering lonelygirlrach was actually a bot is both a sad and-yet-unsurprising reflection on how people actively tend to fantasise and ‘fill in the blanks’ when conversing with those they cannot see.

Someone really should hire that man.

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Dead Already

Brendan Borlase — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 03:31:01 PDT

Lucas needs to pass on Star Wars to someone else. Or kill it, permanently. Cameron Hunt puts it best:

“After this movie, it’s ensuing tie-in TV-series, and the upcoming live-action show (which might as well be titled Days Of Our Jedi), the cash cow will be beaten, dead, buried, rotten, yet exhumed on Lucas’ egotistical whim.”

This is the droll, tired and life-sucking crap Star Wars has become. You’ll find more life in your refrigerator.

George, shut it down. Now.

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Clone Wars

Brendan Borlase — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:25:13 PDT

It was inevitable really — IBM PC clones built to run OS X, such as that built by pystar — and yet there is still a fundamental issue with this solution.

“Another company is preparing to sell Intel-based computers that can run Apple Inc.‘s Mac OS X. But unlike a Florida clone maker that’s been sued by Apple, Open Tech Inc. won’t pre-install the operating system on its machines.”

Yes, they can run OS X Leopard (or Tiger). Yes, it even gives a very similar, almost identical experience. But OS X alone doesn’t make a Mac.

Design Emporium.

It’s the sum of all parts, from large multi-touch track pads on the mac books through the specific selection of base hardware such as motherboard reference design and choice of components. Windows XP (and to a lesser extent) Vista, along with a number of UNIX-ish platforms such as Ubuntu or Fedora have tended to obfuscate compatibility and reliability in component choice over recent years.

Today, it is possible to select almost any type of processor and mate it with a compatible mainboard, some ram, a random graphics card and a hard-drive of some description and you’ll be able to run Windows at the very least, with just about any other Linux derivative also working right-out-of-the-box. But that’s really not how a macbook or mac pro are built.

Components and reference designs are often tuned to suit each other. Something that was done to quite some degree early on in the development of both IBM and HP (Compaq) hardware (as an example) a few years ago. If you supported such hardware seven-or-so years ago, it was not at all uncommon to see very non-standard hardware in use by all the big name brands. Sure, one paid more for it (sometimes a great deal more) but ultimately that resulted in a better, more reliable product.

Clones R Us.

Fast forward back-to-the-future, and most IBM clones are built from off-the-shelf hardware. IBM’s are now in fact built by Chinese giant Lenovo. Customised hardware is still used in the Server realm, but far less often in PC clones. They are no longer built to survive, but rather to suit a market that demands the absolutely-lowest-price. Reliability and compatibility are no longer major watch-words.

Today’s Macs do actually share a lot of similarities with their clone brethren. The same graphics cards, the same hard-drives.. even the same CPUs. The switch to Intel was always going to be a smart one as high levels of component production is assured. It was considered foolish by many so-called Mac experts, surely it would fail. That is obviously not the case, sales are soaring.

This very machine I wrote this article on, can run (and has) run OS X. Indeed a number of clones can. However after observing my partner use her Mac Book, and having the (all too brief) opportunity to use it myself, it’s clear they are not just an ordinary clone. They have been built under an entirely different design philosophy. Macs are built with select components rigorously tested to ensure optimal co-habitation and reliability. Just as brand name PC’s were, years ago.

The Art of War.

Ultimately then, the philosophies can be best expressed as follows: Mac’s empower. Clones duplicate.

And so, the Pystar or Open Tech might well run Mac OS X — and run it just fine — but they are not a Mac. They use non-authorised modified code to bypass operating system constraints that keep OS X Mac only. And that is seldom noted in the push to sell these products. Buying one of those systems means almost no support, on a platform that has an unsupported Operating System (despite what they tell you) that may cease to function at any time.

You are not buying a Mac clone. You are buying a PC clone that just happens to run OS X. It’s not a 1:1 copy, it’s just a cheap, hacked and broken facsimile. Before I used a mac book, I would have suggested that a hacked clone was “almost as good as the real thing”. They are not. There is a difference.

The claims by Pystar and Open Tech that these systems are legally able to run OS X is a joke. They use published hacks to bypass code in the OS X builds. I am no lawyer, but that is still a direct violation of the EULA [section F] which forbids reverse engineering (or tampering with) any code that is not already published under an Open Source licence.

“.. you may not copy,decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, or create derivative works of the Apple Software or any part thereof.”

That’s a legal view, of course, which is open to interpretation and potential legal challenge. But that really isn’t the point. That which makes a Mac stand out from every other PC clone is the entire package. From OS to hardware to support — a Mac is more than just the operating system it runs. It is the sum of it’s parts.

And that is something these cloners simply do not get. In turn, neither will their duped customers, who will continue to buy these systems under false belief.

Get Qurli

Brendan Borlase — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:12:59 PDT

See, the thing with short URI services like tinyurl is that they have this habit of going off-line when you least expect it. Sure, they have some nice features like stat counters and baubles and little bells that go bing, but at the end of the day, sometimes simple is better.

Sometimes, all you want is the link — not the full tactical assault required to go get it. What to do? Well, there are some advantages to the do-it-yourself model, like self-hosting. Namely that it’s my ass roasting over hot coals if it goes down. Having masses of (dv) horsepower, which has this frustrating habit of simply not going down, also helps. :)

Thus, with sod all fanfare, and a reasonably low care factor, I humbly present Qurli, a svelte, quotable, simple and blindingly fast URL shortening service. Long URLs suck. Embrace the axe.

I originally built this URI shortening service (pronounced “curly”) for me. A handy place to horde all those annoying, potentially throw-away 400+ character URIs that I just don’t want clogging up del.icio.us or The Lab bookmarks.

Then I realised, why not just share the love? So I have.

Please be aware the service is still ‘very beta’ — just like the fishstick, there is distinct chance it might not end well.

Electro Dial

Brendan Borlase — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:04:16 PDT

The following comment matches my own considered view — a computer calling me tells me you do not care about either your product, or the consumer you wish to form a relationship with. Thus, neither do I.

“I will not hold the line while I wait for someone to try and sell me something I don’t want. Whatever software you’re using to dial people and then drop them in a queue, get rid of it. Least effective marketing strategy ever.”

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No Explore

Brendan Borlase — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:59:13 PDT

Joen unleashes the pent-up-grey within us all and launches a new design — replete with a special message for Internet Explorer 6 users:

“Fullpage zoom is only available in modern browsers — nearly all browsers built after the year 2001, or in humanspeak: not IE6. That means users of said browser aren’t welcome here any more. That includes potential clients for my webdesign business; yep, I’m that serious. I won’t build your crap anymore!”

I admire anyone that can tell one-quarter-and-a-bit of the worlds browsing community to “get bent”.

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Spiced Hams

Brendan Borlase — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:53:04 PDT

Twitter continues to suffer load issues. The thing that continues to strike me as awkwardly inefficient, is the functionality around the ability to ‘follow’ everyone. That’s an inherently flawed design as the one-to-many link typically means the spammer is receiving millions of (waste) updates a day. Many spammers equals endless load.

“To combat aggressive following directly we have recently imposed new limits on following—spammy accounts following to many users have been drastically curbed. Those that existed prior to this new limit await review.”

About fucking time — there should have been a zero-tolerance policy on this from day one. Anyone automatically following everyone else isn’t there to listen — a simple limit on followers-per-day is all it takes.

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Desk View

Brendan Borlase — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:41:22 PDT

Joen updates us with progress at Deskvu, replete with new community involvement options — you can even go noshop-ing for prints.

“Resident digital life refurbishing outlet, Deskvu, or in humanspeak: website holding wallpapers, has been updated. There’s a refreshed layout, an updated frontpage and most interestingly: an option for you to submit your own wallpapers. Woohoo!”

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Foxed Search

Brendan Borlase — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:25:21 PDT

Shaun has been busy again and has added great new language translation functionality to Shortwave.

“Shortwave has a new default trigger. The tr trigger is short for ‘Translate the current page’.”

Unfortunately, whilst the Shortwave Javascript bookmarklet will pass the currently viewed tab as a variable, Firefox’s built-in search function, and thus Shortwave Search does not have any such functionality.

I am exploring ways to try and overcome this limitation (if at all possible) — existing search capabilities are not affected however.

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