April 21, 2006
This report comes straight from a Saucemaster Inc. Field Officer in Oman:
“As you know, the gulf cAN BE a conservative place at times. however i still manage to access a lot of innapropriate material here on the web using omantel internet service provider (the only in the sultanate) and guess what - saucemaster is now blocked! i dont know what theyve scanned in your blog, but youve been blocked. however, i can look at nude ebony girl blogs…”
What a fantastic thought, imagine that a whole country has deemed it fit to block “Saucemaster.info” from reaching it’s citizens and perverting them with it’s unique mix of filth and fury. We must be proud of this and wear it like a badge of honour!
April 17, 2006
In response to a couple of posts about new features in Rails 1.1, “The sprint of ideas before release“, and “Discovering HTTP #1: The Accept header“:
I can’t understand why you would use XML at all when XHTML will do, and will keep you much DRYer in the process. Take a look at the XOXO microformat, and re-imagine it as a Ruby hash.
Using your XML example from your “Discovering HTTP” post, the following XML fragment
<comment>
<body>First post!!</body>
<author>David</author>
</comment>
could become
<ol class='xoxo'>
<li>comment
<dl>
<dt>body</dt>
<dd>First post!!</dd>
<dt>author</dt>
<dd>David</dd>
</dl>
</li>
</ol>
So instead of maintaining two different interfaces, one for the browser and another for clients, we can have one single XHTML interface that is both XML parsable, and browser renderable. Separate API’s for software clients then become completely redundant…
April 15, 2006
Samsung Electronics, Intel and Microsoft have been promoting their joint project “Origami” mini-laptop PC since they first showed it last month.
In fact, the new PC proved to be too revolutionary, enough to baffle the three firms’ executive officers who publicly tried to demonstrate how to use it.
During Wednesday’s news conference at Grand InterContinental in southern Seoul, some 30 reporters gathered to watch the much-hyped product named Q1, or Ultra Mobile PC. Kim Hun-soo, vice president of Samsung’s PC division, first ascended to the podium as he tried to do the presentation in a Steve Jobs style _ which was not so successful.
Kim first tried to start the Powerpoint presentation, which was saved in his Q1. But after introducing himself, he failed to turn to the second page while his staff nervously watched him.
Unlike conventional laptops, Q1 does not have a built-in keyboard. Users type on its touch-screen keyboard or on a small external keyboard that users may find uncomfortable and unfamiliar to use.
After spending several nerve-racking minutes trying to solve the problem on his own, Kim was finally helped by one of his staff to get to the next page.
“This kind of mistake happens in every presentation, even though you practice it all night,” he said.
But that was not the end of his bad day.
Several pages later, the large projection screen suddenly completely went black. Samsung’s staff again rushed to help the vice president, and found the Q1’s battery has run out.
It is not known why the battery only lasted for a few minutes of the presentation. However, Kim later admitted that Q1 has three hours of battery life and two hours when watching a DVD, which is comparably short to other laptops.
Samsung has been jointly developing the Q1 PC with Intel and Microsoft since last year. It is about half the size of an A4 sheet of paper and has unique features such as a virtual on-screen keyboard.
But Wednesday’s mishaps showed that the innovative features of the Q1 can bring the very different results from what the three companies had been expecting.
Microsoft Korea’s president Yoo Jae-sung became the second victim of the day when he took over the turn after Kim wrapped up his presentation.
Yoo also spent several minutes figuring out how to start the presentation file. Finally, a Samsung employee succeeded in turning it on. But then the Q1 suddenly flipped through every page of Yoo’s presentation file in a just few seconds.
“Now you have seen all the contents in advance,” Yoo said, and made a very brief presentation.
Lastly, Lee Hee-sung, president of Intel Korea, had his turn.
Going up to the podium, the energetic Intel Korea CEO pronounced that he would “do it in my own way as my predecessors have had a difficult time.” But Lee also failed to kick off his presentation by himself, and had to be helped by the staff who looked as if they were expecting the same kind of problems to happen again.
The Q1 will be sold for 1.2 million won in Korea from next month. Samsung aims to sell 100,000 units in the first 12 months.
April 5, 2006
http://www.tunecore.com/Â
TuneCore is a music delivery and distribution service that gets music you created up for sale on iTunes, Rhapsody, MusicNet and Napster
 Seems fairly expensive for the service they provide…
Ahhhh…. Dutch Spiced Cookies…
If memory serves, an obscure old man I used to know once told me, eat these when you’re hungry. So next time you think of Dutch Spiced Cookies remember, “Eat them when you’re hungry”. (For those ignorant of the great Iron Chef series - ignore what I just wrote and read on)
It was really on a whim that I bought my first packet of the Speculaas…out of desperation with the pressure to make a decision, my eyes darting around the shelves in a paranoid circle, I was suddenly captured by a sight I had never seen. A dark red package that looked like a jewel among a river of terds (I’m referring both to the other biscuits and to the old people that are always buying their digestive biscuits in the hope that it will cure or suppress the malignant bowel cancer that is racking their bodies).. I quickly snatched the packet up and departed the aisle in haste. Had I known what would come, perhaps I would’ve reached to get a packet towards the back as I normally do with everything. Days later I had bought the last quart of the packet to work and stowed them in my drawer for safe keeping… sometime in the following week I decided to hand some out so everyone could get a taste. The quintessential fuck-tickle, who had transformed at this time into a normal person, ate his with all the enthusiasm of a starved monkey. But MJ, the resident office terrorist was harder to break, she resisted suspiciously for endless minutes, looking at the biscuits as though they could topple a smal country’s government themselves. Eventually I had finally coerced her into trying just one biscuit and as she reached to pull one from the packet she at some point changed sails and turned her back on me, announcing in a wicked voice that she would, “never eat those biscuits!”
Right then, czp approached taking a spiced cookie as he passed and sat down pointing and laughing at MJ’s suspiciousness while munching on the cookie. We all started to turn back to out desktop playmate’s but very suddenly we all turned back to look at czp when he proclaimed that, “There’s a pube in this!” And so there was, he held the last half of the cookie up, suspended by what looked to be a orange coloured Dutch pubic hair, half of which was buried deep into the cookie’s body.
We discussed this for some time and eventually decided that the Dutch royalty had visited the factory on that particular day my packet was produced. They must’ve stood up on the foreman’s platform and in a matter of ceremony, blessed the cookies passing beneath them with a handful of pubic hairs that floated down amongst the moist cookie dough shapes. We were lucky enough to have one of those cookies in my packet.
The irony, that that particular biscuit czp took had been meant to be MJ’s first taste of Dutch Spiced Cookies, was not lost on me.
Saucemaster.
Due to a stupid mistake on the part the retarded saucemaster (yes, that’s me), I may have compromised the security of some of the more sensitive posts we’ve had here. For the moment I’ve hidden the offending posts and am waiting to see if the storm of faeces passes without dropping on my head.
Saucemaster out.
