Thought Palace

CUPERTINO, California—February 26, 2008—Apple® today announced that iTunes® (www.itunes.com) is now the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group*. Apple also announced that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers. iTunes has sold over four billion songs, …

I really hope they thought ahead and used a 64-bit int for the number_of_songs_sold variable, otherwise some Bad Stuff might happen in the next few months.

(We already know they used an unsigned int, otherwise there would have been a crazy press release a few years ago like “Apple announces iTunes has sold over -2,147,483,648 songs”.)

I used to think it was the Big Time if I got a link from Daring Fireball, but now someone just pointed out to me that the Fake Steve Jobs has taken note of my post.

So … what does it mean for my post to be criticized by a fictional construct that embodies a parody of the CEO of the very same ex-employer my post criticizes? Especially when, more specifically, that fictional construct’s humor is largely based on an exaggerated inversion of Apple’s carefully-groomed non-blogging public image, and he calls out a quote of mine that decries exactly the situation that his (fictional) presence repudiates?

Someone call the Semiotic Crisis Hotline for me! This situation calls for the skills of a Jean Baudrillard — too many levels of irony for me to parse, man.

A bit of cryptography humor, from Peter Gutmann’s slideshow Everything you Never Wanted to Know about PKI but were Forced to Find Out …

(Warning: This won’t make any sense unless you know what things like “PKI”, “self-signed certificates” and “revocation” are)

It’s a sure sign that wikis are going mainstream when one appears for a video-game console. “ZackAndWiki” has the requisite goofy name (like TikiWiki or WikkaWiki), but once you try it out, you’ll find it approaches its job very differently than you’re probably expecting.

37signals gripes about those annoying Bluetooth cellphone headsets with even-more-annoying blinky LEDs on them.

I once had the idea of a charity that would collect discarded headsets from yuppies and distribute them to mentally ill homeless people. Just by wearing the headsets, they would eliminate the social stigma attached to talking to themselves on the street; this would help re-integrate them into society.

I went on a free-font-downloading bender last weekend. I still love typography, and I’m glad to see the arcane art of type design isn’t dying out. Back in the old days of Desktop Publishing, you had a choice between high-quality but expensive fonts from reputable foundries, or a bunch of cheap but crappy knockoffs done in Fontographer.

But now, thanks to mass amateurization, there are people who actually know what they’re doing, who design new typefaces for the fun of it and give them away. (The cannier ones give a few away as teasers and charge for the rest.) Collecting these makes for a fun evening once in a while, at least it does if you share my predilections. There’s the surprise of discovery, the glee of downloading it for free, and then later the avaricious satisfaction of organizing the fonts on your computer, like Scrooge McDuck running coins through his fingers.

The problem is that these days I don’t actually have a whole lot of use for fonts. Desktop Publishing is passé, I hardly ever print anything, and when I design something for the web I can’t use obscure fonts that other people don’t have. It’s frustrating! It makes me want [...]

My friend Tanya asked her friends to write her a short bit of Slash fiction as a birthday present. Which is not something I’m accustomed to, but here goes…

>N

The Troll Room
This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls.
A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room.

Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.
The troll swings his axe, but it misses.

>SWING SWORD
Whoosh!
The troll swings, you parry, but the force of his blow knocks your sword away.

>INVENTORY
You are carrying a brass lantern, a key, an elongated brown sack smelling of hot peppers, a bottle, and a heart-shaped box of chocolates.

>GIVE BOX TO TROLL
“For me?!” The troll grunts in disbelief as he eagerly pulls off the lid and eyes the Super-Deluxe Truffle Assortment of the Frobozz Magic Chocolate Company (By Royal Appointment To Lord Flathead). Unable to make up his mind, he stuffs all the chocolates into his maw at once and chews noisily.
The troll has dropped his axe.

>GO EAST
Too late—the magic chocolates have done their work, and the troll’s attentions now return to you, although [...]

I had a tiny Linux box
Its name was badtz-maru ;
It sat out in the office
Serving tunes for me and you.

One day the Squeezebox just went black!
I didn’t know what to do!
Safari, ssh and ping
Lost touch with badtz-maru.
The living room was silent
(Between games of Pikachu).

Just when it seemed, a decade ago, that the programming world had settled on C++ as the lingua franca, the One Language To Rule Them All, instead we got an explosion of new high-level languages that have risen to popularity. Why did this happen? Chiefly because the World-Wide Web has conditioned users to expect five-second delays before any responses to their actions, which provides an environment ideally suited for interpreted, garbage-collected scripting languages. This movement has been encouraged by server vendors like Sun and IBM who are eager to show Web developers the productivity increases they can get by using such languages, especially after they then install massively powerful servers.