threehv

My iPod has recently been relegated to a secondary music player. Sort of. Basically my 3G iPod died a while back so was replaced by a 2Gb Nano. Not the same thing at all – time for lots of smart playlists tracking “last played” and standard playlists of favourites to fit what I wanted into 2Gb. Until I realised that I was actually coping reasonably well in such a small space. Annoying when I decide I want to listen to “Appetite for Destruction” in its entirety and it’s only got “My Michelle” on it (rubbish), but for the most part it works a treat when you stick it on shuffle.

I recently got a K610i Sony Ericsson phone – not a Walkman, but pretty similar (the same music player, but lacking a radio, the headphones aren’t as good and it doesn’t look as good). Listening to music on there I noticed that the sound quality is noticeably better. I also noticed that a 2Gb memory stick only costs twenty quid. So I bought one, copied my tunes over (even my iTunes store purchases are re-ripped to Mp3) and enjoyed. Apart from scroll-wheeling through 2Gb of songs is easy. Down-buttoning through 2Gb of songs is not. (Slight aside: the problems with this setup are my play counts aren’t updated, screwing up my smart playlists – although the iTunes 7.2 debacle has blown them away – and I still need the iPod for in the car).

Likewise, I remember using a simple GUI on my Commodore 64, controlled by a (digital) joystick. It did the job but it took forever to move from one side of the screen to the other. Compare that to using a mouse on a Mac.

And finally, browsing the web on my K610i (or even the awful Windows Mobile phone I had before) is acceptable, given the small screen. But it is a right pain in the arse to navigate through a page of links a down-button at a time.

In all three cases, his Steveness has taken an interface with slow, clunky navigation and made it fast and accurate. One trick, repeated three times.

Interesting comparison of life at Google and life at Microsoft.

• The parser won’t be more complex than LL(1).

  Simple is better than complex. This idea extends to the parser. Restricting Python’s grammar to an LL(1) parser is a blessing, not a curse. It puts us in handcuffs that prevent us from going overboard and ending up with funky grammar rules like some other dynamic languages that will go unnamed, like Perl.

This post was written using Safari for Windows.

To be honest, it feels a bit weird. There are bugs (cannot import my bookmarks and it made everything freeze for about a minute) but the anti-aliasing is nice and (ugly menu-bar apart) it is much the same as Safari for the Mac.

Obviously, this is all about the iPhone and its non-existent SDK. Plus, as Gruber points out it could make Apple a shed-load of money.

But the interesting thing to me is that it suggests that Apple have kept OpenStep for Windows development on a par with Cocoa. It is presumably the same code-base (even down to sheets instead of dialogue boxes). So what else could Apple unleash with a click of a check-box in XCode? Those fat binaries just got fatter.

You may notice Lisa Scott-Lee in the banner at the top of the page. Well, she’s finally found a new career for herself, doing shared hosting with Site 5 – I’ve been with them for a little while and have zero complaints. Unlike some other hosts I could mention.

As you probably know, this blog started out with an exploration of using Rails on IIS. It has brought me a lot of traffic, some nice emails and IM chats and a warm fuzzy feeling as I read the comments saying how much help my article has been.

But I gave up on Rails on IIS a while back. Not because it wasn’t possible, not because I’m anti-MS, but because I got tired of feeling like I was swimming against the tide as I tried to configure Ruby and Rails. Oh, and I can use Capistrano too.

This does have knock-on effects for Microsoft. My new project will not be running on a Windows server any time soon. It won’t be using IIS or SQL Server. I’ve left them behind. And, today at least, I don’t miss them.