March 31, 2005
Trouble-shooting previews
It seems Thunderbird does something quirky to the display of this blog.
I'm trying to narrow it down, but I currently have two suspects...
The first possibility is that my blogging tool du jour, Ecto, is doing something grim to the markup. In fact, I am pretty sure that's the case - I've seen it mangle perfectly decent bullet lists into something like HTML, but not as we know it.
The other possibility is that my (ab)use of the preview to place the entire contents of the blog post is causing trouble.
Either way, time to fire up Thunderbird and point it at the feed to see what's going on...
Prefetching pages
Google have just announced in their blog that searches done in firefox will prefetch the first result. From the Google help page on results prefetching:
On some searches, Google automatically instructs your browser to start downloading the top search result before you click on it.
This is a cunning idea, but I can see two major problems to it:
Privacy violations: by analysing logs, others will be able to see what a person is googling for, even if the person intentionally did not visit the actual page returned in the Google results.
Bandwidth: some providers (for example BT Broadband) give a very meagre allowance per month for network traffic. Conceivably a person doing a lot of research with Google could find their network usage spiking. Far-fetched, but possible.
The Mozilla link prefetching FAQ addresses the latter concern quite reasonably by pointing out this is already achieved through other browser hacks. Better to do it cleanly and openly than through obfuscated javascript.
I'm not quite sure how you handle the privacy issue: I guess it's time to assume privacy is not an option?
Right tool for the job
Berin talks about holy wars in comparing open source products to Microsoft products. Whilst I completely agree with him that you use the right tool for the job, I fundamentally disagree that you "get what you pay for".
These days with software you rarely get what you pay for. You are maybe granted permission to use what you pay for on a limited basis, but it is only with truly open software that you actually get something tangible - the code. Documentation is an advantage, support is useful - but unless you have restriction-free access to the source, you have no guarantee that what you've paid for is your own.
I'm occasionally accused of becoming hard-line and almost religious about my views on software, particularly by colleagues working for large companies that have a significant investment in proprietary products. I'm often told that open source simply wouldn't work. These companies often refuse free (as in beer) software but also live and die by the old adage "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM". It's ironic, then, that IBM are becoming one of the most prominent open source businesses.
But here's the thing: I do not adamantly support open source software because I am not secure in what I am using. I'm adamant because for the last ten or more years I've tried the proprietary, mixed and open routes, and I am confident in saying that there is only one way to be safe with software: insist it is open. If I come across as adamant, it's because it can be tough at times to maintain my patient understanding when faced with ingrained "we do it this way because that's the way it's always been done" cultures.
The resistance to change is what drove me to leave my previous job and start an open source software company - change from the inside is tough, but external agents are often able to bring about change more rapidly because consultants are perceived as experts and troubleshooters, people more likely to suggest a course of action without being influenced by internal politics, more able to approach a problem with a balanced viewpoint.
I would say anyone working with open source software has a duty to inform their customers, users, managers and staff about the importance of the four freedoms and to offer reasonable and balanced evaluations of proprietary and open source packages for a given context. Not in any quasi-religious evangelical way, that swears by only open source, but in the same way that doctors are expected to uphold the hippocratic oath. If a customer is using MS SQL Server, they should be told that open source options such as Postgres, Ingres, or MySQL exist, how they may be better, how they may be worse.
I honestly think that in a fair and truthful evaluation, taking into account all factors, many companies would be shocked to learn the real cost of not following an open source route.
March 30, 2005
Giants
I'm trying to see out of the footprints of giants.
Open Source is wonderful, but sometimes the lack of documentation can really leave you in a quagmire, trying to piece together the pieces based on what code is available.
Fortunately, it's common practice with the Cocoon project for samples to be added for each new unit of functionality. Usually these are adequate for getting up and running when the documentation is sparse or missing. Sometimes, like today, it can be "challenging" to work out how they work, replicate, and apply them in your own applications - especially when the features you need are powerful, recursive and quite abstract.
I've been working with the <fd:class/>, <fd:new/>, and <fd:union/> functionality of the Cocoon forms framework. It can be used to great effect to build powerful dynamic forms, but since it's only been in Cocoon for for maybe sixth months, examples and HOWTOs are sparse (non-existent).
Hopefully if I don't run out of waking hours, I'll get some notes added to the Cocoon wiki so that others can benefit from my pain...
March 29, 2005
The hardest thing
You know the toughest thing about collaborating with other people on projects?
It's not where they are in the world. It's not what language they speak. It's not their preferred development language. It's not even time zones, bug tracking, project management, operating systems or IDEs.
It's indentation. Tabs vs. Spaces is a holy war, and as with all holy wars, there can be no winners. Well, other than the psychiatrists.
Most ASF projects stick with three spaces. Some of the people I collaborate with prefer four spaces. Some prefer two spaces. Occasionally I see code with spaces and tabs intermixed arbitrarily.
I'm firmly on the side of tabs. With a tab, who cares if it's set to be four columns wide, or two, or twenty?
Please don't tell me to use an editor that munges spaces as some pseudo-tabular evil hack. Just pass me the tranquilisers and the hair restorer.
Not so fast
Via C&V:
Why does God give us the internet before teleportation?
Um, I'm glad we got planes before we got the internet. Though actually it would be fascinating to plot the rise of multinational relationships with the advent of the package holiday "flights-for-the-masses" phenomenon, the internet, and finally vs. the rise of the cheap flight airways.
March 27, 2005
agony and ecstasy
By all reasonable measures I would have stayed at home today.
But I've been known at times to eschew reason. After several days at home in a miasma of lemsip, ibuprofen and sudafed, I decided I'd had enough of being an invalid. I sallied forth and met up with David, Elise, Thom, Paul and John in town for lunch, and then on to an evening out by way of a meeting with Clare, old friend from UEA whom I meet with on something like a bi-annual basis.
In the evening we caught up with Lauren, Nick, Laura, Caz, and a whole bunch of Lauren's friends. We spent some time in the pub, and then when they went to a club, I bailed out.
I'm really paying for my afternoon of recklessness now. My throat is like fire, my head is pounding, I've already written off tomorrow as a bad idea. I'm not entirely convinced Monday should happen, either.
Let's get this out of the way first: this is my internal monologue. I do this to clear my head of the random noise, to work out the problems that are bothering me. Fortunately now and then other people choose to join in, to lend a bit of perspective to my rants. And I'll be honest, there's a hell of a lot of self-censoring going on. Maybe one tenth of the heartbreak, hope, venom and vitriol makes it through to here. Hey, you're listening to a purified and cleansed version of my mind. Bloody good job too. You should thank me for it.
So there's two things buzzing round my head that I'm struggling to work out.
Women have a certain wisdom about them, an ability to cut to the chase without any detail or background. I was humbled by the wise words from Caz when she prescribed in a nutshell my relationship troubles. "Andrew", she said, "you need a woman with brains. Forget about the dizzy ones." I'm paraphrasing, but that covers the gist of it. Goddamit if she isn't right.
David says "widen the pool, dude. C'mon, it's positively inbred up there". Eloquent and accurate.
It's incredibly difficult to meet women here. What's even tougher is I've got into some stupid kind of second-guessing paranoid mindset. This seems to happen as you get older - the carefree devil-may-care approach is discarded in favour of "what if" and "but" and "err" and a million reasons why not. It doesn't matter that I know it's there and that I know I'm a victim of it - self-awareness doesn't help. Go to Jail, do not pass Go.
You're from Huntingdon aren't you?
Someone I met maybe three years ago for maybe a ten minute conversation. She got the abridged version of my life that has me coming from Huntingdon. I remember most of the details of that conversation. She's gorgeous, blonde, a struggling actress - this is the truth, I don't make this up. And here I am thinking "she lives in London. That's no good." with the words of Caz ringing in my ears.
And then there's the other, a moment of breathlessness, a scary whirlwind of intensity, she terrifies and exhilarates me, but wrapped up in unfortunate circumstance and bad beginnings. I find it intensely annoying that I can't work my way round it, resolve the conflict and find out if this actually goes anywhere.
I'm very, very, tired.
March 24, 2005
Editors
Stuck home with a nasty cold/cough/throat infection just in time for Easter. My body always knows when it's time to wind down, kick back and relax ... and somehow lines up a total collapse.
Since I can't go to the pub, I decided to write up some of my thoughts on editors, following on from the frustrated developer post. So without further ado, random rough notes on Mac editors. Let me know if I'm missing anything obvious or if I made any mistakes.
Ironically right now I'm leaning toward JEdit again, because for all-round use it's the best.
Update: thanks to Jeremy for reminding me I'd forgotten SubEthaEdit, and telling me about the split-screen option in BBEdit / TextWrangler. I'm also studying this article on Cocoa Development in Emacs to see if I can pick up some tips on using it ...
New new bike!
The new new bike just showed up. Woohoo!
Or not. Click the picture, watch the video. Something not quite right there...
Luckily I still have the front wheel from the old new bike, so I can cobble together one working bike between the various sets of scrap metal.
I'm so glad life isn't easy or straightforward. It would get boring, wouldn't it?
A Daily Journal of Understated Sarcasm, or the telling of How I Lost My Fucking Temper and became a Farmer
Day 1
Dear Diary,
Mail.app crashed on me again this morning. Since yesterday afternoon, that's three times it has scrolled off this mortal coil and into oblivion. Sent a polite bug report to Apple, outlining in detail what happened:
"I scrolled. It crashed. Again."
March 23, 2005
March 21, 2005
Put down that decompiler
Here's the deal: if you buy proprietary code, or opt for one of the more open licenses that aren't quite open, you are foregoing certain rights: the freedom to run the program however you like, the freedom to look at how it works and modify it, the freedom to redistribute it, and the freedom to improve it.
Step away from the code, sir.
A colleague of mine has been struggling with bug fixes today. The company he works for are thinking of buying a package that blurs the lines - you get the code, if you buy the commercial product. Problem is, they haven't actually bought it yet, they are trying it out. When something went wrong with the trial, he had to break out the decompiler because he had no source code to debug, in order to get his trial back on track.
I have two reactions to that:
- If you're paying money for a product, the onus is on the vendor to warrant it free of defects, and to make good any defects that are found. This is a moral obligation IMHO, one that many companies (software, hardware, non-computing alike) try to get out of with tricky wording and shrink-wrap agreements of dubious legality. It is reasonable for you to expect the vendor to solve the problem.
- If you're having to deconstruct or reverse-engineer a product to find out how it works, for whatever reason, you are on dodgy ground. Why don't you have a description of how it works, or the source code you need to fix the bugs? Because of the vendor's decision not to supply it. You should respect that decision because it is the right thing to do, in just the same way as in (1) above they should fix bugs because it is the right thing to do.
When you pick the proprietary or almost closed-source route, this is the decision you take: to unquestionably trust the morals of your vendor, and to abide by the restrictions they place upon you. Be fully aware of that when you make your evaluation and purchasing decisions.
What truth?
In Re: you can't handle the truth!, Ugo writes:
[...] you cannot hold against the Catholic Church their belief in the historical accuracy of the Bible, since it's not there anymore.
That's a relief. Can we move on to holding all the other things against them, such as their condemnation of condoms? (Not to mention their disinformation campaign on the subject.)
I'm trying to avoid any kind of rant, since religion is a very personal thing for many people, and it's the sort of thing that's best left to an amicable discussion over a beer rather than a vitriolic blogging screamfest.
BCS Open Source Specialist Group
The British Computer Society have recently launched an Open Source Specialist Group.A rose by any other name...
Gianugo gives us a CMS rant, talking about how the full-fledged CMS solution may be dead.
I'll declare up-front that I have a vested interest in this issue, as we built a fair chunk of the solution Gianugo refers to, in collaboration with Pro-netics - specifically, the publish / layout part.
Does this mean I think the monolithic CMS is dead? Er, no. It will ultimately come down to market forces.
For some people, the "do everything" solution from companies such as Vignette is absolutely the right one: they want to tick boxes on their requirements sheet, and have the theory of large company support behind them as they move forward into implementation. I'd hazard a guess that this fits well with medium-sized enterprises, where staffing is perhaps an issue and back-end solutions are limited and not overly complex. Ideally I think your "boxed" CMS should be kept away from any kind of integration - if you can run it standalone, it'll do an admirable job.
Others (perhaps those with more empowered I.T. staff?) find an excellent solution in products such as Plone, Apache Lenya, Daisy, and many others. A certain amount of willingness to tinker is required here - these aren't shrink-wrapped, and you need to be prepared to ask questions. One environment I've seen that is particularly well-suited to this is the academic one - the price is right, and most educational institutions should certainly have staff with skills to handle this. I'm not by any means saying this is the only environment - just one particular place I'd like to see wider adoption.
And then to go back to Gianugo's reusable components solution: the best place for this is surely where the organisation is facing tough integration issues, where any solution will need a significant amount of customisation. From what I've seen, these are really large companies caught up in the vendor myth ("no-one ever got fired for buying IBM..."), who need to be nimble in a rapidly-shifting and competitive marketplace, but are tied down to legacy back-end systems and legacy waterfall development models. Agile components could really save them - but will probably never be given the chance.
March 19, 2005
Crime
There were 2.2 robberies per 100,000 people in Norwich in 2003/2004. The national average is 1.4. What's more sinister is googling for crime statistics norwich would seem to suggest these crimes are carried out by skiing dancers...
The economics of cycle theft are just horrible. A new wheel costs £40, a new bike costs £50, and my insurance excess is £100. I'm going to end up accumulating lots of bike frames - there's now two incomplete bikes in the cupboard, sadly without enough parts between them to make a new one.
Maybe I need to buy a ridiculously expensive bike (perhaps with those £250 gears), then at least I can claim a significant proportion of the cost of it if it gets stolen.
I'll save the rant about how insurance is a twisted game for another day. Suffice it to say that what I wanted to do to the thief in my moment of incandescent rage last night is about half of what I want to do on an average day to the institutionalised thievery that is the insurance industry ...
*Sigh*
thieves
Someone get this computer out of my reach because oh my god I am going to LET RIP.
WHAT KIND OF FUCKED UP SHITTY SOCIETY DO WE LIVE IN WHERE THIEVES PROSPER FROM STEALING WHEELS LESS THAN 2 MINUTES FROM THE FUCKING POLICE STATION?
This is not an isolated event, oh no, fuck no. This is the THIRD TIME I've had some pissant arsehole shithead steal my fucking bike wheel, on top of the four times I've had a bike stolen.
If I get hold of whoever did this (small chance but let me vent) I will hammer their head into bloody splinters with the remainder of my bike. I will feed them bike parts until their only plea for mercy sounds like the click click of chain on cog. Goddamit I will bludgeon them to death with the blunt end of the bike lock they scorned.
Someone point me to the nearest exit from humanity, this place FUCKING SUCKS.
March 18, 2005
March 17, 2005
working gearshift
That ridiculously cheap bike I got? Turns out the gearshift is made entirely of plastic inside. Combine a thin wire at high tension with cheap plastic. I reckon you can guess what happened next.
I've been without a bike for a couple of weeks, so this lunchtime I went to the nearby cycle shop (who are incredibly friendly and helpful by the way) and got a new gearshift for £17.50 - not as bad as I thought, but almost half the cost of the bike. Which is more a comment on the stupid bike price than anything.
Here's something scary. Gearshifts that cost £247.59 (SALE PRICE). WTF?
March 16, 2005
Virtual trading
This is kinda fun: the Tech Buzz Game. Fantasy share trading.
I know, I know, it doesn't sound like too much of a laugh, but I think it'll be fascinating to see how my gut feeling on the way things are going will shape up.
With that in mind, I bet on:
Mac OS X Tiger: it's coming, there'll be a rush of reality distortion some time in April I reckon, during which I'll dump the shares before the cold hard light of day hits people and they realise it's more of the same.
Ubuntu: this distribution just keeps getting better and better. 'Nuff said.
iTunes: I hate how the users keep getting screwed by Apple and the record companies, but make no mistake: when iMovies hits, this stock will skyrocket.
Flickr: did they or didn't they get bought by Yahoo!? Either way, it's a fantastic product and it's going up up up.
Podcast: if Mr Curry and co. are ploughing money into it, this stock is going places.
NetNewsWire: we can't be too far away from the final release of 2.0...
Skype-in: a phone number that regular people can use to call me, anywhere in the world, at reasonable rates? Yes please! If it stops me getting slaughtered by international charges on my mobile when I'm running round the world, it's gotta be good.
del.icio.us: folksonomies and tagging are only just going mainstream.
Skype: killer app.
Strange directions
I've been trying to distill some ideas regarding Free Software sparked by a discussion on the FSFE mailing list, Steven's blog post on open source whoring, and a few changes within Luminas (no, we're not giving up on FLOSS or becoming proprietary).
The last few evenings this has led me to re-read turn of the (19th) century fiction. Strange, but true. All will be explained if I ever manage to turn it into a sane blog post. It makes a refreshing change from Getting Things Done though, which I must confess I haven't got round to finishing ... last time I started it, I ended up reading the excellent Book of Illusions instead.
On the subject of GTD ... the psychology of dumping your brain into lists is amusing me no end. I've been trying to use Tasks Pro, but it's a trust thing. I think I know that all the stuff in my brain I'll remember (yeah, right), but if I dump it into Tasks Pro, I might forget it (which is exactly what I should do, and then use Tasks Pro to remember it again). I need to get used to the dump-and-forget-and-focus way of doing things.
Speaking of amusing, I've become addicted to the Dawn and Drew Show. It's irreverent, foul-mouthed, dirty and just so damned funny. I 've had to stop listening to it when I'm out and about for fear of laughing out loud in the middle of the street. It joins Coverville and Daily Source Code as my "must listen" additions to the iPod.
This has been a stream of semi-conscious ramblings post.
PPC Ubuntu
I know Edd is probably being tongue-in-cheek with his post manifestly not at ETech, but I was stung by his comment:
Give Ubuntu PowerPC LiveCDs to all the open source people shamefully running OS X
I shamefully run OS X on my PowerPC powerbook. Why? Because there are no wireless drivers available for the built-in wireless card, and my days of carting around cards and dongles are done. Thom tells me the reason there's no wireless support is because Broadcom built a software radio rather than just a wireless card. FCC regulations stop them releasing the source in case people use it as a software radio.
Of course, I probably wouldn't run Ubuntu even if wifi did work. I'm done with games like messing with the kernel. I don't care any more - when it Just Works it's good enough for me. I did my Free Software sackcloth-and-ashes internship with two linux laptops and a handful of linux desktops (not to mention assorted cards and dongles), now I want to get something productive done TYVM.
March 15, 2005
Frustrated developer seeks good text editor
Frustrated developer seeks good text editor: must be slim yet full-featured, low maintenance, good looking, with inexpensive tastes.
On Sunday evening, as Jeremy, Gianugo and I were doing final testing on the day's work, it became apparent I'd overwritten some changes to various application files. Thankfully, we were using SVN so it didn't take too long for me to correct the problem, but it was insanely annoying nevertheless.
(Aside: unless I'm missing something, reverting in SVN is a non-trivial task. CVS reverting is pretty simple: cvs update -j 1.4 -j 1.3 hello.c ... but in SVN, it looks like you have to do svn cat -r 1.3 hello.c > hello.c; svn commit hello.c ?? I couldn't find a smarter way in the SVN book.)
It seems the problem was with my editor. For a while I've been using TextWrangler, a nifty cut-down version of Bare Bones Software's BBEdit, the de facto editor on the Mac. It looks like it does not warn you when it reloads changed files, and I think under certain conditions it overwrites changed files without warning. It's the only possible way the lost changes could have happened barring user error, and what are the chances of that??
So despite TextWrangler being a nice enough editor, I'm going to dump it. I can't risk screwing up code, so if there's any doubt about it, the editor goes. But what to replace it with? It's not the first time I've got the editor blues ... jedit hogging memory, total lack of decent editor on the Mac (based on my criteria), editors in eclipse, a list of editors, more eclipse.
I quite liked BBEdit when I tried it, but I balked at the idea of paying $200 for an editor. I just can't cope with the full price. For $200 I could get a complete copy of OS X Panther, Keynote 2, and Pages. The upgrade price is a lot less heinous, so we stumped up for a copy for Jeremy as he has the advantage of being a long-time BBEdit user. I am also trying to run a clean machine with no incorrectly licensed software on it, so simply using Jeremy's copy or a warez version is not an option.
So, let's look at my requirements:
- license: an open source license is preferable for all the obvious reasons.
- sensible price: I'm thinking £50 is the sweet-spot, but I'd stretch to maybe £70. I'd prefer free.
- visually useful: maximise the edit area, reduce menus, icons etc. and smallish fonts (8-9pt). I want to be able to split the screen at least horizontally, preferably vertically too.
- language support: i want syntax highlighting, folding, code completion optional. XML support is a must: preferably tag completion and well-formed checks. Building from within the editor is preferable, but not required ... I'm not necessarily after an IDE.
- small footprint: with cocoon, jetty, tomcat, firefox, and mail, there's not much room left. An editor that is reasonable in its requirements is a must.
- source control integration: nice, but not required. I spend most of the time on the command-line anyhow.
- mac support: it should be fully-integrated with the mac ... proper menus, etc. There's a reason I'm on this platform, after all.
Time to go do some reviewing.
March 13, 2005
MMPP
Playing badminton: 500 XP
Hacking on Cocoon: 1500 XP
Buying food: 100 XP
The new way to play the game of life.
Intersects neatly with the Emyth idea of "the business game". And staves off the WoW withdrawal symptoms.
Badminton
14-10, 15-13, 14-3 to me.
The second game pretty much killed both John and I.
I really need to find a good reference to the rules of badminton - I'm pretty sure we're playing a weird hybrid of badminton and squash.
March 11, 2005
I am Jack's inflamed liver
A roundup of things, and a very round cat.
Has it been a week already? So, last Friday was a London Cocoon Beer Meet, where I got to talk turkey (and trains and plumbing and kids and weddings) with David, Paul, Thom, Pier, Ross and Upayavira. Sadly the Hippo contingent couldn't make it due to snow in Schipol, but hopefully there'll be another fairly soon, where some more locals (throughout Europe) can make it.
I spent the beginning and the end of this week fighting with Cocoon's Forms implementation. Turns out no-one was joking when it was marked "unstable"... as it's being fixed up to become stable, various things are breaking for me. You still can't beat it once you get it up and running and purring like a kitten, but I'm less and less sure it's worth the number of fully-grown cats you have to sacrifice to get there. I'll be happy when we have more end-user features in there,for developers of applications with Cocoon, rather than Cocoon developers.
We have a lot to learn from Rails. I salivate at the thought of automatically-generated cform templates, models and bindings based on a database model (given my first love is SQL, and not RDBMS mapping products). I'd even be moderately satisfied if we can get to the point where you type "cocoon myapp" on the command-line and have a best practice template application automagically generated for you. Anyway, lots of plans for how this might happen, just need to find the time to get on with it.
I'm not entirely surprised to see that one of the sites we developed has been taken offline recently, due to a contractual problem with the third-party authentication service. It seems to me that farming out your logins to a paid-for commercial company can be tricky. This is probably why Passport is quietly dying. On the one hand, it's galling to know a publicly-funded resource is no longer available (it's my tax money too, I should be able to use it). On the other hand, it's not like the ongoing fees for the authentication service would have been a surprise, and you can't blame them for wanting their money.
I got an invitation to present at the International Symposium on Social and Organizational Informatics and Cybernetics '05. That's just kinda funny. I'm thinking of submitting "How Cocoon and Automatons will Rule the World". It kinda looks like it might be just another fancy spam (seems I have to pay to present ... hmmm), but it is in Florida.
This weekend, I'll be delving into the guts of WebDAV and Cocoon (a combination that's been on my todo list for months), as I help to beat the clock for a demo to a very exciting prospective customer. I'm already cursed Tomcat three times, and I'm thinking I should have a swear box beside me as I progress. I can't think of a single instance where using Tomcat has made me smile, and yet so many people seem to use it. What a strange world we live in.
Meanwhile, it's Friday, so have a cat.
OMFG
http://mininova.org/get/16482/Star%20Wars%20Episode%203%20-%20Revenge%20of%20the%20Sith%20Trailer%20with%20OC%20Intro%20%7BC_P%7D.avi.torrentMarch 10, 2005
Doctor Who?
I watched the leaked episode of Doctor Who last night. I have to say, I really enjoyed it. Sure, there were a few annoying things about it, but on the whole it was an entertaining 45 minutes, and I can't wait to watch the rest of the series.
The annoying things: some of the visual effects were repetitive. Worse, the sonic screwdriver was horribly overused, and felt a bit like a caricature playing on the favourite bits of previous series rather than a plot device in it's own right.
I can't help but think this episode may have been deliberately leaked to create some spin. If so, it worked. I hope that the TV companies start including BitTorrent downloads in the ratings measurements though, because I doubt I'll watch much of this series on "traditional" TV...
March 7, 2005
The value of a subscription
I've heard quite a lot of people complain that World of Warcraft is £35 off-the-shelf but then after the first month, is followed by a monthly subscription. My stock reply has become "well, you pay for your Cable TV / Satellite TV entertainment ... why not pay for computing entertainment?"
I decided to do a quick analysis of the costs today.
A World of Warcraft subscription (after the first free month) is £8.99/month.
In one month I had about 3 days of in-game play according to the counter, so 72hrs.
£8.99/72 = £0.125/hr.
The "Base Pack" for NTL Cable TV is £10/month.
In one month I might watch around 2.5 days of TV, so 60 hours (up to 2hrs a night).
£10/60 = £0.16/hr.
So there it is folks - online interactive gaming is officially cheaper than TV (and way more fun). I wonder what this tells us about the future of TV?
Yes, there are hideous flaws in this model. My hours for Warcraft are high because of the "honeymoon" period at the start of the game ... I'm playing a lot less in the evenings now. But my estimate for TV hours is high too ... it's down to about 30 minutes a night during dinner. It may be bad math, but I'll still use those numbers to try and convince others to go out and buy Warcraft ;-)
March 3, 2005
Weather forecasts
Ugo posted his weather forecast. Here's mine:
Not too much snow, but it's gonna be cold tonight.
March 1, 2005
A bad day to travel
I'm trying to get to London. Bad plan. There's overhead power problems in the Bow Junction area. The 10:00 out of Norwich was cancelled, and the 10:30 left at 11:00. Because of the problems it will stop at just about every station between Norwich and London, and they can't estimate a time of arrival. My main meeting is at 17:30, so hopefully I'll be okay, but it really screws up my planned conference call at 13:00.The good news: unlike last week's hypothermia-inducing three hour journey, this train has heating. My hands are slowly thawing after a one and a half hour wait on a freezing Norwich platform, where the waiting room is just about large enough to fit three dwarves and a chihuahua.