My new home...

...is over at www.domuirgheasa.com. Ignore everything here and come visit the new place!

Ah now...

Vis á vis nothing except for the obvious degradation of our society to the point of moral bankruptcy:

That's an ad for Christmas lunch. In August. I just don't know, sometimes.

The Perils of the Printed Word

Ah, shoot.

Remember that story about the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and how it was banned from sale in Europe? Yeah, me too. I wrote about it too, in Gaelsceal (link to a preview - full article in the print version, or available online on Monday-ish. Oh, and it's as Gaeilge, just in case your one of the 99 point something percent of the world that doesn't speak it).

(I haven't bought my copy yet this week, so I don't have a picture to illustrate this story with. Just gonna use this stock newsprint photo instead; in case anyone's forgotten what it looks like)

The problem is, the decision was overturned by the courts on Wednesday. If I had known about it immediately I may have been able to get a last minute change put in place, but it was at least 48 hours after my deadline so maybe not. As it was I caught up with Wednesday's news on Friday, by which time the paper was already in the shops, and anyone who was reading it was either being mis-informed, or wondering about why I seemed to not have a clue what I was talking about. Such are the perils of news print.

Also, sorry :/

In the same article I wrote about Ultrabooks, this newly branded market sector which apparently is due to take off any minute now. Just as soon as someone apart from Apple makes one, you know? I'm going to write about them on here some time soon, but for the right now I'm going to finish up this particular post with a note about SkyGo (not really sure on the capitalisation there, something like that though).

I woke up this morning wanting to watch the Arsenal v Liverpool game. Worked hard all week, some down time, yada yada etc. I don't have to justify myself to you.

Anyway, we don't have Satellite in the apartment here. Or cable, for that matter. We're still in four-channel land here, and for the most part quite happy with that, but this morning I wanted to watch the match and really, really didn't want to go to a pub (on my own, what's more) to watch it. The other option is to head home-home - but that's half an hour on the bike each way, and I'm trying to give a dodgy ankle some time to heal, and... and, well, I guess I still don't have to justify myself to you.

Anyway, as I lay in bed cursing my neighbour for waking me with his drill at 9:30 on a Saturday (late enough that I can't complain, but still early enough to be inconsiderate), I wondered if Sky maybe had a pay-per-view option - I could maybe pay a tenner to watch the match? Something like that? Hardly, that'd be too perfect...

Except they do, or almost. They have a Monthly Pass, for €50, which isn't cheap, but also isn't insanely expensive for what you're getting. I'm moving out of the apartment in under two weeks and I reckon that there are at least 5 matches between now and then that I'm interested in watching. (That's Arsenal Liverpool this morning, Man Utd v Tottenham on Monday, the European Super Cup next Friday, Man Utd v Arsenal next Sunday and a couple of La Liga matches of which I'm sure at least one is a Real Madrid game. In case you were wondering).

So that's roughly a tenner a game, which is equivalent to a cinema ticket. Or another way of looking at it is that all five together are the equivalent of a morning's work. Or one good night out. Or... Who am I trying to persuade here, actually?

Anyway, I paid my €50 and was watching within a few minutes. The streaming is very, very smooth - they use Silverlight's super-cool automatic bandwidth feature that makes sure it stays that way even if the resolution has to drop, and it works really, really well.

The main problem I have is that we're using one of the Meteor Broadband ToGo WiFi dongle thingies, for which we pay €20 for 7.5GB. Streaming absolutely gobbles bandwidth - I reckon I went through at least 2GB this morning, possibly more. Which pushes the price of the games up another notch or two.

Whether or not it's actually worth it is certainly debatable, but as a reminder of what modern technology can do it's quite something. Just a couple of years ago iMode was state of the art - now I can watch more or less whatever match I like on pretty much any device I want, as long as I'm willing to pay for it (and pay, it has to be said, not that insane an amount). Another couple of years and things will be even better. There's also a whole big thing about how this kind of legal option is the way to beat piracy (not that I have any idea whether or not piracy of live events is a big deal or not, but I'll expand on the entirety of the point I'm trying to make some other time).

Anyway, living in the future. I like it.

Motorola and Google shack up

Well, I didn't see this coming. Nor did you, I bet. Motorola and Google; whould'a thought it?!

(Here's Larry and Sergey hanging out with ex-employee Eric Schmidt. Presumably they're laughing about how they've almost certainly just wiped the collective grins off the faces of pretty much every Microsoft and Apple executive).

At 12 point whatever billion this is a pretty serious deal (and about 60% above Motorola's pre-announcement stock price). Even Google don't throw that kind of money around lightly. So what's in it for them?

Well, not much debate about this, really: there's a massive, massive IP library in it for them. Sure, I've heard that Motorola dabble in actually making stuff too (and at that kind of price they'd want to be pretty good at it), but it's hard to imagine that the Google hive-mind is looking at anything but that tasty, tasty looking IP.

I'm sure Samsung and HTC aren't exactly over the moon about this, but it's an almost indescribably massive boost for Android. I've admitted in the past to some slight concerns about Google's business model for Android (it's horribly anti-competitive, basically), but at the same time it's always fun to see someone gearing up to slap Apple silly.

On balance, I think this is probably good news for us little folk. Android's long term future, which was starting to look less than 100% certain in the face of some major legal defeats, is suddenly solid as a rock again - not even Apple and Microsoft acting together are going to out-muscle Google's new patent library.

And maybe Google can bail out new Galaxy Tab while they're at it? Not that I can justify the price or anything, but it'd be nice to at least have the option.

Cosmo, you've done it again!

I'm more or less in love with Cosmo Jarvis. Well, let's say in love with his music. Or perhaps in love to the extent that it would have been socially acceptable in the 1950s. I've got an acoustic version of Gay Pirates that's become my party piece of choice any time there's a guitar being passed around at parties, and if I could do anything like justice to it I'd definitely do some sort of version of Sure as Hell Not Jesus. And now he's gone and done it again, not just with the song but with a video that kinda defies description. Well, that's not true, I guess you could describe it pretty easily if you wanted, but I don't. Just go watch it.

His next album, Is The World Strange Or Am I Strange is out September 26th and, for possibly the first time this decade, I'm really really looking forward to a new album. The three songs above are on it, as well as 12 more that I haven't heard yet. I'm pretty sure there are some dodgy recordings of at least one or two of the new tracks floating about the net some place, but I'd rather wait and pay for it. In fact, I think I might just go pre-order it from Amazon right now. And that's something I've quite literally never done before.

I've never seen him play live, and I'm probably not going to make the September tour around the UK either, but I'll probably regret not making the effort to get to it too. And at some point I'll make it to one of his shows. And then, hopefully, a few more after that too.

The End of the West Wing

***Probably some spoilers in here***

Just got to the end of the very last episode of the very last season of The West Wing. Why they ended it... well, I suppose I can come up with some reasons. It would have been hard to continue the show the way it was before, maybe. There was a natural point to end, it's true. Some of the actors wanted to go do other things, perhaps. The ratings were down, that's true too. And yet...

And yet the ratings were still bloody good, and I can't believe that most of the actors couldn't have been persuaded to stay around, or at least enough to keep the show going, and the show, even in its less well regarded final series was still superb.

There is another side to this though; given that I have final year finally looming, perhaps it's for the best that I have no choice but to put my obsession behind me? Maybe.

Maybe.

Google v Apple

I'm an Android fanboy. Might as well get that one out of the way.

As I see it there's basically a 2-way fight between Apple and Google, and Microsoft are trying to get in the ring but, for the moment, are struggling to figure out how to slip between the ropes. Apple... well, there's an awful lot about Apple to not like. Every time they announce something that's existed for years (sometimes decades) as being revolutionary it just really pisses me off. What makes it worse is the fact that their implementation and advertising are so much better than almost everyone else that most people believe them. They might even be so much better that their claim to be revolutionary has some actual basis.

Google, on the other hand, are totally open about what they're at. They make all their source code available to whoever wants to look at it, for free, and it's free as in speech too - you can muck about with it and redistribute it if you see fit. To a programmer like me, that's a big deal. Not that I ever have actually bothered to root around in their code, but if I wanted to I could.

I prefer Android handsets too, for the most part. Sure, sure, I know the Retina Display is "higher resolution than real life", or whatever guff Mr. Jobs came out with about it, but put an iPhone 4 next to my Samsung Galaxy S and the iPhone looks small, dull and frankly pretty antiquated. But the Galaxy S next to something like the HTC Desire HD the Galaxy S suffers the same fate. The IPS display on the iPhone may have a slightly higher resolution (960x640, as compared to 800x480) but in every other meaningful way the AMOLED, Super AMOLED and Super AMOLED+ screens that have been on the top end Android phones for quite a while now are far, far nicer. Pictures (like this next one that I stole from smartphoneenvy.com) don't really show it, but in real life there's a world of difference.

But...

For all my love of Android (and I've cut down the thousands of words I could write on the subject to the more manageable paragraph or two you can see above) I read something the other day which made me question whether or not they really are the good guys in all of this.

Given that their business model is to give away Android for free (the handset makers don't pay Google anything for the software, unlike manufacturers who want to use Windows Mobile 7, say) how is it exactly that Google make their money? Well, their advertising wing pays for it all, of course. All Google's income, near enough, comes from their AdWords technology, and selling those ads you see on Google search results.

So essentially Google have come into a market that already had a couple of big players, started handing out candy for free, and are now calling the incumbents whiney bitches for complaining that Google is actually handing out not only free candy, but free candy baked to recipes which are protected by patents by those incumbents. I don't like that Apple are moaning so much, basically because I don't like Apple (did you know that they even stole the name "iPhone"?). On the other hand, people have to make a living, and Google coming into their market and throwing stuff around for free isn't exactly what I'd call morally defensible. Not really sure where I stand on this now.