Solipsism Gradient

The phone thingy leaves me completely cold; I don’t own a cellphone, and don’t intend to buy one in the near future. Still, I suppose I should be glad that the market appeared to like it; AAPL even went over the magic $50 mark today for a few minutes.

The iPod nano looks great, even if it’s a little expensive per gigabyte. If I find a suckerbuyer for my 40GB (3G) iPod, I might even switch… given that I use it mostly as a glorified shuffle in the car and in the gym, and I have larger drives elsewhere to keep my main music database, it would make sense. And the “no moving parts” aspect is of course ideal.

(I was puzzled by repeated references to “nano” being a dumb name… until someone told me it refers to a 70s(?) TV show, which I’d never heard of. I wonder if all future “nano” products – and there will be zillions – will be affected by this?)

The third aspect is the new iTunes 5 interface. Dan Wood dislikes it, as do most others who’ve commented. It took me a moment to look beyond the Mail-style splitter control to notice that metal had gone, replaced by Yet Another Different Interface Style.

Personally, I thought the margin-less aspect is positive, and the new gradients aren’t too bad. I never use Mail, so I found the divider-less splitter very strange; although I like to experiment with new UI, this is one thing I won’t try out in my products. (However, users of RBSplitView should note that this is easy to do with it.)

Overall, this reinforces my opinion that Apple is now moving away from a intelligent design approach to UI, towards a more survival of the fittest sort of thing. Each application’s group tries out new UI elements and the ones that survive get incorporated into Interface Builder’s palettes one or two releases down the road. It’s certainly more exciting but also, at times, disconcerting…

For a long time I’ve read, peripherally, the phrase “English as she is spoke”, but only recently I found out that there actually is a book by that name. Here’s the book description from one of the links above:

In 1855, when José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino wrote an English phrasebook for Portuguese students, they faced just one problem: they didn’t know any English. Even worse, they didn’t own an English-to-Portuguese dictionary. What they did have, though, was a Portuguese-to-French dictionary, and a French-to-English dictionary. The linguistic train wreck that ensued is a classic of unintentional humor, now revived in the first newly selected edition in a century. Armed with Fonseca and Carolino’s guide, a Portuguese traveler can insult a barber (“What news tell me? All hairs dresser are newsmonger”), complain about the orchestra (“It is a noise which to cleve the head”), go hunting (“let aim it! let make fire him”), and consult a handy selection of truly mystifying “Idiotisms and Proverbs.”

Here are some gems from the “Proverbs” section:

Take the occasion for the hairs.

To do a wink to some body.

So many go the jar to spring, than at last rest there.

To craunch the marmoset.

To buy cat in pocket.

And here’s some more information and an explanation for the whole thing. It seems that the much-maligned José da Fonseca was simply the author of a competently-written French phrasebook for Portuguese speakers, and that the otherwise unknown Pedro Carolino simply translated the French phrases word-for-word into English from a dictionary. A footnote says:

The Proverbs and Idiotisms deserve a quick note, here, since they inspire a special wonder in the reader who knows a little Portuguese or Spanish. Fonseca’s virtues and Carolino’s flaws butt heads in this portion of the book. Fonseca made a point of translating Portuguese figures of speech into French not by rendering them word for word, but by giving a French idiom of equivalent sense; but Carolino, in his turn, simply substituted English words for the French.

Indeed, most of the samples make some sense when you retranslate them word-for-word into French… fascinating.

I’ve been remiss in updating my blogroll here, but it’s finally done. I’ve had to cut down severely on my RSS feed reading, so some links had to be taken out – I hasten to add that, with very few exceptions, this should not be taken as a negative judgment. Currently I’m updating the feeds once a day and read about half of them immediately, and the rest if and when I have the time.

I’ve been following news about the evolution vs. creationism/ID debate with fascinated/horrified disbelief… until a few years ago I wouldn’t have believed that it’s even an issue!

Anyway, I think the best thing to come out of this whole mess is the flying spaghetti monster and its worshippers, the Pastafarians. Here’s my favorite logo for the FSM so far, designed for boing boing by Jim Leftwich:

Let’s hope that the FSM creation theory is given due attention as a perfectly valid alternative to other “creation theories”. RAmen.

The Presurfer (and several others) pointed at this nice “make your own magazine” facility. So here we go:

The image is by jvzeuss73, by the way. Great photo.

Posted by Nando:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

But I said “it’s funny” because, of course, most of these hackers assume that everybody at Apple is clueless and retarded, which is definitely wrong.

That could be the start of a fairly amazing story on creating an “un-hackeable” system. Microsoft hasn’t done it so far after so many atempts, and Apple has never needed a protection system like that until now. What amazes me is not how fast the hackers are working their way inside this, but how slow Apple is responding to all of this.

I’ve read on MacBidoule that they received a very aggressive letter by Apple asking the site owners to remove links and comments on the videos and texts that described methods of hacking the Tiger x86 Developer Preview. The timing was perfect. It was enough for the hackers to get their copies and methods right, and also the exact amount of time a company needs to build a base of arguments to require the removal of any illegal content from their sites.

This leaves Apple at a very ambiguous position, it is hadr to tell if they have let it all happen, or if it just slipped between their fingers.

Rafael Fischmann wrote:

… and then the hackers brake it again and again and again. Instead of breaking the code in 12 hours, maybe it’ll take a couple of days for the final version…

It took at least two weeks, maybe more. Should they decide to use strong encryption you’ll be looking at more than “a couple of days”.

But I said “it’s funny” because, of course, most of these hackers assume that everybody at Apple is clueless and retarded, which is definitely wrong.

Posted by Rafael Fischmann:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

What I find somewhat funny about the situation is that certainly Apple is following these exploits very carefully and is, in effect, using these people to define and refine the protection technology that will be used in the final product. These are truly interesting times.

So what? Every software or O.S. developer do that… and then the hackers brake it again and again and again. Instead of breaking the code in 12 hours, maybe it’ll take a couple of days for the final version. It’s just a funny game.