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The past couple of weeks I’ve been playing with mobile apps development, both for Android and for iOS (meaning iPhone and iPad in layman’s terms). Being an open source kinda guy and very familiar with Java I immediately felt very comfortable with the Android SDK and the platform as a whole. It really is a great platform and very viable for creating great apps and experiences for mobile devices. However, there are a couple of key issues that I believe need to be fixed in order to push Android to the next level.

First and foremost, paid apps are still not available everywhere. Only users in a few select countries can download apps from Android Market that cost money and, even worse, developers in even fewer countries can publish non-free apps for people to buy. As a mere users there are ways around this but if you’re - like me - a Swedish developer there’s no way to get paid for your efforts. This is a really big deal since developers outside of the nine supported merchant countries also need to eat and pay the bills or whatever it is you use money for. Sure, one might claim that true hardcore developers will develop awesome apps anyway and give them away on Android Market because digital creativity is in our nature and this is true to some extent. But at the end of the day money is one of the best incentives out there and the fact that many potential Android developers can’t charge for their apps is most surely causing a lot of app-awesomeness from happening and keeping the platform from experiencing the kind of “gold-rush” that iOS is having.  It may even be driving some developers to the iOS-platform instead since they might reckon that if they can’t paid why should they bother with the platform anyway?

I don’t see what the frackin’ hold-up is here really. So Google, get off your asses and make this happen sooner than later. Market needs to have paid apps and developers getting paid everywhere, OK?

Another thing that is painfully obvious when you look at the variety of Android devices out there is that the hardware companies that sell them, companies like HTC, SonyEricsson and Samsung, care only about selling new devices. They have very little interest in delivering software updates for devices that customers have already bought. I mean, it took HTC a full year to push out an OS-upgrade for the HTC Hero and SonyEricsson is at this moment selling Android 1.6 devices with the plan to update them to 2.1 around New Year. Meanwhile, FroYo (Android 2.2) devices are starting to hit the market and the specs for 3.0 are already out there.

I fully understand that it may not be easy for these companies that are primarily manufacturers of hardware to wrap their business models and brains around the fact that these days, with mobile phones becoming more and more like “real” computers, software matters more than hardware. A mobile phone will become obsolete a lot faster due to an old OS than due to year-old hardware. So something needs to be done about this. HTC and others need to take care of their customers and push out the updates a lot quicker because not everybody wants to (or can) buy a new $500 mobile phone every three months just to get the latest software. Maybe Google should set up some sort of centralized repository that the makers of Android phones could use to make sure they’re all in sync with each other and with what’s new? I don’t know, but something should be done to keep the platform from fragmenting any further.

And finally one other thing that I think can be a real game-changer is Flash-support. Yes, there is Flash-support in FroYo, I haven’t experienced it first-hand myself though so I don’t know how well it works. But my point here is that since Apple is taking a serious stand against Flash on devices running iOS there is a chance for Android (and Adobe naturally) to shine here. Make Flash work flawlessly on all contemporary Android devices and you will have a feature on the platform that the main competition can’t and will not match, which naturally is a great advantage.

These are the major points that bother me at the moment and I believe them all to be more or less critical for the growth of Android. I want to underline here though that although there are flaws - every platform has them - I believe a great deal in Android and will continue to submerge myself in the platform with great joy.

So Google and everybody else involved, time to step it up a notch OK? I’ll be watching you

No one that follows tech-news can possibly have missed that Apple have whipped up a shitstorm of sorts with it’s changes in Section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement resulting in the prohibition of the use of third-party tools for developing iPhone apps. This is what Section 3.3.1 used to look like:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

And this is what Section 3.3.1 looks like now:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Clearly this is a move that Apple has made in order to even further increase their control and hold over the development done for their mobile platform and shut out any and all apps that are not developed in a manner blessed by Apple. This includes 3D-games developed with Unity3D, all apps that could be built with Flash CS5 and many more.

As a developer I take great offense to this and I consider it to be a real dick-move by Apple. Further, I believe it to be a move that clearly demonstrates that the people making the decisions have completely lost any understanding of what it is to be a software developer and how we developers think and operate.

Some people seem to believe that it’s a good thing that all iPhone OS development is being streamlined into a single set of tools all under the control of the platform-owner (i.e. Apple). Anyone believing this doesn’t get it either and is clearly not a developer themselves. Let me explain.

Developers don’t like being told exactly how to operate and what roads to travel on when on the path to solving a problem or task. There’s always multiple solutions to any given software development issue. There is no such thing as the ultimate tool-set or the IDE to end all IDEs. This is why we like having the freedom to chose what tools to use and how to use them to build software. By putting restrictions on what tools are “allowed” for iPhone OS development Apple is pulling a move with multiple bad consequences.

Firstly, it pisses developers off. Like I said, we don’t like being told how to work and think. In fact, there’s no group of creative people that enjoy that. Can you imagine if MOMA said to all artists that if you want your art displayed in our facilities you have to buy all your supplies in a specific store and hold your brush/chisel/whatever in a specific way? Same thing here. And yes, I’m saying that software development in many ways is an artform. If I want to use a third-party set of tools or some other exotic methods not previously imagined by Apple in order to create an awesome iPhone-app I should be able to do that. If the way my brain works makes this, to me, the most natural path of development, why restrict me and forbid me to do it? It’s ludicrous and any real developer will tell you the same thing.

Sure, I can get behind the idea that Apple want to set up some rules for what apps are allowed into their AppStore (even if the AppStore acceptance process is utterly broken…). Telling developers what to build is sort of OK, but telling them how to build is definitely not OK. It’s bullshit, plain and simple.

Secondly, this dick-move of Apples is ruining business for the companies/people developing these third-party tools as well. Sure, Apple has no responsibility to ensure the business of any other company but this is none the less a really bad side-effect of the changes to Section 3.3.1. People may lose their jobs and companies may possibly go out of business thanks to a really moronic and completely unnecessary change in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement

The main target here, however a company not very likely to go out of business, is obviously Adobe and their product Flash which currently dominates when it comes to video and other multimedia content on the web. The changes to Section 3.3.1 followed swiftly after Adobe announced that the next version of Adobe Creative Suite would include tools that enabled Flash-developers to build Flash-apps that would run on the iPhone and iPad. That means that developers could use CS5 to create apps that were truly multi-platform and with very little hassle. They wouldn’t have to maintain different simultaneous versions for multiple devices, just one version that they could then deploy on iPhone OS, Android or whatever OS they wanted. One version of the app but multiple markets for it to exist in, which consequently means more business for the developers and, once again, all without having to deal with the mess of having multiple versions of the code. Now imagine how happy that would’ve made all of the world’s Flash-developers! Naturally, Apple couldn’t have that.

So that’s the third reason Section 3.3.1 bites, it causes unnecessary problems for developers that don’t want their apps to be exclusive to the iPhone OS, and what developer really wants that? Even if Apple may have the goal that 100% of the smartphones of the world are iPhones, it is never going to be a reality. Naturally software developers want a shot at pushing their apps and consequently make money in more markets than one, and, if at all possible, with minimal hassle. Clearly that’s not something that Apple wants.

What Apple wants for all the apps running on the iPhone OS is for them to be exclusive for their platform. They don’t want multi-platform development anywhere near their products and this was made even more clear by the open letter from Steve Jobs entitled “Thoughts on Flash” that was published on Apples website a couple of days ago.

In his letter The Steve lists six reasons why Apple hates Flash and wants it to die rather than run on the iPhone OS. Some of these reasons are actually somewhat valid, however most of them are complete and utter hypocritical nonsense. Let’s run through them quickly:

Reason one: Adobe Flash is 100% proprietary and Apple is a supporter of the “open web” having created WebKit and pushing HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and other open standards.
Hello pot, calling the kettle black much? This just makes me laugh. Apple is one of the most proprietary companies in the tech-industry. Their levels of secrecy and unwillingness to give away so much as an ounce of their secret sauces is legendary. Just because you’ve successfully pushed one open source project it doesn’t make you Richard M. Stallman. Get off your high horse. Flash is a well publicized standard and going by your own standards that should be good enough for you. Also, when Apple is pushing the very proprietary video standard H.264 as hard as they are (continue reading and you’ll see that they absolutely love H.264) they really shouldn’t be yapping about who is or isn’t being “open”.

Reason two: Adobe’s claim that Apple’s devices can’t deliver “the full web” since they don’t run Flash is caca because plenty of big websites have video in H.264 now and as for Flash-games there are loads of games on AppStore you can play instead.
There is some truth to this but it is still not valid in my opinion. Just because a long list of Apple-approved sites deliver video in H.264 instead of or as well as Flash it doesn’t mean every website does. It will still cause frustration when you run into that site with that video you wanna watch just have Flash - which is currently the dominant way to show video on the web. As for the games argument, it’s just laughable and shows that Steve isn’t a gamer himself. It’s like this: if I wanna play my game, I wanna play my game NOT another game. So if my game doesn’t run on the iPad it is no consolation at all that there are loads of other quality games available. I still can’t play the game that I wanted to play.

Reason three: Flash has lots of security flaws and the number one reason Macs crash.
I have no idea if the first claim is true or not so I’m not gonna argue against it. I’ve never had any of my Macs crash because of Flash but I’m not gonna argue the second claim either since I have no way to know what the truth is here. If Apple have statistics, which I assume they have, saying this, then it probably is true.

Reason four: Flash eats twice the battery life that H.264 with hardware acceleration does.
Again, whether this is true or not I don’t know but even if it is true I don’t think it’s a valid reason for shutting Flash out. Let the users themselves decide what to spend the juice of their batteries on. What’s next? Blocking games that are CPU-intense and thus eat “too much” battery. It’s just ridiculous. If customers want Flash, and they obviously do, let them have it even if it eats the batteries of their iPads and iPhones. Let people make their own choices.

Reason five: Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. You can’t “hover” or “rollover” on a touch screen.
This is true, but it is still an invalid reason simply because the controls of an app are up to the developer. It has nothing to do with the technology itself. Don’t you think Flash-developers targeting the iPhone would’ve thought of not to use controls that require “hovering”? Enough said.

Reason six: Apple knows from experience that all software developed using third-party tools suck and are inferior to software developed specifically for a particular device and/or operating system. Relying on third-party tools is also always a bad thing because then you’ll have to wait for the tool-developers to include new OS-features in their product and that can take a long time.
This part of Steve’s letter is so full of stupidity and claims that are in no way backed up by hard facts it’s laughable. What “experience”? Where are the statistics or surveys to prove this? Nowhere is where they are because it’s bullshit, plain and simple. It’s just a vague claim made like it’s the truth just because The Steve said so. Also, I find it amazing that Steve Jobs has taken it upon himself to save developers from using “bad tools”. I’ve said it several times already but I’ll say it one final time: Developers want freedom and choices! Let us decide for ourselves what tools we use and how we use them! We can take responsibility ourselves for our choices. We don’t need Steve Jobs to make them for us. Let us code and develop any way we want. Period.

So in closing all of this is just another scheme of Apple’s to lock people to their platforms attempting to create a sense of exclusiveness for their products in the process. The very same things they’ve in the past scolded Microsoft for. But what differs from previous ploys of theirs is that this is a tremendously nasty move that really benefits nobody, not even Apple themselves in my opinion. I think it is really sad and I don’t like the way Apple has been developing since releasing the iPhone - I think that’s where it all started to go downhill. I love Apple’s products - the hardware, OS X, iLife, all of that good stuff - but the company policies are pissing me off more often than not these days. Steve and his underlings need to step back and take a good look at themselves, the company’s past and the path their currently marching onwards on before it’s too late and Apple really becomes the new Microsoft or IBM. Nobody wants that, least of all me.

I recently upgraded to Fedora 12 and now find that my own recipe for making Spotify run under Wine doesn’t work anymore. The fix is not that hard though.

First, download the Spotify-installer for Windows from the Spotify-website. Then you install 32-bit Wine with ALSA-support like this:

$ sudo yum -y install wine.i686 wine-alsa.i686

Then make sure you have pulseaudio-utils installed, like this:

$ sudo yum -y install pulseaudio-utils

Then when running winecfg and set wine to use ALSA-drivers you pass it through padsp (which is in the package you just installed) in order to make the sound play nice:

$ padsp winecfg

Now you run the Spotify-installer with wine passed through padsp like so:

$ padsp wine ~/Downloads/Spotify\ Installer.exe

After this you should have Spotify installed. However, when you run it with wine you still need to pass it through padsp in order for it to work, so I suggest making a little script to start Spotify with and putting it somewhere nice like /usr/bin for example. The script would look something like this:

#!/bin/bash
padsp wine “C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe”

And there you have, 64-bit Fedora 12 running Spotify.

Me, and many with me, have reported problems with getting Spotify to run under Wine in Fedora 11. The support pages at the Spotify-website describe how to install and run it if you’re using Ubuntu, but - surprise, surprise - not every Linux-user uses Ubuntu. Well, I think I solved it and it wasn’t all that complicated either.

More and more computers are running a 64-bit OS and especially Linux-users have very widely adopted the x64-platform. However, the problem with running Spotify in Wine in Fedora 11 seem to be specific to the 64-bit version of Wine. So what I did was simply remove every trace of 64-bit Wine and installed the 32-bit version instead along with ALSA-support for Wine (I read somewhere that the Pulseaudio-drivers for Wine don’t play along with Spotify), like this:

$ sudo yum install wine.i586 wine-alsa.i586

Then I ran winecfg and selected the ALSA-driver for the audio and ran the Spotify-installer for 32-bit Windows.

$ winecfg (configure audio...)
$ wine ~/Download/Spotify\ Installer.exe

That’s it! Now I’m rocking the latest Slayer-album in Spotify on my Fedora-laptop. Very nice!

I’m a big fan of the command line. I find that using it is many times a lot faster and more efficient than going the “clicky-clicky”-route via a GUI. Also I often find graphical user interfaces highly restrictive. A GUI is only as good as the designers ability to predict every possible thing that a user would need to do with it and because of this there is no such thing as a perfect GUI.

This is especially true with GUIs that are in reality just a pretty face on top of a console application, which is many times the case. Take for example a graphical front-end to a webserver-application like the Apache Web Server. To cover all bases this GUI would have to make it possible to do and configure exactly every part and function of this complex piece of software with the same precision as you can when you manually edit the configuration-files in your text-editor of choice. I just don’t see how that would be possible without making the GUI a cluttered and hard to use mess, which totally defeats the purpose of using a GUI to begin with. And what if you stumble upon a situation where the GUI lacks the needed knobs and switches needed to configure the underlying application to behave in a particular way? Well, then you’d have to drop down under the hood and go command line wouldn’t you? Now wouldn’t you have been better off being there the entire time then? You might even have picked up something about the application that you didn’t know before just from mucking about closer to it’s innards, which is always a good thing.

Another thing that I really like about CLI-apps is that you can combine them with each other piping input and output all over the place to create new functionality. This simply isn’t possible with a GUI-app because it lives in it’s own little world inside a window full of buttons, sliders, whistles and bells and almost always impossible to get to play nice with other apps unless it was specifically built for this to begin with. A CLI-app that accepts and supplies communication from stdin and stdout has no such limits and at the command line they all come together with incredible power that can never be mimicked by any GUI on earth, no matter how shiny it is.

There are also computing environments where I believe that GUIs have no place at all. One such environment is on a server machine. Why suck up resources from the server by forcing it to power a graphical environment with windows, button and such? It’s a waste of precious computing power and darn right stupid if you ask me. Naturally, by saying this I am also saying that no incarnation of the Windows OS has any place on a server, which is completely deliberate
However, don’t get me wrong, GUIs definitely have their place in the world of computers. Not every user is a power user that needs to control every single byte of data and naturally there are apps that would be simply unbearable or at least highly impractical as CLI-apps. Web browsers for example are no fun in a command line environment and playing media like movies or flash animations is simply not possible. For the menial day to day computing tasks such as browsing the intertubes, handling e-mail and thousands of other things a graphical environment is preferred over a command line based one. But sooner or later I always find myself back at the prompt writing commands with twelve arguments and piping here and there, simply because for me it makes sense. I feel in control and not at the mercy of whoever designed some jumble of buttons and windows believing that his vision is what I and every other user wants and needs.

For my love of the command prompt I’ve even been called a GUI-hater (as a joke though) but that’s not true. I don’t hate GUIs, I just really like CLIs.

END OF RANT

Just like millions of other people I was really excited when Apple announced the AppStore for the iPhone. I immediately thought that this could be the thing that makes the iPhone a great buy despite the hardware failings (pretty cruddy camera, no video recording, no real bluetooth support, etc.). However, it wasn’t long until I no longer felt this way.

First there was the fucking NDA that created an inhospitable environment around iPhone-development and made it impossible to build any kind of community around it. Apple finally made good on that one but it took way too long and that they had that crap in place to start with is inexcusable anyway. What were they thinking?

AppStore - crapstore

Secondly, and this is a big problem that still remains, there’s the whole fiasco with the approval process to get your apps to the AppStore. Since Apple has the final say-so on what gets published on the AppStore and there is no other way to get apps on a non-hacked iPhone if they deny your application to publish your app on the AppStore you’re shit out of luck.

Now that’s bad enough, but what makes it even worse is that there seems to be no clear guidelines as to what gets approved and what doesn’t. Some apps have been denied while other apps with almost the same functionality have been approved. Is there an official way to appeal a denial? I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so.

One app in particular stirred up a lot of attention from the blogosphere and the internet in general, the NIN-app, published by the band Nine Inch Nails. The whole debacle has been well publicized elsewhere so I’ll not get into it in detail but basically the app was first approved but then just a short while later the developers released an update which was denied into the AppStore, which in turn, if I’m not mistaken, made the app unavailable on the AppStore. The reason for this was that you could apparently access some son (via streaming I believe) that had “offensive lyrics” or something like that through the app. OMG! There’s swear words on the internet? Meanwhile you can buy a million gangsta-rap songs on iTunes that contain a multitude of fucks, motherfuckers, “kill whitey”, bitch and other “offensive” things as part of their lyrics. But I guess that’s OK since those songs supply Apple with steady revenue.

Anyway, after a couple of days of uproar on the web by thousands of Nine Inch Nails-fans the app was re-evaluated and finally approved. Now what if this app hadn’t been published by a successfull rockgroup with a very solid and borderline rabid fanbase? Apple themselves have bragged about how awesome the AppStore is because it has turned one man software development companies into successfull businessess and enabled developers to live the dream of being their own boss and still make a solid living. What if an app developed by one of those companies was rejected for some obscure and/or stupid reason thus strangulating their cash flow completely? That could mean disaster and bankruptcy in a worst case scenario and how do we know this hasn’t happened already to some poor unfortunate developer?

Now another app has been rejected for the most moronic reason. As reported by Torrentfreak.com a remote control app for the popular cross-platform BitTorrent-client Transmission has been rejected because according to Apple “this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights”. That is such total and utter bullshit! You’d think that a company that actually makes software would know better than to damnify an entire class of technology because it “could be used to do wrong”. Hey, let’s ban Safari then because using any web browser you can easily find illegal stuff on the internet and download it and you could also use it to access the web-GUI for Transmission! Let’s ban cars because they can be used as getaway-vehicles in bank robberies. BitTorrent in itself is just a protocol and it’s used for lots of legitimate things. Banning applications based on them using a specific kind of technology is stupid beyond belief.

Just a couple of weeks ago, days before the whole Nine Inch Nails-thing got started, I was seriously contemplating getting an iPhone since the prices have now dropped to a reasonable level and the amount of good apps appeared to make it a good choice for a new cellphone, which I am very much in need of. I was also looking at the Android-phone, the G1, and thinking it may also be a good alternative. I do however own an iPod touch which I love. It really is an awesome device which I use everyday. But if I could have that plus a great cellphone in the same device that would be very nice. For this reason I may never completely be able to write off the iPhone as a candidate for a future cellphone.

However, with all of the crap that’s been going on around the AppStore lately I’m really not considering an iPhone anymore. So now I’m basically holding out for the next generation of Android-phones. The Android-software is just as good as the iPhone-software, maybe not as sexy and Apple-ish but I can live with that, and most of all it is based on open source and a platform not encumbered by the problems discussed in this post. So you could say that you lost me again Apple, and for such stupid reasons.

What Apple should do is let people install whatever the hell they want on their phones. If I bought the phone and paid for it I should be allowed to do whatever I want with it. If I want to install an application that floods my screen with random swear words who are they to decide that isn’t appropriate? If I want to use an iPhone to monitor my torrent-downloads that’s none of their business. If I’m doing something illegal that’s what we have law enforcement for. Basically, butt out of your customers’ business Cupertinoites.

Naturally, they should keep the AppStore because it is great to have a source for apps that Apple vouches for so to speak. But if I wanna take a risk and install something that Apple doesn’t deem worthy of publishing in the AppStore I should still be able to do that. This would benefit everybody involved, developers, iPhone-owners and Apple themselves, since it would make the iPhone an even more appealing platform.

But until radical changes are made I’m most likely to go Android for my next cellphone. The future will tell.

The other day I was catching up on the last few episodes of Hak5, one of my favorite internet-TV shows, and in one episode Darren Kitchen was doing some neat tricks with PHP, Twitter and VLC. This got me thinking about what other kinds of fun projects Twitter could be used for.

Twitter is a great service, not very reliable however (fail whale anyone?), and there are already plenty of mash-ups that uses it for various things. My idea was to use Twitter to select what plays in iTunes. People could send me replies with songs in them and if the song was in my iTunes-library it would be played, as simple as that. Not very useful, but a fun experiment if nothing else. So I started coding.

In order to control iTunes I had to delve into AppleScript for the first time. I find it to be an odd language, but whatever, for this project it’s definitely the most appropriate choice for getting quick results. One of my favorite languages is PHP so that’s what I chose for the control structure of the whole thing.

A couple of hours later I had my first prototype and now an additional few hours of tweaks I give you… TwitTunes!

This is how it works:
Person #1 starts TwitTunes on his Mac. TwitTunes sends a tweet - “#TwitTunes starting” - using Person #1s Twitter-account to let the world know that it is running.
Person #2 sends a reply on Twitter containing search words. These search words are then used to search through Person #1s iTunes-library and the first matching song found is played.

Not very fancy and far from perfect, but admit it, crowdsourcing your jukebox via Twitter is a pretty nifty idea and this is my very first proof of concept

If you wanna try out TwitTunes yourself you can download it here (sloppy source code included of course), and if you have any feedback I’ll be happy to hear it.

I’ve been playing around with streaming media (primarily video) from my iMac to my PS3. I’ve tried a couple of different streaming solutions, amongst them MediaLink and MediaTomb, and have finally landed on the (most of the time) excellent PS3 Media Server. It’s free (as in beer), open source (GPL v2), available on Mac, Linux and Windows and it works (most of the time).

PS3 Media Server works better than everything else I’ve tried and does transcoding so that I can play .mkv and other formats that the PS3 otherwise doesn’t support. No real setup, it worked right out of the box so to speak. Install and run, that’s it. Naturally it is very tweakable and you can probably spend hours and hours fidgetting about with all the different settings.

However, just like everything else I’ve tried there are bugs, some more annoying than others, and this got me thinking. Why hasn’t Sony themselves released a media streaming solution for the PS3? I mean, Microsoft have Windows Media Player working together with the Xbox 360 and iTunes has a similar relationship with AppleTV. So I’m thinking, wouldn’t the company that actually designed the PS3 be best suited to author media streaming software for the console? Makes sense right?

I don’t know why Sony hasn’t released a media server application of their own and I don’t know if they ever will. But if they don’t they should at least make an effort to help out the developers working on these applications, publish detailed specifications, and so on. Maybe then we can have transcoding media streaming for the PS3 that works close to 100% of the time.

Until then though, PS3 Media Server will keep doing a really good job pushing my media to my home entertainment system, 1080p, 5.1 surround sound and all. And I’ll keep swearing at weird network errors, freezing video and crackling sound on the fairly few occasions those things happen.

Yeah, you got me. That sure was sarcasm.

A couple of weeks ago I assisted my dad in buying a new laptop. Their old laptop was state of the art when they bought it about five years ago, but today it’s not really cutting it. So, time to buy a new one.

We went to the Sony Center and there my dad fell in love a pretty sweet Vaio-machine. It’s really a damn sexy piece of hardware and after inspecting the specs I gave it the thumbs-up. Only one problem really, it ran Windows Vista.

Now why is this a problem besides the fact that I loathe Windows? Well, it’s no secret that plenty of people that have gone from Windows XP to Vista have had and still are having a shitload of problems with Microsoft’s new and sparkly OS. My dad is not a complete computer imbecile at all, he’s a pretty ordinary user. He does some e-mail, surfs the web, plays some simple online games, does his banking online, organizes photos from his digital camera and things like that. Nothing fancy, nothing very advanced or odd at all.

So, while I was sceptical I thought that since good ‘ole dad’s computer habits were nothing out of the ordinary I said “what the hell” and hoped for the best.

Silly me. Stupid damn fuckin’ silly me.

I assisted with starting up the new laptop, installing all of the bundled software (Norton Security-stuff, a bunch of Google-apps, etc.) and configured it as best I could (remember that this was my first hands-on experience with Vista and that I haven’t been a regular Windows-user for over six years) and when I left my parents’ house it seemed to be working fine.

It took about two days until I received the first desperate call from my dad about his new computer “not working”. I googled some stuff and helped him out as well as I could over the phone. That was just the first of a seemingly never-ending series of calls, and all of them had to do with the new and fancy features in Vista fucking up my dad’s computing experience. In most cases I managed to hook him up with some sort of temporary work-around to the problem that he could live with until I had the time to get over there and get under the hood of the thing.

This week however things got so bad that my dad called me to say that he needs the old laptop back (I’d borrowed it to do some experimenting on) because the new one was completely unusable to him.

He couldn’t send e-mail properly, no applications except Internet Explorer 7 were allowed access to the internet, every time he tried to do just about anything useful he was driven mad by a bombardment of security pop-ups, the list goes on and on. What finally did it though was that IE and Vista wouldn’t allow him to install the certificate for his bank, thus making it impossible to pay their bills online. Awesome. Now tell me what’s so great about Vista again? Fuck.

So here’s someone that uses computers at work and has been using Windows XP both at home and at work for the past five years. Not a dimwit at all, actually pretty computer-savvy for a man in his late fifties. He goes out and buys a brand new awesome computer for $1800 with the “latest and greatest OS” and after three weeks he switches back to his old piece of cyberjunk because he’s being terrorized by Vista. Good one Microsoft.

Seriously, Vista must be the biggest piece of shit ever released by Microsoft. When experienced XP-users can’t get the damn thing to work properly you gotta call it a freakin’ failure, because that’s what it is. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s “more secure” (I doubt it) or looks snazzier than XP. It’s completely unusable to ordinary computer users as proven by my dad and many others I’ve read about online.

If it wasn’t for my dad having to run a few work-specific applications (which requires Windows) on his computer I’d have him buying a Mac or switching to Linux in a heartbeat.

And you know I’m gonna have to go over there next week and spend a hundred hours “fixing” that brand new Sony Vaio. Just because it’s been soiled by Vista. Damn.

Windows Vista is a sad piece of shit and once again Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for releasing such a pathetic excuse for an operating system.

I make no efforts to hide the fact that I think MySpace is a skidmark in the underpants of web 2.0 and more or less represents everything that is wrong with the internet today. I loathe MySpace basically.

Most of my ill thoughts towards MySpace is because of the way they let people bombard their pages with all manner of crap making most of the pages on the site completely unviewable unless you wanna risk an epileptic episode of grand proportions. I agree that people having bad taste and no judgment is not the fault of MySpace, I already knew that people are idiots way before MySpace got into the game, but the core of the matter is that MySpace is the enabler here. There are tons of other communities that look really neat and that don’t make my brain’s synapses lapse into a screaming rage when I visit them.

The only thing that I actually enjoy with MySpace, and that I repeatedly curse for being a feature of said website and not some other site less worthy of my hatred, is what it’s done for underground music. It’s awesome to be able to go on there and listen to and occasionally download songs with less known bands worthy of greater fame. This is, as I see it, MySpace’s only feature worth any praise and the only reason that I don’t want it completely wiped off the internet.

Sure, it’s probably nice that MySpace helps people keep in touch and stuff like that, but that’s hardly anything new as far as online-communities go. I’ve been active on various communities on and off during the past ten years but none of them have even come close to being the cesspool of bad taste and animated GIFs gone wild that is MySpace. This is why I would rather choose almost any other community out there over MySpace.

I actually had a MySpace-account once, but I closed it down after a few months because I just couldn’t live with being a part of it. That’s how bad I think it is.

It was brought to my attention today through an article on TechCrunch that MySpace are apparently not only enablers of crap but also testy bastards that enjoy shutting down companies that supply services linked to the MySpace-site, i.e. companies that add value to their business without it costing them anything except some bandwidth and CPU-time.

In this web 2.0 day and age I think this is pretty appalling and it’s just another reason to steer clear of MySpace. Sure, they’re looking into opening up their platform to developers, something that Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and a myriad of other web 2.0 sites have already done aeons ago, but even if they do they’re pretty late to the dance and with them having behaved badly towards third party developers already I’m guessing that such a venture could be actually be a failure.

I have very little experience with up and comer Facebook, practically none actually. But although I’ve told several of my friends that have wanted me to get on there that I’m not interested in another generic online community, I’m actually now thinking about setting up an account. This is partly to check out what all the fuss is about but mainly to play around with the site and its API. Yeah, I know that’s a really dorky reason but hey, that’s what I am - a dork.

Plus, Facebook doesn’t give the members the right to soil their pages with a multi-colored vomit of Flash, animated GIFs and movie-clips. At least, that’s what I hear, and if I do set up an account that’s what will determine if I stay more than a few minutes or log off immediately and delete my account while screaming profanities at the top of lungs.