Jun

11

Hi, I’m Apple and I like to..

Filed Under Apple, iPhone | Leave a Comment

ban people from using my iPhone SDK to do useful things, presumably so I can do those useful things with less features and sell them for more than the 3rd party would with more features.

Edit: Oh and heaven forbid people have applications that actually run in the background.  That would be the “wrong solution” so instead we’ll wait until september for them to give us a server to push “events” to the phones instead of letting us have the functionality immediately.  Everyone should just forget that practically every other mobile platform out there aside from the ever-crappy PalmOS allows background processes in some form or another without killing battery life.

Edit 2: So it looks like it was a sham (copied from the google maps terms), but the first edit still stands.

Jun

6

When Testing Against Nightly Builds..

Filed Under Other | Leave a Comment

..it often helps if your QA department doesn’t use a proxy server for caching older versions of files.  Food for thought.

Jun

5

SquirrelFish: Webkit’s new Javascript Interpreter

Filed Under webkit | Leave a Comment

So Webkit’s JS interpreter has just hit the big time — it’s now a full blown vm instead of a syntax-tree-walker like the other slow-pokes.  What’s interesting is it’s roughly 1.6x faster than Safari 3.1’s js interpreter and 4.something times as fast as Safari 3.0’s so we’re talking a major improvement here.  The blog post talks about why SquirrelFish is faster and what to expect in the future (the developers state that it’s relatively unoptimized at this point.  Hopefully Microsoft moves to something along these lines for IE9 — the javascript performance of IE8 will still be mediocre relative to other modern browsers (except for its predecessors, of course).

May

31

More Shoutcast on the iPhone

Filed Under Shoutcast, iPhone | Leave a Comment

So I finally fixed that odd crapping out after 30 seconds of streaming issue — I was corrupting the audio buffer in some odd circumstance.  It turns out that Shoutcast 1.9.9 beta (linux only atm) already has native iPhone/iPod touch support so my proxy guy is pretty much moot.  It was still fun to impl and if anyone’s interested in the source, I’ll put it up for download.  Just shoot an email via my contact form or leave a comment.  Unfortunately, I never did fix the client reconnect/disconnect issue.  As for RJ, they’re going to setup an iPhone specific stream shortly using the Shoutcast stuff (much better than each user having to run some proxy software on their computers and deal w/ port forwarding, etc.

May

23

Shoutcast streams on the iPhone

Filed Under Shoutcast, Stream, iPhone | Leave a Comment

So Hamed and I were talking about streaming RJ to an iPhone when we realized that there wasn’t much out there to do it outside of a php script or two that sort-of worked.  Today I made progress on a POC (.net app) that streams (choppy) audio from a Shoutcast stream to an iPhone for about 30 seconds before crapping out. I’ll try to find some time to fix it up next week and throw it out there. It’ll be a single user single stream sort of thing, for now, since it’s much easier to deal with. I need to get over this whole 30 seconds then croak business, make it so it gracefully recovers from client disconnects, and optimize its performance a bit (choppy audio is useless). Hopefully I can finish it sometime next weekend as I’ll be busy this weekend.

May

16

Failed to teach this at GaTech..

Filed Under infinite monkey theorem | Leave a Comment

Behold, the infinite monkey theorem!

May

6

AMChat for AppEngine?

Filed Under ajax, ajx, amchat, appcelerator, appengine | Leave a Comment

I just received my AppEngine invite and wanted to give it a whirl, so I threw together a web-based AMChat using the AppEngine backend for Appcelerator that Mark Luffel wrote.  I came up with this.

May

5

A Windows Back Door?

Filed Under Back door, Microsoft | Leave a Comment

Surprise!  Not really.  The real surprise, if the allegation is true, is how this was not already found.  It’s interesting because the question then becomes does Apple do the same thing?  Does the OS “hide” the data from traffic monitoring tools on the local machine?  Even if that’s the case, how could those who monitored traffic at another layer in the network (say at a router level) not have noticed it for so many years?

May

3

Microsoft pulls its bid for Yahoo!

Filed Under Google, Merger, Microsoft, Yahoo! | Leave a Comment

That’s right — no Microhoo in any of our futures. I’ll bet Google and Yahoo! will pull some sort of partnership out of the hat and make things even more interesting.

May

2

This is brilliant

Filed Under Other | Leave a Comment

2007: Just read it — it’ll make your head hurt.  I’m surprised no one noticed this story.


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