Thushan Fernando Uncut

From The IT Crowd Season 4 Episode 5 -- Bad Boys.

In genius trailer! The .NET vs Java train left the station so long ago for me. .NET’s great for somethings, for everything else, there’s Java. Probably one of the best nerdy videos for the year!

UPDATED: First video was removed

Got to give it up for Steve Jobs, he responds to his followers when things are a muck in his church. But putting aside my dislike for Apple antics, I do agree with most of his comments.

Flash was great in the early days, we had the birth of the XaoXao videos and interactivity on the web, but in the past 5-6 years, the hip cool designers of the world have transformed the browsing experience to be  fully Flash driven – which drives me nuts. Do they not realise that content would not be indexable by search engines nor useful for anyone who doesn’t have Flash? Whats more, I’m not after their fancy dancy effects, I’m after content – the exception of Flash being used for animation in addition to content (like slideshows, video presentations or marketing bits) or navigation around a site.

One recent (2006) example is the Eclipse home page, back when I got the AVN6000 installed, I wrote a little blurb on the (then) DeveloperFusion blogs and sure enough took the bulk of the traffic for the keyword AVN6000. The entire site was flash driven up until 2008 and no-one had indexed the content of the site.  As the unit was installed a week after release, it got quite a bit of traffic – nice for me.

I have FlashBlock installed to avoid uninvited flash content (especially annoying opening up a bunch of news articles and one of them is playing a video!) and have no _real_ need for Flash on my mobile devices – youtube works. Android 2.2 (Froyo) will ship with some flash support but it doesn’t excite me as much as the JIT functionality. Gotta JIT that, Gotta JIT that…

There are a few points you can criticise Jobs on (HTML5, CSS+JS is no where near the functionality of Flex nor Silverlight – gasp! but it has time and momentum to grow) and everything about Apple is proprietary (sure they have a few good open-source projects – DTrace & WebKit) but their business nature to lock you into fruity loops. I still haven’t got a decent way of avoiding installing iTunes if I want to use an iPod which is the only device my (ironically) AVN6000 supports. As for the latter, overall a job well done I say and well justified move for not having Flash on their devices.

Just like to point out one thing having come from working with the On2 VP6/VP7 bits whilst at Vividas.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software.

What he’s talking about here is that Adobe utilises the On2 VP6 for their video rendering in Flash (as of Flash Player 8) and as such there’s no standard accelerator for the On2 codec (yet!) – its all CPU bound (and prior to 2008 quite intensive to decode!). The VP6 and VP7 codecs (though quite differently utilised) powered (or still powers) the Vividas format (could be different now, I left in 2008). Compared to Flash Player 7, the enhancements that On2 VP6 brought to Flash Player 8 effectively meant that a lot of media was encoded optimised for VP6. Newer versions of Flash Player 9 Update 3+ support h264 however.

Don’t forget that JavaFX also utilises VP6. While you’re there, checkout Gosling rant on Android and his thoughts on the Apple OS X Secret API hooks for the JVM.

With Google having purchased On2 Technologies earlier this year, there’s a bit of excitement and worry about the future of VP8 and whether it will become open-source and what will happen to h264 or Theora (a derivative of On2 VP3 which On2 open-sourced).

Having said all that, I can’t leave you without leaving something to ponder about when it comes to Apple and its many evangelists enthusiasts – maybe you’re one of them?

It’s funny because its true (!™), don’t Think Different™. Be different

I guess its time for Adobe to chime in and see their take on things, it better be something flashy!

Why you should never celebrate too early.

Damn! That is whack!

Back when I was at Uni, a close friend (who drove a Toyota Supra) and I used to attract parking inspectors like magnets (needless to say, our girlfriends were not impressed!). There was very little we could do too, some of the inspectors would “camp out” and await our batch of cars (we had a system!) as we swapped each others cars in the hopes we don’t get fined, then BAM! fined. Anyway, those days are long gone. Most of the areas we parked are now permit zoned but these days, inspectors seem to be far more aggressive with fines with very little leniency.

Here’s a letter sent to the City of Melbourne disputing a fine, thought this was hilarious – and encouraging.

Source: NextRound.net

Anyway, that was win for you and me kiddo. For the helpless people that need hope and encouragement, we may not win the war, but we’ve won the battle.

Add that to the collection of Aussie funnies! I wonder if there’s a “Parking Inspectors” forum like the OzLiberty forums, they all get together and marvel at each others fines – time to troll!

This is cool, xkcd is now command line based! Try it!

I was innocently attempting to post a comment on an article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Then after a few refreshes, it decided to take it to the next level.

It was not to be however, even after several attempts the CAPTCHA failed to validate! A good way to end the week!

Yes, thats right, Apple fans everywhere rejoice, for your saviour has released the hugely anticipated iPad. While one Steve Bing’s Bings Bings, another whips out his iPad.

Thats right folks, it’ll be a hit with the ladies! But seriously, can’t wait to ArsTechnica to do a proper review about it.

I guess Bill’s vision of people using Tablets Slate‘s is finally coming true. I still have a Compaq HP TC1000 which I scored from MSFT back in the days when TabletPC was all the rage -- but unfortunately it didn’t pickup. I remember Dr Neil Roodyn used to carry his TabletPC around everywhere he went.

For anyone who doesn’t mind not having the latest shiny toy from Apple, but still functional, beautiful and may not lock you in to the WWoA (Wonderful World of Apple), checkout the Tegra Android SmartPad.

Me likey, checkout the technical specifications.

After last year’s search for Credit Superhero on Seek, I bring you, the IT Developer for Border-Express with….

The original ad has been scaled back a bit as I doubt the right candidate could be found in time. Full credit to TheRegister.

Finally, a worthy competitor.

…you know it.