Software Industry == Love

So, we just received the first grand service pack for MS Office 2008 (Macintosh). This bundle is massive, and contains (apparently) all sorts of important fixes. I'm grateful that Microsoft still sees value in their Mac Business Unit. I agree, for the most part, with those pundits who claim that Office 2008 is pretty much teh best office evahr. On any platform (even without VBA). I'm amused that the MBU claims that, no, really, it will be bringing back VBA for the mac platform in the next major release which "won't be four years away" (sic).

What ticks me off about Office 12.1.0? It's still leaving CGBimapContextGetData error poo all over my freaking system logs.

Sonsofbitches!

Software Industry == Love

So, we just received the first grand service pack for MS Office 2008 (Macintosh). This bundle is massive, and contains (apparently) all sorts of important fixes. I'm grateful that Microsoft still sees value in their Mac Business Unit. I agree, for the most part, with those pundits who claim that Office 2008 is pretty much teh best office evahr. On any platform (even without VBA). I'm amused that the MBU claims that, no, really, it will be bringing back VBA for the mac platform in the next major release which "won't be four years away" (sic).

What ticks me off about Office 12.1.0? It's still leaving CGBimapContextGetData error poo all over my freaking system logs.

Sonsofbitches!

Artist? Try Marketing Exec...

Copyright has, for many years, been a bastion against (oddly enough) commodifying art. But Terry McBride ("top music manager and label boss" according to The Register) says that's over, baby. Forget creativity. Forget art. Embrace the new wondrous corporate feudal state where art becomes "an upsell technique for [art] related products, e.g. ... clothing ... branded physical products".

What really bothers me about this attitude is that it favours ephemeral art. Why the heck would a writer want to toil away on a lengthy, deep, detailed novel? Embrace the word-bite! Blog yourself! Become a celebrity! Use your clever wordsmithery to shill for hip high-tech commerce!

I do not claim the novel is dead, or that film is dead, or that theatre is dead. But the destruction of copyright removes the principal way in which artists directly control the means of production, and are compensated for their efforts.

Do we really want a full-bore return to the patronage system?

(I am not unaware of the irony of asking this question, in this way, in this forum....)

Artist? Try Marketing Exec...

Copyright has, for many years, been a bastion against (oddly enough) commodifying art. But Terry McBride ("top music manager and label boss" according to The Register) says that's over, baby. Forget creativity. Forget art. Embrace the new wondrous corporate feudal state where art becomes "an upsell technique for [art] related products, e.g. ... clothing ... branded physical products".

What really bothers me about this attitude is that it favours ephemeral art. Why the heck would a writer want to toil away on a lengthy, deep, detailed novel? Embrace the word-bite! Blog yourself! Become a celebrity! Use your clever wordsmithery to shill for hip high-tech commerce!

I do not claim the novel is dead, or that film is dead, or that theatre is dead. But the destruction of copyright removes the principal way in which artists directly control the means of production, and are compensated for their efforts.

Do we really want a full-bore return to the patronage system?

(I am not unaware of the irony of asking this question, in this way, in this forum....)

Recently played: Combat Commander Europe

The Monday Night Group did not reach quorum this week, and accordingly, there were two of us and so we decided to finally put Combat Commander: Europe on the table (we had been talking about doing this for some long time). It's much too early to provide any kind of detailed analysis for this game, but I can make some observations.

( Click through the cut to read more )

Recently played: Combat Commander Europe

The Monday Night Group did not reach quorum this week, and accordingly, there were two of us and so we decided to finally put Combat Commander: Europe on the table (we had been talking about doing this for some long time). It's much too early to provide any kind of detailed analysis for this game, but I can make some observations.

( Click through the cut to read more )

Why I've gone back to XJournal

After some solid years of pretty faithfully using Ecto for my blogging, I've finally become a bit fed up and have moved back to XJournal. I appreciate that the person building Ecto is "just one guy" and has a day job. I also appreciate the difficulties involved in making a one-size-fits-all blogging client. To say that there are protocol standards for blogging is to use the word "standard" in the traditional internet way: wild-ass and ironic stabs at some sort of coherent group of interoperable traditions.

That said, Ecto and the technical savants at whoever-owns-LJ-this-week haven't seen eye to eye for months now.

Ecto has a spanky new release that's significantly more elegant than previous versions, and represents a significant re-write of the codebase. Unfortunately, it's support for LJ is pretty much fatally broken, and has been for some time now. Ecto-creator asserts that this is LJ's fault for claiming to support a standard protocol (Atom) and doing a half-assed job of it. LJ could care less, it seems, about pleasing small software creators/consumers of their blogging protocols, and has even less (it seems) interest in "properly" supporting Atom.

The upshot is I have lost any real reason to use Ecto. I started using it because I liked its interface (I still do), and I liked that it let me blog with one tool on LJ and on Blogger (and on a bunch of other places).

Practically, my use of Blogger has all but dried up with the use I had for doing so, and LJ represents 99% of my blogging activity at this point. So I'm relatively fed up with trying to make a utility tool behave like a screwdriver, when it has no Robertson attachment.

Luckily, development on XJournal seems to have un-ground-to-a-halt at seems to be making use of (and enriching?) LJKit, a Cocoa framework for building LJ clients. There's even a version that doesn't swallow it's own ass on Leopard, so yay, there.

Until further developments occur, then, I'm off the shiny Ecto (for pay) app, and back on the slightly-less-shiny (but free-as-in-speech-and-beer) XJournal. Thanks to the LJKit and XJournal project developers!

Why I've gone back to XJournal

After some solid years of pretty faithfully using Ecto for my blogging, I've finally become a bit fed up and have moved back to XJournal. I appreciate that the person building Ecto is "just one guy" and has a day job. I also appreciate the difficulties involved in making a one-size-fits-all blogging client. To say that there are protocol standards for blogging is to use the word "standard" in the traditional internet way: wild-ass and ironic stabs at some sort of coherent group of interoperable traditions.

That said, Ecto and the technical savants at whoever-owns-LJ-this-week haven't seen eye to eye for months now.

Ecto has a spanky new release that's significantly more elegant than previous versions, and represents a significant re-write of the codebase. Unfortunately, it's support for LJ is pretty much fatally broken, and has been for some time now. Ecto-creator asserts that this is LJ's fault for claiming to support a standard protocol (Atom) and doing a half-assed job of it. LJ could care less, it seems, about pleasing small software creators/consumers of their blogging protocols, and has even less (it seems) interest in "properly" supporting Atom.

The upshot is I have lost any real reason to use Ecto. I started using it because I liked its interface (I still do), and I liked that it let me blog with one tool on LJ and on Blogger (and on a bunch of other places).

Practically, my use of Blogger has all but dried up with the use I had for doing so, and LJ represents 99% of my blogging activity at this point. So I'm relatively fed up with trying to make a utility tool behave like a screwdriver, when it has no Robertson attachment.

Luckily, development on XJournal seems to have un-ground-to-a-halt at seems to be making use of (and enriching?) LJKit, a Cocoa framework for building LJ clients. There's even a version that doesn't swallow it's own ass on Leopard, so yay, there.

Until further developments occur, then, I'm off the shiny Ecto (for pay) app, and back on the slightly-less-shiny (but free-as-in-speech-and-beer) XJournal. Thanks to the LJKit and XJournal project developers!