Apple really seems to be throwing down at both Nintendo and Sony with regards to the iPod touch as a gaming platform. Why? And why not iPhone?

I believe they aren’t so much marketing iPhone as a gaming platform because of battery life. If you’re intended (as per the marketing) to play a bunch of games on your iPhone, you probably won’t have much juice left for calls. So right now it’s only iPod touch marketed for games.

Is this a possibility? I’m not very confident the iPod will ever entirely dethrone the DS — there are about 85 million DS consoles around the world right now. That’s a huge hurdle, and while the iPod touch will likely be incredibly successful, it’s hard to judge who buys it with games in mind and who doesn’t.

The other hurdle for iPod touch are the controls. There are no physical buttons which can be used for game controls on the device. Instead you have the touchscreen and the accelerometer. Using the device’s [arguably] flagship game as an example, Super Monkey Ball, it uses touch for menus, and the accelerometer for controlling your character. And it’s really, really difficult. Most other games which use the “tilt-to-move” paradigm are also pretty difficult to control. I think these issues will eventually be resolved as time goes by. Developers will learn the system better and develop more controllable games. But currently controls are a little difficult.

The absence of buttons is seen as a deficiency for a gaming device (as in “it sucks because you don’t have buttons and you can’t do X without buttons”), but I think it’s more of a paradigm thing, again. Given time, developers will come up with novel ways of controlling the games. This is a strength of iPod touch in the gaming sense. No, it’s not going to be the same as A, B, and a D-pad, but that’s getting pretty stale anyway. The device also has WiFi, a microphone, and is location aware. Those are three more new inputs to play around with. So I think it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing more novel games appear which will start to threaten Sony and Nintendo.

But here’s where Apple really has the advantage: the App Store. I honestly can’t believe neither Nintendo nor (especially) Sony hasn’t done something like this already. The App Store is where you get your iPod touch apps (or Games in this case). Apps typically cost between $0-$10 as opposed to $30 on the other consoles. But more importantly, there are no cartridges or discs to worry about. If you lose your game, you just download it again. One game can go on all of your iPods. They are backed up in iTunes. You can download them wherever you have internet access. Are you getting this Sony? Nintendo? This is where Apple has the potential to dominate.

It will be interesting to see where this goes in the coming years. As an aside, I fully believe Apple will eventually move all of their iPods to the iPhone OS (with touchscreen, accelerometer, etc). When they do this (nano touch, anyone?), they will really shine.

/proc/sys/kernel/hostname

Provides me the one word hostname of this kernel. I’m planning on switching this and /proc/version to a uname() syscall (see man 3 uname) to provide better compatibility on systems without /proc.

/proc/uptime

Provides me the raw number of seconds (including factional) since the computer booted, as well as the total number of seconds this computer has been idle (the second bit I discard)

/proc/loadavg

Provides me with the three load averages

/proc/version

Provides me with a long kernel version, which is different than the one supplied by uname -a.

/proc/meminfo

I get all of my memory information from here, but I don’t use all of the information available to me. Most of it is pretty useless, but I do get:

• Total Memory
• Buffered Memory
• Cached Memory
• Free Memory
• Total Swap
• Free Swap

I get ‘memory used’ from the formula: “int memused = memtotal - cached - buffers - memfree;”

It becomes very important when you start needing these computers to do tasks, such as serve up websites, provide SSH servers, or other such services. Unfortunately, power interruptions, and crashes do happen. A lot of times, if a server goes down, you need to wait until you can get somebody to physically press the button if it’s remote, or provide some details on network access (did just the network go down, or did the actual computer go down, or both). Collecting information about a server after it has gone down is a trivial task, just look through the logs. The big crunch here is, what about real-time outage information? Having a server “ping” a webpage every 5 minutes, uploading the latest load average, memory information, disk usage, uptime, and system log information should provide adequate information to provide a decent report on system health.

Over the weekend, I want to see if I can write some code and set up a little site where I can monitor all my computers, and maybe even try and send commands to them (security and authentication being somewhat of a problem here).

Update: I started work on this on the weekend, and I already have it working. Visit data.vectec.net/uptime for live uptime information for three of my Linux computers (Mac OSX coming soon I hope).

X seems to think that the best way to do this is to make a square screen, even if one screen is taller pixel-wise than the other, meaning I don’t get the bottom of the screen on the smaller monitor. The other side-effect here is that the KDE panel goes across the bottom all the way, even if I wanted it just to be on one screen (Windows does this, and it’s a feature I like). Dual monitors is something Windows gets right, and Linux absolutely fails at. Then again, there might be a solution I don’t know about. At work, I have a nice setup. I have a nice large square screen, and spend all day in VMWare, so switching around VMWare has become second nature.

I’m also thinking within a year I’m going to have to get my laptop replaced. Heat has became a big issue for it, and even a chillpad struggles to keep it cool. I’ve tried dusting it a couple times, but unfortunately the air circulation on it has never been that great. I have the most problems when running something that gives the GPU a pretty good workout, usually pushing the sensor temps over 100C, and making the bottom of the laptop too hot to touch. In my dual monitor setup, I must remember to keep the laptop lid open, even if the screen is in use to promote air circulation.

Dear Valued Patron,

I regret to inform you that the Lieutenant’s Pump has been assessed a two day Liquor license suspension by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission. The Commision found us guilty of being over capacity by five people on the patio during last years Stanley Cup Finals.

On the night of the infraction, we did everything in our power to control the patio but did not foresee people jumping the fence. We had staff supervising the patio and when people hopped the fence they were immediately escorted off.

We were not aware at the time that this would be considered insufficient by the Commission. Somehow, the Commission expected us to prevent the fence jumping. Short of barbed wire and electrification I’m not sure how this could have been accomplished. None the less, in its wisdom the Commission has concluded that the suspension is warranted as a general deterrent to other operators and as a specific deterrent to us letting it happen again.

The Lieutenant’s Pump will be closed October 11, 12 and 13 which is Thanksgiving weekend including Monday.

I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this closure will cause. Any concerns about this situation should be directed to:

Ted Meekin
Minister of Government and Consumer Services
4320 - 99 Wellesely St. E.
4^th Fl. Whitney Block
Toronto M7A 1W3

416 - 327 - 6611
TmcMeekin.MPP@Liberal.OLA.ORG

“See You At the Pump”
<SIGNATURE>
John Couse
Owner

Now, I’m not talking so much about say, a Settings window for an app, where different settings are on different tabs, grouped by relevance. Grouping functions of an application together on a tab is not what my gripe is about. That seems fairly appropriate to me. My gripe is with grouping documents into tabs.

So let’s move on with the classic example: the modern web-browser. You can click a link and have it open (optionally) in a new tab (there are other ways of creating tabs but I’m sure we all know them, and it’s really unimportant here). This typically reveals a tab bar, with small rectangles titled for each tab you have open, also bearing a small icon for dismissing the tab. Most modern tab bar implementations allow you to re-order the tabs and also expand them into full windows (otherwise the tab acts as a child to its window). When a tab is selected in the window, it is the sole document the user may view in that window. This is the basic idea of tabs which I’m sure we’re all familiar with.

Here’s my problem with tabs: Let’s say I’ve got Safari open, one window containing 5 tabs. I want to switch from my email tab to my news tab. I’ll just use alt/cmd-tab to switch to new. Ironically, this functionality is busted because I’m using tabs. Also, things like Exposé on the Mac (and I’m sure Compiz on Linux) are broken when it comes to tabs because, they deal with windows and not tabs.

Let’s take a breather here. Yep, most every tab implementation I’ve seen has a keyboard shortcut for switching between tabs. Sadly, these are all different shortcuts most of the time. And even if they are the same in different apps, it’s still not the cmd/alt-tab we’re so accustomed to. And hey, Firefox is pretty extensible, so maybe there is a hack to get it to co-operate with alt-tab, but that only solves the problem for Firefox, not all tab apps.

If you don’t use a keyboard, you’ve now got to hit those ridiculously small rectangles in the tab bar. Let me explain ridiculously small, I’m comparing the target size of the tabs to the target size of entire windows (which, as you may remember, is what we had before tabs). So I’m saying, if I have three windows onscreen at once (tiled in some manner, not full screen), each one of those windows is orders of magnitude easier to hit (and therefor switch to) with a mouse than is a tab.

I don’t think tabs are all bad. I think the real problem lies in the paradigm associated with them. The general paradigm seems to be something like “My browser is fullscreen and I have 3 tabs open, one for every task I’m currently focusing on”. However, if you work more like “I have 3 windows open, one for each task with tabs briefly opened in each window when it is appropriate” then it’s much easier (as I’ve explained) to switch between them. I’m not saying “do away with tabs altogether”, but I am saying tabs should should only be used temporarily, and only when relevant to that window’s task.

It often happens one of my tasks is researching a certain topic. Given my paradigm for browsing, I’ve got a window open with Wikipedia and one with Google Docs. As I read wikipedia, I’ll sometimes open a new tab to read on a related subject, close it, and then switch to my Google Docs window to write something about my topic. The different areas of focus stay separate and tabs are only used briefly, like an extra buffer or scratchpad for any given task.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this one, because I know tabbed applications like browsers are one place we all spend a lot of time.

I woke up early at 6:45, and got up about 8:00, got showered, etc, and left by 8:30. I jumped on the 96 to Bayview, hopped off, and picked up the 182 to where I thought the building was (according to Google Maps). I started in search for a Tim Hortons, found one, but the line was ridiculously long. I started back to the building. When I got to the building, I remembered the email said suite 300. I get to suite 300, but it’s not that company. I try looking it up on my cellphone through webmail, the my phone was rejecting the webmail’s server certificate. Great. I do a quick google, and find a result for a building down the road, so with 20 minutes to my interview, I hike it about a kilometer to the other building. Upon reaching the elevator of this 7 storey building, and I got in and pressed floor 3. She started to press floor 3, then realized I already had. Knowing about the meeting today, she asked if I was the person whom had the meeting.

The meeting went fairly good, about 50 minutes long. I left the building, and went to the bus stop, and waited for about 15 minutes for a bus to arrive. A 15 minute bus ride to a transit terminal, and I took a bus back home. It took me about an hour and 20 minutes to get home, and in 30C heat with 35C humidex. I probably covered about 5.5 km (3mi) of walking today, but I could do with the exercise.