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I need to revisit my previous post about OneNote and the MS Office blog integration…

Apparently, using lists screws things up to holy hell. There were tons of malformed <p> tags, a bunch of whitespace, as well as complete disregard for switching from numeric order lists to alpha ordered lists, when nesting lists. Manual intervention was needed to clean up the gobs of whitespace strewn about my last post on fatblogging.

So… needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend using OneNote/Office’s automatic blog posting feature for anything more than the simplest of posts.

I haven’t heard of this bug in Firefox before, but it sure is interesting. This comment was found in the source of the podcast feed for David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done”

This is 512 bytes of nonsense, since the Firefox 2 developers, in one of the strangest decisions ever, decided they would obsolete XML styles by overriding them without permission. Furthermore, the developers appear to be disinterested in fixing this. Therefore, we use the unofficial workaround, which includes filling up the first 512 bytes of a document so that the sniffer doesn’t encounter the RSS tag. I really enjoy using Firefox, but this particular behavior really annoys me! Anyway, since I’m almost at 512 characters, I’m going to ramble on for another minute in this comment, and then, without further ado, present you with a valid XML feed.

Also, Hi. It’s been a long time. Things have been good here.

Every time I try to get out, they pull me back in.

I just received an email from Larry Hyrb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live!

Sorry Tor, for many reasons from business to technical, ripping of game titles to the Xbox 360 hard drive is not a scenario or feature we can support.

I get the business side of it, but not the technical. I guess I could go on and on and whine about it but I still can’t think of any problems that aren’t solvable here, especially not because of the technology. Case-in-point: Steam rocks, and it works. Essentially, I rip PC games to the hard drive all the time.

I can however see the publishers getting very very antsy about game ripping and possibly denying all access to a net distribution service. In ten years though, I think this is going to be the norm, and publishers in their traditional role will be left in the cold or diminished severely in power.

Microsoft, court the development studios and cut the distribution channels away.

In a recent interview J Allard (via Joystiq) claimed that the featureset of the 360 was designed to make modding unattractive and obsolete.

So putting piracy aside what did most of them do? They made it a media player. They had it connect to portable devices. They had it copy my music off of my PC so I could get it here. They did visualizers. They made themes. They made it something they could actually participate in. Well, we took a lot of those great ideas and said, “You want to make a theme? We’ll give you a theme editor. Go put themes on.” You don’t have to chip your box to make your box yours. You don’t have to unscrew it to put little green lights in it. Just rip off the faceplate and go put on a theme. Because everyone wants to do a lot of what legitimate modders wanted to do.

He leaves out one major convenience of modding, and that’s ripping games to the hard drive. Please please please, let us rip our games to the hard drive. I can’t stand scratching my discs, and I’m lazy as hell when it comes to switching cds. Given that the 360 supports detachable storage devices, it would be amazing to be able to just unplug your hard drive and take all your games, savedata, and everything else to a friend’s 360. The process for ripping should be as follows.

1. User plugs in hard drive via USB 2.0 or uses standard detachable HD.
2. Inserts game to rip.
3. Selects rip game from the menu.
4. Live prompts user for login, and game key, just like Steam does.
5. (Optional) User selects rip target drive.

Microsoft has DRM, it has Live! infrastructure, and patching capability. Make this goodness happen.

Update: Better yet, just implement something like Steam on Live!. I don’t want to wait for pre-orders. I don’t want to move my lazy butt to the store on opening day, or wait out in the cold at midnight. I want to be able to play my games on any 360, and I’m sure you want the retailer’s share of current revenue for yourself.

Heard of 43things? It’s pretty damn cool. Heard of 43people.com? Nobody’s supposed to know what it is yet. But I figured it out.

Here’s proof.

I wonder if they’ll leave the link up…

Today is a better day than most to be Tor. Today’s Slashdot article about Tor, an onion anonymizing Internet protocol, made me giggle. The headline reads, “Tor – The Yin or the Yang?”

“Although Tor claims to improve safety and security, the article goes into detail on how Tor can be used as a anonymous attack platform.”

It’s all true, every last word.

Columbine survivor and friend of the killers and the killed gives his opinion on why violence in games is GOOD thing..

Well, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the fact that iTunes now supports multimedia annotation and playback of audio files. On one hand, it’s great to see excellent support for this kind of feature in a prime-time application. On the other hand they’ve gone and implemented something which is pretty much in the same space as the w3 spec, SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). Why re-invent the wheel? Initial signs point to market protection of iTunes, AAC, iPods, and Garageband software. While this new format isn’t proprietary, it seems like big companies like Apple or MS are supporting alternative niche “open” formats, to create market protection. Sure it’s open, but did they really need to make another competing format? In this case, Apple just gave the middle finger to all current SMIL supporting media players.

If it weren’t bad enough that they created a competing format, they only allow the spec to work with their proprietary format, AAC. The Voxmedia Wiki, the most comprehensive source for how to implement AAC multimedia markup, states that Garageband/Podcast Chapter Tool is only compatible with AAC files. Apple’s decision to only support this markup in their player for AAC files fucking sucks. I’m really, really mad about this. I see no reason why the annotations can’t be applied to other file formats, as it should be the player’s job to associate the timestamp in the XML file with the position of audio playback.

Maybe I don’t get this. I hope I don’t, and if I don’t, someone please set me straight. But from where I’m sitting, this new development is a mixed blessing. It’s too bad that the functionality that podcasters have been desiring is caught up in this GarageBand/iTunes/AAC quasi-open format bullshit.

Found by way of Scoble.
Update: It looks like Simon is a bit miffed too.

I just pre-ordered my Xbox 360 from GameStop and supposedly it’s coming in the first shipment of consoles. I remain skeptical, but I pre-ordered anyways because the down payment is refundable should I purchase a 360 somewhere else.

The only thing of substance in last night’s Xbox 360 party was the segment on the new Perfect Dark game. I learned Perfect Dark is pretty, that’s it. Nothing else. I guess if you hadn’t heard anything about the new 360 you would have also learned:

• 360 is white.
• 360 can stand on it’s side.
• 360 has different face plates.
• 360 has wireless controllers.
• 360 can go online…

All of these factoids are unispiring or are so vauge as to border on useless. They left out all the meat, and failed to show the world anything other than “more screenshots”. Microsoft really dropped the ball.

As an aside, I’m a Scoble-whore, because I use the word Scoble in this post (forgive me). Hopefully, he’ll see this and let the responsible party at Microsoft know how badly they failed to educate and excite people about what should be their newest coolest product. You had tons of eyeballs, you had MTV, and you filled up an hour with the amount of information that could have been printed on a brochure.

Upgrade Firefox to 1.0.4.

Props to Dan for the heads up. Apparently, Microsoft has decided to debut their new system on MTV instead of a major game convention, which as far as I know, is a first for a console manufacturer. Their choice to do this over MTV does make some sense though, as the next Xbox is going to be heavily marketed as a media center capable device.

On a quasi-related note… Does anyone know when/if MTV will show music videos again?

Let me say right now that this is going to be the album for my coming summer, given that it’s got some tasty hip-hop beats and easygoing melodies.

The fact that he’s back collaborating with the Dust Brothers shows through, as it’s somewhat reminiscient of Odelay, though, I’d categorize this album as simpler and far less processed than Mutations, Odelay, or Midnite Vultures.

My third generation iPod was definitely worth getting at the time. Though, with greater competition now, as well as converging devices, I really don’t think I’ll be replacing my iPod when it dies. By the time that happens, I’ll be in the market for a single device, akin to the Motorola MPx, something to replace my phone, my iPod, and PDA. I can’t wait to have room in my pockets for a wallet again.