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Just Pretending

Quite a bit of interesting discussion tagged onto the end of my Unreal Tournament post. Without trying further to identify ambiguous forces like “the cause of violence in America” (note that I never said “the cause” but only implied that it was undoubtedly a cause), I want to ask an honest question of everyone who thinks it’s acceptable for children to play violent video games:

What’s worse: Rape or murder?

If you think murder is worse and you let your kids play games that involve pretending to murder humans or humanoids by the hundreds, then surely you would have no objection to a video game where your character ran around raping women or girls, right?

Those of you who have posted here in defense of murder games: I would very much like to hear your defense of rape games, and to learn why you intend to let your children play them.

Music: King Crimson :: Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part Two
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Sentences Commuted

Amazed at this turn of events in Illinois, where Republican Governor George Ryan has decided to commute the sentences of all death-row inmates in his state. His speech on the subject, delivered to Northwestern University, is long but articulate and impassioned. No matter one’s stance on the matter, it would be impossible to read his words without having their convictions challenged. Glimpses of civilization. Thanks Benjamin.

Music: Shuggie Otis :: Rainy Day
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Take My Teef Out

At Paula’s birthday last night, two-year-old Emerson was showing me his new selection of toy tools (can’t wait till Miles is old enough to dig on a toy electric jigsaw – toys today are awesome) and we were exploring the capabilities of the pliers. After I took his socks off with them I asked if I could pull out his new teeth with the pliers. He squealed with delight and said over and over again “Take my teef out with pliers!”

Music: David Byrne :: His Wife Refused
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Rectangular Text Selections

Rectangular text selections in BBEdit 7.0! (Make sure you’re not in soft-wrap mode, then Opt-drag your selection). This is one of those features you don’t use often, but when you do it’s a life-saver. I used to make frequent use of rectangular selections in Pe for BeOS (now Pepper) and had requested this on the BBEdit mailing list – apparently I wasn’t the only one. Awesome.

Music: Freakwater :: Binding Twine
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More Pro Conference Sessions

Today attended more of the Pro Conference sessions:

Internet Security for the Rest of Us : Pretty breezing overview of firewalls (both router and local), virii, flying under the radar, common weak points in OSes, and so on. Actually hoped for more specifics, but got a lot out of this. Choice quote: “FTP is the single biggest security hole in any OS, any implementation, 2nd only to IIS as breach culprit.” That got a nice laugh, followed by a collective gulp.

QuickTime Compression Secrets : You know all those awesome movie trailers at quicktime.apple.com that always look so stellar that you wonder why your own QT stuff never looks half as good? It’s all encoded by one guy, whose job it is to encourage broader QuickTime adoption by making the content look dreamy. He ran this session, and dropped a bunch of hard-won Sorenson and Cleaner tips and arcana on us.

Advanced File Sharing with OS X Server via AFP, Samba, NFS : I don’t have an OS X Server machine, but am saving up info for the day I do. Pretty intense session. Apparently there are now organizations so impressed with XServe and OS X Server that they are buying these rigs just to serve otherwise 100% Windows clients. Ye olde user-friendly Unix. Does that rock or what? For the 2nd time today, got to hear networking gurus implore audiences not to run FTP services of any kind.

Music: Morphine :: Thursday
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Ozone Poll

In 1930 your risk of developing melanoma was 1:1500 people. Today it is 1:75, due in large part to decreasing protection from our chemically shrunken ozone layer. Skin cancer rates are increasing by about 3% per year.

Do you or does anyone you know apply sunscreen (or put on a hat) every time you/they leave the house?

View Results

Music: The Muffins :: People In The Snow
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Keynote

Received my free copy of Keynote on the way out of the keynote yesterday, with two hours before my presentation. Considered delivering my pres in Keynote rather than in PowerPoint. Installed it on the jschool TiBook I was carrying and imported my PowerPoint presentation. Import went great, and applied a theme that had the whole thing looking ten times better than PowerPoint at its finest (which, some would argue, is not saying much). Out of curiosity, checked the filesizes – the Keynote version was more than 10x larger than the PowerPoint original! This is because Keynote uses an XML data store, rather than binary blobs. That, in turn, means that any app can read and write the Keynote file format, which is fantastic for interoperability. But XML is not known for compactness (see my iTunes gripe).

Music: Sly & the Revolutionaries :: Acapulco Gold
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Unreal Tournament

Stopped by the gaming section at MacWorld today and stumbled on an Unreal Tournament tournament. Out of curiosity, decided to stay and watch for a while. If you’re not familiar with this game, it’s all about shooting anything that moves with high-powered weapons, except that you’re not killing mere computer-generated characters — you shoot at the other people in the room with you, who are playing over the network. I was speechless. All I can say is that anyone who wonders why we have Columbine-style disasters today has their head in the sand. Base and degrading violence aside, the motion was so herky jerky and clumsy it seemed like game technology has barely improved in the ten or so years since I last played (Descent?). Very disorienting and un-fun looking. Hard to figure out what the appeal is, or how something like that can be called a “game.”

Music: Sid Vicious :: My Way
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WebDAV, NetBoot

Attended a session on WebDAV today, which I’ve thought of implementing to allow students remote access to their files. The session itself wasn’t awesome (the speaker from Thursby was dry as a bone) but I did learn that there’s little advantage to deploying WebDAV unless you have a specific need to provide collaborative behaviors in the filesystem. NFS and SMB are just as universally supported across operating systems, and client implementations are more mature. On the other hand, if you do WebDAV now you’re ready for whatever collaborative things your peeps come up with in the future. It was interesting to see what Adobe has done – all of their new generation apps have a “Workgroup” menu item with special options built in to connect to and work with WebDAV volumes shared by groups. Very forward-thinking.

Next attended a seminar on NetBoot and got more than I bargained for. Wanted to learn the fundamentals of disk imaging and restoration, either locally from FireWire drives or over the network, but they assumed an audience with 10 years experience using rsync, revrdist, ASR, and friends – it was the most technical Mac conference I’ve been to. The author of Carbon Copy Cloner was on the panel – fascinating guy, and so committed. Good timing – I’m about to image and restore all the Greenhouse Macs, and this was a perfect intro.

More than 90% of people who attend trade shows just wander the booths, never go to the seminars, but there are so many smart people running the sessions. If you can pull the bread together, it’s usually worth it.

Music: Norah Jones :: Seven Years
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Gift Horse in the Mouth

Does the fact that all these iApps are free mean that I have no right to point out their flaws? Aren’t I being ungrateful, looking a gift horse in the mouth? How can I complain about free products? I’m at liberty to go pay for a competing product, right?

Umm, right. Except for one thing. Like I pointed out in Tales of a BeOS Refugee last December and as Andy Inhatko says in this month’s MacWorld, there is no competition possible in the fields occupied by the iApps. Or precious little anyway. What incentive does a software vendor have to create a kick-ass audio database for OS X when Apple already hit that one right out of the park?

None. It’s exactly the same as the situation under Windows. Who can make a living developing Office software, or a mail client, or a browser for Windows? Microsoft has completely sewn-up and extinguished those markets. As good as the iApps are, Apple has to realize that they’re doing the exact same thing – cutting off limbs all around them.

That said, there are older image database apps out there, like iView MediaPro (the “i” does not imply Apple kinship) which I may try out soon.

Music: The Clash :: Mensforth Hill