Nick Jackson

The MobileMe online login screen.

I thought it would all be good. The .Mac service wasn’t amazing, and certainly wasn’t worth the money for the yearly subscription unless you had more than one Mac and needed to keep them in sync. iDisk was slow, Sync routinely broke iTunes contacts syncing with my iPhone and so on. Then Apple announced MobileMe at WWDC, which looked absolutely amazing. Instant push updates between my Mac and iPhone - even my Windows installation - of calendars, contacts and any mail sent to my @mac.com (now @me.com) email address.

Trouble is, it doesn’t work and has been an amazing cock-up on Apple’s part, a company normally renowned for their flawless execuation of product launches.

It came alongside the iPhone 3G launch, which was predictably insane with demand far outstripping supply and the inevitable server issues as O2 and iTunes tried to handle thousands of people all activating at once. The iPhone 2.0 software update was good despite a small delay in pushing it to iTunes, but the iPhone and the new iTunes expects the MobileMe infrastructure to be in place.

It isn’t. It’s been up and down and unreliable for around 48 hours now, and I still don’t have the update which enables my Mac to talk to MobileMe, rendering it useless. Apparently there was a 1.1 patch hovering around briefly, but this has been pulled, despite some people still not getting 1.0 (Me included).

Guess it’s back to waiting.

So, the judge has decided that Jack Thompson is guilty of being an idiot (That’s technical law-speech), but now instead of the 10-year ban on practising law in Florida she is now recommending a permanent disbarment. On top of that, she’s recommending he pay $43,675 in costs as well.

Excellent.

Today our great and extraordinarily expensive VLE goes down for some upgrades to prepare it for the next academic year, where it’s taken out of the hands of the unfortunate computing students who have been giving it a thorough hammering and replaces the venerable and admittedly shit Virtual Campus.

Will we get features we have been asking for like RSS feeds of course content? Will we finally be able to use the message boards without Java? Will the university finally get it into its head that not everybody uses Word, and perhaps some form of PDF document would be far nicer? Will the academic staff decide on a single, sensible format for all the content so you don’t have to remember how each individual tutor stores their notes?

Probably not. Still, any update which requires the entire system to be taken offline for several hours is either going to be a nice improvement, a major behind-the-scenes set of tweaks, or a total cock-up. I await the results with great anticipation.

It is with joy I report that the BBC have started transcoding iPlayer content for the iPhone/iPod Touch. What this means is that whenever I am hooked up through a WiFi hotspot, I can get hold of any of the BBC’s programmes which are stored on the iPlayer.

There are also some other interesting points raised. Firstly, the ’security’ mechanism behind this is that the BBC does some user-agent checking. Basically, anything which can pretend it is an iPhone (Or Touch) can get the iPhone video stream. It was possible to rip the Flash video stream the BBC was using before, but it was fairly low quality. However, the H.264 stream given to the iPhone is higher quality, hence higher quality rips which are ready to go on an iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV.

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Please tell me it’s April 1st: California College Offers YouTube Class (FOX News)

It’s been 10 years and had countless official inquests and investigations. For the love of God, just accept them.

We’re now at the point with some people who believe that the whole thing was a conspiracy that any official report to the contrary is obviously a government-influenced cover-up of the truth. Since you will refuse to believe anything which doesn’t say “Yes, MI5, MI6 and Philip had everything to do with it and it was all an evil plot!” is there any point in pushing for more inquests?

Get over her people. Seriously.

The BBC have a blurb on… well. Go see for yourself. It made me laugh.

Wheelchair man gets highway ride

Pretty, huh? This is the official logo of the 2012 Olympic games, to be held in London. It comes in a variety of colours, and is designed to be animated in all manner of wierd and wonderful ways. The cost? A phenomenal £400,000 to the Wolff Olins agency, who apparently specialise in things like this. There’s one major problem though, which I will illustrate with the aid of an (Admittedly virtual) marker pen.

Yes, that’s the real logo underneath. Now go look at the the one without my scrawlings.

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