The Books – The Way Out (2010)

The Books are back! After four --- long --- years The Books return with The Way Out. An album upon which they've worked for a year and a half, it is a gradual evolution of their fantastic work of the early to mid 2000s. Familiar, yet daring in parts, The Way Out felt like 'more of the same' at times, with some notable exceptions (e.g. 'I Didn't Know That'). The 'experiment' that was Books keeps going; The Way Out may be interesting, true to The Books heritage, and evolved, but somehow the end-result is not as immediately attractive as their previous works.

Nokia. A Company in Denial.

Arrogant. Disoriented. Unfocused. Accurate characterisations of Nokia? Perhaps. Still, who'd have thought in the early 2000s that the market leader of mobile phones, one of the most innovative companies in its field that owned the European market would be the dying king of the 2010s; high volume sales of silly feature phones, low profit margins, a chaotic software ecosystem, little to no mindshare in the most important, lucrative segments. Perpetually in denial about its ageing Symbian stack, its schizophrenic Maemo/Meego stack, its unstable, ever-changing APIs and the amateurish, mediocre, unpolished user-experience its products provide. So many unappealing devices. A nervous acquisition of Navteq in 2008 for $8.1bn upon that the company never capitalised, while Google and Tomtom keep offering less while gaining so much more from their users (e.g. Ovi Maps has had free navigation for a while and no one seems to care). Its repeated failed attempts to create a mobile service ecosystem/platform (n-gage, MOSH and now Ovi). Prediction: With the N8 not being out until later this year and already looking like a device that should've been out in 2009, Nokia's future certainly looks bleaker than it thinks. Unless it wakes up, ditches Symbian for good and makes Meego something more than the mickey-mouse platform it currently is soon, I can't see how it will ever manage to compete with the super-polished iOS or the lightspeed-evolving Android. (The verdict is still out on Windows Phone 7)

Rails3 Critique Tidbit: html_safe, raw() and h.

One of the most annoying thing with Rails has always been how it provides for convenience at the expense of uncertain (and sometimes shady) abstraction implementations. It's a great framework for prototyping, yet there are reasons why quite a few people are skeptical about it. Nevertheless, in the truest tradition of Ruby, Rails provides a pretty clean way to do web application development. Rails 3, the latest incarnation of the framework builds upon a solid foundation, offering great improvements in many areas. But not everywhere. Take for example the html_safe string escaping that supersedes 'h'. In Rails 3, all input strings are automatically escaped, unless the developer passes the string through raw() before the string. That's fine, as it's bound to make sloppy developers safer by forcing them to go out of their way to leave the string unescaped. One of the issues with this, however, is how the old way of escaping, 'h', is still around in some cases: say when you want to render a link using link_to and you use raw to provide formatting to your link (via span) and include some part of user provided input (as found in the example provided in the xss and scripting screencast at 02:20), then you have to resort --- once again --- to using 'h'. This is confusing and inconsistent; if all strings are automatically escaped, you'd expect input variables to be automatically escaped too, even if included in strings using raw().

Changing our mode of thinking

Despite appearances, this goes well beyond Marxism vs. Capitalism (thinking in such one-dimensional terms would be degrading to anyone doing so). The issues that have surfaced through the world economic crisis of the late 2000s could not have been part of a 'socioeconomic' theory from the 19th century, the 1930s or the 1950s or even a modern one. The debate should not be about whether Hayek/Friedman were right (they never were), whether Keynes was, or whether Marx's arguments hold any water nowadays (some still do, but a lot of them clearly don't). Economic theories usually seem to fail exactly because they try to explain human activity in simplistic terms while struggling to prove a central thesis. That's not how the world works however. Deregulation has meant that the global finance sector has really gone wild in the past thirty years or so, and --- in the end --- markets and the financial deregulation can and have failed with detrimental results to families, businesses and societies as a whole. We don't need to explain everything or prove a meaningless thesis regarding markets, statism or innovation; we don't need to explain human frailty, culture or institutions. If anything, the central argument here is that a viable capitalism is one that exists under a fair, well-defined set of rules, one that fosters innovation and competition and one that respects the dignity of the vast majority of the population, the environment and those extra-economic aspects of human civilisation, like the arts, philosophy and history. We're nowhere close to having that at the moment. Is it possible? [via talos]

A Mobile Phone. An Internet Communicator. An iPod. Great Design, Bad Engineering

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4, admittedly a jaw dropping design of a mobile device, he talked about its antenna, part of the chassis of the device, calling it ‘really cool engineering’. What Steve Jobs, meant to say was ‘great design’, for the iPhone 4 antennæ are likely one of the worst engineering examples […]

DVB-T στην Ελλάδα. 51 μήνες αργότερα.

Τις τελευταίες δυο ημέρες έχουν αρχίσει οι μεταμεσονύχτιες ‘δοκιμαστικές’ προβολές της Digea, της εταιρίας-φορέα που έχουν, από κοινού, συστήσει τα εθνικής εμβέλειας ιδιωτικά κανάλια για την ψηφιακή εκπομπή τους. Δοκιμαστικές διότι επισήμως οι εκπομπή του ψηφιακού σήματος των ιδιωτικών καναλιών ξεκινά την ερχόμενη Παρασκευή, 18 Ιουνίου, περίπου 51 μήνες μετά την έναρξη εκπομπής ψηφιακού σήματος […]