simonb.com: blog > articles from April, 2006

Guy Kawasaki’s latest top ten list is for engineers. Ouch! 

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The Economist has a survey on “New Media” Where have I heard that term before?

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Lots of buzz and fuss on the net generated from this article by Barry Fox on Philips’ patent application to disable the TV remote control via flags in the broadcast stream. Good ol’ Bazza. If you’ve got a DVD player you’ve probably already experienced this. Try fast-forwarding through the copyright notice that plays when the DVD is inserted. On lots of discs you can’t. This is part of the DVD spec. - the disc tells the player to ignore the FFwd command. Of course, the player can ignore the request - just as some players ignore…

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Here’s a video of Steve Jobs telling the Cupertino Council that Apple is building a new campus. He also tells them that Apple is their biggest tax payer and they should be happy that Apple is staying in Cupers. Oh, the star struck awkard grins on the councils faces. Apparently the proximity of Apple is not enough for the council to use QuickTime as their streaming video format - the council is using Windoze Media. Now that’s just not cricket.

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David Weiss has a very interesting tour of Microsoft’s Mac Labs.

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This weblog is (currently) running ExpressionEngine. I just had a bizarre problem: when I went to the home page it was only displaying a message saying “Invalid URI” Sometimes it would load part of the page though without the css. An intermittent problem - the hardest to track down. I searched around the forums and the net for why this could be - found nothing. Nothing changed as far as I know so it was a bit odd. There was also nothing obviously wrong in the logs. I fixed it by restarting Apache and MySQL - maybe only one of…

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China Unicom is launching a mobile email service called Redberry. 

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So last Saturday the Rolling Stones played in Shanghai. Here’s my notes on the gig. 

We arrive early and circle the concert hall several times. The concert hall is small - maybe a 9000 capacity - making this, probably, the smallest audience the Stones have played to in a long time. CNN (Richard funny voice) and MTV are there, interviewing concert goers. I know it’s MTV because they are screaming in to the camera. The tickets cost up to USD 500. It is almost exclusively expats. The Shanghai glitterati are out in force. There’s a row of…

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