Month: February 2004

Sometime recently Ananova stopped providing TV listings. “Oh no”, you might think, “what a tragedy”. Yet it is. Ananova was the only online source I knew of which produced (free) TV listings in XMLTV as well as the more usual HTML format.

This piece by Matt Biddulph from the end of last year details some of the work you can do to generate listings in RDF (from where of course, you could do things like create events in your RDF calendar).

So for now it looks like the only real alternative is to use the xmltv project to pull down xmltv sources and then pass them through to your app. It’s a shame though because the Ananova feeds gave some programme description as well as just the basic time, channel and title which the xmltv app gives you.

The slides and source code for Russell Beattie‘s J2ME presentation at ETech are available for download.

The code includes Hello World, a Google searcher, RSS reader and Amazon searcher. Nice stuff and an excellent resource for people looking to get started in mobile development.

Also nice to see a slide with “Don’t trust the emulator!” on it. 🙂

It seems that Johnny Rotten’s little outburst on “I’m desperate, make me a celebrity” drew 88 complaints from members of the public. I don’t get it – first of all it’s JOHNNY ROTTEN former singer of the Sex Pistols, punk icon and man generally famous for swearing, and then it’s AFTER THE WATERSHED and there’s even a WARNING before show about possible naughty language. Do people really have nothing better to do?

(oh, and he said “fucking cunts” *looks around naughtily*)

Until recently I’d forgotten how much Internet Explorer lags behind in the browser stakes from a user perspective as opposed to a developer perspective. No tabs, no mouse gestures, minimal customisation of menus. Rubbish. Of course, you can get MyIE2 to cure most of these ills, but then that comes with its own bloat, including over-complicated menus and preferences dialogs, inconsistent internal behaviour (such as how to close tabs) and (as far as I can see) a completely uncustomisable menu. Rubbish.

Interestingly, whenever I’m demoing the latest site I’ve put together to someone, it’s always under Firebird, and they never notice the difference from IE until I use a mouse gesture (I have the gesture trails turned on), at which point, to a man, they’ve all gone “hey, that’s good, is that IE?” at which point I go “Nah, it’s called Firebird, it’s a free download from the web, it’s really quick, too” which almost always sells them more on it than any lecture on web standards would.

I like Japan.

Well, I say I like Japan when what I really mean is that I think I’d like Japan, if I ever went. I mean, sure, I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone, or understand roads signs, or know where I am because I wouldn’t be able to read the street names. And OK, I’d probably hate the food because I’ve had a life of only eating a decidedly western diet; eating what I like, and in the quantities I like it. But none of this matters because Japan is cool.

Japan is cool, and they make all this cool stuff. Sony are Japanese, and they make the best-selling console in the world. Nintendo are Japanese, so are Sega. They all make cool games.

Anime too. Anime’s cool, and anime’s from Japan. So Japan is cool, and I like cool things, so I like Japan.

And so OK, I could wander around, not speaking to anyone, and not really know where I was going, but I’d see stuff, and that would be cool. I mean, I wouldn’t really know what I was seeing because I wouldn’t be able to read the signs, and I couldn’t ask anyone what the signs say because I still wouldn’t be able to speak the language, but that would be OK, because I’d be in Japan, and I like Japan.

So not knowing where I am, and not being able to speak the language means I might get lost once or twice as I’m wandering around staring at buildings I don’t know the name of, but that won’t matter because everything I see will be a new and exciting Japanese experience, and I might stumble across some weird old shop selling cute little furry animals that don’t like sunlight.

Not that I’d be able to buy one because I won’t be able to speak the language.

So you want to learn Japanese?