pk commented on my last entry:

Wait a minute… where did you back up that it *could* have been written on another platform? Maybe yes, maybe no but let’s keep the playing field level.

Well firstly I based it on the fact that I’ve written a similar application on OS X myself which seems like pretty convincing evidence.  Secondly you could create a mathematical proof based around the fact that it would be possible to develop such an application on a Turing machine, however I’m on holidays and that’s a lot of work.  Finally it’s pretty easy to provide commercial examples of this being done on both Linux and Mac OS X as pb did in the comments on Scoble’s blog:

Scoble claimed Microsoft was cool because someone else developed an app that ran on it, I pointed out it could have been developed on any OS and then Scoble says:

Ahh, at a higher cost. Which is the whole point of why Windows is used so many places.

Got some figures to back that up?  For someone who doesn’t even know who wrote the software I find it rather surprising that you’ve done a cost benefit analysis of developing that application on different platforms.  Anyone can pull claims out of thin air but you’d have to be crazy to just believe it without figures to back it up.  So Scoble, care to back up that rhetoric?

Scoble thinks that Microsoft is cool because someone wrote a cool application that runs on Windows.  Sigh.  Talk about taking credit for other people’s work.  I’m certain the same application could be created on Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X.  Windows is the boring underlay that just happened to be there, not what makes the application cool.  Maybe Jonathan Schwartz will blog about how the store could have avoided being locked into Windows by writing the application in Java, or RMS might write an open letter about how the application should be opensourced so that the community could improve it and reduce development costs for the store.  None of that will matter in the end though because the RIAA will sue it into obvilion because people are just listening to the music on the in-store computers instead of buying the CDs.

David Jericho complains that he had a hard time setting up a new Airport Express.  I’m not what caused his experience to go so badly but my parents managed to set up an Airport Express without any problems – I know because I’m using it right now.  You can troop out the old stalwart anti-Apple crap all you like but it doesn’t make it true.  Apple *does* play well with others, they go to great lengths to make their software compatible – it’s certainly not perfect but there’s a lot of good stuff in there to make compatibility easy – I know because I use Macs in cross-platform, cross-hardware situations on a daily basis.  Just because it didn’t do precisely the job you wanted it to on one particular occasion doesn’t mean that the company is crap.  Fortunately, Google had some good suggestions for David.

I wound up travelling north for Christmas to surprise my Mum and received a suitable excited response.  It was nice to see the whole family up here as well though the heat is a little much.  I’m up here for the next week so I’ll have to try and track down some old friends and catch up.  I know a few people have discovered this blog so feel free to give me a yell at my parents place.

It’s way behind schedule but my christmas shopping is finally done.  With a little luck the delivery boy will run really fast and cover the 1600km or so to get them to the right people before christmas.  It would be so much easier if I could just email physical goods….

Benjamin finally got back to our discussion about exceptions.  The summary there is a pretty accurate picture of my viewpoint and the history of the debate.

It seems Benjamin doesn’t like the fact that python throws exceptions when stuff goes wrong:

Fine. An exception is thrown. I don’t catch it. I get a stack trace on the command-line, and everyone’s happy right?

No. The pygtk main loop catches it, reports it, and keeps running.

I got hit with some comment spam today which used some rather amusing text to try to hide the links to fraudulent sites.  I’ve removed the comment but the text is well worth saving:

To help determine if you are qualified to be a programmer, take a moment to

try this simple test:

(1) Write down the numbers from zero to nine and the first six letters

of the alphabet (Hint: 0123456789ABCDEF).

Yak points out that the Wayback Machine has a cached copy of Technote 31, complete with the picture of the Dogcow.  Another animal saved from extinction!

It was extremely hot today in Brisbane and my house doesn’t have air conditioning or ceiling fans and I didn’t own a pedestal fan, though the house is very open and picks up breeze well.  Even so, it was definitely time to invest in a cooling device and it was hot enough to convince me to splurge on an air conditioner for my room.  That is of course until I wondered around the beautifully air conditioned store for an hour or two looking at price tags around $1000 for air conditioners that didn’t really suit my needs anyway.  Eventually I saw a pedestal fan for $15 and feeling nice and cool now anyway figured that would do.

I’ve defended Sun a fair bit in the past and I still think that there’s a huge number of people making mountains out of molehills and just looking for any chance to knock them down a peg, but even I can’t believe the bone-headedness required to release source code under a "look but don’t compile" license (Graham Hamilton was the initial source of the news for me and the official site is over at jck.dev.java.net).

You know, I often ignore click-through licenses because I’m lazy, however I’m always suspicious of software that feels it would be beneficial for me to change my browser’s homepage to some cluttered, ad-filled portal with no useful content – it’s just a pet hate of mine, even if you can easily turn off the option.  Since the MSN toolbar asks to set your homepage before it shows you the click-through license, I thought I’d flick through it quickly.  Section 2 is enough for me to not agree to it: