I just began listening to episode 95 of pauldotcom and was glad to hear that they enjoyed my email. Here’s the complete email I sent them:
Well, something must have changed since I last communicated with you
(see http://therning.org/magnus/archives/257). I’m not sure what
though. I heard you when you were on the Linux Reality audio cast and
thought I’d check you out again, just to see what you were up to. Well,
episode 92 (both parts) was bloody brilliant, episode 93 was good too,
and now I’m halfway into episode 94. I have no recollection of the
earlier episodes being this organised and good. At some point when I
wasn’t listening you must have learnt to rock!
I enjoy the tech segment. The amount of banter is down and the episodes
move along a lot more than I remember. No offence to Twitchy, but I’m
not sad he isn’t as involved any more, you know, Kramer is brilliant but
Seinfeld just wouldn’t be a good show if he were in each and every
scene. Twitchy has more of a “celebrity guest” personality… The only
criticism I have, and this is pushing it I know; given my walk to work
I’d prefer each episode to be around 60 minutes, rather than 80-90
Keep it up!
/M
PS I’m planning on posting this email on my blog. I’ll put any reply
from you on there as well.
Reading my email on the show sure beats any reply they could have sent by email At some point I have to go back and check out the other podcast I stopped listening to…
Today I had a long and interesting discussion about what is “more free”, GPL or the BSD license. I did a little searching on the internet afterwards and found the following posts quite illuminating:
I just received an email from KLM UK. I have probably given them my email address and thereby my consent to them sending me “informative emails”. Still, I think their words sound a bit hollow when the link to unsubscribe takes me to doubleclick:
If you do not wish to receive future communication from us click here to unsubscribe. KLM is firmly committed to respecting your privacy. We don’t share your information with any third party without your consent.
My wife managed to win an iPod Touch a the office Christmas party. I got more excited than her; she actually suggested we put it on eBay unopened, of course I simply had to open it and play a little. After a weekend I came to the conclusion that, to me, it was a piece of useless crap that we should try to sell ASAP. Luckily we managed to sell it on to someone who’s recently had a large sip of the Apple Kool-Aid. Here’s what I found out anyway, let’s start with the least bad.
The UI
It’s cute, very cute. Clicking icons, typing in the “keyboard” all very enjoyable. I tried out the zooming in Safari, beautiful. Then the cracks started showing, I can’t zoom everywhere, suggesting that it’s implemented on an application level. Why not provide that on a system level instead, so that all applications have it automatically? I also found it really irritating that there’s no copy-paste (apparently a common gripe). After I broke the jail of the 1.1 firmware and installed a audio cast client I had to use a pen and paper to copy URLs from Safari in order to subscribe. Poor!
Browsing the web
Getting network connectivity was a breeze. The UI of Safari is cute and the zoom is really handy. The first thing that irritated me was that there’s no way of saving things. Yes, there’s WiFi available in many large cities nowadays, but there’s still a lack of wireless connectivity outside of cities. So, my hope of being able to look for things while online and read while offline was a no-starter. I also would have liked to download videos and watch them later, on the other hand, and this is such a ridiculous mistake by Apple since it basically breaks the web, there’s no support for flash. Yes, the format that basically everybody uses to post videos online is not supported! Oh, but there’s YouTube you say? Well, on to that then…
The YouTube application
The only way of watching videos on YouTube is through this application. Surprisingly it’s not possible to use Safari to browse around using YouTube’s well-known web interface and find interesting things to watch that way. No flash support, remember?
On top of this there is no way of saving a video to watch it later. Again, listen Apple, there are areas that don’t have WiFi connectivity in the world!
Loading things on to the iPod Touch
I found this to be most disappointing. The only way to get stuff, music/video/audio cast, on to it one must use iTunes. There are rumours of support in bleeding edge libgpod, but by this time I didn’t bother with trying that out. What I did try was breaking the jail, installing OpenSSH, mounting it using SSHFS just to find out I only had read access in the versions of gtkpod/libgpod that’s in Debian Sid. Then I tried installing iTunes in WINE, but gave up after a few hours of trying to get that working. The next attempt was to use VMWare, using an evaluation license for Workstation I got as far as installing iTunes just to find out that it wouldn’t accept the iPod Touch when I plugged it into the USB port. After all of this, and my other findings, I didn’t think it’d be worth compiling libgpod from source.
Other bits and pieces
I’ve heard the calendar and contacts can only be synced to a Mac. Of course I couldn’t try it, since I don’t have a Mac.
The iTunes application on the device itselfi only contains just enough to spend money on the iTunes store. No way to subscribe to audio casts that I could findii.
Conclusions
I’ve never thought quite as much about the words “proprietary” and “technological silo” as I did while playing with the iPod Touch. The experience has put me off all Apple products, sure they are beautiful and cute, but to me they aren’t usable.
And to show that things are lazy we change handleE:
handleE e = do
putStrLn $ "Caught something: " ++ (show e)
return []
Then we can map errorP onto a list like this:
> CE.catch (return $ map errorP [Just 17, Just 42, Nothing, Just 666]) handleE
[17,42,*** Exception: Got Nothing
In neither cas I saw the behaviour I was expecting. A chat on IRC showed that others see this as natural behaviour, explained by laziness. It wasn’t until a night’s sleep that I realised that there still was something that bothered me about that explanation. Another explanation would be that catch isn’t special. At first I didn’t realise I expected it to be special; I expected it to somehow wrap the evaluation of its first argument so that no matter when it was evaluated any exception raised would be caught. As far as I can see this would be no small feat if laziness is to be preserved. It would require catch to be special.
So, what does this mean in practice? Well, here are my thoughts. One needs to think carefully about where using catch makes sense in a program. It has to be inside IO, a well-documented fact, but it also has to cover something that isn’t lazy since it then will have no effect at all. My gut feeling is that catch is useful “in the large”, with that I mean as a sort of catch-all “high up” in the program, e.g. in main. That means its usefulness in libraries is limited (except for IO heavy libs, like FFI bindings to C), it should also probably not be used like try-catch often is used in Python.
I’ve since taken a look at the ErrorT monad transformer and it seems it behaves like I expected catch to. That’s for another post though.
At some point I have to go back and check out the other podcast I stopped listening to…![[Digg]](http://therning.org/magnus/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Reddit]](http://therning.org/magnus/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.png)