tequila bomb

I am really excited to announce that the Canabalt source is now open and available, including the game code, Flixel for iOS, graphics, sound effects, and music:

First I wanted to explain why we would do such a thing.  First and foremost, the holiday charity fundraising effort in which we are participating, the Indie iPhone Holiday Sale, raised over $25,000 so far for Child’s Play, a wonderful organization that helps bring games and toys to children in hospitals around the world.

Canabalt is running on our first major attempt at porting Adam’s Flixel framework to iOS.  We had a lot of reasons for doing this, and the results have been… variable.  But if you are a Flixel (or even native Flash) developer, and you have a basic grasp of ObjectiveC, this source code might still be useful to you!  Hopefully we’ll be announcing a slightly less insane and more flexible version of Flixel in the near future (we always say that don’t we).

By their own admission the code is not the most polished in the world. I have not taken a look yet, but it should certainly be of interest to developers out there who would like to look inside a complete iOS project.

So overall not a bad little package of code for those interested in the Flixel framework, and how to put an App Store app together. Apparently this version is not even live on the App Store yet, and includes performance enhancements, and accordingly Retina Display support.

The Twitter stuff for Canabalt is missing deliberately, because of fears it may pose a risk of user data being exposed in the game itself. But they did previously share their iOS xAuth Twitter implementation.

“Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented,” the BlackBerry maker said in an emailed statement.

It said development of the battery was on schedule and its performance would be comparable to competitors.

Then why is the PlayBook launch being delayed by months?

And which “competitors” is its performance going to be “comparable” to? The 10+ hours of the iPad or the 6 hours of the Tab? Or heaven forbid the 1 or 2 hours of some less successful Android tablets?

As it stands, most magazines are charging more for the electronic version than for the print. WIRED, for example, costs $3.99 for every iPad issue, but if you get a subscription to the print version each costs about one dollar.

Other magazines are similarly priced.

The problem with this model is that it’s not “human compatible.” People understand intuitively that a print issue involves the chopping down, trucking and processing of trees, the use of expensive ink and heavy, labor-intensive manufacturing, packaging and distribution.

They also understand that none of these costs are necessary for an electronic edition distributed over the Internet.

Exactly.

It’s the same asinine strategy that record companies, movie moguls and tv execs keep trying to apply to digital downloads. I don’t buy eBooks for the exact same reason. If Amazon want to charge me the price of a physical book for a digital download then I might as well make them send me the damn book! I know that the writer is going to get the same paltry royalty whichever way I go. And I don’t give a damn about Amazon’s profits.

Richard Branson was closer to the right price and overall package with his ‘Virgin Project‘. But you can be sure his Christmas giveaway was not simply because he’s kind hearted.

Murdoch is heading the right way with his $1 ‘Daily’ News Paper idea. But when most newspapers are free with breakfast for travellers when staying in hotels and so forth they’ve still got a difficult market to crack. Perhaps an even cheaper monthly / weekly subscription model might be a better approach. Because ultimately $365 a year for a digital rag is not appealing to me at all – no matter how good it might be.

One thing is for sure. The price needs to be right, and the content needs to be much better than your average online news site, otherwise people will just surf the web in Mobile Safari. That’s what I do.

Analyst Shaw Wu of Kaufman Bros. issued a note to investors Tuesday warning that engineering issues with the BlackBerry PlayBook’s battery life could be the cause of delays. According to Wu, the PlayBook’s “relatively poor battery life of a few hours” needs improvement. By comparison, Apple’s iPad gets 10 hours of battery life and the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab gets 6 hours.

The battery issue could “require a bit of re-engineering,” said Wu, and is “likely why RIMM pushed out its launch to the May 2011 quarter.”

iOS and the Apple AX series of SoCs are the main components that give the iPad its excellent power management characteristics. Not to mention the huge battery which makes up most of the tablet’s innards. A well made dual core SoC can actually use less power than a single core SoC when engineered and managed correctly.

Unfortunately RIM (and they are not alone) are trying to rush to market with an acquired OS and non-specialised silicon. Some of Apple’s acquisitions and design decisions are starting to look very wise round about now.

This has relevance to what I said yesterday.

“Apple is on track to refresh the iPad by March and iPhone by late summer. A key component upgrade across these platforms will be a dual-core processor featuring a pair of 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 cores,” according to a research note released on Thursday by Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw.

I would be very surprised, albeit pleasantly so, if the iPad 2 we are all expecting to ship very early in 2011 sports a dual core ARM based processor.

Whilst Ashok’s logic is sound when he argues that the iPhone 5 and future iPads will need to go this way, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to predict that!

It is certain that we will see a dual core iPhone 5 later in 2011. Which will then likely be relatively quickly followed by yet another update to the iPad. This third update to the iPad will be over and above the “bump” early in 2011, which we already expect will sport at least one camera and more RAM in a “lighter and thinner” case.

Just a quick post before I gotto bed, the iPod Nano hasn’t been “jailbroken” as some sites claim, I do not have root access over the device. I did not “install” an app. I figured out how to remove them and insert a blank space into the springboard.

What I have also done is figured out a way for the iPod to boot with modified files (eg the SpingBoard Plist), bypassing the procedure it takes to stop this, I hope this will allow us to figure out a way to jailbreak it. I am primarily focusing on exposing some of the (for now) hidden features of the device.

The hack is simple. It may lead to greater things. I just don’t want people getting their hopes up that’s it’s jailbroken just yet or what I have done to be blown out of proportion.

I’ll write up more tomorrow. Any questions, contact me on twitter: @jwhelton

I’ve emailed Steve three times asking for an iPod Nano SDK! He’s got the emails. I know he’s got the emails. But he must have been too busy to get back to me!

Consequently I am very much looking forward to more revelations from Mr. Whelton. In the meantime here’s a video…

An international group of scientists are aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth – from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on Milton Keynes’ roads.

Nicknamed the Living Earth Simulator (LES), the project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world.

…

Generating the computational power to deal with the amount of data needed to populate the LES represents a significant challenge, but it’s far from being a showstopper.

If you look at the data-processing capacity of Google, it’s clear that the LES won’t be held back by processing capacity, says Pete Warden, founder of the OpenHeatMap project and a specialist on data analysis.

While Google is somewhat secretive about the amount of data it can process, in May 2010 it was believed to use in the region of 39,000 servers to process an exabyte of data per month – that’s enough data to fill 2 billion CDs every month.

A fascinating, and supremely ambitious project.

I would love to be involved on the imaging side of things.

At the risk of making light of the scope of something like this, I wonder if they’ve considered speaking to the “mice” that actually run the supercomputer that is Earth. Ultimately of course, thanks to Douglas Adams, we all know the final result of any simulation like this will yield the answer 42.

Eight years ago, Balsam was working as a marketer when he received one too many e-mail pitches to enlarge his breasts.

Enraged, he launched a website called Danhatesspam.com, quit a career in marketing to go to law school and is making a decent living suing companies who flood his e-mail inboxes with offers of cheap drugs, free sex and unbelievable vacations.

Balsam settles enough lawsuits and collects enough from judgments to make a living. He has racked up well in excess of $1 million in court judgments and lawsuit settlements with companies accused of sending illegal spam.

This guy is my hero. More power to him.

If only we could apply the same principals to TV adverts, excruciating-ly banal product placement strategies, telemarketers and bulk snail-mail.

This is a strong indication that the company is ready and willing to cut sites off if the law should demand it. It also raises the prospect that MasterCard could cut sites off even without a legal requirement to do so. The company recently came under fire from Anonymous over its decision to cease processing payments for WikiLeaks, something it was under no legal obligation to do.

It is amazing that it’s taken the various interested parties so long to think of this. But when they saw how quick financial institutions were to react to edicts to shut down payments to Wikileaks they must have thought all of their Christmas’s had come at once. MasterCard, Visa and most banking institutions are all too happy to take money from any source, it seems, until some pressure is applied. But then it’s not such a huge surprise to any of us that these organisations have very few moral ethics in reality.

Increasingly the way to deal with anything that does not fit with the ideals of big business or government is to “Send them to Coventry” with varying degrees of severity. Unfortunately, this is how we fracture societies, breed resentment, and ultimately end up with fringe groups with nothing to lose.

Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

What’s more, we now have Bank of America who will face some embarrassing revelations in the New Year (courtesy of Wikileaks) unilaterally, and completely coincidentally of course, trying to nobble their cash flow.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.

Why are you reading this? Go be with your loved ones.

And perhaps find a little time also to do something for someone less fortunate than you.