Blogging things

I am now going to be posting new blogs and things at blog.tobycurl.com instead of here (it's not like I most much at the moment anyway). It's hosted on tumblr, so should hopefully take away some of the annoyances that posting to here has currently.
I will use this site as my testing site, which it has pretty much always been.

Super Soldiers/Robot Servants

The inherent flaw with creating Super Soldiers/Robot servants seems to be the need for free well. If they don't have free will then they are just a bit useless. The problem with this is they either go crazy and kill everyone, or kill everyone on their own side and defect (depending on how evil their master/s are in the current situation/story/plot).

I don't have a solution to the problem, just pointing out why it's probably a bad idea.

Edinburgh Fringe 6th-8th August 2010

At the weekend I managed to see the grand total of four shows and also seemed to walk around most of Edinburgh in the process. The weekend with some random photos (taking them in the gigs wouldn't have been polite really), in the order it happened:

Friday 6th:
We went to see The Penny Dreadfuls, 18:00 today.
Three guys doing sketch comedy, Humphrey Ker, David Reed and Thom Tuck. This was overall very funny, the sketches were mostly all good, a few let it down part way through, with a couple of outstanding ones near the end. It did sometime feel a little disjointed but the whole show and a couple of clever sketches running throughout ending in a clash of the two. Worth seeing.



Saturday 7th:
I was supposed to see four shows today however, one was cancelled due to a power cut (which I saw on Sunday and feel was the funniest of the three) and then I missed the next one due to going for lunch (The Leftovers, 15:20, which from what I heard from my friends that went was a great show, so I intend to catch this one soon).



The first of the other two shows was Nish Kumar + Friends, 16:45. A free standup gig which turns out would have been worth paying for. We got there just in time and got the last seats, was packed! Nish is one half of the The Gentlemen of Leisure (see Sunday below) and did a very good half hour of standup. It was a little shaky at points, but some of that we can attribute to tech issues before he started, overall very funny. His friend for today was a guy from Finland (?). Pretty dry tone to this one, but very funny, delivery was good, and I think he played on his accent a little to help with the jokes. Well worth a free hour of your time.



The other show today was Paul Zerdin - Sponge fest revisited. If you haven't heard of him (I hadn't until recently), Paul Zerdin is a ventriloquist. I do feel this was the weakest of the three. I think the puppets put me off, which doesn't bode well for a ventriloquist show. It just felt too silly and he seemed to constantly reference they were actually puppets, not people, which I didn't like a whole lot. He also did a little bit without any puppets that was much funnier, but that obviously can't be the whole show for a ventriloquist. If you like that sort of thing then by all means go for it.



Sunday 8th:


The cancelled show from Saturday, The Gentlemen of Leisure Present: An hour of too much culture, 13:40. I do think this was the best show of the weekend for me (I know the guys performing, so I might be a little biased, but even if this has clouded my judgement I don't think I would have been laughing so much if it wasn't funny). The Gentlemen of Leisure consist of Nish Kumar and Tom Neenan. It was well structured, it was coherent and most of all it was funny. One theme running throughout; so it didn't feel disjointed like The Penny Dreadfuls did occasionally, a couple of more random, but still fitting, sketches in the middle and ending well. They performed well especially with the pervious days show being cancelled (afterwards we learned the power had only come back on 10 minutes before this show!). The one thing they could have done with was a bigger audience; so get down to this one. UPDATE: Here is the Scotsman's glowing review if you don't believe me.

And now for the rest of the random photos throughout the day:

Two months later at a special Apple event...

Halfway through Steve's presentation:

"...and that's iTranslate. The new universal translator from Apple coming this holiday season.

Next, now this is something really special, I am pleased to announce the next generation of programming languages. Something we like to call "RealCode".

Now remember two months ago when I said at the iPhone press conference that we couldn't fix the iPhone 4 antenna issue with software? Well it turns out we can, with RealCode.

Let me show you.

We have created this little app called 'AntennaFix.app'. You run it directly on the device. Like so. *the app opens and closes and deletes itself*.

Now, I'm sure you are wondering what just happened. Well let me tell you. With RealCode you can create anything for the real world, with code. Hence ReadCode. This little app just created a micro-polymer layer over the phone. *Steve smiles and soaks up the applause*. You can now even drop it in a tank of water and it will be fine.

Let's look at some other uses. You can write a RealCode app to make the dinner: *Steve creates a turkey on stage to much surprise*; what about a jet pack: *jet pack appears*; and even a cat with Smarties tubes on it's legs: *boom, a cat with smarties tubes on it's legs appears and proceeds to walk around the stage*. Isn't that just wonderful. Now what about getting rid of all this? Just hit delete. *everything vanishes* It's that simple.

Release date? Today! *much applause*
For only $99 per licence. *even more applause*
It will run on all Mac platforms and the code can run on any Apple device. We are working on bringing it to other platforms.

Now we gave it to some really great developers two weeks ago and they have already created some really great apps. Let's take a look..."

Only three days later, the world would fall into chaos leaving only a handful of people to defend themselves against the zombie hordes created with RealCode. A former Apple developer, who requested to remain anonymous, would tell us he informed the Apple management of the potential for zombie hordes early into development. Our request for comment from Apple would then be ignored and the head of Steve Jobs in a jar would inform us they had no such warning, but did offer free shelters to all developers with a RealCode licence.

My guesses about the iPhone 4 issues

I feel like the signal problem was identified in the US, where from what I understand, AT&T have a pretty poor network and that the signal drop from holding the phone wrong was then reported. Since then, everyone has tried the "death grip" with varying degrees of "success" in reproducing the issue. Sometimes it's seen everywhere, sometimes only in a few places with low signals, sometimes not at all, and sometimes a better signal is gained. It also seems that people are seeing the signal drop a little but not enough to drop a call. This of course could well be faulty hardware or a design flaw, but you would think (and hope) that this would have been tested pretty extensively, especially as the issue was apparently brought to the attention of Apple management early on. All these stories are making people now actively looking for a signal drop and so it is obviously getting reported more and more, even if it's only loosing a bar or two and seems to be getting blown out of proportion.

At the weekend I was in Bristol still with my 3GS, the signal in the hotel room was pretty bad, holding the phone in my hand (like the picture in the engadget post above) I had a very poor signal and no 3G, not even Edge. Having shifted the phones position in my hand to just the finger tips by chance, I gained a bit of signal and 3G, thus in my accidental test got the death grip issue with my 3GS. Having now got my iPhone 4, I briefly tried the death grip but nothing happened, but O2's signal in Edinburgh has been really good everywhere which leads me to believe that the signal strength is the major factor in the problem.

Those are just my wild guesses and who knows what's really going on. I don't know anything.

Let's see what Mr Jobs has to say later on.