Linked List: August 14, 2008

Thursday, 14 August 2008

Jackass of the Week: John Beyer 

From a story in The Daily Mail on MadWorld, an upcoming violent game for Wii:

John Beyer, director of Mediawatch-uk, said: “This game sounds very unsavoury.

‘I hope the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) will view this with concern and decide it should not be granted a classification. Without that it cannot be marketed in Britain. What the rest of world does is up to them. We need to ensure that modern and civilized values take priority rather than killing and maiming people.”

I have problems enough with mandatory rating labels of any sort for games or movies. But hoping for a game not to be rated at all and therefore unmarketable? Despicable.

APC’s BlackBerry Bold Review 

David Flynn reviews the new BlackBerry Bold.

Nancy Heinen Settles With SEC for $2.2 Million 

She admits no guilt or wrongdoing. Are there any remaining loose ends regarding Apple’s options backdating?

Use the Best Available Ampersand 

Dan Cederholm, on applying a bit of Robert Bringhurst’s advice regarding ampersands to the web.

PhotoCalc 1.0 

New $3 iPhone app from Adair Systems:

PhotoCalc offers handy calculations for professional or hobbyist photographers working in the studio or in the field. PhotoCalc provides exposure reciprocation, depth of field and hyper-focal distance calculations, and flash exposure calculations.

(Via Charlie Sorrel.)

Aquaman Is a Pescepublican 

John August on the political leanings of superheroes:

I’d argue that the thematic success of comic book characters, and comic book storylines, comes from how closely they can approach the line separating Real from Too Real, without crossing it.

BusinessWeek: ‘What’s Behind the iPhone 3G Glitches?’ 

Peter Burrows, reporting for BusinessWeek:

Complaints over dropped calls and choppy Web connections on Apple’s iPhone 3G have sparked a wave of debate in the blogosphere over the root cause of the problems. Two well-placed sources tell BusinessWeek.com the glitches are related to a chip inside Apple’s music-playing cell phone. The sources add that Apple plans to remedy the problems through a software upgrade rather than through a more disruptive step, such as a product recall.

The news reinforces analysis by Richard Windsor of Nomura Securities, who said in an Aug. 12 report that the problem involves a communications chip made by Munich-based Infineon Technologies.

The 3G networking glitches may well be real, but it’s worth pointing out that Richard Windsor is the same jackass who issued a report a year ago about the supposedly faulty “film” on the iPhone touchscreen, when in fact there was no such film.

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninjas 

Jeff Atwood on the rise of cross-browser JavaScript frameworks:

But now something else is happening, something arguably even more significant than “JavaScript now works”. The rise of commonly available JavaScript frameworks means you can write to higher level JavaScript APIs that are guaranteed to work across multiple browsers. These frameworks spackle over the JavaScript implementation differences between browsers, and they’ve (mostly) done all the ugly grunt work of testing their APIs and validating them against a host of popular browsers and plaforms.