Saw Quantum of Solace with my wife. Daniel Craig is no Bond, I’m sorry to say.
The last Bond was Pierce Brosnan. He was the ultimate spy, glamorous, elegant, super-efficient—-in other words, nothing like a real spy. We watched Bond movies like fairy-tales, because that’s exactly what they were. Laser-equipped satellites, tanks, liquid nitrogen, huge antennas, stealth boats, spaceships, and all those cool and wacky gadgets Q had supplied that you just couldn’t buy in a shop, created enjoyable movie experience.
Now, it is just another day in the hard life of a mundane special agent. Q is nowhere to be found, replaced with lots of product placement. M is tired of looking at ever-changing Bond (“Has he regenerated again? Oh wait, wrong show”). The plot was about water?! Great. Looked like a bunch of separate clips hastily thrown together, rather than a coherent story.
The gadgets? OK, that one was Microsoft Surface, you can have one for what, $16000? And Bond’s phone, Sony Ericsson?! My iPhone is way cooler.
Severely disappointed. The trainwreck that was Star Wars Episode I (and II, and III) comes to mind.
Actually, my wife did. Not for work, mind you. The only Windows “machine” we have in our home is a BootCamp installation for gaming on son’s Mac mini. My wife is a student, and there is currently an offer for every UK student with .ac.uk email address to buy Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional for £30.
It is impossible to find the link to the offer on the Microsoft site. Their search comes with no results when you search for ‘student’ or ‘education’. I had to google it, which is pretty poor indicator of Microsoft website usability (though this is nothing new). Or maybe it’s me, foolishly expecting websites to be simple and easy.
We entered the email address and got the email with the actual store link. Chose Windows 7 Professional Upgrade instead of Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade (a no-brainer since the cost was the same £30, an interesting business plan there which I don’t get). Made the purchase and got a product code and two links: one to an ISO (or so we thought) and an EXE that one was supposed to run in Windows to upgrade it. Now, our plan was to reinstall from scratch as it was a 64-bit version and we had a Windows 7 32-bit beta. But there came the surprise: the link to ISO was actually a link to an ISO downloader program which can only be run from Windows, and we purchased it from a Mac. An upgrade indeed.
Little annoyances like this is why I try to minimise my contacts with Microsoft software, at least when I’m not at work.
Just finished watching Dr. Who Easter Special with my son. The overall impression was positive, my 11-year old seemed to like it. My impressions, in no particular order (hopefully spoiler-free, but beware if you haven’t seen it yet):
- The cops-vs-robbers perspective was backwards.
- It seems to be the rule that for each good CG special effect/monster in Dr. Who we get a totally cheesy one.
- If something can withstand a wormhole, how can it be taken down using an ordinary weapon?
- If you are using a homing missile against something, why try to shoot it down with a pistol at the same time?
- A high rank and a gun in your hand can mess with your head.
- Crazy scientists are cool. “Doctor! I’m ready” “For what?” “I don’t know, you tell me!”
I have released CocoaFob, a free set of Objective-C and Ruby code snippets for secure asymmetric registration key generation and verification based on DSA, and also for supporting custom URL schemes to enable automatic application registration by clicking on a link.
I’m using it for Decloner and the Store (an instance of Potion Store).
If you need to generate and verify registration for your Cocoa application, and especially if you are using Potion Store, give CocoaFob a try. I’d appreciate any bug reports, comments and suggestions.
Git clone URL: git://github.com/gbd/cocoafob.git
We use PayPal Web Payments Standard (WPS), which is not supported out-of-the-box in Potion Store. So the next choice was Google Checkout. I started plugging it into Potion Store and reached cart submission stage when it became apparent that since we’re in the UK, we can only submit carts in GBP. I wanted to specify the price in USD, which Google Checkout didn’t allow. So I had to postpone it and go back to PayPal.
As I was reading PayPal documentation and browsing Potion Store source code, I discovered that the only part of Website Payments Pro (WPP) that required monthly payments was credit card processing (which we weren’t going to support for now), and you could just use PayPal Express Checkout option with the store out-of-the-box. Granted, the buyer experience wasn’t as great as with WPP, but it’d have to do for now. I set up PayPal Sandbox accounts and got the certificates.
Tip: when you get your API certificate from PayPal, look inside the *_pem.txt file. You’ll see it contains both private key and certificate. In the Potion Store config/paypal.yml file you can use this file as both API key and certificate file. OpenSSL is clever enough to pick the right part.
I also started implementing support for Website Payments Standard (WPS) by looking at Kenneth Ballenegger’s notes but put it on hold for now. Maybe I’ll go back to it some time.
