Posts by Ben Kingston
TheTAPIR’s Staff Have Hissy Fit at Each Other
Photo by yum9me
Our apologies. We are afraid you have been caught up in a minor spat between our very own Ashley and Imogen. Ashley’s hatred for Smashing Magazine (and in fact, everything) and Imogen’s need to be lovely to everyone have caused a chaotic rift in the offices of TheTAPIR and it has fallen upon myself and the management to try to rectify this tiff. To that extent Ashley and Imogen are now both sitting in the corner until they have thought about what they have done.
As soon as they are both able to apologise to each other and have a cuddle, we expect our normal service of relentless (and potentially career damaging) web celebrity journalism to resume.
Everyone is stupid. And arrogant. No, wait…
Photo by Aislinn Ritchie
As is common these days, Paul Graham had a good old fashioned moan about Apple’s app store approval process. Choice excerpts include “The App Store is an ongoing karma leak”, “they [Apple] don’t understand software” and “they [Apple] get away with maltreating developers”. Joining the ranks of such as Trent Reznor and John Gruber, Graham is not alone in his complaints.
Following on from the delay in approval of necessary bug fixes, new apps being rejected because they show unfiltered Internet content (like, uh, Safari) and other apps being rejected seemingly at random – one company even tried emailing Teh Steve directly. Since they had infringed an Apple trademark in their app’s name (iPodRip) Jobs’ reply seemed obvious, and you have to wonder why these people thought it would be okay to doing the equivalent of naming an app “iApple”. (Gizmodo reports in more detail here.)
Peter-Paul CKoch responded to Graham’s seemingly reasonable points by stamping his feet and declaring that everyone is stupid. Faruk Ateş followed up declaring that they’re not stupid, but couldn’t let it go without declaring them arrogant instead. Dion Almaer responded saying that they are neither stupid nor arrogant. PPK followed up saying that maybe everyone is not stupid, but declared that they might become stupid later and so he probably wasn’t really wrong after all. Finally (so far) Ateş followed up the reply to the follow up to the reply to the follow up seemingly unsure to whether or
not everyone is stupid and/or arrogant. However, all these authors seem to have been careful to be apologetic to each other throughout this process and are probably now having a cuddle somewhere.
We think they’re stupid though. And arrogant. Actually, sorry, we take that back.
No, we love you the most. No, you hang up.
Wil Harris is full of hate
Photo by theboybg
You may, like us, have been wondering why it has been such a long time since Wil Harris has appeared as a guest on This Week in Tech. Perhaps his new marriage is taking up a lot of his time (mentioned by Harris before the death of his blog in favour of Twitter)? Perhaps he is busy with the biggest IPTV network you have never heard of? Or perhaps he is just catching up on episodes of The Wire.
TheTAPIR can at last exclusively confirm that the reason Harris has been avoiding appearances on TWiT is that he is nearing the end of his tether with Leo Laporte, and does not want to engage in violence before the public. Laporte cannot help but assume inexcusably bad accents whenever he has the opportunity, and every visit from Harris results in exhibitions of this behaviour.
“Not only is it 2 in the morning, guvnor – but he’s making these bloody voices at me n’all! I can ‘ardly Adam and Eve it. I’ve got huge dentist bills from grinding me teef to stop me effing and blinding at ‘im.” grumbled Harris. “And you fink ‘is British accent is bad? If he ever has a Swedish person on that show, he’s going to get cut.”
No-one knows what Google Wave is for
Photo by niallkennedy
Google have given several demonstrations of Google Wave now, despite it not working properly, and are getting positive coverage in the media. Self-congratulatory smiles abound as the team looks immensely pleased with themselves while text dynamically updates itself in real time, and users work and collaborate together on blog posts, wiki entries and presentations.
As is common in our industry, nobody seems keen to be the first to admit that they have no idea what Google Wave is for. We questioned Lars Rasmussen on the subject, but he neatly side-stepped and distracted us with Firefly references and the endless use of the word “shiny”.
“But, what is it?” we asked to the uncomfortable shifting of many in the room. “Did you see when I typed ’shiny’?” replied Rasmussen, “look, it spell-checked it and everything!” Reassured, the audience nodded confidently.
Rasmussen pointed at his chest to a susurrus of “ooh” and “ahh” from the crowd. “Also, it has this pretty logo. So I hope that’s cleared that up for you.”
John Resig sulks at the BBC
Photo by sgluskin
John Resig completely failed to hide his bitterness over BBC Glow as he bitched on Hacker News. After throwing all of his toys out of the pram he whined incessantly until his fanboys stepped in and took over. “It’s just water under the bridge at this point” grumbled Resig.
Jeffrey Zeldman tries to write something sensible. Universe ruins it.
Photo by kallepa
Jeffrey Zeldman wrote a blog post today about the death of XHTML 2. Naively he expected some kind of intelligent debate on how this positively affects the future of HTML 5 and gives web standards a clearer path forwards. Unfortunately 99% of the web development community still fail to grasp what HTML 5 is, but this didn’t stop them from weighing in with their opinions on the subject.
Comments such as “WAT!?!?!?!”, “Wait, this isn’t news about Michael Jackson?” and “WTF?! jkz” cleared everything up. What had in fact happened was a crossed hyperlink between YouTube and Zeldman’s site. People actually thought they were commenting on this video.
In the aftermath that followed, this post by Mark Pilgrim leaped into existence, and also completely failed to clarify anything at all. Although it was responsible for a few pairs of bleeding ears.