shwons.com

Akon didn’t go to school

On buying a diamond mine in South Affrica,

I always felt like if you get to a point where you’ve got enough money to invest in something real, you gotta invest in anything that’s related to a natural resource because that’s gonna be here forever - so you might as well invest in something that’s gonna be here, rather than invest in something that’s gonna wear out. I know for a fact that these are going to be selling forever.

Umm, yeah, natural resources couldn’t possibly run out. The drug dealer turned prophet, a lumanary of such work as Smack That and I Wanna Love You, also doesn’t belive in blood diamonds,

I don’t even believe in conflict diamonds,” he announces. “That’s just a movie. Think about it. Ain’t nobody thought about nothing about no conflict diamonds until the movie came out. Where was all that shit before the movie?

Amnesty International hold a rather different view.

From and 2007 Indi article

More on the Apple-Whitehouse affair

Either Steve Jobs has been repalced with the ghost of Mary Whitehouse, or Apple are having real difficulties understanding the internet all of a sudden.

Just been pointed to this article from engadget.com:

Apple’s just reached a whole new level of stupidity in App Store approval shenanigans: the Tweetie 1.3 update was just rejected for displaying “offensive language” in its Twitter trend search view. Right, not for offensive language in the app itself, but for offensive language on Twitter — an insanely strict new standard that could conceivably be used to reject each and every iPhone Twitter client out there. (And if you haven’t noticed, there are quite a few iPhone Twitter clients.) Hell, Apple might as well reject the next versions of Safari and Mail, since they can display dirty words too — and let’s not forget the awful things people are doing with Notes and the camera. Better lock it down.

What?!

Apple gets all Mary Whitehouse on Trent Reznor

Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor is one of a few artists who seems to be embracing technology to get his music out there. That’d normaly be a good thing, except Apple don’t see it like that.

Their latest application, which seem to allow you to stream the latest album to your iPhone whilst also providing some soical networking featurs has been rejected, here’s the response from Apple:

Thank you for submitting nin: access to the App Store. We’ve reviewed nin: access and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it contains objectionable content which is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

The objectionable content referenced in this email is “The Downward Spiral”. Since the app is live on the App store, please make the necessary changes to the application as soon as possible, and resubmit your binary to iTunes Connect. Thank you

Trent’s response sums it all up:

Now, “The Downward Spiral” the album is not available anywhere in the iPhone app. The song “The Downward Spiral” I believe is in a podcast that can be streamed to the app.
Thanks Apple for the clear description of the problem - as in, what do you want us to change to get past your stupid fucking standards?
And while we’re at it, I’ll voice the same issue I had with Wal-Mart years ago, which is a matter of consistency and hypocrisy. Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and “clean” versions be made for them to carry. Bands (including Nirvana) tripped over themselves editing out words, changing album art, etc to meet Wal-Mart’s standards of decency - because Wal-Mart sells a lot of records. NIN refused, and you’ll notice a pretty empty NIN section at any Wal-Mart. My reasoning was this: I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any “indecent” material for sale - but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film “Scarface” completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?
You can buy The Downward Fucking Spiral on iTunes, but you can’t allow an iPhone app that may have a song with a bad word somewhere in it. Geez, what if someone in the forum in our app says FUCK or CUNT? I suppose that also falls into indecent material. Hey Apple, I just got some SPAM about fucking hot asian teens THROUGH YOUR MAIL PROGRAM. I just saw two guys having explicit anal sex right there in Safari! On my iPhone!
Come on Apple, think your policies through and for fuck’s sake get your app approval scenario together.

He makes a very good point. Come on Apple.

BeautifulSoup

Wrote this a while back and never posted it. Update at the end.

I’ve been meaning to do something with this library for a while, but have never had the time, or suitable idea. I just wanted to get under the hood and find out what it was all about.

Last Friday I was talking to Simon who runs ticketsource.co.uk. It’s a dead simple service for selling event tickets. I was telling Simon he should have ticketsource tweet the events as they’re added to the site. I’m not sure what his final thoughts were, but it haden’t happened by Saturday morning, so I wrote it myself using Beautiful Soup.

BeautifulSoup creates a dictionary of nodes. You then need to know were the data / information you want is in that dictionary (or dictionary of dictionaries), and pull it out. So if every page is marked-up identically, you can setup some ‘queries’ and pull the info out everytime. This works like a chram. BeautifulSoup also tries its best to work with malformed markup and bad encoding, and does it very well. I’m most impressed.

UPDATE: I’d post some code, except Simon came to his senses and built this functionality into ticket source in an official way. You can follow @ticketsource, or

Less is moar

I had stopped using Facebook recently, Twitter provides me with most of what I need. But I do have friends on Facebook who don’t use Twitter and I still want to keep up to date with them. So, following what seem to be becoming a fashionable trend, I’ve pruned my Facebook friends down to 80. I expected to be closer to 50.

I don’t see that the new, real time Facebook, lends itself to lots of friends, there’s just too much going on, most of which is totally irrelevant to what you’re doing or what you want to be doing. This could in part be intentional, certainly a lot has been made about how Facebook could better target advertising if you had a small group of friends. Personally, I’m not so sure, but it does provide a better experience for me, and that is important.

Instantly, the live feed becomes totally relevant. I interact with all of these people on at least a weekly, most of them daily basis. These are the people I’m interested in, the people that make my life a richer place to be.

It’ll be interesting if Facebook introduces stalker like functionality. I’m not sure people will want to be seen to be stalking lots of people but only being stalked by a few, this doesn’t really seem an issue on Twitter, it’s not an issue for me. Personally, I don’t think it’ll work for them. If they do release it, there’ll be an uproar form the user-base and they’ll remove it.. this seems to be a trend for them, Beacon, Privacy Policy etc..

Anyway, I suggest you drop those people from Facebook who you don’t really know, and enjoy a much better experience.