For those waiting with bated breath to be able to select “Add to Home Screen” while browsing Asteroid with an iPhone and get a sexy icon instead of a small thumbnail of the page, your wait is over. Sexy icon away.

This turns out to be extremely easy to accomplish.

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After digesting James Devlin’s articulate (and still ongoing) series on building a poker bot, an obvious near-term prediction can be made: prepare for a future of bot on bot action. That is, as more knowledge of building software that can play on-line poker masquerading as humans spreads, inevitably the ratio of bots to humans will increase. Far from causing the on-line poker industry to collapse, it will thrive under such conditions, gaining more and more “players”, even as the proportion of actual humans in a virtual seat shrinks. An average of humans-per-table may never hit zero, but it could become vanishingly small. Once it gets lower than 1.0, most on-line poker games will be bots vs. other bots.

A good number of these bots, possibly large subsets of them, will be colluding. Since this requires communication between them in some way, what you will have here are distributed expert systems, programmed for conflict. In short, you’re halfway to Skynet. This, I think, would be a much better story for the Terminator franchise: where Skynet arises out of an intense escalation of poker-bot conflict, and the extermination of the human race is merely the side effect of Skynet’s (successful, though misguided) obliteration of all opposing poker bots.

Devlin’s articles also paint a picture of how disturbingly easy it is to hijack software on the Windows platform. There’s some Skynet potential there as well. For example, it is easy to see how a zombie network could easily become a poker playing powerhouse. Chances are one or more of them already is.

Image from a lego model by robbed.

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I just left a comment on samaBlog kvetching about the tenacity of the stupid Imperial measurement system that continues to thrive in the U.S., as well as the U.K., Liberia and Myanmar. (Measurement is completely arbitrary; you might as well choose a system that at least makes some sense internally. How many inches in a furlong again?) Shortly after, I noticed that (in addition to running out of fours for their signs) some gas stations are now selling gas by the half gallon.

This is, apparently, being done because their pumps don’t support prices higher than $3.999, rather than the psychological reasons you might expect. It would be hilarious, however, if this kind of thing conspires with the price of oil to convert American gas pumps to charge by the liter, essentially using greed, bad hardware programming and laziness to force us kicking and screaming into a new metric dawn.

I also fully recommend that any hydrogen stations that open should use liters, as the price will then look ridiculously low compared to gasoline.

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The plague of reality television has spawned some unexpected phenomena over its decade-long life. Most interestingly, shows that allowed public voting demonstrated that people had both the desire and the means to organically organize to rig elections on a massive scale. Once again, the internet demonstrates its core competency, connecting strangers in weird ways, in this case through nexus sites like Vote for the Worst.

The question that’s been bugging me this morning: how to harness this ability? Any thoughts?

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Although I’ve used Duover for backups until now, I’ve decided to stop using it for two reasons. The first is that it seems to be floundering with the release of Leopard, making backups incredibly slowly, and generally flaking out. As an example, a daily backup from my kitchen machine took about 20 minutes under Tiger but, even with the latest Duover update, was taking over four days under Leopard. Not at all useful. Secondly, Time Machine is just really useful and cool.

So, I’ve just installed a 1TB Time Capsule backup device into my home network. It’s been a real breeze to setup, even for an Apple product. Simply just works. Even though I was pretty sure it would do what I wanted it to, I had a nagging suspicion that my network setup might trip it up, but this turned out to be groundless. My home uses two different wireless networks, one using 802.11g, to serve the older machines, and one using 802.11n to serve the newer machines at the best speed. (Hardware that runs 802.11n can also support 802.11g simultaneously, but doing so really slows down the 802.11n portion.) The additional speed on the 802.11n network makes a huge difference when streaming HD video to the Apple TV (though the g network can handle DVD level video just fine). My setup works basically like this:

I wasn’t 100% sure the kitchen machine (“Nexus”) would be able to see the backup service, but it works fine, just as a good network service should. As long as the machine and the device are on the same LAN, it appears to make no difference how it actually gets there, just as you’d expect. (That initial backup sure is slow, though.)

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Once again, I have updated my recommended Mac OS X software page. It’s been over two years since my last update, though much remains the same.

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Another hideously stupid format war that did absolutely nothing to help consumers is over: Blu-ray wins. Oh, it will be a while before HD-DVD figures this out, but it’s done. You’ll find a number of people saying this lately, largely because of the recent defection of Warner Brothers to the Blu-ray format. This, and things like Apple most likely including Blu-ray drives in the next generation of its machines, are important of course, but I’m calling the war for Blu-ray for a different reason: porn.

Early on, I guessed that HD-DVD would win the format war for the same reason that VHS beat the superior Betamax: it better met the needs of porn producers (cheaper to make, longer running lengths, etc.). And, indeed, HD-DVD appears to dominate pornography in the United States. After some exaustive research (link not work safe) on my part, I can confirm that finding porn titles in HD-DVD is much easier than finding them in Blu-ray. For some time, Sony was actively preventing porn from being available on Blu-ray, but not any more, starting with Debbie Does Dallas Again. So, it appears that porn is at least producing in both formats at the moment, even though HD-DVD is still (by far) more common in porn.

This, however, does not matter. Whatever role porn did or didn’t play in the VHS vs. Betamax war, it will turn out not to have much impact on the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray war, which is the main reason I think this war is now over. There are two things that are different this time around that make this so.

First, porn now has many more outlets than it did in the VHS days. Back then, if you wanted porn, your only choices were theaters or videotape. These days, with rule 34 in full effect on the internet, porn is now almost impossible to avoid. Those looking for high-definition porn are much more likely to find it in some downloadable format than either of the DVD formats.

This pales next to the other reason, though. After even more painstaking research, I have now realized the truth: high resolution porn breaks the illusion. The quality is too good, turning porn into a festival of pimples, surgical scars and razor burn. Some companies are adapting to this, but these are likely to be companies that actually care about production quality, which most porn makers do not.

Taking porn out of the equation knocks a big…leg out from under HD-DVD. While it will still take far to long for HD-DVD to die, it’s now safe stick a fork in it for your purchasing choices.

Update: The death spiral is happening faster than I thought it would. Glad to see that companies that care about this war seem to think it is as stupid and useless as I do.

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