Yesterday Nat Friedman (really famous in the Open Source world) posted a friendly challenge on his blog to fellow programmers.

The challenge was this: Twitter limits it's posts ("tweets") to 140 characters. So, the challenge is to come up with the best one-line program (or shell script) that falls under twitter's 140 character limit.

Here is Nat's first-try example script:

s="-<";while true;do echo -ne "$s\r";s=`sed 's/->$/-<-/;s/^/;s/--/->/;'<<<$s`;sleep 0.1;done

I've done a little shell scripting here and there, but this just looks like jibberish to me. Yet, if I paste it into my Linux terminal, it's a nifty little program that creates a fun little animation.

And that's pretty good. But you would be amazed at what some of the programmers who stepped up to Nat's challenge were able to come up with!

You can read the contest results here, on Nat's blog.

I just happen to notice that today is the infamous April 1. I'm really hoping that the below is an April Fool's Joke. Hackers are notorious for this sort of thing.

If it is...he sure got me.

I'm hoping it is. I really am.

I really don't want to hate Apple that much. And yet, I wouldn't put it past them. That's the scary thing. If it's a joke...it's just plausible enough to fly under the radar.

I'll update later to let you know.

UPDATE: Looks like it is all a joke. Planet Gnome has been buzzing with people getting really angry, and then finding out it was all a joke. :) Lot's of people are really mad about it (example), but I think it was pretty good...and very much in the spirit of April Fool's Day. I admit that he got me, but I'm not going to get mad about it. It just makes me take myself less serious. ;)

Apple is really doing their best to make me hate them right now. This just irks me something awful:

They called the head developer of Cheese and ordered him to cease and desist.

Cheese is a Photobooth inspired application. I wholeheartedly admit that. But was it really necessary to call up the poor guy and strongarm him into getting rid of the app?

I have multiple problems with this. First thing: Cheese isn't even an Apple program. It could conceivably run on Apple's OSX (we'll get to why this is in a moment...it's another point). But, fundamentally Cheese is a part of GNOME Linux. This type of application crossing has long been done between operating systems. Examples: Windows Media Player, iTunes, Banshee; Outlook, Apple Mail, Evolution; Internet Explorer, Safari, Epiphany/Firefox; MS Instant Messenger, Apple Chat, Pidgin; I could keep going forever.

And now the reason why it really hacks me off that Apple is doing this--they use a ton of Linux/BSD code to begin with. This is the reason why Cheese will run under OSX...because OSX flat-out uses a BSD Open-Source Kernel. On top of that, consider all the things that Apple has "developed" that really came from Linux-land. You know their whole new "Spaces" thing. Yeah. We've been doing that in Linux since the 90s. Apple's fancy Print Server? Taken code-for-code from Linux. In fact, they recently just bought the company that has been maintaining the code. I didn't worry about it much then...but now. I'm not so sure.

Oh...and how about his one. Safari? Their fancy web browser? Taken from the KDE developers. Code-for-code.

So, after using Open Source Software to basically make your operating system, now you're going to pick on a poor student who made a program that does basically the same thing as your Photobooth App. An application that uses a webcam to take pictures. Wow! There sure was some genius thinking there...I can see why that would be worth of a patent! /sarcasm How big brother can you get?

This is just ridiculous. And one more reason why I will absolutely never buy any Apple product again. After all, the one Apple product I did buy (an iPod), I ended up not liking at all...and I replaced it as soon as I could with an excellent Cowon iAudio player. (60 hours of battery life...no lie! along with crazy codec support...FLAC, ogg, mp3, aac, you name it. Oh yeah...and it can play videos as well. Oh...and did I mention that it is compatible with Windows, OSX, and Linux out of the box? Oh, and it has a built in Radio. A built in Microphone. And Line-in recording. And it's cheaper. Yeah. It's that good.)

I really hope that GNOME or the FSF will help to fight this. I don't really care all that much about Cheese. It's not really functionality that I was absolutely pining for. It's more just the principle. And that's what OSS is all about.

If you recall a few weeks ago, I said I would be reviewing open source programs that can be used to replace their typical proprietary equivalents. I wanted to do about one review per week.

I'm still planning on doing this, and I have the idea for the first review already churning. Unfortunately, in order to do a proper review, I've decided that I need to use the software I am reviewing for at least a week, so there's going to be a 1 week delay with the first review.

To give you a brief preview, I decided for the first review to look at music management and playback software. You know...like iTunes and Windows Media Player. There are many open source alternatives, so that's what we're going to be looking at next week. :)

I just read about this. I can't believe that Apple would be so stupid to do something like this. Well...yes I can. Bravado seems to be something that Apple not only possesses in great quantity, but even endorses as an extra benefit of owning one of their devices.

But this is just plain wrong.

For those of you who haven't heard, if you have a copy of iTunes or Quicktime installed on your Windows computer, Apple is now pushing it's own web browser (Safari) using the iTunes/Quicktime updater.

photo credit: cnet

So, in other words, if you have iTunes installed, a window will pop up on your computer, telling you that a new update for iTunes is available. This is all well and good, but simply clicking the "Update" button will do more than just update your iTunes. It will actually install Safari on your computer...and make it the default web browser.

Admittedly there is a check box available...but by default that check box is selected to install Safari. At the very least, that check box should be unchecked.

John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla (the company responsible for Firefox and Thunderbird) wrote up a nice blog post for why this sort of thing is simply bad for software vendors in general.

Now, some have accused Mr. Lilly for simply being scared of a little competition. And sure, there might be some of that there. But I believe that Mr. Lilly's post contains some excellent points that need to be considered before throwing the whole argument out, attributing it to "I wish we had some sneaky way of getting people to install our software like you do...but since I don't I'm going to poo-poo and shame you."

I think Mr. Lilly's response at the end of the zdnet article is revealing...and demonstrates some of the key points behind my previous open source article. If you're tired of it being all about the money--open source seems to be the best answer.

I would also like to point out that Mozilla is perfectly capable of pulling a stunt like this as well. Consider that Firefox is certainly not the only piece of software they produce. It's simply their most popular. Can you imagine, though, if a Firefox update installed Thunderbird and set it as the default mail client? Same sort of thing as what Apple is pushing now. But after seeing Mr. Lilly's response to Apple, I can be assured that Mozilla won't ever try something like this.

As a final thought on all this...if you're thinking to yourself, "What's the big deal?" like I was, initially, try thinking about this type of practice from a different perspective. For some reason, Apple as a company seems to be immune to bad feelings for this sort of thing. Kind of like Google (by the way...the whole google-toolbar thing annoys me in exactly the same way. Google...please stop it. It's not helpful). Just imagine, though, if this was Microsoft, instead. What if Microsoft started using it's Windows XP updater to start installing software you never asked for? The outrage would be deafening, I can assure you.

But, truthfully, I would have less of a problem with Microsoft doing that than Apple's current practice. In the case of Microsoft...it's their operating system. In some ways, I would almost expect them to use their own OS in this way. By using Microsoft's OS, you are almost implicity trusting anything coming from them. Even though, I still would argue against it. Apple is really acting like rogue software here, though. So, this is what I have to say--Apple, if you want to do this sort of thing, stick to doing it on your own OS. Okay? Thanks.

EDIT: Just one more thing to make this story even better!