Universal have made the decision not to renew their contract with Apple to supply the iTunes music store. Or, at least, are considering it. The decision is being reported as a major blow to Apple, but I’m not so sure.

Universal must be making this decision because Apple will not allow them to dictate the pricing on the iTunes store. This has been the chagrin of the recording industry since the introduction of the store. Apple wish to have a single price for all songs, which is 79p a track here in the UK. The record industry wish to have variable pricing, which they control. Popular artists would be more expensive, less popular artists less so.

Presumably, the invasion plan for Iraq ran something like the following:

InvadeCountry(Country.Iraq, Tactics.ShockAndAwe);

// Back home for tea and medals

Now, any semi-competent programmer could tell you that this plan is woefully inadequate. Firstly, there is no checking of assumptions. A start at improving the code could go like this:

Assert(PrettyGoodEvidenceForWMD);
Assert(NotIncrediblyVolitileCountryHeldTogetherByIronFist);
Assert(NotLikelyToIncreaseDangerOfTerrorism);

InvadeCountry(Country.Iraq, Tactics.ShockAndAwe);

// Back home for tea and medals

In production code, however, there would need to be more pre-condition checks, as I’m sure we’ve missed some.

If they take the time to keep the nine circles of hell up to date, one circle, perhaps the sixth or seventh, features sinners constantly writing WSDL documents by hand. In fact, the coiners of the phrase Simple Object Access Protocol must be in the hypocrites circle writing WSDL using Notepad, trying to get early implementations of web services talking to each other.

In the outer circles, you’d find the people writing to the WS-basic specification using a tool like XMLSpy, one of the better tools for the job—though I think one would describe it as “encroaching upon reasonable”.

I suppose what I am aiming for here is to bring disparate bits of my online persona together. Flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm and dx13 all live in different corners of the web. Tools are beginning to appear which allow you to bring different aspects together into a single online display — a start page for the self. This site will be the start page for me; a place where I will attempt to bring my online aspects together.

The most abhorrent quality of the most zealous pro-life fanatics is their sheer devotion to life over and above quality of life. A child and its parents could be terribly unhappy because of some circumstance, perhaps the child was conceived due to rape or is severely disabled, but all that concerns the pro-lifer is the life of itself. It’s so un-wholistic you can’t help being shocked by it. What they espouse is essentially that you deserve to be unhappy if the alternative is the removal of the potential for a life — lets remember we’re talking about bundles of cells here.