Recently read on a tweet that Blizzard are looking for people to Beta test StarCraft 2.

Seems nice. You have to login to Battle.Net, and tick an ‘opt me into beta testing’ box. But I can’t seem to remember what my Battle.Net password is, and it says my credentials for getting it reset are not valid.

After some chasing details. Searching how to install StarCraft on Intel Macs. I discovered that I wasn’t actually registered on Battle.Net, just the Battle.Net you access via the game (which expires after not using it for 3 months anyway).

Along the way I found this nice guide for installing StarCraft and Diablo II on Intel Macs. And I got to play a game I haven’t for a while.

To put yourself down as a potential beta tester you need:

1. to register a Battle.Net login (and login)
2. Add a game to the Manage My Games list, using the CD key from your game
3. check the Beta Profile Settings and tick the games you want to be down to test.

After registering I found that you can download CD images of StarCraft and Brood War from the Battle.Net site. Quite nice if you still have your CD key, but lost or damage your game CDs.  You need a bit of spare bandwidth though, about 1.4 GB for StarCraft and wasn’t Diablo II in 5 CDs?.

It is also nice to see for a change that Australian games get to have a go before everyone else. Reading the StarCraft II FAQ I noticed that Australia will be in the first batch of countries offer beta testing.

When does the StarCraft II beta test start?

We don’t have an exact start date to share at this time, but note that when it does begin, we will be adding additional regions to the beta test in phases. North America, Australia, and New Zealand will be the first regions to begin beta testing, and other regions will follow afterward in phases. We will have more information to share about all of these phases in the future.

Are people starting to see the worth of Australia as a good English speaking test bed with its fast uptake of technology? Or is it just that being such a small region it was easier to set us up first?

The flickr upload software for MacOS X, 1001, has been updated to version 1.0.17.

This release seems to fix the problems that I recently started to experience with 1.0.15:

• No sets were being listed, and
• Photos were not being added to groups.

Nice to see that the software is still being maintained.

• 1001 @ Infinite Sushi
• 1001 @ VersionTracker

Apple Australia is being sued for allegedly controlling a failed reseller, trading while insolvent for months. This reseller (and by inference, its managers) was so grossly incompetent that Apple did not trust its management’s ability to manage and account for its own business!

read more | digg story

Looking back through the photos I have taken in Tokyo I found this one of a train covered in iPod advertisements. Not just the outside, but also all the ads inside.

Being the major transportation form in Tokyo, about 70% of all travel, trains are also the perfect venue for advertising. There are ads around the inside of the car just below the roof; banners hang from the ceiling at intervals the length of the car; and JR East carriages have video ads above the doors (with all the dialogue in subtitles).

But this train was special. All the ads are for iPods, all the poster, all the video, and it even had some on the outside. And not just this car, but every car of the train.

I wonder how much it costs to have a train devoted solely to your advertising? And is it worth it?

I have only seen a couple of devoted trains in my stay. But I can see when they might be effective: you have 5 to 30 minutes of a lot of people’s time, with only your ads to look at (aside from their keitai or PSP).

I have a nice new PSP 3000 and thought it nice to upload some video to it. But all the software I found for MacOS X crashes or produces bad files. All that is but one.

Looking through the things available in MacUpdate and VersionTracker wasn’t too useful. The stuff listed is all a little old, or unrated. And searching Google turned lots of links old bulletin board posts and sites that looked dodgy.

Finally I found a piece of software that worked, was stable and did the job, and I was able to upload working files.

What software did I try? And how does it stack up? Read below.

• iPSP Movie Loader (1.0.2, 2005, Feeware)
  Free, but not updated since 2005. This program crashed every time I tried to open it.

• iPSP (2.0.4, 2005, Limited demo)
  A shareware program. Opened some times. Tended to crash if you tried to do anything.

• iPSP (4.0.1, August 2008, Limited demo)
  Without registration it keeps popping up windows telling you that it was a ‘feature limited demo‘. And when I clicked on the video icon in the left, it briefly displayed a listing of my Moives folder then crashed. (Not to mention their site has separate pages about version 2.0.4 & 4.0.1)

• ffmpegX (0.0.9x, January 2008)
  After all the extra software you had to download separately (for licensing reasons), this looked promising. It has pre-set Target Format for PSPs. Movie conversion took around 30 minutes, though I’m not sure as there was no indication and I just left it in the background. The movie played in Quicktime. But the PSP did not see the movies uploaded using the instruction on their site. When I worked out where to upload the MP4s, the PSP thinks the files are corrupt.

So, what did I end up using?

• iSquint (1.5.2, March 2008, Freeware)
  When you open iSquint, the first time, it asks you if you would like to get VisualHub their commercial product. After that it doesn’t bother you. It just works. (With a nice easy to use interface.) Drag the video you want to encode into the window; select ‘Optimize for iPod‘; click the Start button; and 15 minutes later your 700 MB file has been converted to a 180 MB MP4 ready to copy to your PSP. Selecting H.264 compression it took a little longer, 20 to 30 minutes. Copy the files to the PSP and they play without any problem.

Unfortunately this great product has one drawback. It is no longer being developed. In October 2008 the developer announced that the company was moving to other projects [2, 3]. Which is a pity, because it is a great program.

But not all is lost. iSquint continues to work. And the source of  Techspansion’s 3 programs have been released as Open Source projects. There has even been a guild to compiling the Open Source projects written (by one of the compeditors to cash in on the current search for iSquint).

How to upload video to the PSP?

Here are instruction I would have liked to find more easily:

1. Attach your PSP to your Mac with a USB cable.
2. On the PSP, from the ‘Settings’ menu select ‘USB Connection‘.
3. The PSP will shortly mount as a drive on the desktop.
4. Inside the drive there should be a folder called VIDEO
   If there isn’t create it.
5. Copy your MP4s to this folder.
6. Eject the PSP.
7. You should now be able to play the videos by going to the Video menu, selecting Memory Stick, and choosing the video to play.

Notes:

• You can put videos into sub-folders of the VIDEO folder, the PSP can find and play them.
• The MP4s downloaded from YouTube also work on a PSP.

And for your reference, the machine I used to do the above is:

• MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• running Mac OS X 10.5.6
• PSP 3000 (firmware 4.21)

In recent news I see that Steve Jobs is having hormone issues. Reports say that his current weight less is not due to a recurrence of cancer, just a hormone imbalance.

Isn’t it obvious, at 53 Jobs, the mother of Apple computers, has entered menopause.

Jobs has entered the ‘grandmother‘ phase of his life cycle at Apple, and now needs to help nurture a new mother. Speculators believe that Philip Schiller is to be the new mother after giving the Keynote at this year’s MacWorld.

This is not a new phenomenon in the computer industry. With Steve Ballmer replacing Bill Gates as mother figure at Microsoft.

Still, many pause to see what effect this will have at Apple.

• Steve Jobs Cites Treatable Hormone Imbalance For Weight Loss
• What’s going on with Steve Jobs’ hormones?
• An Apple a Day…
• iNotSick
• Big Mac Daddy Has Hormone Issues
• Phil Schiller No Steve Jobs, But Better Than Your CEO
• Apple’s New CEO Phil Schiller?

As you leave Shinjuku station via the west exit you can’t but notice the mass of advertising for Apple iPod Nano. The rise between the pedestrian level and the ceiling has a ring of iPod advertisements (pictured below). And many of the pillars had the same advertisement on each side.

While this may seem like overkill, here in Tokyo I have seen a whole train covered in advertisements for one product. All the ads on the walls and hanging from the ceiling conveyed the same message. And the same video ads in the train playing over and over again.

It seems that advertising campaigns here in Tokyo can be overwhelming, but short in duration, and then disappear like the last season.

For those interested, the ads say “Nano 色いろ” (iroiro). The Kanji means ‘colour’, and is pronounced ‘iro’. The Hiragana that follows is also pronounced the same. The pun being that, いろいろ, pronounced  ‘iroiro’, means ‘various’.

Seeing at the Paralympic are now on I have updated the BOMC widget to display their medal results.

I’m in the process of rewriting the backend of the widget (seeing as this is an experiment of using JQuery in Widgets), but thought you might like it now. So here is the existing code set to display results for the Paralympics.

Beijing Olympic Medal Count Dashboard Widget

And it actually has an icon now.

(An interesting problem I will have to investigate later is that the scrolling text area scrolls, using the mouse wheel, but the scroll bars don’t appear.)

• BOMC 0.3

(more…)

BOMC 0.3

It may be a little late, considering the Olympics are almost over, but I thought people might like it anyway.

Here is a widget I wrote to display the medal count at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Since there is no RSS feed for on the Olympic site for the medals I had to write code to read values from the html.

So though it is a little late it was an interesting exercise in doing screen scraping with JavaScript and using JQuery in widgets.

You can download the widget here:

Beijing Olympic Medal Count Dashboard Widget

Yes, you read that correctly. I downloaded the Xcode 3.0 disk image at an average of 3000 KB per second. So the 1.1 GB file took less than 6 minutes.

Ah the joys of having an optical link.

Now if only most sites could deal with the speed.