For the last week or so, I've been annoyed by changes Microsoft have made to servers causing your MSN display name to get reset each time you log in. The behaviour affects genuine and other MSN clients, and there's no sign of it being fixed any time soon.

So in the meantime I've built a Pidgin 2.6.3.0 set of win32 binary with retrospectacus's contributed patch which gets around the problem (for now). I've put them up with this post in case anyone else is interested.

If you're curious or would like to build your own version, the bug report is here:
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/10763

Happy MSNing :)

UPDATE With the 2.6.4 release of Pidgin, I've removed the download links to my build of Pidgin.

Last week whilst looking at a Wikipedia page, I saw a reference to a notable historical figure Nicholas Flamel. The name struck a chord, as I've read the Harry Potter books a number of times, and I was suprised to see such a person existed.

It turns out that Nicholas Flamel is a legendary alchemist, and was concerned with finding the Philosopher's stone, a means of obtaining immortality. For those who haven't read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the charachter by the same name is clearly intended to be the same.

This is hardly newsworthy, and I'm not the first person to notice - however it was a fresh reminder of how much I enjoy finding and recognising hidden references and other subtle wordplay in fiction where it's otherwise unexpected (sorry , that means your historically-based fiction isn't counted).

I'm curious if anyone else has a favourite reference like this, or a subtle play on words like Hiro Protagonist?

In reply to Jason Calacanis's recent post entitled The case against Apple - in Five Parts - one of my coworkers asked for my input. What follows is my somewhat lengthy reply which I thought I would share with everyone.

Jason has some good arguments, but I think he’s essentially missing the precepts of Apple’s design (as I see it):

• It has to be immensely intuitive and simple to use
• It has to be a masterpiece of industrial design

Specifically looking at the case of the iPod, it does one thing (plays music) and does it well.
There’s no need for it to do anything else, because they’re not aiming at that market – the product perfectly matches the (simple) set of requirements.

If you have different needs, there are still a ton of competing products out there to cater to your specific needs. This is almost a perfect example of a competitive market.

Also, if people are worried about their music and DRM/licensing – they should choose to buy it from a DRM-free location where they can download it. Actually come to think of it, Apple already offers DRM-free music from some labels. Don’t hate on them for not doing this originally, it’s a near certainty that they didn’t have the market power with the labels when they first launched.

With the iPhone the argument is pretty similar, however it’s important to note that Apple must do what they can to protect their investment. Part of the beauty of this product from a technical point of view, is that the software and hardware configurations are the same everywhere. It’s the same argument as with video game consoles, it works because the manufacturer puts things in place to make it easy for developers to deploy for it.

If Apple allowed a bajillion web browsers for example, what would happen when Opera is installed and is the default browsing app? Would other applications need to support launching Opera, would it just do it automatically? If so, can Opera handle all the iPhone specific display tags? It’s in their best interest to protect this investment, and to a certain point I can agree with the restricted platform – remembering that convergence be damned, its primary function is still being a telephone.

I think it’s laughable that people can make the argument that we’re headed towards an Apple monoculture – it’s not Apple’s responsibility to create competition, it’s the competitors who need to step up.

Further to this, have a look at what Apple’s innovation on the iPod and iPhone’s respective markets! Their product is setting new usability and design standards and injecting new and fresh ideas on how to make a simple mp3 player work better, and the number of yum-cha rip-offs reflect this.

In summary, I think it’s business as usual and from my perspective I don’t think Apple are doing anything inherently evil – in fact, I think we should congratulate them for bringing a brilliant product to market – their sales figures clearly indicate they’re doing something right.