Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

_Online_ music sales decline

The RIAA is stating that online music sales are down significantly from a year ago.

AP: Survey: Online Music Sales Tumble

What about offline sales? What about the landscape of online music sales? How has that changed? Perhaps prices and/or availability and/or service isn't as good now as last year.

Don't believe the hype! And if music sales really are decreasing, perhaps the RIAA should ask their customers why and do something about it that customers will actually like.

Very strange story about Pooh

Reuters: Disney Eyes Pooh Rights in 2004, Legal Foe Says No

RSS-enabling mailing lists

NetNewsWire is becoming more of a hub for me.

I check NNW more often than I check mailing lists now, and by my request Seth is setting up RSS feeds of some Conversant conversations (mailing lists) he wants me to keep up with.

I don't know of any other mailing list system that generates RSS... and even if it does, it's unlikely the RSS is as configurable as Conversant's is.

New QTVR weblog: VRlog

I just subscribed to VRlog's RSS feed in NetNewsWire Lite. I'm a QTVR enthusiast, and very happy to see a QTVR-related weblog!

One thing that's driving me nuts is I haven't made a single panorama with my new camera, because my tripod is missing the piece that the camera connects to.

Canadian supercomputer for a day

BBC News: Canadians brew up a supercomputer

Borland to acquire TogetherSoft

Very interesting! Borland Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire TogetherSoft Corporation for $185 Million in Cash and Stock

Write Cocoa apps in 7 (8?) different languages

MacSlash: Using Perl With Cocoa Classes

So, now you can write Cocoa apps using:

• Objective-C
• Java
• AppleScript
• Ruby
• Python
• Perl
• F-Script
• C++* (not sure, can you?)

Am I missing any languages?

Gaiman vs. McFarlane

At a halloween party over the weekend, Justin Louie (nay, The Amazing J, nice costume, bub!) told me about a lawsuit between Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane over rights to characters, royalties, and other stuff.

This whole story starts with Spawn #9 (cover image), which I had at least one copy of, it came out while I was in high school, still collecting comic books and working at Curious Comics. Neil Gaiman created the Angela character, which turned out to be very popular and successful for McFarlane. IIRC, there were 4 issues around that time with guest writers, Dave Sim of Cerebus fame, Alan Moore of Watchmen fame, Neil Gaiman of Sandman fame, and Frank Miller of Dark Knight Returns (et al) fame. Those 4 issues were a big deal in the comic industry... those were THE heavy-weight writers in the industry, and of course Todd (and maybe still is, I'm outta the industry now) THE artist at the top.

Anyway, here's the lead-up story to the lawsuit, there's links at the bottom to the proceedings and conclusion of the lawsuit.

As many of you know I'm a big Todd McFarlane fan. I'm surprised I didn't hear of this sooner. Anyway, I'll reserve judgement, but it's interesting to see things like this from my past come back to focus.