Nicholas Pike

So who would have thought, that a bottle of tasty purple vitamin water was created by the rapper 50 cent?

He[50 cent] worked with glacéau to create and market a grape flavored Vitamin Water drink called Formula 50. In 2007, Coca-Cola purchased glaceau for US$4.1 billion. 50 Cent, who owns a stake in the company, was estimated by Forbes to have earned $100 million after taxes.

Honestly, they didn’t create something different here… its grape flavored water!  But oh it tastes good, and because its owned by Coke, is available just about everywhere.  The bottle itself gives no indication of its affiliation (if you don’t think too hard about its name anyway: formula 50).

I noticed yesterday afternoon, that under the bottle’s wrapper (ooh, there could be a clever pun here!) (which is unbelievably impossible to peel off) is a 50 cent promotion:

i’ve got your digits.  and when i speak… people listen.

So with every bottle of grape vitamin water, you get a code to send someone a sweet 50 cent message on their cellphone – sign me up!  Really. Do it.

I am quite tired of all these “stars” that think its cool to change their name to something ridiculous… I mean, 50 cent?  What?  How is that even remotely considered a name?  Retarded – use the name your mom gave you.  From now on, I will call you Curtis James Jackson III, and your stupid (but tasty) drink will be Formula Curtis James Jackson III.

(In all fairness, “50 cent” is his stage name – and his name is still legally Curtis, but do you ever see a star with a stage name referred to by their real name?)

For those about to rock… I salute you

The latest installment of the Guitar Hero series comes out Sunday,  Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.  For the Xbox 360 it will be retailing at a gentle $99.99.

Ninety  nine ninety nine.

What?

Guitar Hero I and II for PS2 were each $75-80, including game and peripheral.  GHII for the 360 was $89.  Why must GHIII for 360 be a hundred bucks?  Outrageous.  But I will still buy it.

The game sports a very impressive track list, and some new multiplayer features that really have me drooling.   I’ll finally have a chance to win a few 1vs1 playoffs against my friends that are too good to be playing the game in the first place.

Hit the link above for the details on this fine game.

Dive Into Greasemonkey, at Thomson West’s Weekly Developer Forum

This afternoon I’ll be giving a quick presentation to a bunch of developers on the Firefox extension Greasemonkey, and some of the scripts I have written for it to aid my work here at Thomson.

Should be fun.

So where are my iPod Touch / iPhone applications?

Short story:  I’ve been busy!  Life is crazy, I no longer am a geek with too much time on my hands.

Long story:  I’ve reinstalled 10.4 (from Leopard dev build) – and have compiled the iPhone toolchain.  For some unfortunate reason my gcc is refusing to compile UIKit applications, but console applications seem to compile just fine.  I hope to get this resolved soon, and in the near future there will be some native iPhone / iPod Touch applications available here on npike.net.

Some of my ideas:

• Google Calendar.app (duh!)
• GMail Notifier
• Jezzball
• Audiofications  (Audio notifications for events the operating system doesn’t handle on its own)

So I spent some time reverse engineering Google Reader to discover their underyling API to pull feeds, stories, and subscription information in XML format.  Google has not made this API public yet, but it exists.

Then I started the ground work on an iPhone web app:  a “prettier” Google Reader.  Google Reader on the iPhone is dog slow, and the mobile version is just plain ugly.

As you can see to the right, I got pretty far – locally.  Unfortunately Safari on Windows, and Safari on the iPhone implement the “same domain security policy“.  Namely, the browser will not make XML requests to sites outside the domain of the currently loaded page. So the iphone app, hosted on staging.npike.net, can not make requests to www.google.com for needed XML data.

With out this, a web app for this purpose is not possible.  There are of course a few work-arounds, but I will investigate them at a later time, because they will be too time consuming to waste any time of my Friday.

I am very disappointed, and extremely angry at Apple for taking this approach for 3rd party development of the iPhone.

Here’s to a frustrating Friday….  :-/

So Apple had their iPod conference yesterday 1PM EDT. (Why is it labeled EDT now instead of EST?) And they announced changes to the whole iPod lineup.

• New colors for the shuffles
• New “fatty” nano with video support
• iPod “Classic” 160gb
• iPod Touch

Obviously the only one I really care about is the iPod Touch (pictured on the side). When the iPhone was announced, I said I would but it if it didn’t have the phone crap. Well now its here, well almost – won’t be available until the 24 of September 2007.

They also announced that the 4gb iPhone would be discontinued, and that the 8gb iPhone would drop $200 in price to a much more palatable $399 sticker.

I spent the rest of the afternoon feeding Jenn the right words to increase her interest in buying one. Which she did. And its awesome.

Pictures below, until she kills me and has them removed.

Jenn moving contacts from her old phone onto the iPhone while I rustle up some burgers on the BBQ.

Activation of the new iPhone

Jenn playing with the display iPhone at the AT&T store in market view.