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Tablet

Two weeks ago, dissatisfied with the shortcomings of offerings unveiled elsewhere, I decided to set upon the task of making my own tablet. What? Oh! No, not that sort of tablet.

I decided to follow what is by all appearances the canonical page on the subject of making tablet on the Internets; Stewart Russell’s recipe. Firstly, I decided to go with his recommendation of using vanilla sugar, which meant leaving a vanilla pod inside a bag of sugar for two weeks to allow the flavour to be absorbed.

— Two Week Intermission —

Having removed the vanilla pod from the sugar, I then assembled the other ingredients; condensed milk, unsalted butter and half a cup of milk.

First, I added the sugar to the pan along with the milk. Stirred together, this made a slow-moving, gritty thick paste to which I added the butter (sliced up into smaller pats) and the condensed milk. Once this was reasonably well mixed and there were no dry patches, I turned on the heat to begin to bring the mixture to the boil.

Within a few minutes, the mixture began to froth and expand massively — Stewart wasn’t kidding that you need to use a much bigger pan than the ingredients themselves require. After about 10 minutes, the mixture will be properly boiling and the heat will need turning down, to allow it to caramelise.

After about 20 minutes of simmering, with occasional stirring, the mixture is not only frothy, but will begin to turn a golden, caramel colour. This means it’s nearly ready for the final stage. As our recipe suggests, if you take a teaspoon full of the mixture and immerse it in cold water, it’ll quickly cool (at least, on the outside!) and you can see how it flows at low temperature. If it slowly drips then it’s ready for the next step.

The recipe wasn’t explicit about this, so I had to do this step with one hand stirring whilst the other reached desperately for the fridge and the rest of the block of butter; grease a tin or pan of suitable size (about 18”x12”) and take the mixture off the heat. Stirring the whole time, feel for when the mixture begins to thicken slightly and the bottom of the pan starts to feel slightly gritty. At this point, pour the mixture into the tray.

I’ll have to report back on how good this stuff tastes once it’s had time to set. It certainly tastes good when molten (but really; be careful — it’s incredibly hot when in liquid form). Now I have to go wash the saucepan before it becomes a permanent fixture…

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for i in *.wav; do mplayer "$i" -af pan=2:1:1 -benchmark -ao pcm:file="`basename -s .wav "$i"`.stereo.wav"; done

Microsoft's iPad Problem

A lot of the current hand-wringing regarding the iPad seems to concern its lack of Flash support. A vocal crowd of people with a vested interest in Flash’s ubiquity are beside themselves at the concept of a Flash-less browser gaining widespread adoption (even though this actually happened about 18 months ago). To me their incredulity resembles the first stage of the Kübler-Ross grieving process — denial — and pretty soon we’ll start seeing the other stages too (arguably we already have).

On the other side of the fence, HTML5 advocates are beginning to sound optimistic about what the future holds. A week ago the mobile space looked like it might be the battleground to decide HTML5’s future, but a general web built entirely around open standards is now beginning to seem even more credible. However, the fight HTML5 was engaged in wasn’t simply against Flash, but sandboxed runtime plugins in general, and there’s another significant player here: Microsoft Silverlight.

Silverlight was born from the realisation that Microsoft’s war for the web wasn’t really in the browser space, but — with the rise of Rich Internet Applications — the plugin sandbox they were beginning to reside within. It’s no coincidence that Microsoft chose to restart their work on Internet Explorer around the same time as Silverlight came into being; the former platform was now just the bootstrap for the latter, and the competition subtly shifted from Mozilla, Apple and Opera to Adobe.

But there are three significant reasons for Microsoft to be deeply concerned about the success of the iPad. Firstly, Silverlight — a plugin with very low market penetration — is as good as dead. Web-facing businesses may take a little time to realise they can’t use Flash to underpin their sites, but only the near-suicidally imprudent would hinge their future on Silverlight now.

Secondly, and presupposing the former, in order not to risk utter irrelevance, Microsoft will be forced to support HTML5’s key features: <video> and <canvas>, as well as a far wider-reaching interpretation of the CSS spec than they’ve so far managed. If their browser doesn’t work with the popular sites on the web (and with Google finally putting Internet Explorer 6 on notice, this is a genuine threat) then their entire OS platform is in jeopardy.

Finally — and this one might be the hardest for them to choke back — they’ll have to support H.264 natively, something which would undermine their own WMV HD codec’s adoption and in turn their machinations within the music and movie industries.

Whilst the stakes for Adobe may seem high, as a company which builds tools enabling creatives, there will always be a market for them to build the tools these creatives work with; for Microsoft the stakes are far higher. This isn’t just about browsers, plugins or video codecs. It’s about their continued relevance as a maker of computing platforms.