Plaidophile

My home network had an outage pretty much all day because my UPS failed shortly after I left for work today. Is it ironic that it is only because of the UPS that I had any downtime?

On that note, any good recommendations for cheap UPSes?

So, after several days with this, there are already a few bugs cropping up. Nothing severe, but hopefully they can be dealt with:

• The placement of the microphone hole happens to be where my pinky naturally goes during a long conversation. I'll have to get used to not moving my pinky there.
• The phone seems to reboot overnight, no explanation given. I lock my SIM, so I always find that my phone is completely inactive until I unlock it. For now I've just unlocked my SIM, since the phone has the pattern-unlock and I don't care so much about locking my service anymore since it has nearly unlimited service and there's a PAYG-enforced cap on things that aren't unlimited. This is an issue that others are reporting too.
• Sometimes the phone goes to complete silent (not even vibrate) mode when it's in my pocket. Hopefully I can figure out what causes it. I have a feeling that it's one of those dumb human factors problems, since if you hold the power button for several seconds (even when the phone is locked) it brings up the silent/airplane/power menu, and the touchscreen is sensitive enough that it detects my skin through my pants pocket. That is definitely something to complain to Google about; a similar issue is what led me to finally abandon the Ericsson R520m (which I was otherwise perfectly happy with, although granted I wouldn't be happy with it now).

Because I just can't resist temptation for pretty shiny things, I have already upgraded from the myTouch 3G (aka HTC Magic) to the Google Nexus One (aka Google Nexus One). Yeah, it was expensive, but whatever.

I'll just keep it brief here since there's been plenty of other people reviewing it too.

The positive points:

• Many of the issues with the myTouch 3G are gone. Plenty of RAM and CPU means that even with the extra eyecandy and so on, the device stays responsive most of the time (there's still occasional bursts of lag but they're on the order of around half a second, as opposed to the myTouch which could often be unresponsive for as much as a whole minute)
• The UI is really shiny. A lot of stuff has been updated and tuned and refined and is just generally better.
• The built-in IMAP client is way the hell better. There's a unified inbox (with per-account color coding which works extremely well), it's fast and responsive, and just generally great.
• The web browser is also much improved. The keyboard finally gets next/prev buttons for form entry (rather than a catch-all "done" that sometimes goes to the next field but usually submits the incomplete form)
• The OS supports multitouch! Or at least, Dolphin Browser does a good job of faking it somehow. None of the built-in apps use it.
• The dock connector promises to make for some very nice future charging cradles.
• The first-party weather+news widget is very nice, much better than any of the battery-sucking CPU-chewing third-party widgets I had tried.
• 5 launcher screens means I don't need folders to organize my apps (for now)
• Sound quality on headphones is way better than on the myTouch. It's still nowhere near as good as my iPod Classic, but at least it will do in a pinch without making me feel like there's sand in my ears. It also doesn't seem to have the floating sample rate issue over A2DP that the myTouch had.
• Tactile feedback on the touch buttons almost makes up for the fact they are no longer physical buttons. Almost.
• It actually stays connected to WiFi without me babysitting the connection!
• Battery life is about as good as the myTouch...

The negative points:

• ...which means I still have to recharge it daily.
• The calendar app still sucks (especially the date and time pickers!), although it's improved.
• Still no built-in Exchange ActiveSync for calendars (there is ActiveSync for email but I don't care about that) so I still have to sync Outlook to Google which causes weird issues
• The external speaker isn't as loud as the myTouch, so I'll need to come up with a better alarm clock sound than Bell Chime
• Just when all my devices were using USB Mini for everything, making it so I only ever needed a single USB Mini cable with me in order to use or charge any one device, along comes USB Micro...

The WTF points:

• Okay, I get why there is this nice unified "easy access" app which offers clock, calendar, alarms, music playback, weather, and a few other things. But why is that app called "Clock?" And it has some weird behavior if you use the pattern unlock (as I do); if you lock the screen while "Clock" is running, then when you unlock, it's in that app, until you try to use any of its widgets, which is when it shows the unlock screen. If you're not running that app in the foreground, there is (apparently) no way to get to it from the unlock screen. It would be really nice if there were an option to go into that app after unlock if you locked it from the home screen, but there doesn't seem to be an option for that (or any options for it at all, really).
• I have mixed feelings about Google releasing an awesome first-party phone that they were developing in secret while partners were working to get awesome third-party phones out. I am sure that many of your development partners are more than a little ticked off right now, especially since Google's platform enhancements were basically hidden from the partners and always released only when "done," meaning that the other platform consumers were (and likely will forever be) a few steps behind the bleeding edge. I thought this was supposed to be an open platform for the future, guys.

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As I've mentioned in the past, I worked on Kindle. I think I've specifically said I worked on the Topaz format. If not, well, that's what I did on Kindle — I designed the Topaz file format and rendering/layout library, and did a lot of the work and problem-solving on the actual conversion process.

One of the (minor but important) parts of the Topaz format is, of course, the DRM, which has so far eluded being compromised, which is funny because it's actually a pretty trivial "secret-sauce" algorithm which was implemented under some pretty ridiculous constraints (I had limited time to implement it, wasn't allowed to pull in any external libraries, and had to keep it performing quickly without using much memory on an already-constrained device), and somehow it's eluded being cracked for a bit over two years.

Until now.

I had been having trouble with Outlook at work, where I'd been getting messages like "As the meeting organizer, you do not need to respond to the meeting" when someone else sent an update for a meeting I was on. Outlook had somehow gotten the notion that I was the meeting organizer, even going so far as to make it so I couldn't change my own reminder time without it trying to send out notifications to everyone about a "change in meeting time." Of course, the meeting itself on the calendar showed the actual originator as the organizer, but apparently Outlook's messaging and calendar components were out of sync with each other. It was probably caused because I originally accepted the meetings from Thunderbird+Lightning, and then later switched back to Outlook. It didn't help that both affected meetings had been updated since their original receipt.

There were plenty of results on a Google search for the key phrase, but none of them provided a solution (plenty of them blamed everything but Outlook, though). Fortunately, I found a workaround which seems to work for now, but it relies on still having the original meeting request messages available and an external IMAP client (so obviously you need to be able to talk to Exchange via IMAP).

Basically, I just deleted the meetings from my calendar, and then found the original request messages. They still showed me as being the organizer with the added wrinkle that the items were "no longer on the calendar," BUT if I used a different email client (i.e. Thunderbird over IMAP) and moved the items back into my inbox, then Outlook finally saw them as they originally were, and I was able to accept the meetings appropriately.

It's fortunate that both of these long-term recurring meetings happened to have been originated recently, though. If I didn't still have the original meeting request emails, I'd have been out of luck.

So, ever since the Logic 9.0.1 update went out, it's been wonderfully solid. Thanks, Apple!

However, there is still one issue with it which has been bothering me since version 7 at least (and maybe even earlier): it would be really nice if it were smarter about prefetching upcoming audio files, so that if I've, say, had a project open and idle for a few hours, it doesn't give me an "audio engine overload" error every single time the playhead touches a new uncached file for the first time.

The easy workaround is to just do an offline bounce but that's silly, and only partially solves it for extremely complex projects. Most of the time Logic is sitting there with an empty HD load indicator, so I know it could be better about actively prefetching assets. It's not like playhead motion is a Turing-complete problem or whatever (it only moves in one direction and usually doesn't even change speed that much).

Obviously, freeze tracks aren't the answer, since it just replaces a bunch of small un-cached files with a bunch of large uncached files.

Maybe there's a buried setting. It's not like Logic is short on obscure preference panes after 20 years of accretion...

One of the many reasons why I gave up on the Sidekick/Hiptop was because I didn't have any reasonable way to synchronize my data between it and other devices. (This particular reason was at the top of the list, although ongoing usability problems and aggravation with not-quite-there features didn't help any.)

So, of course, the worst possible thing happened, and many people (including at least two friends of mine) were lost without their data and any way to recover it. I'm sure that basically none of them had a backup, because Danger went out of their way to make it difficult to keep your data synchronized or backed up externally.

"Cloud" computing as a promise is nice, but in execution it usually means "having all your data held up under lock and key by a single provider." You have to trust that provider to keep your data safe.

iTunes 9 has an "automatically add to iTunes" function. On its own that simplifies the process of adding music to iTunes (since you just drag files in there and iTunes will organize them into the library without any work on your part), but the really killer thing about it is that, being a Mac, you can place an alias to that folder on the desktop of another computer. Since I do all my work from a MacBook but keep my iTunes library on my old PowerMac, it used to be a major pain in the butt to download an mp3 and put it in my library, but now all I do is download it to my MacBook and then drag it to the handy "itunes dropbox" alias.

It helps that they finally fixed network share automounting either in 10.5 or 10.6 (I haven't tried it since 10.4 when it was still horribly broken).

Anyway, this makes it much easier for me to get music via my Magnatune subscription and the random mp3s that friends post on Twitter and the like.

As soon as I got home from work, Mark IMed me suggesting we go to Buena Vista Park and try using my telescope where there would be more visibility and substantially less light pollution than my roof. So we met up there at 9 PM, and after a rather interesting climb (apparently homeless people think that anyone with a flashlight is a cop, and that simply freezing in place and not answering a simple "hello" will make them not be noticed) we made it to the clearing at the top of the hill.

Once again I trained my telescope on Jupiter, and we managed to see it. Unfortunately, right now Jupiter is about the only interesting thing up in the sky, and the Galileoscope is still not particularly good for looking at it. I also looked at a few other random stars, but those basically aren't at all exciting unless you have a really good telescope. Now I'm thinking about buying a $250ish wide-field from Edmund Scientific.

We spent the next hour just yammering on about computers and anime and whatever, as we usually do, so it was still a worthwhile excursion.

On my way home, the back row of the bus had a bunch of high school students. They made me feel very old. When I was their age, the Internet was just what nerds like me used, and these cool kids were talking about their Facebook friends issues and whatever. THey also used the word "hella" in ways I never thought hella possible. When I realized the jacket I was wearing was probably older than they were, I suddenly felt very old.

But not as old as the stars.

Back in May I ordered a couple of Galileoscopes (two for me, and two for donation to youth programs). Unfortunately, due to an ordering mix-up the order got canceled, and I had to reorder in July. My scopes finally arrived today, so of course I assembled one of them and started to see what options I had for actual stargazing. (Not many, unsurprisingly.)

Was it really a cost-cutting measure that kept a camera out of the iPod Touch to keep it as cheap of a gaming platform as possible? That doesn't seem very likely to me. Cameras are very useful for gaming (which has been recently rediscovered by Microsoft and Sony, but was previously known by Treo owners), and if they really do want the Touch to be an ubiquitous gaming platform, not making quite as much profit on one would be more than balanced out by the large numbers of games being sold for it, right?

Also, "8GB of storage for free" is a bit disingenuous when it only applies to an iPod Nano which doesn't actually have any music loaded on it.

On that note, I also found Phil Schiller's comments about gaming to be a bit off-kilter. Yeah, there are a lot more games for the iPod than for the PSP or DS, but how many third-rate Same Game knockoffs does a platform need, anyway? Also, his mention of the "purchase experience" being bad on the PSP and DS because of the supposed lack of an app store is just an outright lie. (Okay, the iPhone App Store is admittedly a somewhat nicer experience than the PSP's, but he made it sound like the PSP could only play UMDs.)

So, because of my new phone, I decided to get a third-party generic knockoff charging dock for it.

The travel charger which came with the phone was a bit dumb in that it's a little wallwart puck with a USB jack, and you still need to carry a mini-USB cable around with you to plug them together. This charging dock is a bit dumb in that there's an integrated USB cable (for plugging into the computer) and a separate mini-USB jack for plugging in the included AC adapter (which has an integrated mini-USB lead). Fortunately, those dumbnesses cancel out — I plug the integrated USB cable of the charging dock into the included OEM travel charger, and use the charging dock's mini-USB-plug charger as my travel charger with integrated cable. Both problems solved. (Of course, I generally don't use a travel charger anyway — my netbook makes a perfectly useful USB power source, and I always have a mini-USB cable in my bag.)

The other problem is that there is a bright blue LED at the bottom of a little hole (which seems to be intended to showcase the clear plastic stylus which came with the dock, which is funny because the HTC Magic screen is capacitive and thus doesn't work with a stylus). Fortunately the hole is also the right size for a cotton swab to be stuffed in, and failing that there's plenty of other ways to plug the hole (putty, electrical tape, etc.).

Now that I've had the HTC Magic for a week, I can provide some more real-life information and observations:

• Music playback via A2DP is kind of assy. It has buffering and CPU load issues, and seems to be constantly adjusting its playback rate to try to keep the buffer exactly the right size for what's needed, which makes the pitch shift and flutter. This offends my ears.
• The built-in DAC also kind of sucks. It sounds like it's only precise to 12 bits or so. So quiet bits and fades tend to sound grainy. And the headphone adapter is surprisingly cumbersome, especially with how the mic is placed on it.
• So today I did the unthinkable and went back to my second-generation iPod Nano for music listening, and I'd remembered how great the Nano is. It's small and light enough that I really don't mind carrying an extra device, especially since it just does shuffle-by-album directly, and it's much less of a hassle to sync with.
• Finally, by using the HTC Magic as a normal, non-geeky, light-data-usage-and-a-little-phone device (since I was listening to music on the iPod), after a full day the device's battery had only drained by about 3%, making its real-world battery life significantly greater than the iPhone (which would have been drained 25% or so at least under the same usage patterns). Hell, this is about as good as my last non-smartphone (Sony Ericsson W580i) was in terms of standby time.

So, yeah. as an iPhone (phone, Internet device, and media player) replacement it's pretty good, as long as you don't care a lot about sound quality. As a smartphone (phone, Internet device) used alongside a separate media player, it is astoundingly phenomenal.

I did run into a somewhat major issue with the alarm clock this morning, though. If a notification (such as an email) comes in while the alarm is playing, the alarm just sits there in silence. Fortunately I set my alarm early enough that even oversleeping by an hour didn't make me late for work anyway. But it's definitely something to watch out for. The Android bug tracking system is full of alarm clock-related issues, though, and in the meantime I might just finally learn Android app development enough to just Do It Right anyway.

So, the Android alarm clock is pretty good, but it has the problem that all the built-in sounds are rather hostile and invasive and just plain loud. Fortunately, it turns out that it's pretty easy to install your own mp3 alarm sounds — simply make a folder "alarms" (all lowercase) on the SD card and put your mp3s in there. So I made a very simple, gentle, ease-you-into-waking up sound which is just a simple sinewave chime that goes every 30 seconds, which you can grab right here.

So I've spent some time with Android now, via my G2 HTC Magic myTouch 3G, and while comprehensive reviews have probably been done to death, here are the things which stick out at me:

Android isn't an iPhone killer just yet but it's well on its way.

I really hate the term "microgravity." It is supposed to convey that people in orbit around the Earth are only subject to a small, immeasurable amount of gravity, but that simply isn't the case. They're actually subject to a rather large amount, it's just that their "ground" is also subject to it and is falling just as fast as they are. There are subtly immeasurable variations in the local gravity field due to the spaceship itself, but there is nothing "micro" about the total gravitational force, aside from how it would be measured without a known external reference (like the big honking planet right outside the window, which I think qualifies).

Personally, I prefer the term "freefall," since it explains exactly what's going on and follows every implication perfectly (relativistic effects included). What do other people think?

A phone works a lot better if it lets you, you know, ANSWER. Sometimes a call will come in and the touch screen will be completely unresponsive while it keeps on ringing away. Sometimes I'll manage to accept the call right before it goes to voicemail. Usually I don't.

This seems like it's the most basic function of a telephone, and the primary reason for a cellphone in particular.

So, Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will be using base-10 file sizes. There has been a lot of nerd outcry over this, but frankly, I think it's about freaking time.

There is absolutely no reason to use base-2 file sizes. Yes, computers deal with things in terms of base 2, but nobody else does. When you look at a file that is 104768926 bytes big, you think, "oh, 105 megabytes," not "100 megabytes." As files get bigger and bigger, the disparity between MB and MiB gets worse and worse.

People have long accused hard drive manufacturers of "inflating" drive sizes by using base-10 instead of base-2, but really it's been the fault of OS makers for deflating it, based on some really ridiculous legacy which dates back to the 70s, namely that it was a lot easier for OSes to just say how many 1K clusters were available, or divide the bytes available by >>10 instead of /1024, or whatever.

The practice of 1024-as-K has also led to all sorts of weirdness, like 1.44MB disks (which were 1440KiB, i.e. 1474560 bytes - neither 1.44MB nor 1.44MiB).

"But computer parts are sold in terms of 1024 units!" is also crap. The only part that has ever been sold on that basis is RAM, which actually makes sense for various technological reasons not worth getting into. CPU speed is base-10. Network adapters are base-10. Bus speed is base-10. And hard drives are sold based on base-10, but reported based on base-2.

Okay, so RAM sizes will be somewhat disparate from hard disk sizes, but really, why does that matter? RAM sizes only matter to programmers, and as a ballpark figure for users for having "enough" memory. Just because a file on disk takes 1200KB doesn't mean it will take 1200KB of RAM; chances are it will take much more. (Granted, there are a lot of spots where it makes sense for code to use power-of-2 sizes, for things like memory allocation and caches and the like, but that doesn't need to be reported to the user.)

The only place where hard disk size really has any base-2 issue is because file systems tend to allocate things in base-2-sized chunks (usually 512 or 1024 bytes), but that's not counting overhead of the filesystem itself, and anyway the vast majority of files (the ones which take enough space for hard drive availability to be an issue) are so large that the cluster size essentially just amounts to rounding error anyway. Okay, so the "real" storage space taken by a 123456789-byte file is actually 123457536 bytes, but that's still a lot closer to 123.4MB than it is to 117.7MB!

In short: Apple is doing a good thing by finally freeing us of some ridiculous legacy which has no bearing on reality.

Okay, so it does mean there will be a mismatch between file sizes reported on OSX 10.6 vs. any other OS, but when does that actually matter?