May 19, 2011

B-Day

My wife is just days away from delivering our first child.  It’s been a long journey, and it hasn’t really sunk in that we’re going to have a very tiny roommate in just a week, maybe less.  I am incredibly excited to welcome our daughter to this planet for all of its wonders and horrors.  The soul that is about to take residence in our daughter will hit the metaphysical jackpot of being born in a stable country that values women, lets them vote, allows them to own property, and have self-directed decision power over their own reproduction.

I will steep her in the western tradition with stories of Greece, and the duality of the western civilization.  This is all selfish projection of my own world view, but that is one of the joys of children isn’t it?  She’ll figure it out for herself and rebel anyway, so I’m going to lay the groundwork for her to rebel against.  This is the role of the father.

At this point I suppose I am getting ahead of schedule a bit.  For the immediate future, I’ll be happy to keep her fed and keep her diaper clean.  Sleep will be optional.

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March 28, 2011

Space Maximized

This is a terrific looking apartment in an amazing 344 sqft.  Imagine applying these techniques to a ~2000 sqft. American home.  This young architect should have a long future ahead of him.  It’s easy to spot great work when you see it, and this is certainly it.

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March 25, 2011

Nuclear Woes

The crisis in Japan is a huge world event.  The possibility that a significant portion of such a small densely populated country would become uninhabitable would be a death kneel for the nuclear industry.  In Chernobyl it was almost ignorable by western parties under the banner of “Chernobyl wasn’t a western design.”  Fukushima was, and although there are several stories of design and cost considerations that weakened its final design, it did hold up better than Chernobyl under far worse of an event.  Of the 6 reactors, only one is in serious trouble and it did suffer a 9.0 mag quake as well as a tsunami.

Since it has gone to the #2 spot in the news cycle as of late, one would assume it’s ready to forget.  I’ve found http://mitnse.com to be a good source of educated opinion.  There are radioactive isotopes entering the environment at levels far above normal.  In the ecosystem these could accumulate into something that is dangerous.  The half lives of most of the debris are anywhere between a few days and a few years.  Assuming the remaining reactor is cooled and potentially buried in concrete, this disaster doesn’t appear that it will leave a stain behind on the earth as heavy as Chernobyl.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

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December 27, 2010

Modern Day Public Opinion

The NY Times just put out an article comparing Jon Stewart of the Daily Show fame to Edward R Murrow.  The Times sites journalists of previous decades as having a pivotal influence on policy for exposing the issues of their day to gather enough political attention to drive action.  There’s little doubt that Jon Stewart is doing the same today.  The Daily Show recently became the most popular late night show on television beating out prime time night spots like Letterman and Jay Leno.  Their format does have an advantage in that it is shorter and strictly political so they can remain focused and fill a shorter space with more entertainment.  It’s a harder task for a longer show.

Jon Stewart has a very convenient shield being a satire show.  He claims that he’s a comedy show and not the news.  Technically that shield sticks.  However anyone who’s watched the show knows that Jon Stewart takes on contemporary political issues head on.  He does so in a way that speaks to the details of the issue as well.  Cable news only has 120 seconds to cover each topic of the day, so you’re only able to get a kindergarten level of understanding of the issue.  Popular panel formats offer more depth, but usually degrade into name calling and shouting matches on prime time networks.  The reason most young people willingly admit they get their news from the Daily Show is that it’s the spoon full of sugar that helps the news go down.  It’s entertaining, educational, and usually contains a moment of realization that something in our government is wrong and needs to be changed.  This leaves the viewer entertained and angry at the same time.

That is a powerful combination that no one else does well, except for the Colbert Report.

I am inspired by what Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert have been able to accomplish.  Speaking truth to power behind the veil of comedy is an age-old Western tradition, and it gives me hope and joy to see it alive and well in these two.  They will be able to pass the 85 test with flying colors.

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Filed under Politics

December 18, 2010

An unexamined life not worth living

This is a quote of Socrates and recently came up while listening to public radio on a lazy Saturday when I should be out getting my Christmas shopping done.  This kind of set me back to spend a minute examining my own life.  I like to think that I have reasons for doing what I do, and there is some purpose to my own personal madness.  However it may all be an illusion.  If you set your context far enough back, say on a universal scale, then nothing really matters as the sun will eventually go nova and humanity will fade into space dust.  Now this point of view at first makes me think nothing matters, go hedonism!  Abandon all but self-interest.

However I do find two escape clauses for this line of thinking, and I only search for them because the previous conclusion makes me feel guilty.

1. The fact that our mortality as a person and as a planet makes what we do even more meaningful because there is an end.  Without an ending there is always an escape, more to do, an extension, no deadline for your final assignment.  So without that final sense of accountability, there is no pressure to achieve, contribute, or make the impact that you want to make in the world.

2. Conventional interplanetary travel.  If humanity is able to escape the gravity well of the Earth and colonize other planets outside of our solar system, then we extend #1 by several orders of magnitude, as now we are limited by the lifetime of our galaxy and perhaps universe instead of just our solar system.  This is reassuring but still the same problem eventually shows up, just on a longer timeline.  Assuming our understanding of the universe is correct, heat death awaits us as the universe cools.  Still our understanding is young and there is much to explore.  I have no doubt that this will evolve over the coming years and new ideas will emerge.

Now the real kicker about number two is the concept that conventional interplanetary travel is simply not possible.  What if the physics of our universe are such that a living being as we know it cannot move between the islands of life, like our planet, without consuming more resources than are available.  It would be as if whatever made the universe made it such that life may evolve and exist throughout it, but those solitary habitats will never have the capability to reach one another.  If this is actually the case it’s somewhat reassuring as we don’t have to worry about meeting aliens of vastly different technology levels which rarely go well for the receiver.  It’s somewhat depressing as the lifetime of our species does have a measurable end, and it’s the short version.  However if this is the case we get back to number one which gives us meaning and purpose because our time is limited and there is no escape from our blue oasis in space.

This brings me back to what am I doing to lead an examined life?  What is my contribution?  Why do I get up and occupy myself with work?  I’d like to think I am making a difference with my wind farm project in an attempt to create a future of renewable energy.  I do get sidetracked keeping the bills paid which is a valid use of energy, but doesn’t make the kind of impact for me spiritually that the renewable energy project does.  It does take care of my family which is a critical contribution.  Aligning your work with what satifies you I believe is the key to happiness.  So I will continue seeking, and try to remember to examine if what I’m doing day-to-day makes the impact that I want.

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Filed under Philosophy

December 8, 2010

Music Piracy is Over.. Really?

Wired posted an interesting article that music piracy is over.  I suppose from my experience that would be true as well, but not because the lure has been removed.  It’s more because the price has dropped so much.  The days of carrying hard drives over to your friend’s house have long past for me.  Of course that probably has more to do with my demographic than anything else.  College students today may still be doing the same thing.

Ultimately we trade money for value, and in this case that value is expected to be music.  For me the value lies elsewhere but music is still at the heart of it.  I am self-proclaimed anal.  I love keeping a neat desk, a neat room, well swept floors and all the other annoying habits that go with the title.  Part of that is a neat file system.  Like many other geeks, even the shabbier variety I think like to keep their computer files in some semblance of order.  This leads me to the real value proposition for buying music which is the meta data.

Buying music means I don’t have to rip it, fix the track numbers, put it in its own directory under the right category and make sure all of my players pick up that location, not to mention backing the files up.  Buying online gives me all of that easily.  Plus it’s easy to find new music that you buy.  Pirating requires trolling bit-torrent sites for files of dubious quality and mis-tagged data.  There is also the old school method of assembling files from newsgroup posts, how arcane.

Buying music is simply the path of least resistance.  Given the cost is so low now, the small contribution of which more goes to the artist, is well worth satisfying my anal nature when it comes to my file system.

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November 22, 2010

The humble progress bar

I’ve done a lot of programming over the years, but not very much on client applications.  My history is primarily with server applications and test code which in many cases only has an input file as UI or better still a SQL connection string.  So I wrote a progress bar today.  They’re not too hard and MSDN actually has an ok resource on how to build one *gasp* with example code!

I ended up not using that exact variation but came close.  This part is what gave me the most trouble, although it wasn’t that much.

SendMessage(hwndPB, PBM_SETRANGE, 0, MAKELPARAM(0, cb / 2048));
SendMessage(hwndPB, PBM_SETSTEP, (WPARAM) 1, 0);

The above code assumes you call the following which increments the bar by the 3rd parameter of the PBM_SETSTEP call.

SendMessage(hwndPB, PBM_STEPIT,  0, 0);

However this didn’t appear to work for me.  My bar didn’t move at all when I called SendMessage with a PBM_STEPIT, so I used PBM_ without calling the SendMessage with PBM_SETRANGE.  This is easy because without that cal the progress bar defaults to min/max of 0 to 100.  This way I had just a handful of places in my code where I wanted to advance the bar to specific intervals because the code inbetween was not equal in it’s progressness.  So using the following I was able to explicitly set my progress bar where the 3rd argument is a value from 0 to 100.

SendMessage(hwndPB, PBM_SETPOS, 10, 0);

This is a pretty simple implementation and I would probably use a variable in place of the 10 if it were more complex, but I only made 5 calls, so this works for now.  The MSDN article covers the rest pretty well including styles and dialog options.

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Filed under Coding

November 19, 2010

Windows Phone 7, which one?

This is turning out to be a serious holiday season when it comes to new computer hardware.  PCs have never been faster, sleeker and lighter.  Microsoft has now entered the smartphone market for real now and offers 5 phones through 2 carriers, AT&T and T-Mobile.  Sprint is coming early next year as well as Verizon.

AT&T
1) HTC Surround – slide out speaker , mm ok.
2) Samsung Focus – lightest, best looking screen in my opinion
3) LG Quantum – slide out keyboard

T-Mobile
1) HTC HD7 – largest screen
2) Dell Venue Pro – slide out keyboard, nicest physical form factor in my opinion

I am currently on the AT&T network with you guessed it… my iPhone.  I love my iPhone, but I’m ready to give the Windows phone a shake.  I’ve seen several of the models hands on and it looks great!  The one I’ve been most impressed with is the Samsung.  At first I actually didn’t like it’s weight.  It felt too light, cheap even.  However that is a consequence of my age.  I associate heft with quality.  The Samsung phone on the AT&T network is very stiff and although it’s light it performs really well.  The screen was by far the clearest and brightest of the 5 phones I looked at.  Responsiveness is very crisp as well, faster than my iPhone 3GS.  I can’t speak for the iPhone 4, I don’t have one.

Still what I’m really looking forward to is the Windows Phone app store.  This is something Apple has had via iTunes for a while, but I have lived inside Visual Studio most of my programming life, so I will be much more likely to write my own applications for the Windows Phone and the developer pool out there is huge.  There are going to be some really good apps for the Windows phone in the coming months.

All of that being said, I’m still going to wait until January to see what Sprint’s offering is.  Their network is faster and cheaper than AT&Ts assuming you are in a 4G area, which I am.  My contract is up, so I can jump ship without penalty.  That will give the app store some time to fill out too.  I hate not being able to buy a new phone now, but delayed gratification is supposed to be a sign of maturity, or so I’m told.

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November 19, 2010

Found it!

Ok, Lenovo just updated their website today and they now offer a W510 with a Class 2 GPU in the same ballpark as the ATI 5650.  The Lenovo looks like it could take on a truck, and certainly doesn’t get the sexy style points that the HP Envy or the Mac get, but it has…

1) A High Res Screen (>= 1400×900)
2) SSD Option
3) Class 2 GPU or better – NVIDIA FX 880M (1GB)
4) A 15” Screen Format

This whole package with a 160GB SSD, I mention that because it is the priciest upgrade, is about $2100.  The Macbook Pro with similar specs is $2600.  So I think I’ve found my machine.  Thank you Lenovo!

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Filed under Laptops

November 19, 2010

The.. Laptop

So being in OEM, I spend a lot of time looking at laptops from all over the world.  We often get machines early for testing and see many new models just as they are coming out.  We spend a lot of time analyzing and consulting on the performance of the images that OEMs put on their machines.  Of course the apple compete issue is always on our minds.

Since I am very much a laptop aficionado, this job is perfect for me.  I am always shopping for my next laptop.  I use several new laptops every month and I actually work from at least two or three per year.  When I say work from I mean that I go through the trouble of setting up e-mail accounts on rich client applications and actually do work on them instead of just kind of tinkering and judging news ones that go by.

After using so many, from 11” up to 17” I personally keep coming back to the 15”.  11” is just too small for my hands.  13” is nice and portable, but not so good for writing code or doing side by side document editing which I do a lot.  A 15” accommodates all of these.  A 17” does even better, but the size and weight really do start to become too much for me at that point.  A 17” is so big, I might as well have my desktop machine to work from.

So I like looking at 15” models.  Now I will confess that I do play video games on my laptop from time to time. Lately Civilization 5 has been a vice in airports waiting for a flight.  So I like to have a good GPU on my laptop for just such occasions.  I also like high resolution displays, meaning in the 1400×900 or greater range.  Being in the business of performance, I know that the disk the today’s primary bottleneck, just like it has been for the last 50 years.  So a SSD is the single most important hardware upgrade you can add to your computer to noticeably improve it’s performance.

I have found only 4 laptops that almost meet these criteria.

1) Lenovo T510 – GPU is Class 3 (notebookcheck.com)
2) Alienware MX15 – Does everything!  Except it looks like a gaming rig.
3) HP Envy 15 (No longer shipping, they only have the 14.5, but it’s only 1366×768)
4) Sony VPCEB390X – No SSD option

Now there’s #2 staring at me saying look I meet all of your criteria.  This is true.  However that notebook looks like something out of Toys’R’Us or a Car Toys bling factory.  I still have to meet with customers and business people with my laptop.  When you open that thing up, it says something about you, and that’s not what I want to communicate to my business associates.

The other contender that came close was the HP Envy 15”.  I don’t know why HP is no longer shipping that machine in favor of the 14.5” version.  The Envy 17” meets all of the criteria save for the fact that it is so large.  For some reason, OEMs assume that if you want a high resolution screen, you must want a 17”.

I even looked at our key competitor, Apple.  The Macbook Pro comes close and offers all of my criteria except the GPU is class 3, similar to the Lenovo.  However it’s also worth noting that the Macbook Pro spec compared to the Lenovo, literally the exact same hardware save for the design is $500 more expensive.

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