20130508

This is meant as a list of things that have interested me lately.  Some of it is from best-of lists from other blogs (best of, best of?), and a lot of it I found in my Evernote trashcan.

Personal Status

I'm waist deep in my second Android class (of three).  I'm really enjoying the platform, but I am getting a little frustrated with not being as well-acquainted with Eclipse and Java as I'd like to be.  At some point the best way I'm going to learn is to apprentice with a more experienced Android developer.

Headliners

Stop reading the news
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli
I found it ironic that a story about not following the news looks a lot like a news article.  I also found it funny that I got the lesson out of this article by only reading the title and all the bold subtitles.

You should blog even if you have no readers
nathanmarz.com/blog/you-should-blog-even-if-you-have-no-readers.html
It's like they were talking directly to me!

Android: Handling configuration changes with Fragments
http://www.androiddesignpatterns.com/2013/04/retaining-objects-across-config-changes.html
(i.e. using AsyncTask when the user changes the phone's orientation)
I'm to the point where I feel comfortable researching Android topics on my own, I still feel like I can't really give advice to others as to the best way of doing something.  Even so, I found this post especially useful for handling AsyncTask threads. 

The battle between flat design and skeuomorphism
http://sachagreif.com/flat-pixels/
Skeuomorphism is the word you use these days to signal to others that you are smart, hip, and with it.  It's one of those words that reminds you what it feels like to be a Freshman - everyone around you hates being made fun of, but then the next year you make fun of everyone the new Freshman class.  I never understood the lack of empathy in these situations.

The Exceptional Beauty of Doom 3's Source Code
http://kotaku.com/5975610/the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-source-code
A nice little analysis of Doom's source code.  This is a summary of another article, but there is a link to the original analysis that I also enjoyed.  I'm not hot on debating the position of a curly bracket, but some of the other stuff was useful to keep in mind.  I especially like the section on Const and Rigid Parameters. 

Tools that might be useful

BitTorrent Sync
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrents-secure-dropbox-alternative-goes-public-130423/
BTW, don't "dropbox" me: there's nothing wrong with looking at alternatives

Interesting Stories 

The rise and fall of AMD
The Making of Pulp Fiction
Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams
Interesting story involving Dennis Rodman and North Korea
How to avoid Drones
Beat by Dre

Entertainment

Guns in movies being replaced by thumbs-up
Salary Negotiations: Whats possible when there is no more money?
Funny animated gifs of infomercials
It's like sky-mall for your computer!




 

Slightly OFF Communication

 (otherwise known as real-life Seinfeld situations)

I was walking to an office in Fremont when I noticed a man trying to simultaneously steer and push his car at the same time. Despite the pouring rain, I decided to lend him a hand. I quickly learned he wasn't trying to push his car, was was trying to push START his car. I eyed him smartly and asked "have you ever successfully push-started a car before?", he assured me he had. I was already committed (the dog was tied to a street sign), so I proceeded to help him push his car up and down the street. Eventually we gave up and pushed the car into a parking spot, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.

If you know my dog, you know he howls like the dickens when he's not within 2 feet of me in public. So throughout this entire ordeal there was the background noise of a howling labrador echoing throughout Fremont. While we were pushing the car into its final parking space, a woman approached me to ask if the dog was mine, because she thought someone might have abandoned him. Imagine a howling dog attached to a no parking sign in Fremont - yeah it wasn't pretty.

...

I got to the office and the door was locked. Was anyone there? I knocked, no answer, but a desklight was on far inside. I pulled out my cell phone and sent a text to the person asking if they were in the office, and he replied "Yes!". He apparently did not get the hint that I was at the front door, which makes sense because I only occasionally work at this office. So I was about to text him a more obvious message when the (fall-off) hallway door opened, and someone familiar stepped in. It looked like someone who worked in the office, so I calmly waited for him to walk down the long hallway. As he approached, he acknowledged my dog and came up to pet him, so I just said "I'm in luck, you just saved me 25 cents". He gave me an odd look, which is when I noticed it wasn't who I thought it was, but some person from another office in the building. There was nothing I could do, so he oddly passed me by and I stood at the (still locked) front door looking like a tool.

Cord Cutter

I'm a cord cutter - which is just a person who got rid of their pay TV service (cable or satellite) in favor of another method. This post is just about the method I use, yours may differ. My hope is that it might give you some ideas on how you can also be a better cord cutter.

• Everyone watches TV differently, so it's important to figure out what's important to YOU.
• We enjoy having access to live broadcast tv, so we hooked an antenna to a DVR (Tivo Premiere) to record all the shows from the major networks. We supplement with Netflix, and for anything else we use Amazon Video-On-Demand (VOD), which costs about $2/episode.
• It might sound confusing, but remember the Tivo does 95% of the work. We setup which shows we want it to record and it does the rest. Everything else is available on Netflix, and if you find yourself still wanting more you can then turn to Amazon VOD. What makes it even easier is that Netflix and Amazon are hooked directly into the Tivo.
• Our goal was to shoot for a equivalent price per month lower than cable, which was around $70/month. I'm happy to report we usually pay about $20/month these days, depending on how you measure it.
• If you don't care about broadcast tv, or don't care to have a DVR, I'd recommend a Roku. It opens the doors to more online services, such as Amazon Prime Streaming for instance (a Netflix competitor that doesn't work with Tivo).

Future Phone, 7 plus or minus 2

I had this thought swirling around my head this morning that wouldn't go away.  What I usually do in such cases is write down enough to be satisfied and then continue on with whatever I was doing.  However, today involved building an image, so after quickly sketching it up in gimp I figured I might as well post it somewhere.

I was thinking about how we make phone calls. 

1. Originally we called an operator and asked to be connected to a house address (i.e. using words)
2. We switched to a 7 digit number
3. There were so many phone numbers we had to add the area code every time you dialed, so it became a 10 digit number
4. (I'm ignoring countries outside the US, sorry but you guys have a ton of numbers to dial)
5. With the phone Address book it seems we're almost back to the original model of connecting using words

 * There shall be no implications what-so-ever that I know anything about the history of telecommunications from this list, although I did take a very interesting telecom class in college.

This got me to thinking: how else could we make calls other than using the number method?

The address book has pretty much eliminated the need for memorizing a phone number, although you could think of that number as being a good unique key into the world "database" of phones.

That's it.  Thanks for the ear internet.

Built this fairly quickly in gimp, I'm not sure why everyone complains about it being too confusing to use.

Student Protests

When I was in the 5^th grade, our students had a walk-out protest.  I can’t remember what the issue was, but I did know one thing – we weren’t the ones protesting. 

Sure the teachers told us we were protesting, and so did the news reporters, but it wasn’t the truth.  It was obvious we were just pawns for the teachers who were using us to make news about some school issue.  I don’t remember what it was all about, but I sure remember the feeling of how fake the entire situation felt.

When I was in high school, our school decided that my generation didn’t respect our elders, and decided to make changes to our dress code to reflect it.  Therefore we would no longer be allowed to wear baseball caps in class.

I didn’t care too much about it because I never wear baseball caps, they just don’t work well for me. There were even a few always-capped kids in school that I felt shouldn’t wear hats, because they had awesome hair.  So in some ways you could say I was in favor of the change.

As word got around school, the students who wore hats started talking about organizing a walk-out protest.  The rumors built up to the point where we actually had a date and time, and everyone knew about it, including the teachers.  Like I stated earlier, I really didn’t care about the hat rule, but I did feel it was silly – who cared if someone wore a hat in school?  I was planning on joining the protest.

The day before the protest there was an announcement on the intercom from the dean stating that anyone who walked out of school would be suspended.  This really angered me, because walking out would probably not change the rule, but the students could at least send a message that we felt the entire thing was stupid.  I even felt that if everyone walked out anyway they would probably not suspend the entire school.

The day of the protest came, and soon enough so did the time.  I remember it like it was yesterday.  I was in accounting.  The clock struck, the room was silent, and I felt an incredible urge to stand up and walk out of the room: but I didn’t – and no one else did either.  I remember peering into the hallway and it was completely empty - you could hear a pin drop.  Just then my teacher spoke up and said it looked like no one was stupid enough to go on any silly walk out.  This angered me even further, enough for me to review my school schedule in my head for the next week, but I still stayed in my seat and did nothing. 

As I sat there, the protest from 5^th grade popped into my head.  I remembered being told how it was such a learning experience for us, and now that all felt like hogwash.  I have never forgotten that day in class, and even though I had no reason what-so-ever to walk out of that class room (I never wore a hat, I wasn’t popular, I’d just be laughed at), I still regret not doing so to this day.

This is why I have a hard time believing student protests.  True protests are supposed to be about people standing up for the things they believe in, and pointing out to the rule makers how silly they are acting.  It’s supposed to be a reality check that stands against black-and-white policies that fail the big picture test. 

It’s kind of sad to say, but I feel that the medium has been abused so much that I don’t believe people are serious unless there are consequences they are facing for having their say.

How I got started in Computers (part 1)

I've recently read some blogs from people telling the story of how they got started in computers.  I decided join in and organize my thoughts on the subject.  After I started writing down my thoughts, I decided to break this up a little bit.  My first few computers fulfilled different things in my life that I feel are working mentioning.

Our first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000.  It was a little computer that only had a keyboard and hooked directly to the TV.  It had no storage outside of the on-board RAM, so you had to save your programs to a cassette tape as audio.

We had a vanilla tape recorder that we connected to the computer, and then we would record the audio of the program to cassette.  I remember a few times playing an unlabeled tape on our stereo and discovering it was a program when the sound was all beeps and fuzz. 

Running an existing program involved reversing the process: hooking up the cassette player and playing the audio while the computer "listened" and converted all that sound back into a program.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't work.

Years later I learned that some radio stations would broadcast programs over the air.  You would record the audio off the radio and then load the program from the tape you recorded.  I'm not sure if any of the radio stations near me did something like this or if I was too young to know it was occurring.  Either way the thought that this was possible fascinates me.

My brother and I had no games or programs to speak of other than a book that I believe he found in a store.  It was called "51 Game Programs for the Timex Sinclair 1000 and 1500", and it was simply a list of programs and the code you had to type in to get it to work.  Some of them were small, but naturally all the cool looking games were pages upon pages long.  My brother and I would lie on the floor and take turns typing in those programs.  I remember a car racing game that we just couldn't get right – the picture showed the road with twists and turns, but our version only showed the road as straight as an arrow.  We suffered a lot over that program – multiple failures trying to save to tape, retyping to try to get the program right, etc.

Coincidentally I still have that book on my shelf!  My mother tried to sell the computer at a garage sale sometime in the mid-80's and some woman begged my mother to sell her JUST the book (she didn't want the computer).  My mother refused and for some reason my 10-ish old mind decided I would keep the book.  I'm so glad I did, it proudly sits next to all my other computer books on my bookshelf.

A few years ago I thought I had an "Ah-ha!" moment when I remembered the entire audio-saving technique of the Timex.  I thought it might be useful for communicating with a group of others at a ski resort.  This was before smartphones, but I thought you could replace those little walkie-talkies people carried around with one that also had a small keyboard.  Then you could leave a text message using those devices using the same audio bandwidth the radios already used.

Facebook money

Here's hoping that all these new Facebook millionaires don't just create new wealth elsewhere in the economy but also help extinguish the notion that your kids have to grow up to be doctors and lawyers in order to be successful.

Visual Studio 2010 comment syntax

I just want to air an annoyance with Visual Studio 2010 and how it formats comments.

Code I want to comment:

I select the code and hit the comment button:

(By the way, Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C is the worst key combination I've ever heard of)

The Result:

Why can't I get a result where the comment tags are on their own lines? 
This seems much cleaner to me.  It also is the same syntax the Microsoft doc uses.