iPhone 4

22 July 2010 : reviews

In general, I’m happy with the iPhone 4. It’s a huge upgrade in performance from my iPhone 3G, which was getting to be sluggish and useless, especially under iOS4. I don’t think it’s a huge upgrade from a 3Gs; if I was in contract with a 3Gs, I would probably wait till next year. It is faster than the 3Gs, but it doesn’t really seem faster, except for in situations where you time some computationally intractable task (like how long it takes to load Grocery IQ; I’m going to try a new shopping list application, because this has gotten silly).

There is no other phone on the market that is interesting or compelling to me, though I would be hard-pressed choosing between this and a 3Gs, given the price differential, were I a new customer. If you don’t own either device, you should.

Multitasking

I know this is an OS feature rather than a hardware feature, but it’s an OS feature I didn’t have available to me until I upgraded.

It’s great, for the apps that support it. More apps need to support it. I like the multitasking implementation. It does everything I strictly want/need, but doesn’t hit me with a penaltry otherwise. It’s perfect, except that it requires developer effort to fix.

Sidebar: The difference between developers that ship apps and forget them and those that keep up with the iOS advancements is huge. I’m thinking of separating my applications into pages. The first page is “applications by developers who give a shit” and the second is “everybody else.”

The Screen

The screen is amazing. The difference is palpable, but I don’t miss it when I’m using my old iPhone 3G. It does make text look nice. The apps that take advantage of it look more crisp, but aren’t fundamentally more useful or different. Maybe my vision just isn’t so good that it matters for most use.

It’s very impressive. It’s very obvious. But, I don’t think it makes any real difference to me in what I do. I don’t find myself making the text much smaller, though I appreciate that it’s crisper. I don’t find myself not zooming into photos that I would have zoomed into before. I wish more applications would be updated to support it, but it’s not really going to change anything for me. At playing distance, games don’t seem any more impressive. Maybe time will tell on this one, but the most “amazing” feature of the new phone is amazing in theory, but it doesn’t really increase the utility of the phone for me at all.

Glass & Steel

I’m so happy that the plastic is gone. I brought it back with a bumper. I have a bumper for one reason: I don’t want a phone that can slide on a slick or semi-slick surface. The rubbery case I had on my iPhone 3G prevented it from sliding off things and onto the ground numerous times; the grippy sides of the bumper provide the same functionality in a less obstructive package. I’m a fan. I want a phone that stays put. If they put little rubber feet on the back of the phone, I wouldn’t bother with the bumper.

I am afraid of breaking the back glass, a little bit. We’ll see how this holds up over time.

Battery Life

I’m not impressed with the battery life. 2.5 hours of use and 12 hours of standby is enough to deplete half of the battery. When used as a telephone, the battery seems to decay even faster. Maybe I just have a bum battery, but it appears one day of moderately active use is all I’ll ever get out of a full charge.

There’s an incredible reserve of battery life in the iPad; it seems to hang out at “100%” for longer than should be possible, and a day’s worth of use on and off leaves plenty of power left for the next day’s adventure. I know we’re talking about apples and oranges here, but I’ve become spoiled by the iPad; I want the same from my iPhone now. This is probably an unreasonable desire given the size and weight of the device.

The Phone Is Fundamentally Broken

No, the antenna is fine. Reception has been good.

Every phone call I’ve made, the proximity sensor issue has triggered. I’ve gone to speaker phone, face-dialed, and hung up on people. This never happened for me on the 3G. I’m going to have to switch to a headset, because I cannot use this phone reliably as a phone right now. This is a serious flaw and is unacceptable. This needs to be fixed.

On the upside, I don’t really own an iPhone for its phone capabilities. It’s much more useful as a piece of wearable connectivity and reality augmentation, so I’m still happy to have upgraded, and definitely would not go back.

Hummingbird

20 July 2010 : photo

Niki noticed that there was an abundance of hummingbirds at the resort in Pembroke where Bill had his wedding. She spent a lot of time being patient and getting some amazing shots.

I think the lesson I learned from this is that there’s probably a lot of photography that comes from stealing somebody else’s idea. In this case, I cheated by using a camera with better resolution (despite its depressingly bad AF) and shot in afternoon light from an elevated position on a bench, and got lucky after about 400 exposures. Bigger crop on flickr.

Congratulations, Bill & Krista

19 July 2010 : photo

Bill got married in the south this weekend; it was my first excuse/opportunity to wear a seersucker suit.

Pro tip: When you’re wearing light-colored seersucker, remember to get some flesh-colored underwear.

Thanks goes to Niki for the photos.

Review: The Millenium Trilogy

12 July 2010 : reviews

I finished the Millenium Trilogy over the weekend.

I get it. Loyal narcissistic obsessives polyamorists and hyper-rational autistics are neat. The hubris of the evil will be dealt with by the eternally vigilant.

I guess I just don’t see what the big deal is. “Bottled lightning?” Hardly. It was good light reading, but I don’t think there’s anything deep or meaningful here. It’s a great script for some action films. It was worth reading, but I guess I’m glad I’m done with it, as well.

6/10.

Another MRTG Chart

6 July 2010 : rambling

The weekly internal temperature chart is looking even worse today, so when my box fell off the grid, I assumed there was a thermal cause:

Turns out there wasn’t a direct thermal issue (though the battery controller on the RAID controller is pretty ornery about how hot the battery got). How do we explain the story?

Here’s line voltage into the UPS that feeds my equipment rack:

And UPS charge levels, for added effect:

And that’s pretty much the story. I’m guessing there were some crazy power issues today trying to cool Connecticut when it was running over 100 degrees.

Everything went into safe shutdown once the UPS ran out of power, and then turned back on once the power was back. Sort of. My core switch didn’t come back online; I think there’s a timing issue about when it first powers up, and one of the switches on the network never ran out of power (it has a few hours of battery life on its UPS).

Anyhow, having a girlfriend willing to go check all of this stuff out when you’re on the other side of the country is pretty awesome.

Not That Hot in California

5 July 2010 : rambling

It’s 66 in California right now. I’m glad to not be sharing the room with the Tubbs Center for Advanced Computation right now:

(ignore the k, and it’s x10 instead of x100)

Three Stross Reviews

5 July 2010 : reviews

I read Overtime by Charles Stross on the flight to California this morning. This is the first thing I’ve “read” in iBooks. It wasn’t unpleasant, but I much preferred the time I spent with a paper book later. The iPad is still too heavy. I enjoyed this, I’m glad I didn’t waste the paper, but alas. The story itself was okay. I hadn’t yet read The Atrocity Archives, so I had very little context. It was a cute sci-fi story and all, but nothing really compelling or engaging. Not very thought-provoking. A weak showing, compared to some of his other shorts, to be sure. 5/10.

Palimpsest was far longer, but I read it via a cached copy in Instapaper instead. On the iPad, I prefer reading in Instapaper to iBooks, though the headers were mangled in the mobilizer conversion. Can’t have everything, I guess, but I like the lack of superfluous fake book shit. Anyhow, Palimpsest was much longer than the previous story, and took some time to actually read on the iPad. As far as time travel paradoxes mixed with singularities go, it was a pretty compelling read, and it’s worth a go, especially since you can read the whole thing online for free. Painfully predictable at times, but I still enjoyed it. 8/10.

The Atrocity Archives was a good book to read on a plane; it doesn’t take a lot of thought, and reads pretty easily; I polished it off in about three hours. It combines lovecraft, insider IT jokes, math and computer science, and Castle Wolfenstein. Pretty much can’t go wrong, if it’s the sort of thing you’re looking for. If you’re looking for hard singularity/relativistic science fiction, however, it’s a bit on the easy side. I’ll probably finish the series, but it’s fluff reading. Reading this one on paper was far more pleasant than either of the digital reading experiences. I’m quickly becoming an anachronism. 6/10.

Red Bull Air Race

22 June 2010 : photo

Went to qualifying for the Red Bull Air Race on Saturday. It was pretty neat.

In general, the photo opportunities are pretty fun. Price is a little high. Turns out there were some stretches of the park that were open that would have worked fine; crowding was mild enough that there was plenty of room on the green. C’est la vie. I think there was substantially less turnout than expected, or else race day is just completely another beast. That makes little sense to me, since qualifying and the real race are more or less identical, less some flyovers by various other things, and the podium at the end.

The one thing I’ll note is that if you’re not going for the photography, the coverage on TV is … better than you can get trying to see the race yourself. Sure, you don’t get the sound and excitement of it, or whatnot, but the camerawork provided by the various cranes and helicopters and onboard footage is amazing; we were pretty far away from the race most of the time, which provided a neat vantage point, but you lose a lot of the detail of what’s happening.

I’ll put some more of these up on flickr in a bit…

Why I Should Stop Coding

16 June 2010 : rambling

So I wrote a relatively straightforward program to try to quickly solve an NP-complete problem. The details are unimportant, but I can’t explain the result. I wrote my C++ in a way that caused it consume a great deal of memory rather quickly (pretty much as quickly as an allocator can spit out 48-byte blocks on an Opteron 180). Once I ate up about three gigabytes of system memory, oom-killer started obliterating system services, but not my stupid program.

I don’t understand how this is possible. What stupid thing did I do that allowed oom-killer to leave my dumb program alive, but to kill system-level services?

Best Job Ever

16 June 2010 : rambling

When I was a kid, I loved to get involved in the Mac versus PC debate. Anybody who had a brain, of course, used a PC. Anybody who really had a brain was running something other than a Microsoft OS on that PC, too. Macs were for the people too dumb to have their own preferences and designs on their computing experience. When in doubt, flame somebody for their computer choice, and you had a few days of fun on the bulletin boards.

I think the turning point for me was my on-campus job in college; I learned more from that job about being a hacker (in the most respectful sense of the word) than I expect I’ll ever encounter in the rest of my career. My desk came with a mac and a Linux box, and my boss had the same. “I assume these will be satisfactory for you,” my boss inquired on my first day, more as a statement than a question. He was pretty hardcore, and I very quickly came to respect him. Not wanting to ruin my $13.25/hour job in the first few minutes, I didn’t launch into my self-righteous spiel about the suck that was the Mac.

And that was the end of the religious wars for me, beyond trolling and playing to somebody’s nonsense for sport; I guess that’s what trolling is. I’ve got a weird ecosystem of computers at home now, but I can’t be bothered to care about what they’re running anymore.

I guess what I’m getting at is “shut up about your stupid phones, this oil spill is way more interesting.”

Foursquare and Corporate Achievements

9 June 2010 : rambling

Some coworkers were trying to explain foursquare to me today; I’m not sure I fully get it, but whatever, I signed up. I think my first goal will be to become the mayor of Espresso Neat. Or maybe my apartment. Probably my apartment.

Anyhow, as I slowly started to understand things, foursquare is pretty much achievements for life. This started another conversation, which leads us to the killer idea: Corporate Achievements.

Let’s illustrate with some badges:

• Completed new hire orientation.
• Sent first email.
• Checked in fix for first bug.
• One month without a sick day.
• Spoke up in a meeting.
• Asked for help.
• Got promoted.
• …

I think this has huge potential. Maybe it can replace performance appraisals. Just check the person’s Corporate Achievement Score against their peers.

I mean, this is a stupid idea. But it would be fun.

Mad Science

31 May 2010 : rambling

Feeling like a bit of a mad scientist lately.

In my closet now is a 20-pound tank of CO2, which actually weighs about 65 pounds. I guess I should have gotten an aluminum tank. I’ve started re-filling the Soda Club tanks for my carbonator; while the fills from SodaClub are cheaper than buying seltzer, they’re still a pain for two reasons. First, they are charging an absurd fee for a tiny tank of extremely cheap gas. Second, their proprietary delivery service is sort of a pain to work with, and not optimal for any of my shipping locations. Maybe if I was unemployed this wouldn’t be such a big deal.

My first go at transferring liquid CO2 went pretty well, at least until I realized I put an extra 300 grams of liquid CO2 into the recipient tank, which would have put it to roughly 5000 psi in short order. The safety valve should have kicked in at 3000 psi, but probably better I weighed the tank and immediately engaged the vent circuit, rather than waiting to find out of the safety valve work. Very happy to have an accurate scale and the understanding of why I need to use it in this case.

Anyhow, it doesn’t end there. I ordered a case of butane tanks. It turns out that I could get a dozen of the things for only double the cost of buying a single one. I can’t explain why it works this way. So, I was happy to get a case of butane tanks for relatively cheap.

That is, until I realized that I now have about a cubic foot of highly explosive flammable gas I need to store somewhere. While the CO2 tank has the risk of becoming a small inert rocket, the butane scares me a bit more. I need to think about this one a bit.

I cooked two steaks in a water bath tonight to medium temperature, and they were enjoyable, despite being medium. The exterior crust was perfectly browned (thank you, butane torch), and the interior was uniform and delicious. I never thought I’d enjoy a medium steak, but there you have it. The results when rare or medium rare should be outstanding. The carrots are cooking now; the downside of having only one sous-vide rig, I guess.

I’m flying model helicopters with batteries that are preposterously dangerous.

I have no point in any of this, beyond that these are fascinating times for the autodidact.

Dare to Dream

31 May 2010 : rambling

I’m sure half a million people have already taken similar photos, but hey, this is funny.

ExpandOS

29 May 2010 : rambling

Every once in a while, an idea comes along that’s so obvious you’re offended it took so long to get to this point.

Today I was exposed to ExpandOS. I’d never heard about these before. They take recycled (and recyclable) cardboard and make it into thin sheets. Then they have a machine that folds pieces of the sheets together into little rigid interlocking space-filling triangular prisms. These displace things like packing peanuts, air packs, bubble wrap, and so forth. I found that they held things VERY securely; unlike with packing peanuts, things don’t have a tendency to fall through and end up one side of a box. So, they’re better for the environment and they’re actually better at what they do than the product they replace. This is a rare thing, I’m impressed.

Crossing Guard

13 May 2010 : rambling

I was at the liquor store yesterday, buying some beer. I picked up some Burton Baton, some Festina Peche, and my favorite standby beer, some 60 minute. I took the day off, so I was doing this around 3PM.

When I reached the checkout, there was a crossing guard there. In Connecticut, we seem to have crossing guards at all of the busy school bus stops. Their job is to make sure cars stop and that kids don’t get killed, as far as I can tell. Like this guy, which apparently saved a kid’s life.

Anyhow, as I mentioned, it’s 3-ish, and we’re at a liquor store, and the crossing guard is there. With his safety vest and stop sign and everything. Buying a hand-held bottle of vodka. The checker asked if he was done with his work for the day, and he muttered something about being cold. She had a look of horror and tried to clarify if he was done protecting kids for the day, and he got sort of belligerent and said something to the effect of “No woman, I’m cold!”

Damn.