^_^

Top 5 Under Sold Nexus One Features

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:46:54 -0400

Before I bought a Nexus One, I obsessed about it for 2 months, while I sold some things. I am not the kind of person to buy anything (even a data cable) without some decent research, and in the last 22 hours since receiving my delicious treat, I have found that there are 5 things that I don't think have been properly conveyed by marketing and reviews so far, and no video or picture has done justice. 1. It is not as fat as you imagine At the risk of having an Apple fan boy use my Geo IP to track me down, the iPhone is fat. Fact. I got an iPod Touch when they were released, the iPhone had been released 4/5 months before but I had yet to see one. The iPod Touch worked for me, and I was instantly sold on the iPhone... until I went to see it. The iPod Touch is slender, I could see myself using that as a phone, the iPhone is not slender. It is sleek, but it is not slender. I honestly didn't care about most of the missing features on it, I just cared that I just didn't like the size. So when getting the Nexus One, I had the same reservations. The Nexus One excels in enough other areas that could make me want it more than the iPhone which I had totally gone off by now, even if they made it as slender as the iPod Touch. There is no marketing, picture or video, that can really show you how the Nexus One looks and feels in your own hands (even the web site tries, but still made it look chunky). Other HTC phones don't do it justice either. It is a slender but rugged thing which just sits nicely in my hand. I have tried several demo and friends iPhones in the last 3 years to compare it to, and I am well aware that they are only "slightly" thicker, but that slightly makes the world of difference. 2. OLED is totally lost in translation I can not count the number of times I have read "hard to see in the sun" well I live in the UK and I am a geek, the amount of time I spend in the sun is basically nothing. But today I tried it in the brief amount of sun that our government schedules us every day, and I could see it perfectly while it was directing me to a Subway for lunch. When I first saw the Nexus One video of the start up screen, I actually thought it looked quite tacky, all streaking in and forming an X in the Google colours while it loaded. I can tell you now, watching that on YouTube and being able to get an idea of how good the OLED screen is, is like watching Avatar in 3D without 3D glasses. The screen is so sharp I have turned it off several times just to show people the start up logo, so they can appreciate what I appreciate. 3. The Tracker Ball is more powerful than you could possibly imagine I honestly didn't see the point of it. I didn't really see any reviews using it, I didn't see any videos really using it, it was utterly pointless to me. However, it's power comes in navigating text. I now couldn't live without it. 4. The battery life is like a Duracell bunny on amphetamines.
I charged the phone. I then used the phone for nearly 4 hours in a row with full brightness, using WiFi, with bluetooth turned on, and GPS on (although not receiving). I was up until 2 am watching you tube videos downloading apps, trying out apps, uninstalling apps, changing live wallpapers, organising my shortcuts and widgets, translating as many uncensored rude words as I could think of for my own childish amusement. This morning when I got to work it still had 19% charge left in the battery. On checking my battery usage stats, I saw that 81% of the battery had been taken by the display, which made sense to me as I had been using it non stop. It doesn't matter what the official stats are, and I'm quite shocked that anyone could complain about the Nexus One battery life, I honestly am. So impressed I was with the battery life, I've taken the docking station to work, and Ill just charge it there, I very much doubt the battery will run down over the weekend. 5. There is an app for that... oh and it's probably free. I've seen the Apple adverts "There is an app for that" and It made me want some of those apps. And I was disappointed that I was getting an Android and I wouldn't have access to those apps. This must be the biggest under-sold and unsung feature of the Nexus One, ney ALL Android phones. The Android Market place is awesome. Everything I looked for, there was an app for, and most had several. Every one I wanted, and got, was free. I am sure that there are loads free on the Apple store too, but the Android market place really impressed me. The Apple store is clearly good, but i really love the Market place for it's freemium model... because I can deal with some adverts on my non-critical apps, i'm certainly not going to pay for an app where Arnie say's stuff. --- I'm not saying the Nexus One is an "iPhone" beater, because for many people it isn't. In reality it's a life style choice. In that respect I guess it IS an iPhone beater, for me. Edit: 6. It comes with a case - How pleased I was when I just dropped it and the nice padded case gave it a little soft bouncy noise on the carpet; instead of the anus clenching thwack that I have heard my iPod Touch make all too many times.

Conditional Floating Breakpoint

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:53:08 -0500

I have been thinking about this recently, and I have done a little Google checking, but I can't see anything close to what I am looking for. Which is this. What I would really like is my debugger to afford me the luxury of a Conditional Floating Breakpoint. By this I mean, I want to say to the debugger "Hey, break the code at the point where this condition is true". When the condition cannot be evaluated because the variables are out of scope then it is always false. This would be useful to me when debugging everyone else's code, where I cannot directly access an object and the only way to evaluate which call is changing it is to put a watch on it and spend several hours stepping through code, with a various system of breakpoints that I have to turn off an on repeatedly because I am working in a GUI where there are constant calls and I don't want to have to step though from the input state machine down all the time. I would like to give birth to: Conditional Floating Breakpoints

Clojure == Half Life?

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:41:27 -0500

I wonder has anyone else noticed that the Clojure logo looks really similar to the Half Life logo?

I wonder if the founder of Clojure eventually founds Black Messa? :) Joking aside, I find Clojure very interesting, do we really need another language that runs on the JVM? Ruby, Groovy, Fantom, Clojure, Scala et cetera. I can only see that all these languages often try and combat the same thing for different reasons or directions. I do actually admire the people who are creating these languages; I think Fantom is great. But the reality of the situation is are they really needed? If so, I think I will sit back and wait for the victor. Or perhaps there is room in the world for all of them, at the end of the day a language is just a tool. I would happily write in any language because it is the design that is important, and language is almost just a route to market, an implementation point. Ok, so i'm playing down the language choice a bit, but really, any developer worth their salt should be able to adapt to any language because they got the design right in the first place. Right? I am a hard core Java developer, if I was going to run a start up myself, there is no way I would use anything but Java, I can implement my design quickly, and I can fix any bugs quickly. The techincal overhead of me adopting something like Ruby would pose a serious risk to a project. On the flip side, if I was hired to run a start up (e.g. not my money) I may well select one of the other languages which run on the JVM because it may mitigate some other risk, and there would be the ellusive (in this economy) financial cushion. Or is the cushion a lie like the cake, or the promise of doughnut and more doughnuts to come?

The iPad revolt begins

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:09:47 -0500

I'm sure the iPad is good, I'm sure that it has the best touch screen ever, i'm sure i'm sure i'm sure... But why would I buy one when for $100 less I can get something with a keyboard too, that is open source, and doesn't make me use iTunes and propriety everything? Secondly, why would I have an iPhone when I can now have a Nexus One (can't wait for the walking talking Nexus 6 :P)

Scott McNealy waves bye bye to his baby.

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:19:10 -0500

One of my geek idols (right up there with Charles Babage, James Gosling, Tim Berners-Lee and Joshua Bloch) has said a typical (for him) fair well to Sun Microsystems. As reported here by CNet. Although this is full of the usual McNealy self amusment there is definitly an sad undertone in his writing. It does make me wonder how Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla feel about the loss of Sun, perhaps they have made comment on it? I am sure that Scott wont be a stranger with his kind of slightly eccentric nature which pops up now and again in Silicon Valley, I don't believe we have seen the last of him.

Company run into ground? Check... Time to leave.

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 04:24:07 -0500

Has this really just happened? Was Jonathan Schwartz given the Job of CEO for Sun Microsystems in 2006 only to run it into the ground to be bought out only to resign. Well according to the Digital Daily he is probably going to resign, it is only my opinion that he ran Sun (a company that many looked up to), into the ground. And very rich for it! In 2008 he (Schwartz) took over $11 million dollars for himself cite. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a time of economic turmoil isn't that several thousand jobs? cite. It may appear that I am trying to demonize Jonathan Schwartz, but in reality I am just pointing out the obvious. In June 2008 ago I was having a long running altercation with Sun Microsystems. My beef was that they had increased the cost of the Java certification exams in one part of the world, by quite a reasonable amount, yet not in other parts of the world. I had several email conversations with everyone from support, to the salesman (that's right, salesmen for exams) up to regional heads of Sun Learning Services. It got to a point where I was getting no where, and simply repeating myself. e.g. "Why are you bias, charging these developers over here nearly twice as much as these developers over here. Surely it it's the same exam, as there is no language translation from English to English, and it's an exam marked by a computer and ran by a global prometric testing center, so how can you justify the massive cost difference?" Eventually, I got so frustrated that I wrote an e-mail and copied in jonathan.schwartz@sun.com and scott.mcnealy@sun.com simply asking if they felt that being prejudice and unethical towards developers [who drive Java] was how they wished their company to be seen. To my amazement I received an email 9 days later from the international director of Sun Learning Services, who stated that it had been Jonathan Schwartz himself who had forwarded my email on to her, and requested that she deal with the issue. SUCCESS!! I was amazed that the CEO of Sun Microsystems had read my email and actually (appeared) to agree with me, and wanted something done about it. The "something that was done" was that they proceeded to raise all the prices of all the exams in all countries to bring them inline. This was of course not what I had suggested, I had petitioned that they lower the prices of the minority that were being over charged. Still, my complaint was valid, and they had rectified the prejudice, although not exactly as I had planned. Now I look back on this, I have to ponder whether it was this mentality is what broke the company? Did Jonathan Schwartz do this in all aspects of Sun? e.g. "lets just raise the price, that will save us from economic doom". Did Larry Ellison get an annual bill from Sun and make him think "dang, I may as well buy the company if they are going to charge me that much!"? All these questions answered and more... well not, but I'd still be interested to know.

Webdows 3.1

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:14:02 -0500

Yes thats right, someone with too much time on their hands has simulated Windows 3.1 with JavaScript.... dubbed "Webows" by me, just now, this second. Have to say, I was most amused by being able to do this:

R.I.P Sun Microsystems

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:13:17 -0500

A Sad Sad day :( blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/so_long_old_friend

M$ Certified Engineers, are only as smart as a 9 Year old

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:22:10 -0500

Proving something that most of us have known for many years, being a Microsoft Certified Engineer can be obtained by anyone, and now appears it only makes you as educated as a 9 year old. By the same example it also means that Microsoft Cetfied System Administrators are only as smart as a 6 year old, go figure. My congratulations go out to the 9 year old :)

R.I.P Twitter 2006-2010

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:45:34 -0500

When Twitter started, being a geek I love to check out these things early, I had a look. I found myself thinking "huh, how pointless, like anyone cares if I just had a cup of coffee". I saw it as a sink on time and life and that it was a bit pointless, who really has time to read and write everything, and who really cares. I honestly didn't think it would be as big as it got. What I missed was celebrities, they love to talk about themselves, and the vast majority of masses love to read about them talking about themselves. Ok, so I get that, but I still kind of thought generally it was pointless, and I certainly didn't understand why some of the smarter celebrities started Tweeting. However, 2010 has brought a reprieve, some of the smarter people are wising up to Twitter being a bit of a life sink. Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais and also (I was surprised to see) Miley Cyrus, to name the 3 I've heard of, but I'm sure there are more. Finally, the mass exodus of people who should have never have joined are finally realising what I always knew? For my next trick I predict the demise of Facebook (another annoyance of the Internet)! I am sure there are plenty of people thinking "Nah not Facebook" but only 4 years ago people said "Nah, not MySpace". I finish this post with a question... why didn't the geeks keep the Internet for ourselves? Didn't we go through enough at school that we deserve this technological wonder (e.g. mass of cables, servers, switches and satellites) to ourselves?

Applying the Formula

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 06:44:54 -0500

Narrator: "Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C.
(a * b * c) = x.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

It seems to me that majority of people I know spend their day just applying the formula. Sure, not the exact one above, but look at your job, do you go in to work, face your work load, what ever the task is do you just apply a formula?

If I'm being honest, I probably do, we all do. There must be very few people (if any) who don't apply the formula, and those people probably decided the formula doesn't work, but they must do something else which is just another formula that is based on or different from the original and proves to be a success.

I'm not trying to be disparaging and say there is no creativity left in the world (although it may appear that I am saying that). What I'm saying is that Fight Club probably got it right.

At any one moment there are a finite amount of problems/tasks (it may seem infinite, but it can't be so, its just that the finite level increases). The ones we can't solve/handle we attempt anyway by applying a formula that we think might bring success. The ones we can already solve/handle are because we know the formula we are about to apply that has the highest probability of success.

Regardless of how you look at it or phrase it (applying a formula, or implementing a pattern, or following instructions et cetera), we all very rarely (if ever) do not apply the formula.

Consider a racing car driver, they apply the formula, but they do lots and lots and lots of them, instantly, the one who can apply the formula for their car the quickest, drives the quickest. They don't call it "Formula 1" for nothing ;) (N.B. this subject area wasn't written about just so I could make that one joke. That came by my brain applying a pattern to find something funny out of something serious, at which point I applied another pattern to type it, and then another to realise that I should explain that it was a joke at the expense of the context).

Which makes me ponder, does all life survive by applying endless formulas, for everything. Indeed, perhaps we never actually learn anything but formulae for success and how to apply them. It's not a bad thing, in some ways its a great thing, because all of a sudden I don't actually have to know the answers to anything, just a general set of formula and patterns that will put me in the right direction to success.

Do all brains simply do this already? Is the reason we get confused, or forget, or fail, because we are trying to find the answer without applying the formula?
Therefore, trying to skip the formula results in failure. Simply not knowing the formula also results in failure. But failure is utterly integral to the formula, without failure the formula would not exist. Take the cavemen, how many times would they have failed to make fire. In fact, I'm sure Edison failed to make the light bulb several thousand times (like a typical Engineer though he didn't accept he failed, he put it down to just finding several thousand ways not to make a lightbulb).

As long as I don't deviate from the formula I win.

.... \o/ yey me.

For those of you who are now thinking "well, thinking out side the box is not applying the formula" you are wrong, that is just applying a different formula that just happens to work, with different variables or success rate. The bottom line is, if you can explain your solution to someone else, that means they could have thought of it too by applying the appropriate formula.

Google Wave Account

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:30:54 -0500

I have more Google wave invites all of a sudden. If you want one, or know someone who wants one, then roridge at hotmail com Email subject: oooh oooh me, please, I'd like a Google Wave invite.

Wave bye bye

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:57:16 -0400

I like Wave... I have done ever since I first read about the premise, add to that one of the most important people at Google; of Google Maps fame Lars Rasmussen and his brother, both kings of AJAX development were involved, meant it was going to be good. There are some negative elements of course.... mostly the massive amount of people who QQ about things, but oddly there seem to be more than a few people who "got an invite, tried it, and ditched it". What that says is people are stuck in their ways, and wont embrace change... those people are dead to me. Now im not saying Wave is the future, but maybe it is, certainly since I started with the dev preview many months ago it has improved, and will continue to improve, but I am of strong mind it will take much much longer to get "normals" over to using Wave as a standard replacement for communication though the internet. For a start people like applications, having everything web based kind of makes it feel cheap, even if the cost of producing it was amazingly high. Good news is that the Wave Protocol is entirely Open [awesome strategy] which means anyone can write a Wave server, or a Wave front end if they want, it doesn't have to be web based at all!! Use Abode Air if ~~you're a sadist~~ you really want ^_^. Secondly, "normals" don't like to change, it has always been the way that the geeks and computer lovers will push these things forward... why fax a letter when you can post one, why send an email when you can fax your document, why use a mobile when I can use a land line, why send a text when I can make a call, why use a Wave when you can send an email, use an IM, use a forum.... If your answer to any of those was "because I can, and it's awesome" you are not a "normal". I actually started this blog entry with the mind to simply point out how I loved the Wave developers sense of humour; by showing you what happens when Wave goes bye bye.... it's nice that development companies still allow developers to have fun... (If you are new to Wave via invite to the preview, you will no doubt be immediately familiar who Dr Wave is :) ) N.B. If you don't get why that error message is fun, then you are a "normal"... but don't let that put you off scrounging a Wave invite from anyone you know, and giving it a go.

Apache = Risk

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:00:10 -0400

I just realised 2 things.
Every time I read though the Apache Projects list, I find:

even more projects, and I am reminded of projects that exist I had forgotten about, (how many building projects are there now, Ant, Maven, Buildr, Archiva?).
myself thinking "that's good, but in the time it would take me to learn and evaluate if its any good, I could have designed and written my own smaller, slightly more specific version that I am in total control of".

I have come to realise:

Apache = Excellent
Apache = Hidden Risk (not from the code, but by the time you decided it wasn't quite right for you, its too late).
Apache = Open Source for Open Source. In the current climate most companies can't invest the time, this goes for almost all frameworks out there right now.

I realise this wont make me that popular, and I am also talking "small company, not much time, non-web based work". Where I am a big fan of what Apache has done for the world of Open Source, and many commercial establishments rely on Apache projects. Unless there is money and time to research all of the Apache projects, the risk of using them is just too high, unless it's something well established like HTTP Server, Tomcat or Ant. I guess my thought is really new/unproven Frameworks can cause a bigger risk in adoption than they can mitigate in the long run. My challenge to Apache framework projects is to:

Explain the benefits of using the framework in one paragraph (and simple, easy and lightweight are rubbish... tell me something I'm actually not expecting to hear, because all frameworks claim to be those things, I have never read a framework that says "slow and a bit crap".
Explain how easy it is to use in one paragraph.
Show me how to use it in one paragraph.

What I like about Spotify

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 01:26:10 -0400

At first, I didn't like Spotify back when it was in its beta state, there were very few decent labels signed up, doing a radio station of Rock from the 90s got you songs from Elvis from the 50s... generally I disregarded it for best part of 6 months in favour of Blip.fm If you haven't met Blip.fm before its like Twitter, but with a point. You see, I couldn't give two dead ducks hanging in a Chinese shop in soho for what other peoples micro blogs, that tell me they have a funny feeling about Michael Jackson, especially a million peoples, and definitely celebrities. However, when you attach that comment to a Thriller track, then that's something I can work with. Blip introduced me to music I previously never head of or would never listen to, e.g. Regina Spektor and Rob Zombie respectively. It was always good to hear other peoples musical selections who I had on my friends list. However, Blip.fm while great, is effort, and while I really attempted to make the effort, in the end, time won out over the fact I don't have any. At this point I went back to Spotify, and found that now it was more open to the general public (previous invite only) it had got much much better \o/ But what I like most is when I turn on my laptop in the mornings, it comes out of hibernate, I click play on Spotify, and I am instantly listening to the queued songs I was listening to when I left work at 19:30 yesterday... Guns N Roses certainly know how to wake me up. In conclusion, Blip.fm is good (and also should mention we7 here, is good, but not as good as imo) and Spotify ftw \o/ http://open.spotify.com/track/7aveks6ohp3F6Dc2ZZertT

Welcome to the new Wave

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:18:00 -0400

Wellity wellity wellity A while back I got an email from Google inviting me to the developer preview for Google Wave (\o/) and I finally signed up to it last week. YEY, I was able to Wave, this was awesome I thought as I begun to explore the interface and write my first wave, then my second, then my third... Then, the excitement began to wear off, after all, what is the point of Waving at no one... its very similar to going to the Grand Canyon, looking at how cool it is, and then shouting hello, it's only any good if you have someone to reply. Currently I remain Waving into the void, and trying to find time to develop my wave based project. All things being equal, Wave could turn out awesome, or it could just prove to be impossible to move people from email, forums and social networking... but part of Wave is to involve those things into the "new" structure... and did people really have many issues moving to CDs from Tape? or Blu-ray from DVD. Anyway, welcome to the new Wave ;)

Clover Content, the blogging tool that should (and does)

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:01:15 -0400

In my second ever post, and maybe my last (who knows) i decided to just write a little bit about clover content, the currently and lovely people providing the means for this blog to exist. Having read about their existence in an article linked via HackerNews about steps on the road to making your own start up, I decided to check the web site for http://clovercontent.com. I was very interested, and pleased that I had found something that I have known should have existed for a long time. Infact, about 7 years ago, I wrote something similar which allowed me to update my blog by just sending it an email. There was none of this funky in site editing in blogs back then (well there was but it wasn't free) or that easy to use. Anyway, I decided that I had to give this a go, something which I rarely find time for, so here I am giving it a go. Thanks to Clover Content for providing the means for this blog FOR FREE, with seemingly no pay off for them (seriously, I really can't tell how they are making money from this venture at the moment). maybe this is the thing that will actually keep me blogging this time?

First Post, LIVE from the first little blog

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:12:42 -0400

And probably, knowing me, the last but its good to know it works :)