the vengeful cow blog

TextMate rocks!

Posted by marshall Wed, 28 Sep 2005 19:29:00 GMT

I love TextMate. It is the software I spend the vast majority of my time in during the day, and I'm constantly discovering new worlds of functionality in it.

Posted in Computing

Digital projection and 3D

Posted by marshall Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:38:00 GMT

There's an interesting article on the New York Times site about digital projection and 3D. The thing that caught my eye about it was the screen refresh info. Apparently the 3D version of Chicken Little will be shown at "144 frames per second".

Now, I'm guessing they actually mean the projector will have a refresh rate of 144 Hz, and the movie itself will still have a standard 24 frames per second. But the point is that with digital projection, they can run the projector at a far higher refresh rate than film projectors have run, making it possible to alternate left and right images for 3D very quickly. With 144 Hz, each eye is essentially getting a 72 Hz refresh rate, which is what a lot of people run their CRT computer monitors at. That's pretty cool.

I wonder what the implications for this are for home theater. The article says they use a single projector. Hmmm...

Posted in Home Theater

SPAIM

Posted by marshall Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:10:00 GMT

I came in to work this morning and there was an instant message up on my screen. It said it was from a user named rn55gjs2721950. I knew at once that it must be my long-lost friend Ronald Norman, who's currently 55, works in Australia for GJS Machinery, has a collection of 272 PEZ dispensers, and was born in 1950.

But alas, it was merely IM spam. Oh well. Guess I'll never hear from Ronald after all.

Posted in Gallimaufry

Wintreo day

Posted by marshall Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:55:00 GMT

Well, it's official. Palm's new Treo will run Windows Mobile. And they're partnering with Verizon to release it first. So the most promising smartphone manufacturer is now in bed with the most predatory monopoly-abusing software company, along with the wireless company with a history of crippling phones so it can charge customers for things that should be free. What happy news.

Posted in Smartphones

Smogsets

Posted by marshall Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:47:00 GMT

Ah, Redlands, where you can see what you breathe. The smog generated by thousands and thousands of square miles of running automobiles comes in and settles here, frequently hiding the nearby mountains in summertime. It does cause some quite lovely sunsets, though:

The sunsets in Idaho are supposed to be brilliant, too, despite the lack of smog. All the benefits with none of the drawbacks? Almost sounds too good to be true.

Posted in Pictures

Turn down the noise

Posted by marshall Fri, 16 Sep 2005 18:59:00 GMT

I finally got around to buying a copy of NoiseWare the other day. I've been meaning to get some kind of photograph noise reducing software for a while, and the new phone gave me the final push. As with most consumer digital cameras, the camera in the 6682 doesn't fare too well in low-light conditions, and even has some graininess in well-lit scenes. NoiseWare is amazing at reducing the noise while preserving the detail. It's not perfect -- there's only so much it can do with what you give it -- but it certainly helps.

Click on the picture below to see a before/after comparison:

I really should have bought it earlier; it also works very well on photos I took with my Treo. Combine it with a bit of black/white level adjustment and slight unsharp mask, and some surprising detail can emerge.

NoiseWare's certainly not the only product on the market that does this; I also tried Noise Ninja, and I've heard good things about Neat Image as well. I liked Noise Ninja's method of selecting parts of the image you knew to be noise. But from what I read and from the free trials I used, NoiseWare seemed to provide the best results. I got the Photoshop plug-in version; there's also a standalone one for those without Photoshop. All three of the products mentioned have versions for both Mac OS X and Windows.

Posted in Pictures, Computing

The Story of Tetris

Posted by marshall Wed, 14 Sep 2005 22:48:00 GMT

I came across this history of Tetris recently, and it's quite interesting. What a crazy mess of licensing. I didn't know that there were two versions of Tetris for the Nintendo; I only knew about the version by Nintendo itself. It turns out that Tengen -- a division of Atari Games -- created a version as well, but was forced to remove it from the market because the rights to Tetris that were sold to Tengen weren't legitimate.

I like the Tengen version a lot better (you can find it for emulators at ClassicGaming); it's much closer to the Atari arcade version, which was always my favorite.

Posted in Gallimaufry

Your choice is Microsoft or Microsoft

Posted by marshall Wed, 14 Sep 2005 17:28:00 GMT

This morning I read an interview with Bill Gates. This has got to be one of the scariest things I've read in a long time. From the article:

At any point in our history, we've had competitors who were better at doing something. Novell was the best at file servers. Lotus was the best at spreadsheets. WordPerfect was the best at word processing. Right now...Nokia is way ahead of us in phones; we're closing the gap. Sony is ahead of us in video games. We're just on the verge of something (the Xbox 360) that will help us close the gap there. In Web search, Google is the far-away leader...And Apple in music has done a fantastic job.

Look at the list of competitors -- all in different markets. And the message Gates is giving is, "We're going to kill them all." And when they're done with those, they'll find new markets to conquer. There's no need, market-wise, for Microsoft to compete with Nokia: Sony Ericsson, Palm, and Blackberry all compete in the smartphone space to drive it forward. There's no need for Microsoft to compete with Google: Google has competition from Yahoo and other search/portal sites. The only driving force is greed. Microsoft wants to own every single tech market, just because it can. And that's a terrifying prospect.

The future according to Microsoft: when you talk on the phone, it will be a Microsoft Windows Smartphone. When you drive your car, it will run Microsoft Windows Automotive. When you start your computer, it will run Microsoft Windows Vista. When you watch a DVD, it will use Microsoft Windows Media. When you play a game, it will be on the Microsoft Xbox. When you connect to the internet, it will be through the Microsoft Network. When you open your internet browser, it will be Microsoft Internet Explorer. When you search for something, your search results will come from Microsoft Network Search. When you check your e-mail, it will be with Microsoft Outlook. When you type a document, it will be with Microsoft Office. When you want news, you'll watch Microsoft NBC. When you listen to music, it will be Microsoft Windows Media Audio. When you set up a web site, it will run on Microsoft Internet Information Services, with the Microsoft Active Server Pages .NET runtime, using a Microsoft SQL Server database, and running on a Microsoft Windows Server. And that's just the short list.

These are all different markets -- phones, cars, operating systems, multimedia, game consoles, web search, databases, television, web browsers, and more -- with companies competing in each, but Microsoft wants there to be just one company controlling them all. All of the information you receive will come through Microsoft. And just as they did with Novell, Lotus, and WordPerfect, they will ensure -- through licensing deals, pre-installation, and other monopoly-extending means -- that competitors in every tech space are not given the chance to breathe.

I hope Google wins. I hope Apple wins. I hope Nokia wins. I hope Sony wins. Anyone, really, but Microsoft.

As a side note, here's another fun Gates quote from the article:

Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was some software that had this security capability and our software did not.

Actually, Bill, the UNIX base that drives Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, and other operating systems was set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together, from the beginning. Just because you were late to the game doesn't mean "software in general" was.

Posted in Musings, Computing

The 6682 arrives

Posted by marshall Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:51:00 GMT

Looks like the order went through after all. Apparently it was submitted to the warehouse Thursday afternoon when I ordered it, processed on Friday, submitted to FedEx on Saturday, and actually shipped on Sunday, arriving yesterday afternoon. Strangely, FedEx left no door tag; if I hadn't been tracking it on-line, I wouldn't have known they had attempted to deliver it.

The box included the Nokia 6682 itself, a new SIM card (already installed in the phone), a 64 MB MMCmobile card pre-loaded with some extra software like Opera and QuickOffice, a power adapter, a USB cable for connecting it to a computer, and several manuals. The USB cable was surprising -- that's been an extra cost on most of the phones I've owned (the Treo being the only exception, but Palm devices have historically included cables for synchronizing).

So far I'm liking it. I stayed up way too late installing a Nintendo emulator, an SSH client, a Bust-a-Move style game called Frozen Bubble, and several other applications. The Nintendo emulator was all that I hoped it would be: I can finally jump in Double Dragon, and several games that didn't work on the Treo (including Tetris, Dr. Mario, and Excitebike) work perfectly well on the 6682.

The camera is certainly the nicest I've had so far in a phone. While it's still quite grainy for indoor shots, pictures outside come out fairly well. Here's a photo of the intersection by the Redlands Carl's Jr (slightly color-tweaked and sharpened in Photoshop):

I'm most of the way back now to the Bluetooth functionality I had on my Sony Ericsson T610. The T610 would inform my Mac of incoming calls and text messages, complete with looking up the Caller ID in my address book, and I could forward calls to voicemail or respond to text messages using the computer. The computer could also detect when the T610 came in range and do things when I left the computer and/or came back, it could pause iTunes when I was on the phone, and I could select people from my computer's Address Book and click "Dial" to dial them on the cell phone. The Treo could do none of these. The 6682 can do almost all: about the only thing it's missing is that it doesn't notify me of incoming text messages and let me reply. I can send outgoing text messages from the computer, I just don't receive them.

There are, however, some phone-computer things that the 6682 can do that neither the Treo nor the T610 could. After synchronizing the phone with the computer, I found that my phone contacts included the pictures I'd set up in the Mac Address Book, so now I have photo Caller ID without having to do anything special. The contacts include both work and home addresses, as well as the Notes field. The Treo could only sync one address and didn't sync the notes or the photo. I also get the album art of the currently playing track in iTunes on the phone with Salling Clicker, which may have worked on the Treo, but Salling Clicker was so limited and unstable on it that I never really used it.

The best part about the synchronization, though, is that I didn't have to install any software to do it. I just clicked "Set up new device" in the Mac OS X Bluetooth preferences and followed the prompts, and now iSync has a 6682 icon in it (looks just like it, too). No abandoned Palm software, no quirky Missing Sync, just out-of-the-box pain-free integration. Technology is so wonderful when it works.

Update: I should clarify that the whole photos and notes sync thing with the Treo is a limitation of the Mac sync software, not the device itself. Given decent software, the Treo could have synchronized those. I'm told that Outlook for Windows, for example, synchronizes both of these fields. So that complaint is more directed at Palm's virtually nonexistant support for OS X.

Posted in Pictures, Smartphones

Short life line for this Palm

Posted by marshall Fri, 09 Sep 2005 21:59:00 GMT

So PalmSource has been acquired. It's not terribly surprising; it was clear that things weren't going well for PalmSource a while back with the rumors that the next Treo will run Windows Mobile, the general lack of interest in Cobalt, and the impending name change due to the-company-formerly-known-as-palmOne buying back the rights to the "Palm" name. But this to me sounds a lot like the death knell for the Palm OS platform.

It may take a while; Palm claims they'll continue to support the operating system that bears its name, and I'm sure there are devices in the works that will still use the Palm OS. But Palm has shown no interest thus far in Cobalt, which PalmSource released over a year and a half ago (right when Lara and I arrived in Redlands, actually). PalmSource has said that they'll be migrating Cobalt from its current BeOS-based foundation to a Linux-based one, so device manufacturers that might have been interested in Cobalt probably backed off until PalmSource figured out what it was doing...and now it's even more uncertain with a new company taking over. If I were making smartphones, I'd be looking very hard at Symbian, Windows Mobile, or possibly Nokia's new Linux-based platform.

And I had such hopes for Cobalt. I like the way the Palm OS works in general -- it's still considered by many to be the most usable PDA operating system -- but it desperately needs a more stable and capable foundation, and Cobalt would have provided that. Now it doesn't look like Cobalt devices will ever come about, because no one is going to want to wind up with an abandoned platform should ACCESS decide not to continue the OS after all, kind of like how PalmSource bought Be and then decided to move to Linux instead.

I'm guessing that, as with PC operating systems, the smartphone world is eventually going to come down to Linux and Windows. Symbian's doing very well right now, but Nokia's showing a lot of interest in Linux, as is Motorola. I can easily see, in a few years' time, the smartphone market being comprised primarily of several Linux-based systems with Flash user interfaces pitted against Windows Mobile. But then, I haven't had much success with predicting trends, so maybe ACCESS will end up taking the Palm OS API and mapping it to Symbian or something crazy like that. That'd be weird.

Update: Even weirder would be if they already tried it. Apparently the CEO later decided the current Palm OS was "good enough", just before he was ousted. Ah, what could have been...

Posted in Smartphones