Technology

Upgrades and obsolescence

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

In years past, if a computer was 3 years old it was on the way out. For a computer to still be in service after 5 years was strange… that it was still being used was impressive, that such a relic could still be useful.

It was especially harsh in the Mac world. Whereas you may still see someone today using a Pentium with Windows 98 and being happy about it, you just don’t see many Centris or Performa or Quadra still in circulation, except perhaps in a hermetically sealed off elementary school. But even these days that’s rare since most of those can’t exist in the modern world of the Internet (especially with a need for Flash).

But something changed a few years ago. Apple changed to Intel processors, and Moore’s Law appears to have tapered off. My MacBook Pro is 4 years old and performs well-enough. Oh sure would I love to upgrade? Yes. But what would I gain for that? I’d lose a FireWire 400 port. I use a USB port. I lose the express slot (but big deal, I’ve rarely used these). I’d gain an SD card slot, but that’s of minimal use to me. I’d gain 802.11n wireless, but that’s not a huge deal since I’m mostly wired up and when I use wireless it’s just short bursts of network need and it’s fast enough as it is. Faster processor and graphics, but for the most part what I have works… it’s sufficient for email, web, IM, whatever… only compiling would be better but there my bottleneck is the hard drive. Gaining the nifty new multi-touch trackpad would be cool.  But really… for dropping a couple thousand dollars I’m not gaining a HUGE advantage over what I presently have. The biggest thing I’d really want is more RAM since I’ve maxxed out the capabilities in this machine but again due to compiling code you just can never have too little RAM.

The one other upgrade needed? Hard drive. The drive in here I’ve outgrown. I’ve ordered a Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 7200 RPM model from Other World Computing. That’s about the best I’ll get these days: 500 MB of storage on a faster 7200 RPM drive. That upgrade right there should help overall system performance. Yes there are some slightly faster drives, slightly larger drives, but the Travelstar seemed the best bet in terms of price, performance, capacity, low noise, low vibration, lower power consumption… to me it was more important to have a cooler, smoother, quieter, less battery draining drive than say a Western Digital Scorpio Black (whose performance benchmarks were wicked awesome). That upgrade should be here today, and I’ll be down for a while while I do the drive transfer.

But I just find it interesting that while this MacBook Pro is showing its age, it still churns along respectably well. I don’t feel a need to upgrade now because there isn’t the obsolescence there once was. Oh sure, within a couple of years I’m probably going to replace it, but it feels good to not have to plan for a new machine every few years.

Testing WordPress for iPhone

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

Testing WordPress for iPhone update.

Well it seems to be a little better, but I still got it to crash. But it has a new crash reporting feature, which is cool.

Typing body text in landscape mode finally works. I wish it would always be savvy to landscape mode (e.g. Editing a post’s other info) since it’s easier to type in that mode.

We’ll see if this version is finally usable.

Back to the Mac

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Yesterday, Apple held an event to get “Back to the Mac”. You can watch the replay of the keynote here.

My impressions.

First, it’s evident from the growth of the product sales, the revenue, the units shipped… anyone that continues to say Apple is some niche just isn’t paying attention.

iLife ’11? I like it. You can tell this is a mature product suite. It’s not adding major new features but rather refining what it has to a high degree. It’s lots of little touches, little things to help make life easier. For instance, that your Flickr and Facebook albums are just a part of the iPhoto library so you have the same editing interface? Awesome! I’m considering buying iLife just for that, as I know Wife would appreciate it. I got a major kick out of the “trailers” feature in iMovie. They did a great job at making movie editing “for the rest of us”.

Lion. Mission Control makes sense because yes, they had all these things that were disconnected so it’s time to bring them all together. I’m not sure about LaunchPad, how really necessary it is, but I think it’s something I’d have to play with. I can see for less savvy users that it could be just the thing they need.

Of course, the big thing for me to watch is the App Store. This is a possible game-changer for Mac developers. You can read the store review guidelines here, but it’s behind an ADC login so I’m not sure how publicly I can discuss it. What I will say are the impressions and questions that came to mind when I was watching the keynote:

  • Apple controls the end-to-end experience, so I assume this means you can’t use your own registration/license scheme, nor your own installer (and probably have to create your install in a particular way). That makes sense, but it’s a bit of a pain for developers since now we’ll have two means by which our apps could be installed, two code paths, two different builds, two different things to have to support and test… it’s just more work on our end, but it stands to reason for the mechanism.
  • I figure this will benefit small developers, but how about big boys? For instance, will Microsoft sell Office? Will Adobe sell Photoshop?
  • Will we start to see competing app stores? It’s well-possible for them to exist, but then what sort of additional headache and nightmare will it be for developers?  Could we see the end of traditional sales channels?
  • What about non-applications? Like plug-ins?
  • The concern is, Apple’s store will become THE face of how you buy Mac software, thus if you don’t comply with them, you’re out of luck and will suffer. I’m concerned about Apple’s content restrictions, technical restrictions (e.g. non-app sales?), and so on.

But really, all we saw of Lion were some basic things. I’ll be more curious to hear about things at the developer-level, which I reckon will come with WWDC 2011.

Finally… there’s one more thing.

The new MacBook Air’s.

Impressive. That’s all I can say. Sure they are not uber-powerful (slower processor) and decked out (e.g. only 2 GB RAM) when compared to the traditional MacBook and MacBook Pro, but my word what they do offer. The small size, the light weight. You do get an amazing amount of stuff in a very small package. If I travelled often on business, lots of coach class flights, and had to get lots of work done on the road? I could see picking up one of the 11″ models to help me handle email and work on the road.

And at that price point and form factor? Gosh… if I had a few thou lying around, I’d pick up 3, one for each of my kids. Don’t have the money, but it was just that compelling. Granted, your basic MacBook gives you more for less money, but the Air is so cutting edge that yes… it tantalizes me. 🙂

The main point tho is to see Apple well.. getting back to Mac. Mac has always been Apple’s bread and butter, but for the past few years it’s been about iPod/iPhone/iPad, which I totally don’t blame them for. For me personally, I make my living making Mac OS X software, not iOS software, so at times I felt ignored. It wasn’t true, Apple has been continuing to update the OS and Mac, but it just hasn’t been the forefront… I skipped the past couple WWDC’s because they were all iOS focused. But the irony is my life is now shifting away from Mac, just as Apple is shifting back to it. It’s like fashion from the 80’s… retro is cool again, and so is Mac. 🙂

Droid impressions

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

I’ve been an Apple guy all my life. I like Apple products because Apple puts an emphasis on making things “just work”. Oh sure, nothing is perfect, but they score higher on the success chart than anyone else. Human-computer interaction is a primary thought, not an afterthought, and it shows in the design of both their OS and their hardware. Apple leads, everyone else follows.

While I love my iPhone, I can’t help but be curious about Android. This past Sunday at a dinner, a gentleman sitting next to me had a Motorola Droid X phone. I asked him about it, he let me play with it.

Gosh, but I’m impressed.

I liked that you could put a storage card in there, to facilitate transfers between your phone and other devices. Not sure how smooth and seemless it is, but gosh that’s nice.

Decent camera with a flash. Seems like a simple request, but my iPhone 3GS’s camera isn’t that great.

Overall response of the system and network was peppy. Never felt like anything was dragging.

I loved the huge screen size. Of course, that meant a larger device and it’s certainly pushing the limits of a “pocket device”. But I think what I also dug was the use of that limited space. For instance, menus weren’t constantly along the bottom of the screen but only came up on-demand by pressing one of the 4 buttons on the front of the device. I like that because precious screen space is now filled with content, not menu. It doesn’t always matter of course, but I just like the concept of being able to use limited resources to the fullest.

I liked that the main screens aren’t just flipping through pages of app icons, but instead you can have some vital things running so you can quickly access information you care about, like sports scores or today’s calendar of appointments, or whatever.

I only got to play with the device for a short while, so my impressions are shallow. There were some things I didn’t think it did as well as the iPhone, but it’s subtle little human-computer interaction details, too difficult to articulate in the limited space I have here. Still, I left with an overall positive impression and certainly am curious to explore it more.

Simplicity

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

I am an engineer by trade, and Wife points out that I have an engineer mind.

While I spend much of my time working with complex systems, I understand that simplicity is king. Simplicity is actually quite difficult to achieve because it takes work. You start off doing what you need to do, over time things grow and it will become more complex and kinda messy. You must take the time to stop, step back, and reengineer and rearchitect things to regain that simplicity. Typically this will mean you must discard and cast off.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery said:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Tao Te Ching #48:

In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.

Simple is not easy, but it is best.

I’ve seen a few things in the past couple days that reinforce this.

I stumbled across this blog posting on “What is good code?”

Good code is simple. Even complex good code is comprised of simple building blocks. Good code hides or cuts through the complexity in the problem, to provide a simple solution – the sign of a true coding genius is that he makes hard problems look easy, and solves them in such a way that anyone can understand how it was done (after the fact). Simplicity is not really a goal in its own right, though; it’s just that by means of being simple, code is more readable, discoverable, testable, and maintainable, as well as being more likely to be robust, secure and correct! So if you keep your code simple (as simple as possible, but no simpler), it is more likely to be good code – but that is by no means sufficient in and of itself.

And all of this talk of simplicity isn’t just something for the world of engineering…. I think it applies to all things in life, and I think it’d do well to be applied to government.

Witness the mess there is in classifying sensitive information: (h/t Slashdot)

Protecting and classifying sensitive information such as social security numbers shouldn’t be that hard, but perhaps not surprisingly the US government has taken complicating that task to an art form.

It seems that designating, safeguarding, and disseminating such important information involves over 100 unique markings and at least 130 different labeling or handling routines, reflecting a disjointed, inconsistent, and unpredictable system for protecting, sharing, and disclosing sensitive information, according to the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office.

Read the full article (it’s short) to see just how messy the problem is. This is not simplicity, this is about the furthest thing from simplicity. How does this make life easier?

Then I see this flowchart on Department of Defense acquisitions:

The Integrated Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Life Cycle Management System -- MY BRAIN HURTS!

Wow. Even the name (The Integrated Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Life Cycle Management System) is a complex beast.

I truly hope no one considers that to be a simple, streamlined process.

Have you ever noticed, any time the government talks about streamlining or improving their process, they always create some new group to do so? Nothing ever gets shut down or shed or cast off… it’s always grows.

If people are tired at how inefficient government is, at how bloated and slow it is, how complex, how confusing… why aren’t we working to truly simplify things? Why does no one believe in casting off? Why do we call them “law-makers”, as that seems to imply all they can do is make more laws instead of refining or repealing what we already have?

Why don’t we have any politicians that run on a platform of repealing, stripping down, and simplifying? Why is a discussion of “loss of government jobs” considered a bad thing? closing of government agency a bad thing?

Consider how truly simple things are better in life (or at least, consider how those ugly complex things make life difficult). Work towards the ideal.

iOS 4 – finally

/ hsoi

I’ve been in the professional software business for about 15 years. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, bugs happen. Consequently, never use the x.0 release of something — always wait for x.0.1. 🙂

So when the iOS (iPhone/iPad OS) 4.0 came out, I did not want to upgrade. I am evolving into what they call an “old fart” and am no longer an early adopter. It’s simple. I write enough of my own bugs in a day, I don’t need to have my life hampered by someone else’s. 😉  There are always inevitable bugs (software is a human process), and since I need to get things done in a day I’ll wait until the kinks get ironed out.

I have been wanting to upgrade to iOS 4 because it does have a lot of cool new features. So last night I bit the bullet and upgraded.

In general it’s a nice upgrade. I’m sure I’ll see more advantages to the multitasking as I use the phone in daily use.

I did not like that all my photos showed up fuzzy. It seems when you sync photos they get optimized for the phone, which is fair, but why the upgrade process couldn’t have automated this is curious to me. It was simple to fix (just sync), but if it was that simple again, why the iOS 4 upgrade process didn’t just handle it was odd.

I do not like the loss of being able to program what a double-click of the home button does. I liked being able to double-click it and get the camera. Now it’s dedicated for multitasking app switching. While I understand the phone has limited interface and something had to give well… that just wasn’t my favorite to have to go.

I like that I can have picture wallpaper everywhere. I know, small thing, but hey… if I want to stare at a picture of my wife and kids all the time, it kinda sucked that only the lock screen showed the picture.

While this wasn’t an iOS 4 upgrade, I was running low on space so I enabled the “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC” option and resynced my music library. That took all night to do, but recovered a lot of space. Will I notice an audio fidelity difference? Maybe, but unlikely. I’ve abused my ears with many years of loud things (heavy metal music, motorcycles, guns, etc.) so I have some hearing loss and really doubt I’ll get all audio-snob about this. More space is more important, but if by chance I notice, I can always change back.

I haven’t noticed much for reception issues yet, but the upgrade is still young. 😉

Now to upgrade Wife’s iPhone….

OK, Apple…. this should be amusing

/ hsoi

Today Apple is having some sort of special press conference, which I’m sure is about all the iPhone 4 and iOS 4 problems… be it the silly stuff about the antenna or maybe how iOS 4 is less than stellar.

Can’t wait to see how Steve’s patented Reality Distortion Field comes into play.

I mean… look at this shit:

(h/t Gawker)

This is why my iPhone is still using the iPhone OS version 3.x.x. I’m a software developer (and a Mac developer at that… Apple has somehow buttered my bread for probably 30 years of my life)… if there’s anything I’ve learned in my career it’s to NEVER go with the x.0.0 release of something… wait for the x.0.1. 🙂  Of course, if a few months go by and there is no x.0.1 then likely the x.0.0 release is fine. My point is, I’ve given up on being an early adopter. Again, being a developer myself — one that writes his fair share of bugs — I know how fragile and buggy and troublesome software development (or any sort of product development) can be. I have enough of my own bugs to worry about, I don’t have the time to waste dealing with someone else’s bugs.

Let’s see what Steve does today. Should be amusing.

Google is watching you… quickly

/ hsoi

Wow. That didn’t take long.

I publish the previous post. I thought… hrm. “Officer Potus”. I wonder if Pastis is meaning anything by that, so I punch “Officer Potus” into Google.

I get the first page of results.

What was the last link on that first page of results? My previous post… with the time stamp of “46 seconds ago”.

Man… Google is fast. Makes you wonder what Google has to do to get things indexed so quickly. What must it be monitoring, and how… and the sort of infrastructure necessary for that. Fascinating. A little scary too.