Sounds From The Dungeon

Status

For a long time, I've thought it would be nice to have a page aggregating the various bits and pieces of junk I put out on the internets. Then, when Jois built his status page, I knew I had to have one too. We even exchanged emails about implementation issues, etc.

Well, that was then and this is now and in the time in between, I've changed jobs, travelled the world and learned a few new words in a few new languages, both human and machine. Which is to say, it didn't take me too long to create a status page of my own. ;-)

I call it: Recently.

Please don't laugh at my javascript :-|

misc | 5 comments | permalink | 29.07.2007 23:51 SGT

Stickies #15 : Counting Sheep

media | 4 comments | permalink | 23.07.2007 21:17 SGT

New Books

• The Confusion - Neal Stephenson: Since Quicksilver was so much fun!
• Earth, Air, Fire and Custard - Tom Holt: bought it on a whim; not a good decision. Turns out, this one is book three in a trilogy of three.

Still couldn't locate River of Gods; it was either out of stock or just got lost in Borders' wonderful organization system.

misc | 2 comments | permalink | 17.07.2007 10:35 SGT

Tired of iPhone/Safari lying

It appears that mainstream media journalists and many of the so called technology pundits are actually clueless, gullible idiots who'll eat anything dished out in a shiny package. They've been so completely fooled by Apple's rhetoric of 'first time full internet on a mobile device' that they wouldn't even consider looking out there for the truth. Fact is, Opera Mini has been giving a pretty decent 'full internet' experience for some time now although being software makers, they really couldn't do much about device screen sizes.

But more recently, Nokia has been shipping a fantastic browser on its latest phones such as the N95 well before the iPhone came out. Their browser renders websites as on a regular desktop browser and has the mini-map view that Apple loves to show off in their Safari/iPhone videos. In fact, the Nokia browser goes further and actually provides offline mode, form autocomplete and a password manager in their browser! I'd love to watch iPhone users tap out their username/password again and again and again. What is the most incredulous thing in all of this is that the Nokia browser and Apple's Safari are both based on the same open source WebKit code base!

Here's the latest sample of this brand of 'journalism' from Betanews:

Opera Mini arguably does a better job, but requires Java and does not work on many popular phones such as the Samsung Blackjack. [snip] This is what makes the iPhone's debut especially important, because an answer has finally been found.

So Opera Mini is ruled out 'cos it is available only on a few (i.e. a few hundred) phones but all hail Safari 'cos it's available on a grand total of one phone! What a way to make your point. The rest of the article is pretty much senseless too, with only a tangential mention of Nokia. It says Nokia is licensing touchscreen technology in a response to the iPhone - Nokia has been demoing touchscreen concepts before the iPhone's debut. And talking in those terms (feature-against-feature) doesn't even make sense. It's not like there weren't any touchscreen phones before the iPhone.. heck, I owned a Motorola E680 touchscreen until last year! Apple's genius is in building a compelling user interface around that technology. You can't license that!

From the videos I've seen, the iPhone looks like a pretty sweet device with a great user experience and it has most certainly forced everyone else to up their game, especially Nokia whose S60v3 is probably the slowest mobile OS on the market. But can we stop with all the lying please?

techtalk | 8 comments | permalink | 10.07.2007 10:44 SGT

The Joys of Linux

deepak@vyomlinux:~$ sl
The program 'sl' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install sl
Make sure you have the 'universe' component enabled
bash: sl: command not found
deepak@vyomlinux:~$ apt-cache show sl
Package: sl
Priority: optional
Section: universe/games
Installed-Size: 132
Maintainer: Kenshi Muto <kmuto@debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 3.03-14
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4), libncurses5 (>= 5.4-1)
Filename: pool/universe/s/sl/sl_3.03-14_i386.deb
Size: 15976
MD5sum: de03e0be86e8d7b0c7c3b3b2cbf246ef
SHA1: 25fbec4a67ec2875852439be948704d456a557bb
SHA256: 4a7a4cf5cdbe5756226590219c4ef2ff7dce04ca9e096f5be86e8a555d83bc6c
Description: Correct you if you type `sl' by mistake
 .
 Sl is a program that can display animations aimed to correct you
 if you type 'sl' by mistake.
Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com
Origin: Ubuntu

deepak@vyomlinux:~$ sudo apt-get install sl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  sl
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 16.0kB of archives.
After unpacking 135kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.science.nus.edu.sg feisty/universe sl 3.03-14 [16.0kB]
Fetched 16.0kB in 5s (3004B/s)
Selecting previously deselected package sl.
(Reading database ... 102570 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sl (from .../archives/sl_3.03-14_i386.deb) ...
Setting up sl (3.03-14) ...

deepak@vyomlinux:~$ sl

And the rest, you'll have to find out for yourself :-)

techtalk | 3 comments | permalink | 05.07.2007 16:54 SGT

Stickies #14 : Bad Career Choices

A new Stickies after a long time! This one came to me while getting my eyes dyed in fluorescent hues.

media | 2 comments | permalink | 02.07.2007 23:29 SGT

On the iPhone

Quoting from John Gruber's iPhone first impressions:

Sleep/wake is effectively instantaneous – far faster than any Mac.

Comparing a phone's sleep/wake time with a full blown computer? How about comparing it with other smartphones?

The simple one-button remote on the earbud microphone is genius.

Genius? I've got to find out some detailed review of this earbud microphone to see how it differs from the kind shipped with Nokia, Sony, Samsung, et. al.

I’ve been curious what Apple planned to do with the standard Cut/Copy/Paste clipboard commands. With no menu bar, there’s no Edit menu. With no keyboard, there’s no command-key shortcuts. The Newton solved this with magic gestures. The iPhone solves this by not having a clipboard at all. No copy, no paste.

Solution or cop out? You be the judge! :-) This will probably be one of the most frustrating limitations of the iPhone. If the iPhone supported native 3rd party apps, I bet the first app would be a clipboard!

I've also read somewhere that the system data on an iPhone comes to around 700MB. So large apps are being read off a slow media (HDD) as opposed to other smart phones where relatively smaller apps (the system data would be < 50MB) are read off a faster media (Flash). I am curious to know how this affects app startup time and general task switching latency on the iPhone.

Anyway, it'll be a long, long time before the iPhone reaches these shores.

techtalk | 4 comments | permalink | 01.07.2007 12:58 SGT