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September 25, 2008
Working with Computers
When people ask what I do, I tell them, simply, that "I work with computers". I guess that covers a lot of people nowadays. But if you think on it, you'll realise that different people work differently with computers. A fair portion sit at the corporate workstation and spend time keying in. They key into prefab screens, without any freedom to create something that they would call a work of art. Some people write or create works of art with computers. And although the computer is an extension of their arm, they work harder than the machine, typing, clicking, drawing.
We all want a screen with a big button. You know, the one you can click in a split second and then the machine does what a machines should do - work hard to produce an outcome. Whilst we can lean back, think deep thoughts, envision even more social and career delights.
Truth is, the screen with the big button eludes us mostly. Whether or not we're wearing our fingers to the bone or frazzing our brains out mentally flipping between two physical screens and three virtual ones, we're actually slaving to the machine.
Food for thought as we go into the weekend?
Posted by Anandasim at 10:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 12, 2008
Well, they certainly don't wear turtle-neck jumpers
Or say "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac"
The fact that a design uses inheritance and polymorphism, doesn't make it a good design
The previous one in the series is a segue, maybe they're all segues.
Posted by Anandasim at 06:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Delaying the inevitable
Image via Wikipedia
My desktop Windows XP machine has been thrashing the hard disk a bit lately - notice how the machines feel tuned and fast when you don't use them but when you do, they feel like molasses? Ananda's first rule of Windows machines, that is. Dentabox ended up starting from scratch, I was trying to avoid that. I'm eyeing that 750Gb Samsung for AUD 100 but I have all these older hard disks, lying around not used. So I mounted a 160Gb Seagata PATA, copied data off my main 120Gb Seagate SATA, used Easus Partition Manager to resize the original volume, took deep breaths and crossing of fingers as it did and luckily, I'm back, typing on this machine. I re-selected various options for the Windows Paging File, ensured that the machine was biased to assigning more memory for Programs, and so far, the impact has been positive.
But 750Gb sure looks kinda nice to have. As does the Dell 24inch LCD. As does a new battery for the workhorse notebook. Or a new notebook...
In the meantime, Brandon tells me there will be a Mooncake Festival celebration at the Victoria Market on Sunday. Hmm, photo op.....
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Posted by Anandasim at 04:23 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 06, 2008
You can be creative without a Mac?
British detective novelist - a great writer and a lovely man who does little stick figure drawings when he signs books (we know because we stood in line to get one at a Melbourne Writers' Festival a few years ago) - Ian Rankin rates the Mac as his worst investment ever. In an interview on a writer's finances in The Telegraph, the author of the Rebus series says:
Everyone used to tell me that as a writer I should have an Apple Mac because they are better than PCs, so a few years ago I went and bought the biggest Apple Mac system I could buy and a G4 laptop to go with it for around £3,000. I tried it and didn’t like it - I gave it a few weeks of struggling and then went back to my PC.He writes his novels on a Sony laptop. And he apparently trusts it a good deal more than he should. In another piece youngwriter [the Romanitas trilogy] Sophie McDougall an author's party, we learn that Rankin turned up with a laptop under his arm on which was the only copy of the novel he had just completed. And he was tipsy. We can't bear to think of the chances of the laptop being mislaid, dropped, immersed in liquid or who knows what? And given that he's been a victim of a burglary in which he lost his iPod, you'd think he'd know better. Isn't it interesting what you can find out about people?
One of our favourite columnists, the Financial Times Lucy Kellaway, has also had bad luck with iPods. She recently bemoaned the fact that Apple's quality control is less than brilliant.
In the 3½ years since I got my first sleek music machine, I have bought nine further iPods. Two for me and the rest for other members of the family. Of these, six are now kaput and one only works in one ear. Am I angry with Apple for selling me all this expensive crud that doesn’t work properly? Have I shouted at people on Apple help lines? On the contrary – I have taken it like a lamb.We've just had our fifth dead iPod in three years. But happily, the iPod Touch is still going strong.
In my experience, most iPods waited until around the 366th day, when the guarantee expires, to get sick. Then you take them to the gorgeous Regent Street Apple shop in London – a cathedral for the worship of sleek gadgets – and visit the Genius Bar. A handsome young nerd in a tight black T-shirt with the word Genius on his arm looks sadly at it and explains that it couldn’t be fixed, or could – but only at a high price.
If I were a genius myself, I would have worked out that it might be better to junk Apple and buy a cheaper MP3 player that works.
But I’m not. I’m a bundle of suggestible sentiment and emotion and each time I find that a newer, even sleeker one has arrived in the front of the shop just begging to be bought. What luck that the last one broke, I always think, as I happily part with another £160 for this sleek, high-tech tat.
Posted by cw at 03:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 04, 2008
A message from Deep Space for the PM: Stop the rip-off!
You may recall our comments on SMS messages, "the purest form of profit ever invented", which translates for the consumer as "the purest form of rip-off ever invented.
It now seems at last - after the BBC calculated that the data charges involved were four times that of sending a message to Earth from the Hubble telescope in Deep Space - the European Union is proposing to do something to stop the gouging. It's considering capping the SMS roaming rate at 11 euro cents, or 16 US cents.
Isn't it time the economically conservative Rudd Government stopped doing what the massive Telstra lobbying push tells it to do, and decides that maximising corporate profits by limiting competition isn't a very clever thing to do when the inflation genie, according to our Treasurer, has popped the cork?
Posted by cw at 04:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Chrome: Wax On, Wax Off
Well, it's been a long while since Google Chrome Beta was announced and launched. Yes, I'm on Internet Time - a day seems like forever. Chrome has cast a spell that Apple Safari on Windows failed to do - maybe it's due to the anticipation of a browser fight (some people are drawn to that) or a Google vs Microsoft battle. Or, maybe, it actually has some innovative features, even in it's beta form.
Make no doubt about it, Chrome needs some polishing, particularly where it is dented.The initial EULA is getting some buffing. Also there are concerns about them using an antiquated edition of Webkit that has a security vulnerability - something called a carpet-bombing attack.
And although Chrome does not appear to take possession of your machine, there is some concern about the update mechanism. We've grown quite jaded with the Microsoft Windows Update hoo haa, then the Microsoft Office Update thing, then the Apple Update thing, the Adobe Acrobat update thing and now, the Google Update thing.
Posted by Anandasim at 02:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 03, 2008
Malware attacking people not networks
I had a couple of instances the other day of some rather clever 'social engineering' and Jesper Johansson has written a detailed account of this at The Register - Anatomy of a malware scam and just as I had thought to myself, Jesper also notes "I must give the criminals here credit for graying out the background to lend it credibility; a la Vista User Account Control (UAC)".
The first part gives the basics of what is going on and the remainder of the article gets a bit technical as Jesper loads up a virtual machine and installs it step-by-step showing what actually happens when this is installed on a Windows XP PC.
At the end is the conclusion which I couldn't agree more:-
This type of malware is very, very disturbing. One can only wonder how many users have been duped into installing ineffective security software, and what happened to their private information and credit card data when they paid for it. The presence of such software, and the overall very high quality of the ruse it presents, is frightening.
Posted by Stephen at 04:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Getting Chromed
Internet Explorer 8 beta has been in the news on telly - I didn't catch the full details, I was walking between rooms but I did hear it promised to wipe traces of your surfing or something like that. If it does, it sort of legitimises the behaviour that Browzar and Kejut have been providing to the paranoid or the teens.
More recent and less sung about is the release of Google's Chrome browser yesterday. It's built on the gecko engine from Firefox and Webkit engine used in Apple's Safari. Why another browser?
To generate more paying work for webmasters so that they can again tweak their site CSS? From the horse's mouth:
Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.
Their comic strip tells us one important rationale - Google is in the cloud and they need a multi-threaded browser to enable their apps better.
It was easier to convince me to download and install Chrome Beta because I knew that such a beta product would not gum up my machine if things went really bad than to download IE 8 Beta - Microsoft's approach to their browser is to replace the core modules on your Windows machine and nuke the current IE you are using - I haven't re-read whether they still carry out this affirmative action, I'm not bothered to do anything like that on my production desktop.
The download is a two step download - you get a small stub executable and then the executable brings down the main installation - it must have to do with balancing demands on Google's servers but at the expense of being able to simply get one full installer and taking it to any machine.
It's still a beta product so not many in-your-face empowering features yet and it curiously grabs at your IE favourites rather than offer the option of grabbing your Firefox ones....
If you give it a try, tell me us how you go....
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Posted by Anandasim at 12:12 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack