Blog Posts

November 2011

• 2011-11-15

  I don’t ‘get’ iTunes match

  What I don’t get is the price. First I had to have bought the music (from Apple or someone else) and now I have to pay again ($24.95 per year) in order to make it all available over iCloud. I think I will stick with my new favorite, Spotify.

  I am sure I don’t fully understand the details, but it seems to me that the essential benefit that the new iTunes provide is that I can access my whole music collection (as far as it is ‘legal’) from any device attached to iCloud. Anything else?

  Well, I think the very idea of ‘owning’ a music collection is antiquated. I mean it’s evidently inefficient that millions of people have a copy of the same bits that form “Let It Be” on each of their computers....

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  #apple #music
• 2011-11-14

  Pogue does not love the new Kindle Fire

  I was excited to hear about the Kindle Fire. But I was waiting to read some impartial reviews of one before running off and buying one. After all I am a big fan of the Kindle (gen 2) and enjoy reading books on Kindles. And, believe it or not, I don’t yet own an iPad.

  So the Fire seems like a match made in heaven, right?

  Well, today David Pogue, tech reporter of the New York Timeskind of reviewed the Fire (along with the other new, low end Kindles.) Well, the punchline is, he loves the new inexpensive Kind...

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  #technology
• 2011-11-12

  Patents and perpetual motion machines

  An interesting commentary on a couple of patents that issued from the US Patent Office:

  “The US patent office no longer grants patents on perpetual motion machines, but has recently granted at least two patents on a mathematically impossible process: compression of truly random data” (from Gailly.net)

  Also you might be interested in the topic, there’s a second patent that seems also to be fatally flawed — ...

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  #legal
• 2011-11-11

  When no response means “no”

  Here’s a tiny social conundrum. When someone writes you, calls you and leave a message, calls and doesn’t, or even texts you, what is your obligation to respond? If the question is “are you free for lunch today” and you know you are not, is it OK to just not answer? If the question is “have you seen this?.”

  This seems to come up, and different people and different communities seem to have different rules about this. So before you take offense at the lack of response, consider that it might just be a different social protocol that you may not necessarily adhere to!

  I’ve had that happen, though, when leaving several emails or support tickets with services that I use. What do you make of a la...

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  #personal
• 2011-11-10

  Make it matter

  Chris Shipley of Guidewire Group has a great post bemoaning how entrepreneurs are driven to invest their time and energy and (other peoples’ money) on more and more vacuous projects:

  “Indeed, the collective attention of young entrepreneurs seems be have been hijacked by all things trivial. How many knock-off AirBnB sites does the world need? Or new vertical social networks for niche groups that can’t figure out how to create a Facebook page? Or Foursqure meets Match.com meets World of Warcraft?

  Presumably, these proportedly hot startups are endorsed by the taste makers of the angel investor scene. And if you’re an investor, these busines...

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  #business
• 2011-11-09

  Game Design: Tiled Game Boards

  I’ve spent the last few weeks in dribs and drabs building a new game for Android. Lately I got deeper on what it means to have a ’tiled’ game space display where you construct the appearance of the game space by arranging a series of graphic images based on what’s needed for a certain level of the game. The idea is that you get essentially data driven graphics.

  In my case the game space is a maze, ostensibly a map of a neighborhood. Creating these, still rather ugly tiles, is fairly painstaking both to understand what the tiles are in your vocabulary to be able to create a variety of game levels, and then to do the graphic design and actual image files for these baybies.

  Here you can see a...

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  #programming
• 2011-11-08

  Facebook – Group your Place on a List and Put it on A page … or something

  I am a big fan of Facebook. They are doing so many things well. They have become so pervasive that if anyone is doing anything that involves a group of people online the first and biggest question should be, why should we not put this on Facebook? Because it works on so many levels.

  

  But all is not rosy. I wanted to create a presence on Facebook for a place called Windward Harbor. Should I be creating a Place, Page, a Group or a List? I don’t have the time or inclination to try to figure that out. Here’s one example where having more than one way to do the same thing is just not that useful.

  If you know better, please illuminate me!

• 2011-11-07

  Welcome to my new blog

  So after some trouble porting the content I am now running my blog on Squarespace. My main motivation is to get out of the server management business and also clean up my messier and messier self-hosted WordPress.

  Jury is still out whether this will be a keeper but for the moment I am happy and really like the fresher look of the blog compared to the previous incarnation. I will certainly keep you posted!

October 2011

• 2011-10-29

  Passion vs. Professionalism: Everyone has to take the garbage out some times

  Interesting article with a provocative title: “The Designer’s Notebook: Passion Versus Professionalism“. This is a topic that interests me. He says:

  “Passion” is an excuse used by employers to mistreat their employees. Your passion is supposed to make up for the insane hours and low pay for which the industry is notorious. Many job ads emphasize the importance of passion in applicants; few emphasize the quality of life that the employer offers. (from Passion vs. Professionalism”)

  Reading the whole article, in the end I don’t agree with his argument. I think in general passion is a very important t...

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  #business
• 2011-10-28

  Plato: “Be Kind, for Everyone You Meet is Fighting a Great Battle.”

  That’s a great quote. And no, it’s not AT ALL autobiographical. It’s just something that I’ve thought about for a long time and I loved seeing the nicely put pithy quote. I googled it and this was the first hit I got.

• 2011-10-28

  Kindle changes everything, no?

  This link lets you see all the passages in Steve Jobs’ new biography that were underlinedby Kindle readers. All of them. Pretty interesting don’t you think?

  #technology #books
• 2011-10-26

  The Impending Flash Crisis?

  An interesting article about this impending crisis. Although it’s impending, I had never heard about before, despite the claim that “This impending “flash crisis” is well known in system circles. It’s almost like a mini Y2K.” Ok, tell me more…

  The core does make a great point:

  “What happens when you blow up the “slow disk” assumption is that your entire software stack begins to crumble. When the cushion provided by those 10 ms of seek time goes away, CPU becomes your bottleneck. You have to start rethinking a lot of design choices.” (from Impending Flash Crisis)

  Interesting…

  #technology
• 2011-10-25

  Khan academy to the rescue

  If you haven’t heard about Khan Academy, let me be the first one to introduce you to its wonders. There is a huge library of 10-12 minute educational videos on high-school and college level topics from matrix math to trigonometry to how mortgages work. You need to read the background, it’s an unbelievably prolific individual guy, Kahn, who records each one of these. From what he says, he’s not an expert in all of them, he just ‘bones up’ on the topic and then records the session. The quality of the teaching is really amazing.

  Case in point. A few weeks ago I had to recall how and why ...

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  #education
• 2011-10-18

  [GEEKY] Possible Decision to move to SquareSpace

  I finally got my new blog on WordPress.com working. That should have been the simplest but their automatic spam detector encountered a single post referencing some free iPhone upgrade service I once mentioned. I had no idea that they were not legitimate at the time but anyway, I deleted that mention and all was well again.

  So now WordPress.com looks like a good candidate. I know wordpress and I can run my blog, essentially unaltered on their site, for free, and ditch my $25/month server that does almost nothing other than serve up my blog.

  Oh but there’s a fly in the ointment. WordPress.com does not allow me to keep m...

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• 2011-10-18

  [GEEKY] Moving away from self-hosted salas.com blog

  Running my own Linux server has lost it’s sex appeal. Now I am going for simplicity and so I am exploring simply not having my own server but using one of the several cloud services. It turns out that there are lots of little bumps in the road to move from one to the other:

  I like Tumblr. But there are no good ways to move from WordPress to Tumblr. Worse, when you move from one to the other, you have to deal with images yourself, in other words, Tumblr doesn’t let you upload your embedded images into their service. Hence I would not be able to Kill my old www.salas.com server.

  ...

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• 2011-10-08

  Designing a game soundtrack – kind of like we first got to pick the fonts in our documents

  Can you compose crappy music? I had a field day today ‘designing’ a bit of music for my “Game Of Life” Android game. In the old old days, when computers for the first time allowed you to choose a font for your text. we all became bad amateur typographers and book designers. Do you remember the “ransom note” font in the original Macintosh (yeah, that was 1984?) It looked like this:

  

  We loved it and everyone played with it. And there were lots of other ugly fonts but how did we love them.

  Well now (for me) the same thing is happening with music. Yeah I am an amateur piano and g...

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• 2011-10-06

  [GEEKY] Mac Sound Converter Utility

  Apparently (not sure why yet) on Android, sound effects files using the OGG format work better than those using wav or mp3. It might be an AndEngine thing, I am not sure. Anyway, here’s my result of half hour googling and experimenting for a reliable way to convert the files. I tried a bunch of things, and I finally settled on MediaHuman AudioConverter. Use it. It really works and is nice and simple.

  #apple
• 2011-10-05

  My review of A Reliable Wife

  A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick My rating: 4 of 5 stars

  Odd book. In the end I really liked it but at first it takes a surprising set of turns and is not at all what you would think. The writing style is almost poetic which is what I think I enjoyed the most,

  View all my reviews

  #books
• 2011-10-04

  Nation Building

  Here’s a topic I have never written about before… Nation Building. I just want to point you to a great article I read in the Globe yesterday that puts some meat on the question of “Nation Building,” when has it happened before? How long does it take? What is really happening? How does it start and how does it finish?

  Here’s the crux of the argument in “How to build a nation” – The Boston Globe

  “Identities are chosen strategically, they evolve over time, and people make decisions about what identities to prioritize,” said Jeremy Weinstein, a political science professor at Stanford University who...

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  #politics
• 2011-10-03

  Update on Spotify II

  I have become a total Spotify addict. I have almost totally stopped downloading MP3s and am gradually locating all my favorite music on Spotify. I posed a couple of semi-sceptical notes when I first started using Spotify and so I am due for an update, right?

  Cancelled Rhapsory, trying Spotify

  Spotify, Genres???

  Update about Spotify I

  So what has happened since? I find that I am using Spotify on my iPhone and on my computer, all the time. Occasionally I will dip back into my large iTunes collection to remind me of artists that I want to listen to. But I promptly go onto S...

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  #music