Iphwn

Yeah, that’s right. Last week I bought an iPhone off ebay. If I need to tell you what it is, simply press the google shortcut (Alt+F4) and search for it.

Anyway, it came this morning. I am an Apple fanboy. I have high expectations and standards (and taste, and class, etc). This device surpassed anything I have ever thought possible. Opening the box reveals it in its plastic cradle, waiting for your embrace. Unclothe it (plastic wrap) and it comes alive with the stroke of your finger. The screen comes alive, wanting you to fondle it. Then suddenly you are taken to the “Locked” screen, where you can’t do anything except activate it with your computer (you MUST do this in order to use any features).

Activating it is not a problem because of the brilliant minds over at the iPhone Dev Wiki (again, Alt+F4 to Google). Using a command line tool, my iPhone was activated in seconds. What does this mean, activated? It means that I can use all of the its features, EXCEPT the telephone part (more on that later). In iTunes, I bestowed it a name (”Namaste”) and synched it up to my libraries. It was pretty fast (no shock there).

Gripe 1: For some reason, Apple decided it needed to recess the headphone jack (it’s sunken in). This means that a lot of headphones will not fit in to it without an adapter (mine included!). The buds included do, and although decent for pack-in buds, they are rather terrible compared to any high-end headphones.

Other than that gripe, playing music is a joy! The interface is incredible. Coverflow+fingers is brilliant! Also, the tilt sensor is genius. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say it’s incredible. Browsing photos is also amazing. The interface (your fingers) is so natural. It feels like you are handling actual photos (or albums, etc). The included iSight camera (2 MP) is also quite great. It’s nothing exceptional, and its not too great indoors, but outside it’s stunning. I took some spy shots on the bus this morning and they are gorgeous.

In general the interface is a real treat. It’s novel. It feels ALIVE! You drag the page and it scrolls but it also slides; it’s fluid. The apps bounce open. It seems to know what you want to do. Typing is decent. Not amazing but not as bad as all the reviews are saying. But the interface is really a shining achievement. After switiching back to my laptop, it feels dead and static. We’ll see how this adjustment works!

WiFi has been…troublesome. My router won’t let me connect (basically anything!), no way, no how. I went out to a Bridgehead (local coffee shop) and not much luck there either. Starbucks connected but it was a pay serice (wtf?). That was about as close as I’ve come on day one. I was able to load a page served from my laptop, but other than that and some “pay us” sites, no dice as of yet. I will keep trying. Qbasicer’s router may prove more useful, who knows.

I think that about sums it up for now,

Namaste

Borked DNS

Alrighty, so I’m quietly surfing the web in my living room, when I decide to visit the Allegro Website, when it takes 2 minutes to resolve the DNS. Being the person I am (and running Linux at the time), I decide it might be interesting to see what IP it was resolving to. So I ran the host command, and pretty soon I noticed a pattern of always resolving to 123.123.123.123 or 123.123.123.125. Even for my OWN website. With some help of kc32, I managed to set up a custom DNS server that takes it’s DNS requests from OpenDNS. I’m unsure whether it fixed the problem, but I’ll just have to check tonight when I get home.

On the Other Hand

The exams like HP0-790 are worth taking for it professionals and people can seek help regarding their solved question from Internet. Similarly HP0-678 also facilitates students to come up and show their skills in the field of IT. The ccna meet the criteria of exam offered to candidates seeking a single-exam preference for the Cisco Certified Network Associate certification. The ccie is the most respected IT certification and it stands for California colleges for international education. Other exams like 642-503, 642-176 and 3M0-600 are it related and require full preparation that can be obtained through various websites.

Microwaves

Ok, so here’s a fairly serious question, does anybody actually use those “Smart” buttons on Microwaves? The one at work claims to be able to cook Mexican and Oriental meals with the push of a button. I’m fairly certain this wouldn’t work that great, there’s just too many different foods out there.

Then there’s the popcorn button. What the hell? I’ve never seen a bag of popcorn come out as pristine as when I manually enter a number. It either comes out barely popped or burnt. There’s also a button for “Frozen Dinners”. I can tell you that my frozen dinners take way different amount of time. Is this a possible appliation of RFID? Could the tag be embedded into the carton, and swiped past the microwave when you put it in? I often laugh at these “futuristic technologies”. There’s an article in a Wired magazine outside my office that claims that someday all our food will have RFID, and that there will me smart checkouts, and carts with displays on them. I say this will never happen. Vandalism to the carts, a way to disable/remove tags, etc will make for free food. That’s a huge cost right there, coupled with the cost of actually implementing (and maintaining such a system) would be equally huge.

For years they have toted at us these “great” and “wonderful” technologies. A lot of it is plausible, but I just don’t think will happen.

</rant>

Eclipse Shortcuts

As a student, I like to hang out with some friends over a few drinks. Well, on Saturday night, about 7 of us from IBM, or past IBM co-ops, got together in one room. The result? An hour and a half long discussion of Eclipse, and mainly it’s shortcuts.

Most everybody agreed that Ctrl+3 was the best shortcut. Personally, I exclusively use ctrl+shift+R. A couple of us have never even heard of ctrl+3. It was great fun, and I’m sure the Eclipse developers would be proud.

ZDLSharp 3.0.5.0

Tommorow night I should be releasing ZDLSharp 3.0.5.0, although no promises. While it’s been a week or so to do some minor fixes, it’s been a very busy week. I’m going to dedicate a large chunk of time tommorow to finishing of 3.0.5.0.

I’ve launched a new wiki website, at zdlsharp.vectec.net. Check it out, it has all kinds of interesting information, plus roadmaps. If you have any extra information to add, please feel free, or if you have any questions or suggestions, edit the talk/discussion pages.

I bought a $70 C# book a couple weeks ago. Unfortunatly I havn’t had a chance to look at it. Hopefully it’ll give me a few good tips on how to make ZDLSharp your favourite ZDoom program!

Charles

Tim Hortons

As I walked by a Tim Hortons today, I thought about getting a coffee. The only problem was that the line was almost out of the door (9:00 Tuesday morning downtown Ottawa, which consists mainly of office towers).

It occurred to me that it wasn’t in fact the price that deterred me most from Tims, or even Starbucks, it’s how long I have to wait. While I would have enjoyed to have a coffee on the bus on my way to work, I could not justify the 10-15 minutes standing in line. At Starbucks, I’ve had to wait that long as well, depending on the day. So where is the major bottleneck?

Space I think. If the area is not large enough, it’s hard for employees to work together, as they keep running into each other, and just in general do not mesh. The solution then is not more staff, but a larger space. The problem with the larger space, is during peak periods you may not be able to justify it. Being able to handle more customers simultaneously would be a big advantage to both the store and the customer. Say you have 15 people waiting in line initially, and one cash can serve 1 customers a minute. If the rate of people joining the line is 2 per minute, as long as the line is not longer than 20, you will see a positive amount of customers as long as you have at least 2 cashes. Say you can add 2 customers more per minute at line 15, 2 at 10, and 2 at 5. Very quickly, you attract the people that would have otherwise not purchased an item. In order to be ahead, you would have to have 8 cashes open just to keep up.

While this is not very realistic, I think I get my point across. Now excuse me while I drink my free work coffee with no lineups.

Some new gaming goodness

So last week I bought Doom 3 and Quake 4. I’ve finally got around to playing them.

I played Doom3 back when it was released but that was borrowed from a friend, now I have my own copy. I won’t bother reviewing it or anything. It’s pretty much what everyone else says it is. I downloaded OpenCoop 1.1 and have been playing through it with Shadow. Doom3 is a million times more fun with another player. There’s always someone to hold the flashlight!
I also got the RoE expansion pack to see what kind of stuff it has, but I’d like to finish OpenCoop D3 with Shadow first.

I’ve been having an absolute blast with Quake 4. It’s really too bad I waited so long to play it. People have said it’s “boring” or “too linear”. I don’t find it boring at all. I really like the outside-ness of most of the game. Doom3 had good graphics and all, but it was wasted jammed into tiny corridors. Quake 4 let’s you go outside, and best of all, there is light! About it being linear, I don’t mind. I don’t like wondering where to go. Ever.

I’ll probably play a bit of each online just to see what it’s like.

Whoops!

I didn’t hold on to my DS tight enough when I pulled it out of my pocket and this happened…

I called up Nintendo and they said they would fix it for ~$60 USD. They also said I would be DS-less for 20-25 days.
At least Nintendo told me it would take a month instead of that “Oh we’ll have your ThinkPad back to you in 3 days!” crap IBM gave me 6 months ago.

ZDLSharp and Mono

I tried to run ZDLSharp with Mono today. Unfortunatly, Mono won’t have support for Winforms until Q3 2007, so Linux users at locked out until then. Sorry!

That being said, once Winforms 2.0 is supported in Mono, I will be doing semi-regular tests in Linux to make sure everything is going fine. I also implemented a primitive Update Manager. Right now it only prompts the user if there’s a new version, but in the future it will be more complex. I have higher priorities with ZDLSharp right now :D.