Questionable

One thing I’ve always said I was going to do, is read all the archives of Questionable Content, a daily web comic. When I first saw in on April 1st, I thought it looked really cool. I decided that I’d read right from the beginning, but with 1,200 comics, that isn’t an easy feat. I recently had a small three week vacation before I flew out to Ottawa, so I took 3 days, and read about 300 comics a day. I can safely say I’m caught up, and I highly recommend the comic to other people.

Also, sorry for the lack of content of late. The well of ideas is kinda dry right now. I start a new job on monday, so maybe that will give me something to talk about.

Wrapping Up Another Term

Summer session is quickly drawing to the end. Over the summer, I’ve taken a total of four classes: Computer Organization 1, The Romans, Data Structures, and Software Engineering. In case you weren’t familiar with how the summer school works at UNB, it’s divided into two smaller terms, Interssesion (May & June) and Summer session (July and August). Classes are super compressed into six weeks, as opposed to three months (with a month for exams, totaling four months). This Saturday at 1400h, I have my software engineering exam, and then Monday at 0900h I have my Data Structures exam.

After my exams I’ll be returning back home for a few weeks before I head back out to Ottawa for another four months. This fall I’ll be going to QNX Software Systems out in southern Kanata. I’m not familiar at this point as to what my actual assignment will be, as they said they’ll figure where I want to work when I get there. The only unfortunate thing about working out in Kanata is that it’s over an hour bus ride from my house, vs about 45 minutes to the IBM lab I worked previous. The one good thing about a bus ride that long is that I can take a small nap on the bus. I’m really looking forward to my term there, and I think it’ll be fun to try something different. After my work term, I’ll be returning to Fredericton for another term of school.

Walk Through The Park

iPod/iPhone 2.0

Well, I figured I’d better write a post. It’s been a little while!

I’ve been using the 2.0 firmware on my iPod touch now for a couple weeks. So far things have been going really smoothly. The enterprise WPA works beautifully at my university, although setup wasn’t that fun (instructions here). Stability at first was a bit of an issue. Some of the apps kept crashing (it was actually less stable than my jailbroken iPod). In fact, sometimes an app would freeze up and make my music skip.

Some of the apps are great, some are not. The Facebook app is pretty decent, at least now you can view people’s walls. The Lastfm app would be a lot better, however, Apple doesn’t allow background processes, so unfortunately it doesn’t support scrobbling. As expected, Super Monkey Ball delivers and is really great, but is also very challenging! A fun little game is JirboBreak, which is just a breakout clone. The NYTimes app is pretty good, although a bit unstable at times. Tap Tap Revenge is great, it’s like guitar hero type deal for the iPod/iPhone. There’s a wordpress app, which I haven’t had a chance to use yet, and the best is the Remote App. Remote lets you use your iPod/iPhone as a (ed:) [G.D.] flickerbox for iTunes, allowing you to browse your music and change the volume, scrub, and pause tracks. Very useful for parties.

Exchange support is here, however, I don’t (yet) have any use for it. One thing iPod touch users will like is the beeping on mail. As soon as it gets new mail, it’ll beep at you, alerting you of your new mail. It doesn’t seem to be as quick on the draw as before, and doesn’t always tell me if I have new mail. I’m not sure what the issue is, but I wish it would tell me every time!

Push notifications aren’t anything really interesting. Mail checking can only be set in 15 minute increments. Since all my accounts are IMAP, they only support fetch anyways. I’d rather have 5 minute increments for mail checking, but I guess 15 minutes is fine.

The only thing I want back from my jailbroken iPod was Lastfm scrobbling support. I’m hoping someone will find a way to make this work, but until then, I guess I’ll just have to live without it.

Apple to Limit iPhones to Canada?

Written on another blog is news that Apple, king of the new mobile market, and creator of the iPhone, has bitchslapped Rogers, Canada’s only real GSM carrier across the face.

Rumour has it that Apple, who is dissatisfied with Roger’s data plans, is limited shipments of iPhones. Numbers have not been mentioned, but apparently the numbers have been “significantly reduced,” and apparently it’s been confirmed that the extra units are going to Europe. There are some other interesting tidbits, and I encourage you to RTFA.

In other similarly related news, Bell and Telus are supposed to start charging users for incoming text messages if they’re not on a texting plan $0.15 per text. Users that go over their current plan, or do not have a plan, already get charged $0.15 per text. There are several facebook groups dedicated to the issue, and a petition at the New Democratic Party (NDP) of Canada. Bell and Telus have released new texting plans, as follows:

• $5/mo, 250 outgoing, unlimited incoming
• $10/mo, 2500 outgoing, unlimited incoming
• $15/mo, unlimited outgoing, unlimited incoming

There’s an internal PDF document with steps on how to deal with the matter here

The Telecom Delemma

Currently, my cellphone provider is Bell, a national CDMA telecom business. Bell’s influence even reaches my corner of Canada, although under a different name. In Atlantic Canada, the big telecom business is Aliant, which is is pretty much Bell under a different name. You’d think that by essentially being the same company, that it’d be easy to switch between the two. This is not the case.

Last time I switched to Bell from Aliant, the customer representatives had no idea what was going on, and it took many hops between the two carriers to get my contact onto Bell. Normally that would be fine, but every 4 months I switch in and out of Aliant and Bells areas. In the fall, I just kept my bell number back in Ottawa, a mere 1,000km away, because I really don’t use my cellphone when I have a land line.

In an effort to try and stay with the same company, I wanted to try Telus, which is consistently available all through Canada, plus has the advantage of already being CDMA, which one would think would be easy to switch my Bell/Aliant phone to Telus. Once again, I am easily foiled, as today, they inform me that I have to get a new phone with them, as the two systems are incompatible. The hitch is that I wanted to go with Pay as you Go, as I really don’t use my phone that much, so lots of my minutes get wasted. This means that I would need to buy a $400 phone outright, which obviously, if you’re trying to save money, is no good.

Why not just switch between Aliant and Bell on Pay as you go? Because there’s the pesky $35 activation fee, and probably a cancellation fee. But wait, you say, what about GSM?

The only GSM provider in Canada, Rogers, is probably one of the worst companies to deal with. I completely flat out refuse to get a cellphone through them. I’ve heard bad stores about them, and even I have had issues dealing with them (about their internet).

I may end up just canceling my cellphone for the time being, and just using a land line until I get back in Ottawa, and then going with Pay as you Go for those 4 months, rinse and repeat.

Playing With Water

I’m moved back into Fredericton for school now, however, after being in Ottawa for their almost record breaking snowfall, it looks like I could be in Fredericton for their worst flood on record:

If you have me on facebook, you can see some of the pictures of the flooding. I’m going down to help out with the Emergency Measures Organization later on today, as there’s lots to do. They’ve turned off some of the power to downtown, and people are evacuating. Provided the power stays on, this webcam is a live image:

Last night University Avenue started to back up via the storm sewars, and the walking bridge underpass at University was dry, now both are closed today.
GNB Riverwatch
Fredericton Riverwatch
Road/Street Closures

Fibbing Around

My officemate Alexei and I were wondering a bit on how fast Fibonacci in assembly would be, so I wrote a quick little linear fib application in Linux.

08048074 <_start>:
 8048074:       31 c0                   xor    %eax,%eax
 8048076:       bb 01 00 00 00          mov    $0x1,%ebx
 804807b:       ba 01 00 00 00          mov    $0x1,%edx

08048080 <_calc>:
 8048080:       31 c9                   xor    %ecx,%ecx
 8048082:       01 c1                   add    %eax,%ecx
 8048084:       01 d9                   add    %ebx,%ecx
 8048086:       89 d8                   mov    %ebx,%eax
 8048088:       89 cb                   mov    %ecx,%ebx
 804808a:       42                      inc    %edx
 804808b:       83 fa 2e                cmp    $0x2e,%edx
 804808e:       75 f0                   jne    8048080 <_calc>
 8048090:       89 cb                   mov    %ecx,%ebx
 8048092:       b8 01 00 00 00          mov    $0x1,%eax
 8048097:       cd 80                   int    $0x80

Runs pretty quick, but I’m not sure how good it would be, as it’s only using 32 bits, so it can only calculate fib(46) and lower, and doesn’t even output (that’s a bit trickier).

Smallest Hello World

In what turned out to be an assembly vs Java comparison of hello world, I’ve managed to get a hello world app down to a lean 380 bytes. objdump -d:

hello.bin:     file format elf32-i386

Disassembly of section .text:

08048094 <.text>:
 8048094:       ba 0c 00 00 00          mov    $0xc,%edx
 8048099:       b9 b8 90 04 08          mov    $0x80490b8,%ecx
 804809e:       bb 01 00 00 00          mov    $0x1,%ebx
 80480a3:       b8 04 00 00 00          mov    $0x4,%eax
 80480a8:       cd 80                   int    $0x80
 80480aa:       bb 00 00 00 00          mov    $0x0,%ebx
 80480af:       b8 01 00 00 00          mov    $0x1,%eax
 80480b4:       cd 80                   int    $0x80

Can you do better? This hello world does not link to any outside libs like stdlib, and only uses kernel system calls. We were able to get a java 6 compiled class to 517 bytes, but I’m not sure if I could make it smaller (Java bytecode maybe?)

Edit: I found a page on creating really small ELF executables for linux. They don’t say hello world, but it could be easily modified if you knew how to translate AT&T to Intel. I really can’t remember, or have the ambition to do so, so I’ll just link

Daft Punk’d

I’m pretty sure I’m a Daft Punk addict. Last.fm says so. That’s alright, I guess. There’s much worse things to be an addict of.

I now offically own all but one of the Daft Punk Albums:

• Homework
• Discovery
• Human After All
• Daft Club
• Human After All – Remixes
• Musique Vol. 1
• Alive 2007

The one album I need to pick up to complete the collection is Alive 1997, which I’ve found on Amazon for $85. I’m thinking I might just find a copy this summer to complete my collection. I’m especially proud of my Human After All – Remixes, that I picked up for about $40. It’s a rare Japanese only album. It’s one of 3,000 every made. Unfortunately the CD has a lot of DRM, so it wasn’t quite easy to import into iTunes, but linux got the wave files last night, so I just gotta encode them and slap them on. It’s actually pretty nice, I’m glad I picked it up. I got the actual CD off eBay through a seller in Australia, and it came really quickly.

I’ve started toying around with Last.fm a bit more, the radio feature is quite nice, and I’ve found a few songs I’ve liked already. Mmmm, instrumental jazz….