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March 27 Technical Review - Zune Car AdaptorToday I bought a car adaptor for my Zune. I really like the device and with good earphones the sound quality is very good.
As for the car adaptor, just in case you don't know, it is a FM transmitter. You connect it to the device and use the car radio to pick the signal. You have to configure it to use a frequency not used by any FM station.
Here is the short review: don't buy it. The longer version: When it transmits, which is not always, the signal is very weak. If you're lucky enough to pick the signal, the sound quality is awful.
In my all time electronics sh*t-list here is its standing (worst on top, minus software):
- Toshiba PocketPC e740. By a mile - I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy anything from Toshiba again even if it is 99% cheaper than the competition. This deject of the product line was so bad that I have an eternal grudge against Toshiba. I don't like their service department to a point I don't like their families by extension. If you work at Toshiba please do not tell me. And yes, I saved all emails - too bad I did not record the calls.
- Zune radio car adaptor.
- Pharos PocketPC GPS. You can read a short story before it acquires the GPS signal.
Just the thought of the Toshiba PocketPC make me feel better about the adaptor. It is not as bad after all. It did not hurt me, did not lose my data, did not cause me to waste endless hours dealing with support, I didn't have to return it 4 times under warranty and it costed 20 times less.
You know what? It is a nice battery charger that works on my car. Go ahead and buy it, it is worth the U$20 bucks as a charger.
March 22 Outdated Technology is PatheticAround 1994 I was completing my undergrad studies, had a government grant to work with natural language research and working as free-lancer developer to pay for tuition. That used to add up to 70-80 hours of work per week and it was hell, but beats washing dishes or asking relatives for money by a mile. To this date I look with suspicion to people that say college is fun. I had the opportunity to meet a couple of Russian researchers during that time, including a head of Computer Science department of the Moscow University. He was visiting Brazil to work with multimedia in the classroom and to save some money the Brazilian government was giving him as a guest researcher. If you’re familiar with the values involved you now know how bad things were in Russia those days. The Russian professor taught me a lesson I will never forget. It wasn’t on purpose, and not what he was trying to teach me. His project was a VCR with a serial port and a location counter that was encoded into the VHS tape. The idea was that students and teachers would complete tasks on a computer and when certain tasks were completed the VCR would forward to the right position and play a clip. When done, it would send a signal to the computer to move to the next lesson. I asked him why he didn’t use the computer to play the video. The interface would be much simpler and even windows 3.1 had multimedia primitives. I wrote libraries to do the same over DOS and my friends did the same for the Amiga OS. He told me the sound card was too expensive, and so was the video card able to play the video. That day I learned how ridiculous we look when we get old around technology. That was the lesson – watch for it, if it happens then move on. I watch Twitter, Amazon’s Kindle, iPods, the Wi-Fi/GPS enabled cameras and phones and can’t stop wondering what the new generation of developers will come up with. For them the communication layer will be solved and many things we struggle with will be solved or contained. I’m not sure we will continue to open everything or go to walled gardens because of the business models (yes, I am a pessimist) but I know things will be very different. Now, to make the same gaffe Obama did last week, every time I get into an argument about whether or not we should have layered systems with standard APIs, if we should allow managed programming or if we should be data centric I feel I am part of the special Olympics of software development. I wonder how much faster I will become obsolete in an environment where I have to argue about string classes.
March 14 Happy Pi DayA lot of people know Pythagoras' name (http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Pythagoras.html, http://www.mathopenref.com/pythagoras.html), mostly because of the quadratic equation formula. No one knows if he wrote that formula himself or if one of the members of his sect/cult/school did the work. He and his followers believed that numbers should be able to explain everything and that numbers had personalities that would explain their nature, even masculine and feminine numbers.
He was educated by Thales, something that maybe matters to one person I know, and accepted both man and women among his disciples. He got himself in trouble for accepting women as pupils and for dealing with dangerous topics such as justice and equality with mathematical precision. He was also a complete weirdo that would not step on his nail clippings and do his bed quickly in the morning up to avoid the "evil eye". He was also a vegetarian and would not eat beans. Still, his school was tremendously important for mathematics and music.
So what has Pythagoras to do with Pi? Pi is an irrational number and cannot be represented in the form of a fraction or proportion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_number). Pythagoras believed on the perfection and beauty of numbers and his school was, ironically, called semi-circle. One of his pupils found Pi and told Pythagoras about it. The idea of having a number that would not fit his concept of beauty was so hard that they did the only reasonable thing. They threw the pupil from a cliff and forbidden everyone to talk about it. Those guys would do just fine in modern management.
I was looking for references of his death, but there are two dozens of versions. The one I like the most is that an angry mob stormed his 'school', upset about the death of the abovementioned pupil, burned the men and sliced the women with oyster shells so they bled to death. Lovely.
So with no more delay...
3.1415926535897932384626433832795 02884197169399375105820974944592 30781640628620899862803482534211 70679821480865132823066470938446 09550582231725359408128481117450 28410270193852110555964462294895 49303819644288109756659334461284 75648233786783165271201909145648 56692346034861045432664821339360 72602491412737245870066063155881 74881520920962829254091715364367 89259036001133053054882046652138 41469519415116094330572703657595 91953092186117381932611793105118 54807446237996274956735188575272 48912279381830119491298336733624 40656643086021394946395224737190... March 11 GratitudeI just came back from vacation and will post something soon. In the meantime I have to share my gratitude with the universe. Aren’t you happy that gravity is proportional to both bodies instead of the sum of the masses? Otherwise we’d have to live in very small planets, places where the new iPod shuffle makes sense (http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/features.html). |
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