New technology

I hate when a new technology comes out, developers and designers spend additional resources with the new technology, just to mimic some imperfection of an old technology. This statement is best illustrated with examples

• Some digital cameras make the noise that is similar to a mechanical shutter at the time of shooting. All the user needs is a confirmation that the picture is taken. A simple beep will do just fine. Now that someone needs to make/record/synthesize a sound file to mimic that. What's next? When I put in a new memory card, the camera will make the noise of film being scrolled?
  
• There is a world clock widget in Apple's Dashboard. I am not against analog clocks on computers, but if you look closely at Apple's widget, when the second hand moves every second, it shakes back and forth a little before landing on the next second. This is a perfect example of the imperfection of a traditional analog clock. How does this reproduced inaccuracy enhance time measuring? What's next? A pendulum below the clock?
  
• Cell phones show reception strength in bars, usually from 0 to 5 bars. I would guess that the actual measurement of the signal strength is a numeric value, but not from 0 to 5. So now the developers have to convert the strength to a 0 to 5 scale, and then draw bars on the screen with increasing sizes? Isn't it easier just to display a percentage number? A 2 digit number will take about just as much space on the screen. Why sacrifice the precision?
  
• Some calculator programs on computers display digits like a green 日 shape LCD. Again, it would be easier just to print the digits with regular fonts! Apple's Dashboard again falls into this category.
  

Doing things like these is just a waste of hardware and human resource. These examples are not so different from a flat screen TV morphing the picture so that the rectangular video frame would have round corners.

Who read my blog?

Overview at the right.


We all know that telecommunication in Taiwan is very developed. But I never know that ET home (東森) has operation in the Gulf of Guinea.

Eating habits

Many people like to comment on the way I eat. In order to save time, I write this FAQ preemptively.

Q: You don't eat meat with bones. You're lazy.
A: Nope. The definition of lazy is not doing things that you're supposed to do to avoid trouble. I stress "supposed to do". Although I'd like to avoid trouble, eating meat with bones is not a duty of anyone. If the duty doesn't exist in the first place, the issue of laziness doesn't exist either.

Q: You don't eat seafood, except sashimi and sushi. It is inconsistent.
A: If you think that having exception is inconsistent, not eating all seafood is consistent, then I beg to differ. "Not eating all seafood" is equivalent to "Eating all food, except seafood". Contradiction.

Q: You eat fast. Why not eat slowly and prolong the enjoyment?
A: Perhaps for some people, the joy acquired per unit time (dj/dt) is about the same at any eating speed. But for me, when I eat fast, the value of dj/dt can be so high so that the total amount of joy (the area under curve in the graph) would be higher than if I eat slowly.

Q: If you've never tried this, how do you know it's not good?
A: I have tried many things. It's just that I deem them not good after trying. It doesn't take 20 years to try these. In addition, not every instance requires trying. Existing knowledge can provide much insight on the chances of good or bad. Why do people not eat shit without trying? Because our knowledge tells us there is a very high probability that it wouldn't taste good. By the same token, if I have tried yellow watermelons, red watermelons, and they taste about the same; Red apples and green apples are about the same. And I've tried green kiwifruits and deemed that not tasty, then I don't need to try golden kiwifruits.

iPhone

Apple announced iPhone on 1/9/2007. This is a news the industry has been expecting, so there's no surprise here. Many news media report the event, whether it's newspaper, TV, or online-only. It's big, of course. But it's been 2 working days and I have seen few editorials or true journalism. All they do is reporting what happened, what feature the iPhone has, or what Steve Jobs said. Well, I can get all that from the keynote speech video. So I thought I'd like to through in my 2 cents.

Apple excels at user interface and design, I reiterate. Not just the look, but the usability as well. Here are some highlights that I feel are innovations or good reinventions.

• With so many features, the device is only 11.6 mm thin, and weighs only 135 grams.
  
• I often find the QWERTY keyboard on other smartphones clumsy. Most of the time, I don't type. But I do want to preserve the possibility to type. My current phone offers a sliding solution, which satisfies my need. But the drawback is a thicker body. The iPhone has a soft keyboard only. It addresses my concern of clumsiness, but iPhone is definitely not the first that has a soft keyboard. Let's see how well it does.
  
• "Multi-touch" control where you can use two fingers to zoom in and out things by the distance between the two points. Innovation. Period.
  
• Proximity sensor that shuts off display and touch screen input while the phone is near the ear. This is a problem all smartphone users have. Apple has solved it!
  
• Ambient sensor that adjusts the brightness according to, um... amount of ambient light. As above. But see my counterpoint below.
  
• Accelerometer determines if the device is portrait or landscape. Nice feature, but many cameras have that already.
  
• Random access voice mail. You don't need to go through the first 5 message to get to the 6th. Again, a solution everybody can use.
  

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Those being said, I would like to give my constructive criticism as well. These include things that are questionable or never discussed.

• No stylus. Steve said this as if it were a feature. Perhaps the touch screen is so sophisticated that even people with larger fingers can type the virtual keyboard with no problem. In that case, more power to iPhone and I give the credit where it is due. But what if I want to prevent my sweaty fingers to smear the pretty screen? Some of us like to preserve the phone so that it would have higher resell value.
  
• While the ambient sensor is a good thing, is there a manual override?
  
• It runs OS X. Really? True OS X or a scaled down version? Forget about whether or not the OS is shrunk down version. Is it easy to develop software on iPhone? Is there any developer tools?
  
• – Which leads to the question – how many software will there be? How easy is it to install? No demo, no mention at all. What about Skype?
  
• Steve and the official website briefly mentions synchronizing contacts and other stuff between the phone and your PC or Mac. Great, but no demo. What kind of contact does it accept? Outlook? Thunderbird?
  
• The keyboard was shown with 3 lines of regular keys and 2.5 lines of symbols and numbers at the demo. What about international characters? How easy is it to mix different languages while typing?
  
• Steve demoed the contact with scrolling. It would suck if I need to call multiple members of the Zellwegers. Can it display by categories? Go to Z? How easy is it to transfer a contact to another device?
  
• When talking about the price, Steve combined the price of an iPod nano, $199, and an average smart phone with 2 year contract, $299, because "these phones sort of do music, but nobody uses them for music". False, 2 of my co-workers and I have the Windows Mobile phone and we all use the phones for music (not that Windows Mobiles phone are good phones). The point is, a simple addition doesn't justify the $499 cost.
  
• No expansion slot.
  
• There is no way to replace the battery easily.
  
• In the U.S., iPhone users are stuck with Cingular. I'm not against bundling two products or services that are highly related. I am against offering the bundle as the only choice while its products are totally separable. Why do they have to pick Cingular for me?? This will suck for frequent travelers. But Steve has the amazing ability to spin this as "partnership of innovation". We all know better.
  

Metric

Use metric. I don't know why the Americans are still using the customary units. I'd like to ask, if a pound of meat costs $3.45, how much does one ounce cost? Who can compute 3.45 / 16 without aid? How much does one ounce of water weigh? Ah ha, there are many different ounces, such as American fluid ounce (29.57 ml), British fluid ounce (28.41 ml), avoirdupois ounce (regular weight system, 28.35 g), and troy ounce (31.1 g). When the United States achieved independence, Thomas Jefferson promoted a decimal currency, as opposed to the British 1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pence system. There are a series of acts in the States to promote the metric system, such as the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 and its amendments. But the voluntary conversion is useless. Because the metric is not yet adopted, Amazon has encountered problems when transmitting product information with other companies. Yes, habits are hard to change, and it will cost a great deal. But the earlier the better. If Canada and Australia can, so can the United States.

Wikipedia

Sometime people ask me what I do during my free time. I've always been busy as Wikipedia for the past few months. Why and how? Because the tasks are like ever-expanding tree. In layman's term, 1 task leads to a few others, and they in turn lead to more. This is part of what I've done today

• I found out that Kyrgyz banknotes are not eligible for copyright (So are banknotes from other ex-USSR republics).
  
• Someone else has already uploaded some Kyrgyz banknote images. But I have better ones. So I upload them.
  
• For the ones I got from www.banknoteworld.com, I had to tag them properly with their sources as dictated by the Wikipedia policy.
  
• So I needed to make a template so that the same tag can be reused.
  
• There were existing tags, but they were all over the places. I needed to clean them up.
  
• On the English Wikipedia, I categorized these tags.
  
• I repeated that on Wikipedia Commons, which is a image depository for Wiki in all languages.
  
• Finished the upload
  
• Requested the inferior images for deletion
  

This is just for Kyrgyzstan.

Juggling convention

My boss said there is a convention for juggling, and his son participated one for a week!

Attempted to put JavaScript here. Can't!

Holiday gift blunders?

When I was deleting my spam mail, I came across a website talking about holiday blunders. It says "don't give kitchen gadget to a woman because it is like telling her to do more housework," and "don't give a man a gift that would hint your intention of changing him, such as body care product". These arguments all sound logical and we've all heard this before. But on closer examination, the arguments are under the assumption that gifts come with some agenda of the giver. This is wrong. This is not the spirit of gifting. So instead of picking the gift that the recipient really wants, which is already a difficult task at times, now I have to think about "how to avoid making myself a complete ass by hinting something I don't mean in the first place"?

It is, of course, wrong to think about hinting when buying gifts. At the same time, it is wrong to think about avoiding hinting when choosing a gift because you're just thinking about self-preservation instead of what the recipient really wants/needs. It is equally wrong to think about these thoughts when receiving a gift. That is mind game. That is diplomacy. That happens when people are not completely honest and forthcoming to one another. That is not the spirit of giving gift.

Gifts are not instruments of hint. Let's get back to the real spirit of gifting. You love someone; that someone loves you.

Uzbek music

Topdim Bahtimni
(presumably) I've Found My Happiness


Topdim Bahtimni (live)


Toshkent Samarqand


Chin Muhabbat


Sog'inch


Muhabbatim


Muhabbatim (Live)