Motorola Droid and Google’s Android OS

Published on February 28, 2010 in Android and Geek. 0 Comments

So last November, I finally got a smartphone (through work no less).  Gotta love not having to pay that monthly phone+data bill.  The iPhone always had a lot of appeal to me, but the thought of having to switch to AT&T wasn’t especially attractive to me.  I’m not big on the restrictions Verizon usually places on their phones (let’s disable all the features of your phone out so we can force you to use an expensive VZW service instead and nickle-and-dime you to death).  But it’s hard to beat their coverage.  Long story short (too late), I ended up with a Motorola Droid running Google’s Android OS.

So far I’ve been pretty pleased with it.  In general, integration with Google services is pretty solid (gmail, calendar, contacts).  There’s the Google Market for installing new apps, and there are lots of pretty good free apps.  At some point I’ll probably do some followup posts highlighting some of the apps I find clever/useful.  The SDK is readily available and more importantly you don’t have to hack the phone to install non-Market apps (such as those you wrote yourself).  So Google isn’t maintaining a chokehold on app distribution as Apple is.  There are some really neat features of the Android SDK/API (e.g., a barcode scanner app can easily export it’s scanning routines so that other apps may rely on them).  And of course there’s the added flexibility you get with multitasking support.  But there are tradeoffs that come with this freedom.

I’ve never owned an iPhone/iPod Touch, but I suspect Apple has easily done a better job when it comes to general polish and usability.  While a vanilla Android install seems pretty snappy (at least on the Droid), you can definitely bump into issues with responsiveness especially as you install more apps.  You can definitely see the appeal of Apple’s approach to a restricted hardware platform since you know how it will perform, what features it will have, etc.  Since Android runs on a variety of platforms, there’s no guarantee how fast a CPU, how much memory, how much storage, etc are available.  And since it relies on every manufacturer to manage OS ports for their devices, there’s no guarantee that new OS releases will make it to all phones (or in a timely manner).

As far as the Motorola Droid in particular, it’s been a pretty solid phone.  It’s got some heft to it, but feels more solid than heavy to me.  The screen is pretty fantastic, and call quality is good.  It’s nice having a standard headphone jack and microUSB connector instead of any vendor-specific nonsense.  Most of the time, I find myself using the on-screen keyboard (especially after downloading the 3rd party Better Keyboard app), but occasionally having a physical keyboard is nice (such as when typing up long emails, or funky passwords).  They’ve certainly made some sacrifices with the keyboard to keep the size/weight down (keys aren’t offset and they’re pretty flat without as much of the usual tactile feedback you’d like).

What I find most odd is their choice of the Dpad.  It’s pretty big and forces you to a smaller keyboard.  But it’s on the right side instead of standard left as you’d find on a video game controller.  Makes it a little awkward since there are some pretty decent game emulators out there (I’ve got NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators installed at the moment so I can play Zelda, Mario, Sonic, etc).  Not bad for a phone.

 

Alabama faux-snow

Published on January 7, 2010 in Photography. Closed

As a followup to my snow photos from Champaign at Christmas, here’s a sample of a few photos documenting what it takes to shutdown much of Huntsville:

IMG_5915

Christmas snow in Illinois

Published on January 7, 2010 in Photography. Closed

Finally getting around to going through photos I’ve taken recently and uploaded a set I took of the snow while we were in Champaign for Christmas. Here’s a sample that I liked with Sarah chasing Rachel down the street with a snow shovel full of snow:

Sarah chasing Rachel with a shovel full of snow

eMusic makes me a sad panda

Published on June 15, 2009 in Musika and Rants. 1 Comment

I’ve been a happy happy joy joy subscriber at eMusic since 2005. I wasn’t sure what I thought initially when Lee clued me into it (indie music being a new thing for me), but after that first month I was hooked. Took me a few months and then I bumped up to the annual subscription option. Until recently, my most recent subscription plan worked out to $16/month, which got me 90 tracks a month. Not bad considering the $0.99/track (or $9.99/album) you’d get at iTunes (not sure how their current pricing scheme works out, but it’s close enough for this discussion). The key distinction to me revolved around the subscription scheme instead of a-la-carte (so they’ve charge less but presumably can expect a steady flow of cash coming in) and the emphasis on indie music labels. So the biggest complaint for many potential consumers (and the reason they left after their initial 30 free tracks) was the lack of mainstream/top 40/major label music. But eMusic filled a nice niche for those of us who were more interested in finding cool new music that was outside the mainstream. If you wanted mainstream stuff, you could always go to iTunes, Amazon, Walmart, Rhapsody, Napster, etc etc. But eMusic was fantastic for indie stuff. At the price point they were charging (especially for my “grandfathered” subscription), you could try stuff out even if you’d never heard of it, and even if you did end up with a fair bit of chaff, there was still plenty of wheat in there to make it a good deal. And it exposed indie artists to a much wider audience (I know I ended up buying physical CDs for a bunch of stuff I picked up on eMusic to support the artists I really enjoyed).

That was all until recently when they announced that they’d signed a deal to get access to some of Sony’s back-catalog (i.e., stuff that’s at least a couple years old), were eliminating all grandfathered subscriptions, and putting in a significant price hike for all. I believe just prior to this, you could get 50 tracks a month for $16. The new plan they plan on switching me over to as soon as my current annual subscription runs out is 35 tracks a month for $16. I can accept that they may need to cut back on plans like mine due to the incredibly low price per track, but such a drastic change makes me want to kick them to the curb as soon as my contract’s up and take my business elsewhere. Really seems like they should give existing subscribers the option to keep their existing plan (or at least the previous incarnation, before the recent hike) and restrict us to the indie labels. I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the major label stuff. As I said, if I wanted it, I’d go elsewhere. I came to eMusic for what made them different. But now that their wanting to be like everyone else. Guess I’ll need to find some place new to get my indie music fix. :(

CEO’s blog post and the ~1500 mostly negative posts about this

Rackable acquires SGI?

Published on April 1, 2009 in Geek and Work. Closed

Well this is certainly not something I expected. SGI is one of the few HPC vendors out there that I’m aware of who are still doing neat things with hardware. We’ve got some of their large SMP Itanium boxes on the floor where I work, and I think they’re pretty slick machines. Pricy, but slick. And so far their support is about the best I’ve dealt with. That’s not saying their perfect (try getting a CXFS guru on the phone when you need one without sitting on a major outage for several hours), but they generally seem better than most of the other HPC vendors I’ve worked with (IBM, Cray). But SGI’s certainly had its share of financial woes and I think there was a recent warning from NASDAC that they’d be delisted. So I’m not necessarily surprised that someone’s buying them out, but that it’s Rackable specifically.

I’ve never had real day-to-day experience with a Rackable system, but they seemed to work at the other extreme of value commodity systems. I’ve chatted with some of their sales/technical folks and they push their cluster in a cargo container idea pretty hard. Their distinguishing features seem to be power distribution (aiming at higher efficiency by doing a single AC -> DC conversion and distributing DC to all the servers in a rack), and cooling efficiency (half depth servers loaded from both sides of a rack and blasting hot air into the gab between them in the middle of the rack). These are certainly aimed at addressing some of the big issues in datacenters everyone’s facing (power & cooling), but a lot of the big vendors are attacking those same problems, so I couldn’t guess whether Rackable really stands out in the commodity cluster space. But I suppose if they’ve got VC cash lying around, buying up the engineering assets at SGI may go a long ways toward giving them some more unusual products to set them apart.

I have to admit there’s a small part of me that thinks today was not the best day for them to announce the acquisition given the history of April 1st online shenanigans everyone’s expecting.

[Press release]

The Woz takes job at Fusion-io

Published on February 8, 2009 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: , .

So this story has been all over the place (at least if you read computing/HPC news). Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer and designer of the historically significant Apple I and Apple II, took a job as chief scientist at a startup I was already aware of, Fusion-io. They’ve been designing PCIe boards loaded with flash memory to deliver super high performance storage to servers and maybe high-end gamers. In theory it’s using similar technology to SSDs, but they’re able to achieve significantly higher bandwidth and IOPs than has been achieved in an SSD that is focused on stuffing flash into a conventional SATA hard drive form factor. This isn’t the first time companies have tried using flash memory as a hard disk for HPC (Dave would remind me that one of the old Crays had a sea of flash memory intended for this purpose), but flash densities are finally getting high enough to put a useful amount of storage in a machine (as opposed to just using it to speed up your swap file/virtual memory).

What makes this particularly interesting to me is that John (buddy from UR and best man at my wedding) is chief hardware architect at Fusion-io. Hopefully this announcement, combined with their deals with some of the major manufacturers (Dell, HP, IBM) solidifies their company in the storage arena. I really think they have a cool product that sets them apart from everyone else trying to use flash memory in servers.

For more details, see the story at insideHPC.

Nashville Photos: Lane Motor Museum

Published on May 3, 2008 in Auto and Photography. Closed Tags: , , .

A couple of weeks ago, we went up to Nashville and hit a number of the sights. I’ll go ahead and split this into two posts, since I’ve only uploaded some of the relevant photos so far. The first day, we hit their recreation of the Parthenon. Apparently, it’s actually the second replica they’ve built, with the first being built in 1897 to celebrate their centennial but it was only built to last 6 months. The locals liked it so much, they elected to rebuild it in a more permanent manner. It now also hosts the city of Nashville’s art museum.

After that, we hit the Frist Center for the Visual Arts to catch their exhibit featuring Monet to Dali (on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art). The other exhibit featured some of the work of Angelo Filomeno, who does really interesting (if a bit disturbing) embroidery work on large silk panels. From the Frist website, his works feature “embroidered images of fanged skulls, exploded peacocks, and hovering insects.” Strangely enough, that was about all they had. I have to admit we were a bit disappointed overall. We figured there’d be a more substantial art museum in a city the size of Nashville, but we arguably had a better time at the Huntsville art museum (especially given the difference in the price of admission).

Finally, we hit the Lane Motor Museum before heading home. By far the best stop of the day, especially since admission’s only $5 for an adult. I don’t know what Mr. Lane does for a living, but apparently he must do pretty well for him to have accumulated such an impressive selection of unusual autos predominantly from Europe and Japan. The collection includes everything from cars to trikes to motorcycles to a massive US Army LARC and other oddities like the Helicron. All sorts of cool stuff. Go check it out!

Cat Diary, Day 38,974 – Now where did I leave my dignity?

Published on April 24, 2008 in Cat Diary. 1 Comment Tags: .

My masters have hauled me down to this strange new land they keep referring to as The South. It seems like I’ve been hear for ages, which is apparently just long enough for them to inflict me with a bladder infection. I felt so uncomfortable I showed them who’s boss by peeing in things to anger them, and figured they’d break them any moment. Since they hadn’t made me better, I figured I had to be more blunt with these simpletons and started going to the litter box every fifteen minutes and I even stooped so low as to drag my ass on the carpet like a filthy dog.

Little did I know they would try and fight back by taking me to the evil man with his pointy stick that he’d use to poke me. As if that weren’t bad enough they started cramming nasty pills down my throat twice a day after taking me home. To ensure my cooperation, they even had the nerve to withhold food until I submitted to this abuse.

After suffering two weeks of this, they took me back to the evil man and he made noises about growing crystals in my pee or something like that. His solution, switch me over to even crappier kibbles than the diet ones I’d had before and start drinking more distilled water every day. Oh, and he wanted to extend my pill punishment for another week beyond the week I had left!

A few more days of that and I was about at the end of my rope. So I started off by peeing in the masters’ suitcase twice in one night! They escalated past that by giving me a bath! The next day they tried to lock me up in a bathroom after that with nothing but lousy prescription kibbles, but I broke out and got into their bedroom. I figured I’d show them good by peeing in their comforter. No, that’s not enough of a statement. So then I crapped on their papers and then smeared it on the wall. Top that silly humans.

An Engineer’s Guide to Cats

Published on April 15, 2008 in Geek. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Research in Alabama – scorpions fight cancer at UAB

Published on April 10, 2008 in Work. Closed Tags: , , .

Medical researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered a new use for scorpion venom — cancer medication. Each year, some 9,000 Americans are diagnosed with malignant glioma, a form of brain cancer that kills about half its victims within a year of diagnosis.

Glioma cells work a lot like cockroach muscle cells. And while that fact is pretty disgusting, it also got UAB researchers thinking about the giant Israeli scorpion, whose venom is harmless to humans but deadly to its cockroach prey.

Doctors found that when they injected a drug derived from the venom of giant Israeli scorpions into cancer-infected human brains, the poison destroyed the glioma cells and left surrounding, healthy cells alone. The treatment is still in the early stages of development, but researchers remain optimistic.

See the rest of the article on deadly animals that might save your life at Mental Floss.