• unresponsive UI
• terrible battery life
• “bad” apps easily leading to worse battery life or constant “force closes”
• fragmentation (hard for app devs to write once and get it to work well on all of the different kinds of hardware and OS versions + hacked vendor UIs)
• short window of hardware vendor support for major OS updates, typically much less than the typical 2 year contract (infographic)

The Motorola phone hardware was pretty robust (only minor dings after 2 years and I dropped it on concrete/asphalt more times than I’d really like to admit), but the software was just too awful. If you want a specific example, once I tried to call Amanda with my Droid. I was able to pull up her entry in my contacts, but then the UI went out to lunch and refused any input when I’d try clicking on the number I wanted to call or anything else for that matter. After a minute or so of poking it, I gave up, hit the power/sleep button, and put it back in my pocket. Ten minutes later, it finally got around to calling her from my pocket. I’m generally a fan of Google, but Android seems to have less polish on it than their usually “beta” web applications. When your solution to unresponsive software and poor battery life is to bump up the hardware specs every month (now with a 2 GHz dual core!), I think you’re missing the mark. Really seems like they need to take some time and work on optimizing the software to better suit mobile use than to just rely on Moore’s law to make up for clunky software.

• What You Need to Know About the Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012 (Huffington Post)
• Explainer: understanding Sopa (great little animation from The Guardian)
• MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It (Popular Mechanics)
• How SOPA Creates The Architecture For Much More Widespread Censorship (TechDirt)
• The Myth That SOPA/PIPA Only Impact ‘Foreign Sites’ (TechDirt)
• SOPA Supporters Learning (Slowly) That Pissing Off Reddit Is A Bad Idea (TechDirt)

On an happier and only tangentially related note (GoDaddy – Go = Daddy), anyone who actually reads my excuse for a blog has probably noticed the complete lack of updates in over a year. Turns out being a Dad pretty effectively consumes all of your time, especially if you’re trying to keep up with Addy.

“Cost of the building next generation of supercomputers is not the problem. The cost of running the machines is what concerns engineers.”

That’s one thing that sometimes frustrates me when it comes to working with academics who want to get their own HPC system. For example, you may be looking at an annual facilities cost that’s say 10-20% of the original purchase cost of the system. It’s usually a whole lot easier to get funding from the fed or elsewhere for a 1 time big purchase than it is to get them to provide you with an annual budget for operational expenses. I’ve certainly heard horror stories of folks that went out and got a grant to buy a cluster and only talked to the university computing folks after it arrived to find out there weren’t enough data center resources (floor space, power, cooling) available to unbox the thing and turn it on. Then you end up in situations where they unbox a small handful of rackmount compute nodes and stuff one under each grad student’s desk in order to get something out of it. Not quite the cluster they were hoping for, but that’s arguably better than going back to the grant agency after a few years to tell them you haven’t published anything with the system you bought since you didn’t think to make sure there was a place to put it before you pursued the grant.

A more frequent pet peeve of mine is the end users that don’t understand why HPC storage doesn’t cost the same per TB as they can get from Best Buy. “But I just saw in their ad last week that I can get a 2TB drive for $100. You should give me way more storage on your HPC system than you do because it’s so cheap.” Right. Who cares about performance or scalability or reliability and BER. Certainly not them until they start complaining that the system is slow or demand to know why their data went poof.

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.

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 older part of the museum could definitely use a revamp though. Didn’t seem to be organized in a way that someone without a fair bit of previous rocket/NASA knowledge would get much out of it. Felt like what you’d get when you ask a bunch of scientists to design a museum. Again, factually correct, but rather dry and lacking the polish you’d hope for in a museum that was aiming to appeal to the general public. The multimedia parts felt really dated. While they’d spent the bucks on upgrading to nice fancy plasma TVs, they were still obviously playing videos produces back in the ’80s that were being played back on VHS tapes that dated back to the same time period. Ignoring the crappiness of ’80s production values, the audio and video quality were pretty lousy to the point where you were glad they had the closed captions turned on everywhere so you had some idea what they were actually saying. I distinctly remember one video that had some cheesy ’80s music that sounded like a bunch of kids singing at the bottom of a well…

I’d started off with this provider a couple years ago as part of a VC campaign (give us a large wad of cash, and we’ll give you an account for as long as we’re in business), and I’d upgraded at some point when they had a similar campaign that bumped up the specs on my hosting account and added their Connector service (group email, calendar, etc services with their own chunk of attached storage) and Strongspace service (large reliable online backup storage accessible via sftp/rsync over ssh/web over ssl). Anyway, all of this translates into my having the equivalent of a “Premier” service (see here). Long story short, I’ve got a lifetime account with the following specs:

• Connector: 100 users/100 GB
• Strongspace: 100GB
• Hosting: 50 websites, 20GB Disk, 60GB Bandwidth, 100 databases

Considering what I paid for my initial VC lifetime account, and later the upgrade that added Connector and Strongspace, and the fact this level of account now runs $100/month, I think I got off like a bandit. I wouldn’t even get close to a year of service with what I’ve paid, and that’s for “lifetime” service at the above levels.

And the Premier level account means there’s 14 other accounts/virtual servers on my Shared Accelerator, so it should remain nice and snappy for me. So far it’s been much zippier for my sites as they were getting kinda bogged down on the old box. I’m not sure what all was going on there, if they’d simply oversubscribed the box or were starting to have issues with their storage backend for the old servers since they were pushing hard to move away from them, etc.

Now I just need to take some time to finish some of the manual migration for changes from FreeBSD to OpenSolaris, and fix up some stuff that was broken a while back due to a WordPress upgrade. I’m also taking this opportunity to start picking up Ruby on Rails, and am vaguely contemplating ditching WordPress in favor of something of my own creation built on RoR.

It’s still early (i.e., I’ve got a lot to learn about Rails), but so far it looks like a really sexy web framework and I threw together something resembling a blog after watching a 15-minute screencast that runs through the process to getting a basic app up and running. It’s still very basic but functional: add posts, edit them, list all posts, add comments to a post, and some of the unit testing framework in Rails. I’ve started thinking about what all else is really needed, and there’s a fair bit: authentication (so only I can post to the blog or edit stuff), more advanced comment handling (akismet for spam, etc), categorization/tagging, searching through posts, and of course actually putting some style into the whole thing with CSS. But what I’ve got’s a start and now that I’ve got my performance issues sorted out following the migration, I’m not in as big a rush to dump WordPress.

Your Movie Buff Quotient: 88%

You are a movie buff of the most obsessive variety. If a movie exists, chances are that you’ve seen it. You’re an expert on movie facts and trivia. It’s hard to stump you with a question about film.

Response from anyone who knows me:

well, duh. of course you’re a movie geek.