Archive for the 'Rants' Category

Adieu Android, or bienvenue iPhone!

Published on December 23, 2011 in Geek and Rants. Closed

My foray into the world of Android phones is finally at an end, and am now the owner of a shiny iPhone 4S. It was an interesting experiment, and there were a few features that I will miss that I haven’t found a way to do on the iPhone, but the Android experience finally got bad enough (and I hit my 2 year contract anniversary) to push for a phone upgrade at work. There were just too many issues with my Droid and Android in general from a usability standpoint to suffer it any further. Issues with the Android ecosystem (at least as I’ve been able to experience it… maybe 4.0 will really start to address some of their problems):

  • 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.

The cost of supercomputing

Published on November 12, 2010 in Geek, Rants and Work. Closed

So this upcoming week is the big annual supercomputing convention, SC10, down in New Orleans. Since I’m skipping out (anxiously waiting for the arrival of Little Miss Sunshine), I’ve got time to actually try and read through the slew of new product announcements and news coverage. So today I saw this quote on twitter from hpc_guru and just had to share:

“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.

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

Bad Karma

Published on April 28, 2006 in Geek, General and Rants. 2 Comments

I guess I’ve been swimming in bad karma or something lately. First, I broke the nice set of Sennheiser HD515 cans I use at work leaving me with the craptacular closed Aiwas I’d used before seeing the light. Then, I broke the belt clip on my cellphone. Fortunately, superglue seems to have solved both problems.

Then, I realized my Thinkpad wasn’t charging like it should. Everything indicated it was charging, but the battery meter kept getting lower. I pulled the AC from the back and reinserted it and the resulting sparks and burnt electronics smell tipped me off that something was amiss. Turns out I had 3 weeks or so left on my 3 year warranty, so I called up support (Monday) had it shipped out the next day (Tuesday), they had it in hand end of the next day (Wednesday), were repairing it the next (Thursday), and according to online tracking have fixed it and should be shipping it back out today (Friday). Assuming it comes back fixed, I’ve been pretty pleased with the overall experience. Added bonus: the support center I talked to was in Atlanta and not India. Seeing as I’ve had this thing for 3 years now and this is the first real problem I’ve had (well, ignoring the part where my cats chewed on the AC adapter), I’ve been quite pleased with the build quality on this machine. Beats the pants off the Dell I had that broke a keycap off the keyboard in less than a month…

On a sadder note, Merry sort of knocked over my external hard drive while it was running, and it sort of ended up running upside-down until I noticed it, and shortly thereafter it started making a weird siren noise and refused to spin up. And since hard drive manufacturers have been pushing capacity/performance/price as hard as they can, they’ve had substantially more reliability/quality control issues than when I first got into computers (I’ve had drives that ran close to continuously for 5+ years before I retired them when I needed more capacity). Now most of them have 1 year warranties if you’re lucky, and mine ran out in January so I’m out of luck.

Maybe all this has been happening since I’ve been so frustrated at work. Who knows. Just seems like a lot of bad juju all at once like this.

Damn Dolphins!… or hanging out with Rachel and Tammy

Published on April 24, 2006 in Musika and Rants. 5 Comments

Rachel and her roommate Tammy (who’s a hoot btw) came down Friday night to catch the show at the Canopy Club featuring The Living Blue, Tractor Kings, Dark Country, and The Dolphin. We showed up some time during the Dolphin’s set and all I have to say is weird. I couldn’t really tell whether they were playing something or just getting setup and making random noises on-stage. We elected to wait out at the bar until after their set was over.

Thought Dark Country put on a pretty good show, but I would’ve liked to hear a bit more (they were only able to play a handful of songs). Hopefully I’ll get to hear more from them in the future… perhaps an EP?

I’m not quite sure what I think of the Tractor Kings. I will definitely say I was impressed to see one of them playing a 12 string acoustic guitar as a part of their act. I might have to check out more of their stuff to see what I think. Seemed like fairly subdued music compared to the other acts, but maybe that’s just me. Guess I should also check out the old 57s (er, I think that’s what Tammy said they reminded her of… not sure since it was kinda loud in there).

I’ve seen the Living Blue previously, and they fit with what I’d remembered. Clearly most of the people there on Friday night had come to see them play as they swarmed around the stage when they got started. I will say I thought their show I caught at Cowboy Monkey was more entertaining (perhaps because it was a more intimate venue and the place was comfortably packed).

Good stuff overall. Was kinda fun getting to hang out with Rachel and Tammy in their natural habitat so to speak.

<rant>
Although a lot of their associates clearly don’t think very highly of CU… sort of reminded me of all the Chicago Bears fans who had the nerve to come down and ruin our poor little town for a weekend (several times over the course of a season while the Bears were playing at our stadium while theirs was under repairs/construction) and then to have the nerve to complain about everything (there’s too much traffic… well duh you guys were the traffic, it smells bad… well duh you’re in farm country, etc etc).
</rant>

You eeediot!

Published on October 11, 2005 in Rants and Work. Closed

What’s the deal with stupid people getting union secretary gigs in Universities? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some great and helpful secretaries in my time. But so many of them are just so useless! I’ve been dealing a bit with one in the business office for our department trying to place orders for my students in senior design. Here are my two experiences so far:

1. Took a couple of days to get my first order placed. Some of this lag (ie an hour or two) was me trying to figure out what all info they really needed on the form. Apparently they’ll order stuff off the web, but want you to write down the company’s address and phone number and such anyway (not like they could possibly look that up the same way I did on the company’s website). Get a call a while later saying there’s been some problems with the order. Drop by there to find out she’s leaving for the day at 12:30 (and it’s 12:15 and I’m in a hurry). For some reason that she wouldn’t explain she couldn’t order from the website I’d given her and had to order through a distributor. Not sure why she couldn’t order it… I gave her the web address that led directly to the product, and there’s an “add to cart” button prominently displayed on that page, but I’m figuring maybe she’s using a corporate card and they want her to go through a distributor or something. So she’s randomly selected Cabela’s outdoor goods and tried searching for the part I’m ordering and has the good sense to ask before submitting the order. It’s a good thing too since I’m trying to get an OEM GP S sensor and Cabela’s (being a consumer store) only carries the little handheld GPS units with lcd displays and so forth. I’ve got to go so I tell her I’ll find a distributor that carries it and place the order again the next day when she gets back into the office. Find 1 place in the US that carries it and they want $70 more for it than the manufacturer. So I figure I’ll press the issue the next day and ask why she can’t order it from the site I give her. I sort of watch what she’s doing and it’s clear she’s only entered the blah.com part of the address (instead of going directly to the link I’ve given her) and cluelessly tried to search around their site for the part in question. She apparently had better luck that day since she actually found it and confirmed it was the right thing and actually placed the order.

2. Second order hasn’t been much better so far. I’d grabbed another form on my way to meet with one of my groups. Filled out the info and tried to drop it off at the office. Turns out they’re out for the day by 4:30. Not really surprising I guess, but you’d figure a big office that has to have at least 5 or 6 secretaries might be open till the end of the business day. But there’s a drop box outside the door for purchase orders so I stupidly drop it in. Haven’t heard anything in the following few days so I assume there haven’t been any problems and I’ll be notified when it arrives. Go to double check the order’s been placed after meeting with a group yesterday to find out she has no idea what I’m talking about (not entirely true, she tries to tell me baout the order I’d placed 2 weeks earlier). I confirm that the drop box is where I should put orders when they’re closed and she says she’ll double check the box. Turns out they only do a cursory visual inspection of the box to see if it has anything and don’t actually bother to open it unless it is overflowing with orders (only way I can see that they’d notice there was anything in there without actually checking). Sure enough my order was still sitting in there from when I dropped it off 5 days earlier. In theory the order’s been placed… now.

3. Guess we’ll wait and see. Don’t have high hopes that my third encounter with this woman will go any better than the last two. I can understand having an off day, but it seems to be the only kind she has.

Soda prices

Published on July 20, 2005 in Rants and Work. Closed

Was just down to the basement in CSL to buy a soda only to find they’ve jacked the 20oz price up to $1.25. Lame. They don’t provide us with free espresso-based beverages, they don’t provide us with a convenient places to buy espresso-based beverages, and now they’re mugging us on the sodas. How are grad students supposed to work into the wee hours without a cheap source of caffeine? :( Might have to just start bringing my own.

Stupid people suck!

Published on July 18, 2005 in Geek, Rants and Work. 2 Comments

I hate stupid people. I can accept that the population at large is generally clueless about all things tech, and so I have a fairly high tolerance level when they do annoying newb things. The people that really tick me off are the ones who are clearly in a technical field (say, a whole bunch of people in academia on a FPGA research/education mailing list), and are clearly clueless about very basic concepts such as email…

The trouble all started this morning when some Computer Science and Engineering associate prof at Penn State (funnily enough he got his PhD from a Florida institution…) accidently tacked the address for the aforementioned massive FPGA-related mailing list as a CC on a email intended for some prof about his proposal for an upcoming conference. This email was clearly intended for members of the program committee, but ended up being sent out to I don’t know how many hundreds of people. I can forgive that as a relatively honest mistake (not sure how he managed to tack on a completely unrelated address, but I suppose it could happen if you weren’t careful). The real problem is the flood of idiots on the mailing list that feel the need to reply to the entire list asking why they’ve received this email… Someone a few hours ago posted “hey, this guy screwed up, not meant for this list, please stop replying about it.” But it keeps on coming. And there’s this stupid .gov address that keeps marking some of the messages as quarantined and proceeds to send yet another email to the list letting everyone know that it didn’t like that email…

Now if I can only figure out how to get off this damn list… I didn’t actually subscribe to it… went to a conference with the guy that runs it and he automatically added all the attendees, and I think it’s more of an old school distribution list than a full-on automated mailing list. Hasn’t been too bad in the past, but this is just ridiculous.

Heathens!

Published on June 23, 2005 in Rants. Closed

I hate stupid people. Amanda and I were enjoying a nice dinner at Nitaya Thai last night when this flock of heathens came in. I knew they were heathens because they promptly asked for a kids’ menu. Where do they think they were… Denny’s? Gets worse from there. When they find out there’s no kids’ menu, they’re youngest broodling has the nerve to confront the waitress with a loud, finger-quoted “what do you mean no kids’ menu?!?!?” Good to see kids are being raised to be respectful, well-mannered little mongrels… Then the elder mouth-breathers ask if they serve anything besides Thai food, because they’d really like to eat something that’s not Thai food. The nerve of these heathens. If you didn’t want Thai food, perhaps you should check out a place that’s not a Thai restaurant. I suspect McD’s would be more to their liking… Fortunately they left at that point, which is good since I’d rather not have to listen to them whine about how they can’t get burgers and chicken nuggets and are being forced to experience alternative cultures.

One of those problems I have with some people… completely unwilling to try new things. My folk raised me to at least try new things before deciding I didn’t like them (unlike some people who know they don’t like things before even trying them). Sometimes this works out and I find some new favorite… and sometimes I have a Happy BucketTM experience. But even then I come out with some great stories and can impress some people with my bravery. :)

Rant: Parking

Published on September 17, 2004 in Rants. Closed

So as of a few weeks ago, they finally got the parking deck close enough to “finished” to open it. By “finished”, I mean the bulk of the structure is there, but they’re still actively working on it. Like putting in the sidewalks around it, putting in the street to the south, actually building up the 1st floor interior (where all the “retail” is supposed to go). Oh, and of course installing the elevators. The elevators is a critical part, because students (such as myself) can only park on the top 2 floors (5th and 6th), and I’m lazy. Now they’ve got it to the point where 1-2 elevators work on the opposite side of the building from where I want to be, and appear to be very slowly working on the elevators on the side I want to use. At least they’ve got the sidewalks opened finally (used to have to walk a block down and back to get to the other side of the parking deck).

But hey. It’s there, and it’s open, and I’ve got a permit. So I can’t really complain too much (better than busing it, that’s for sure). Thing is the 5th floor of the deck is generally all parked up and I have to park on the top of the deck (which will almost certainly annoy me more in winter when I have to dig my car out at the end of the day). I had my suspicions before, but now I’m positive. 95+% of the students parking there live close on campus and are using this as their primary parking spot. Which basically translates to the 5th level of the deck generally being full because the cars only move on the weekends. Clincher is I got into work early this morning (and by early I mean I was walking in with the secretaries at 8AM). First 4 levels of the deck were largely deserted except for the handful of secretaries that have to be here at 8. 5th floor was still packed.

Whole thing seems kinda silly since professors and staff generally only park on the first couple of floors, leaving a couple more reserved and largely vacant while the students are all parking up on the top of the deck. Oh well, what do I know. At least parking is allowing some students to park there.