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Apple - Support - Discussions - Screen auto-dimming when I hit delete …

Apple - Support - Discussions - Screen auto-dimming when I hit delete ….

LOL, this had me puzzled for a bit. While playing with my mac, I noticed the screen dimmed everytime I hit the delete key.

What happened:

  • the mac book pro adjust screen brightness to the ambient light
  • it has two light sensors in the stereo speakers
  • when pressing the delete, your hand covers one of them
  • normally this is not a problem
  • … unless you are in a dark room with a desk light to the right of the mac

Hehe.

Otherwise things are fine with my new Mac. Annoying things include having to learn new keybindings and our annoying windows based intranet stuff.

But consider me switched.

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2008 09 26 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (0) Permalink

The Way We Live Next

I stumbled upon somebody writing about Nokia’s 2007 Way We Live Next event in Oulu. This event was intended to give the outside world a view on what is going on in Nokia Research Center.

Nice quote

Lots of interesting stuff was shown off during the course of the two days and the most interesting I came across was the indoor positioning concept. Using WiFi and specially created maps, the devices we were issued with were running the software which enabled you to move through the NRC building and pinpoint exactly where you were. So, if the next presentation was in room 101, the device would simply, and quickly show you the way. It instantly made me think of the frustration of trying to get where I want in huge shopping centres - and I figured this had to be the perfect solution.

Next week, the 2008 edition of the WWLN is going to be in Espoo and I will be giving a demo there of our indoor location based service platform, customized for a real shopping mall. We’ve demoed last years version of our software platform at the Internet of Things Conference last April. At the time our new platform was already under development for a several months and we are getting ready to start trialing it now. The WWLN event next week will be when we first show this in public and hopefully we’ll get some nice attention from the press on this.

PS. I like (good) beer …

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2008 09 16 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (0) Permalink

X-plane on an iPhone

If you’ve read my past reviews of X-plane, you’ll know that I’m somewhat of a fan of that product. It’s an ultra realistic flight simulator. If you’ll read the product page you will see that it boasts a long list of features. I can assure you, they’re being modest. I don’t pay for software very often but I’ve bought v8 and recently v9 of this one.

Anyway, I just had a little WTF moment reading this little blog post from Benjamin Supnik, one of the lead developers of X-plane who works on the scenery engine. They’ve actually ported X-plane to the iPhone! If so far, you didn’t think much of the iPhone as a development platform, look again. This is really impressive.

I just looked up the product page in iTunes and it has some nice screen shots. Of course they don’t ship the full UI or scenery. All you get is an area around Inssbruck (default area in the demo version of the normal version). Probably it is heavily tuned to work nicely on an iphone. However, the mere fact that they have it running at all is very impressive. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to link to product pages in iTunes, so you’ll just have to look it up yourself, producer is Laminar or you can go to Games->Simulation in the iphone section.

Also hilareous is Austin Meyer (founder and owner of Laminar that builds X-Plane) denying there was an iphone version of x-plane, just before he launched it on September 11th. A bit of a symbolic date for launching a flight simulator, don’t you think?

Sadly, I have no iPhone or ipod touch to play with. Working for Nokia and all that.

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2008 09 13 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (1) Permalink

Failing power supply

In April 2007, I replaced a broken power supply in my PC with a Antec SmartPower 2.0 500W Power Supply. Check my review here. A few days ago, my pc has started producing a high pitched noise. Really annoying. So, I Google a little and what do I find: Antec SmartPower 2.0 500W Power Supplies apparently have 21% failure rate. Tell tale signs include the damn thing making high pitched noise.

I have to investigate a little further but probably this means the power supply is failing after less than one and a half year. Out of warranty of course. Damn it, really annoying to have to open that case again to replace the same part. Basically, the PC is now nearly three years old and maybe I should just replace it altogether. Something quiet, fast and reliable would be nice.

In a few weeks my new Macbook Pro should arrive at work (ordered yesterday). I was planning to wait and see if I like that and if so, just upgrade to a nice Mac at home as well. Not fully convinced yet.

Feel free to recommend a decent PSU. Has to power a Nvidia 7800, 2 drives, lots of USB hardware and a amd 4400+ dualcore CPU.

Update. I ended up installing a ZALMAN ZM600-HP. Seems to have a few good reviews http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/zm600hp/. It’s expensive, over qualified for the job and supposedly really good and quiet. Sadly the rest of my machine is still rather noisy.

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2008 09 09 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (4) Permalink

Joost and video on demand

Screenshots And Video Of The New Joost

Joost has announced that they are changing the way their service works. Having used it quite a bit, I think this is probably the best thing for them since it was based on a misguided channel/TV metaphore. However, I wonder (along with Techcrunch) what their added value really is. It used to be that p2p seemed like it was the only way to escape from blocky, tiny videos with low frames per second and audio/video sync problems (aka Real Video, what happened to those guys anyway?).

Just last week I was looking at some videos on Vimeo and noticed that they have streaming HD now. Like Youtube, it starts streaming right away. Unlike Youtube, the video is sharp, full screen, high resolution, and mostly free from severe compression artifacts. In other words, they seem to have figured out a way to push large amounts of data to me cost effectively. I didn’t measure it but I estimate I was getting around 1mbps data from them at least.

Doing this on a large scale used to be really expensive. However, in recent years, content delivery networks (CDNs) have emerged that can cost effectively deliver large downloads to massive amounts of users. A CDN is actually similar to p2p. Essentially it involves ensuring you have a servers+bandwidth in every major provider network and keeping these servers in sync. Bandwidth inside a provider network is a lot easier to get. For providers the benefit is that they don’t need to use expensives bit pipes from other providers to get the content to you. So as long as they don’t run out of local bandwidth (of which they have plenty), they will prefer this. Also with less hops to the user, it is a lot easier to ensure there is actually enough bandwidth to the user. Essentially, this brings the best features of p2p to web streaming and makes Joost more or less redundant. Although arguably, they still have a slight cost advantage here due to their reliance on a CDN (this type of service of course costs money).

There are now several flash based streaming sites that use a CDN. What these services have in common is crappy content. There’s only so much amateur, 3 minute video fragments I can take. Also, 3 minute “commercial” fragments of full content normally broadcasted on really obscure tv channels in the middle of the night is hardly compelling. The reason for this is copyright legislation and a systematic ignoring of users outside the USA by media corporations.

Joost, flawed as it was, actually has some okish content hidden inside it. I quite enjoyed watching episodes of Lexx (an obscure but fun Canadian SF series from the nineties) and also a few full feature kung fu movies from the seventies as well as a few documentaries. I wouldn’t pay for any of that but if you are bored, it’s at least a way to pass some time. But Joost never managed to convince media corporations to provide premium content. They still haven’t solved that problem.

If you live inside the US, life is good, apparently. There’s Apple TV, Amazon, Hulu, and a few others like netflix offering massive amounts of good quality pay per view type HD content for download, and in some cases even streaming. Some of these services are ad supported, some of them are subscription based. Joost won’t stand a chance in that market.

However, for about 5.8 billion people outside the US, life is not so good. Here in Finland there are only a handful of video on demand companies whose offerings suck big time comparatively. Additionally, their UI is in Finnish which makes it extremely hard for me to use them or even to figure out what they are trying to offer me. The US based ones won’t deliver content outside the US because that requires separate deals with media companies for each country. In the US, one deal helps you reach a population of around 250 million users. In europe, countries are a lot smaller. My understanding is that to some extent this type of services is now also available in the UK and Germany, which are relatively large countries.

Finland has only 5 million inhabitants.In other words, no content for me. So, if I want to see a movie, I can hope one of the pay per view TV channels broadcasts it (I don’t have a subscription though); buy the DVD; go to the cinema; or hope one of the handful of local TV stations broadcasts something worth watching.

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2008 09 06 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (0) Permalink

Google Chrome - First Impressions

First impression: Google delivered, I’ve never used a browser this fast. It’s great.

Yesterday, a cartoon was prematurely leaked detailing Google’s vision for what a browser could look like. Now, 24 hours later I’m reviewing what until yesterday was a well kept secret.

So here’s my first impressions.

  • Fast and responsive. What can I say? Firefox 3 was an improvement over Firefox 2 but this is in a different league. There’s still lots of issues with having many tabs open in Firefox. I’ve noticed it doesn’t like handling bitmaps and switching tabs gets unusable with a few dozen tabs open. Chrome does not have this issue at all. It’s faster than anything I’ve browsed with so far (pretty much any browser you can think of probably).
  • Memory usage. Chrome starts new processes for each domain and not per tab. I opened a lot of tabs in the same domain and the number of processes did not go up. Go to a different domain and you get another chrome process. However, it does seem to use substantial amount of memory in total. Firefox 3 is definitely better. Not an issue with 2 GB like I have and the good news is that you get memory back when you close tabs. But still, 40-60MB per domain is quite a lot.
  • Javascript performance. Seems fantastic. Gmail and Google Reader load in no time at all. Easily faster than Firefox 3.
  • UI. A bit spartan if you are used to Firefox with custom bells & wistles (I have about a dozen extensions). But it works and is responsive. I like it. Some random impressions here: 
    • no status bar (good)
    • very few buttons (good)
    • no separate search field (could be confusing for users)
    • tabs on top, looks good, unlike IE7.
    • mouse & keyboard. Mostly like in Firefox. Happy to see middle click works. However, / does not work and you need to type ctrl+f to get in page search
  • URL bar. So far so good, seems to copy most of the relevant features from Firefox 3. I like Firefox 3’s behaviour better though.
  • RSS feeds. There does not seem to be any support for subscribing to, or reading feeds. Strange. If I somehow missed it, there’s a huge usability issue here. If not, I assume it will be added.
  • Bookmarks. An important feature for any browser. Google has partially duplicated Firefox 3’s behaviour with a little star icon but no tagging.
  • Extensions. none whatsoever :-(. If I end up not switching, this will be the reason. I need my extensions.
  • Import Firefox Profile. Seems pretty good, passwords, browsing history, bookmarks, etc. were all imported. Except for my cookies.
  • Home screen. Seems nicer than a blank page but nothing I’d miss. Looks a bit empty on my 1600×1200 screen.
  • Missing in action. No spelling control, no search plugins (at least no obvious way for me to use them even though all my firefox search plugins are listed in the options screen), no print preview, no bookmarks management, no menu bar (good, don’t miss it)
So Google delivers on promises they never made. Just out of the blue there is Chrome and the rest of the browser world has some catching up to do. Firefox and Safari are both working on the right things of course and have been a huge influence on Chrome (which Google gives them plenty of credit for). However, the fact is that Google is showing both of them that they can do much better. 
Technically I think the key innovation here is using multiple processes to handle tabs from different domains. This is a good idea from both a security point of view as from a performance point of view. Other browsers try to be clever here and do everything in one process with less than stellar results. I see Firefox 3 still block the entire UI regularly and that is just inherent to its architecture. This simply won’t happen with Chrome. Worst case is that one of the tabs becomes unusable and you just close it. Technically, you might wonder if they could not have done this with threads instead of processes.

So, I’m genuinely impressed here. Google is really delivering something exceptionally solid here. Download it and see for yourself.

Posting this from Chrome of course.

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2008 09 02 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (1) Permalink

What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t

What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t.

Business week has an interesting article on the economics of platforms. Interesting, but flawed. They compare two platforms (Facebook, and Apple’s mobile platform). The argument goes roughly as follows: Apple is using it’s platform to create a new market by being open and Facebook is using traditional methods of using the market as a control point. Apple is creating an open market and Facebook is making an open market more closed. The author even goes as far as to associate the keywords good and evil here.

The article is flawed because in fact Apple is not creating an open market. They have been removing applications that don’t fit their business model (e.g. anything VOIP related) and are still keeping people from writing about the APIs because NDA has not been lifted yet. Apple is acting as a dictator here. That it is a mostly benevolent one doesn’t matter. It doesn’t sound very open to me in any case. Or very new.

Sure, their platform is pretty nice and their online shop pretty usable. That’s definitely disruptive to the mobile industry, which is not used to good quality platforms and well designed use-cases such as online shops for applications. However, there’s a pretty big market for mobile applications and most people writing for the iphone don’t do so exclusively and instead target multiple mobile platforms. You can download several VOIP applications for S60 or mobile windows and other platforms, as well as numerous games, productivity apps, etc. Then there is J2ME of course with a few billion phones in the market right now. You might say it is crappy but it has a huge reach. Incidentally, Apple also blocks components from their shop that would enable people to run J2ME applications since an open source Java platform has in fact been ported long before Apple even ‘opened’ up their platform. That’s right, a good old case of reverse engineering. Apple’s platform is quite unique in the sense that people were developing for it long before Apple decided to hand out developer kits.

Facebook indeed is also not very open but they were first to a market that they created, which is pretty big by now. As a viral way of spreading new services to users it is pretty much unrivaled so far. It is Google that has created a competition for more openness with their Open Social platform, which is in many ways similar but has open specifications and may be implemented freely by other social networks. Both Google and Facebook have a very similar centralized identity model that is designed to lock users into their mutual platforms (Google Friends Connect & Facebook Connect). Google is maybe being somewhat more smart about it but they are after the same things here: making sure trafic flows through their services so that they can sell ads.

So, Facebook’s model is advertisement driven and Apple’s business is operator driven. Apple makes most of their money from deals with operators who subsidize iphones and give Apple a share of the subscription revenue. That’s brilliant business and Apple protects it by removing any application from their shop that has conflicting interests with this revenue stream.

However, the key point of the article that the platform serves as a market creation tool is interesting. Apple managed to create an impressive amount of revenue (relative to their tiny market share of the overall mobile market) and Facebook has managed to create a huge market for Facebook applications. Both are being challenged by competitors who have no choice to be more open.

Interestingly, Google is competing on both fronts and can be seen as the primary threat to both Apple and Facebook’s platforms. Google could end up opening up the mobile market for real because it is not protecting any financial interests there but instead are trying to spawn a mobile internet market. Android is designed from the ground up to do just that. It needs to be good enough for developers, users and operators and Google has worked hard to balance interests enough so as to not alienate any of these.

All three are fighting for the favours of developers. Developers, developers, developers! (throws chair across the room & jumps like a monkey). That too is not new although Microsoft seems to have forgotten about them lately.

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2008 08 25 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (0) Permalink

Wired 4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board

Intriguing phrase (about Alexandria’s lighthous) from an article (page 31) by Neal Stephenson from 1996:

The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over. But it took only a few seconds, and if you were looking the other way when it happened, you might have missed it entirely - you’d see nothing but blue breakers rolling in from the Mediterranean, hiding a field of ruins, quickly forgotten.

2008 08 23 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (0) Permalink

Songbird Beta (0.7)

Songbird Blog » Songbird Beta is Released!.

Having played with several milestone builds of songbird, I was keen to try this one. This is a big milestone for this music player & browser hybrid. Since I’ve blogged on this before, I will keep it short.

The good:

  • New feathers (songbird lingo for UI theme) looks great. Only criticism is that it seems to be a bit of an iTunes rip off.
  • Album art has landed
  • Stability and memory usage is now acceptable for actually using the application
  • Unlike iTunes, it actually supports the media buttons on my logitech keyboard.

The bad (or not so good since I have no big gripes):

  • Still no support for the iTunes invented but highly useful compilation flag (bug 9090). This means that my well organized library is now filled with all sorts of obscure artists that I barely know but apparently have one or two songs from. iTunes sorts these into compilation corner and I use this feature to keep a nice overview of artists and complete albums.
  • Despite being a media player with extension support, there appears to be no features related to sound quality. Not even an equalizer. Not even as an extension. This is a bit puzzling because this used to be a key strength of winamp, the AOL product that the songbird founders used to be involved with.
  • Despite being a browser, common browser features are missing. So no bookmarks, no apparent RSS feed, no Google preconfigured in the search bar, etc. Some of these things are easily fixed with extensions.

Verdict: much closer than previous builds but still no cigar. Key issue for me is compilation flag support. Also I’d really like to see some options for affecting audio playback quality. I can see how having a browser in my media player could be useful but this is not a good browser nor a good media player yet.

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2008 08 22 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (0) Permalink

Vacation photos

I’ve uploaded the photos from my recent vacation in Spain. Earlier, I posted an overview of the places I’ve visited so I won’t repeat that here. I took quite a bit of photos and filled both 1GB SD cards I have.

Of course, I took lots of nice panorama photos as well. The latter have also been added to my special stitched photo album where you can admire them in slightly higher resolution. Too bad I don’t have the bandwidth + space to put them up in full resolution. For example the one below is originally 18319×2191 pixels wide and composed of no less than 11 8 megapixel photos and the jpeg is 40 MB. The level of detail is amazing. Wordpress is sadly messing up the aspect ratio but if you click on it you should see it properly.

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2008 08 16 Jilles Blog Posts Comments (0) Permalink