Rubenerd

During a wondrous product keynote with lasers, Microsoft announced plans for their latest tablet device. Here are some thoughts!

Hardware

According to Engadget that live blogged the event, the new product will a size niche between tablet computers such as the iPad, and paper based devices. They also hinted at its functionality.

We’re told Courier will function as a “digital journal,” and it’s designed to be seriously portable: it’s under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn’t much bigger than a 5×7 photo when closed. That’s a lot smaller than we expected.

A compelling size. An iPad is lovey, but can't fit in my cargo pants.

Software

In a fit of common sense which I'm relieved to see, it seems Microsoft has admitted nobody really wants to run Windows 8 on tablets, and instead the Courier will run a mobile OS.

Rather than Windows 7, we’re told the Courier is built on Tegra 2 and runs on the same OS as the Zune HD, Pink, and Windows Mobile 7 Series, which we’re taking to mean Windows CE 6.

As to the UI itself, Microsoft seem to be taking a different tack to iOS and Android by fundamentally rethinking how users input data with a pen-based interface. It'll even fit in well with their recent Barnes and Noble acquisition.

[..] centered around drawing and writing, with built-in handwriting recognition and a corresponding web site that allows access to everything entered into the device in a blog-like format complete with comments. [..] it looks like the Courier will also serve as Microsoft’s e-book device, with a dedicated ecosystem centered around reading.

As Engadget said, it "sounds spectacular"! Microsoft have a history of demoing and announcing products that never ship (so called vapourware), but I have every hope this won't be one of those devices.

I'll be keeping my eye out. Admittedly, Microsoft haven't excited me for a very long time, but I'd buy one of these in a heartbeat.

My good friend Seb informed me this afternoon that he'd had a dream involving me last night. I'll admit, I had a dream involving him too recently, and for his convenience I shall regale you all with it here to the best of my ability.

It was a particularly chilly and frosty morning, evidenced by the fact it was rather chilly with plenty of frost around. Also, it was morning.

The UTS anime club (and two people I knew from other places) had been living in a shared apartment in town for the better part of a few months, give or take the days when we'd been in cryogenic status to avoid having to deal with flus and other irritating illnesses. We'd saved a small bundle in public transport fares, which we used to pay the rent for a shared apartment in town. Cue Elton John's The Circle of Life here.

Given the temperature, Sebastian and I had ordered everyone to remain in bed on this chilly Sunday morning, while we braved the cold to procure sweet pastries of a highly unhealthy nature, and several large thermoses of tea. It would be my job to carry the food, while Seb wielded a rather large wand made of dried apricots to fend off the swarms of flying toasters that would feast on pastries and burn them, if they got their way.

Turning a corner as we rubbed our hands, we somehow found ourselves in a little side street off the Champs-Élysées. As you would expect walking around inner-city Sydney. Walking down this idyllic street with its rows of trees and buildings that all looked the same, we chanced upon an adorable café nestled in the ground floor of a turn of the century apartment building. The bus stop out the front had a giant advertisement for the Panty and Stocking anime, which I sheepishly admitted I'd never finished, but that I liked some of the art. Besides, someone who loves eating cake all day can't be bad, right?

Entering the café in order to get out of the cold and purchase foods of a warm nature, we strolled towards the counter to inspect their wares. It was a difficult maneuver, requiring us to climb a ladder on the side wall, the walk upside down across the ceiling.

Despite the classical French feel with blue and white awnings outside, the smell of traditionally baked bread and freshly roasted French style coffee permeating through the café, there was something not quite right about it. Seb agreed; for one thing the counter on the ceiling we had to climb a ladder to reach had a black marble top. It was just out of place. Then there was the Korean pop music playing lightly in the background.

The owner of the shop approached us while we were raising these concerns with each other. She had perfectly white hair and a large red hair band with red bows, as if someone had thought her hair was so wondrous, it deserved to be gift wrapped. Speaking in our finest German to her (wait, what?) we ordered what we'd come for, and soon after we left carrying several large bags of baked goodness. The bags of course being made out of old ThinkPads, which we had to keep closed.

Our next challenge lay in the bridge we'd crossed to get there. Somehow, a large alligator with the tail of an… alligator had swallowed it, as if it were a Parisian pastry of some description. Of course, the Seine only has one bridge crossing it (wait, what?) so we did the next best thing. Taking a few large steps back, we ran towards the river, jumped with all our might, and sailed gracefully back to the street corner some 100 metres away. I lost a Danish in the transit, but figured we'd bought such a vast quantity of sweetness we could afford to lose a few.

Turning the corner back to George Street, Seb took us to a basement book store that necessitated us spending 15 minutes in a lift. I wrestled with the implications of having a bookstore in the centre of the Earth, for one thing, wouldn't the books singe in the heat? And wouldn't the location have shockingly high rent?

We arrived back at the apartment having only left for a minute or so, as evidenced by the clock which had been mounted sideways and displayed its time in multiples of 4. We gathered up the food, spread it out across the loungeroom floor, then called everyone in to feast. Naturally everyone brought their blankets, quilts and other bed coverings, which we used to huddle up while we talked and watched a wood fire video loop on our large circular television

Usually my dreams don't end so clearly, but the last I remember was batting a toaster with my left hand back out the window while we laughed and talked.

An exerpt from the Multiple sub-Nyquist sampling encoding article, under Cultural and geopolitical impacts:

One could say that without Hi-Vision, there would be no modern digital HDTV. There is some latent truth in this, but you must look back in time 20 years when Japan was the world’s “consumer electronics research heaven”.

I am a passionate Wikipedia article creator, contributor, template code writer and defender, but… I guess we can all afford a little downtime ;D

Those of us with Mac Pros haven't been feeling the love as of late, but at least Tim Cook has bucked Apple's secretive trend and assured us the line still lives

It didn’t used to be this way, Smithers

For the longest time, I had a souped up MacBook Pro as my primary workhorse and travel companion. Given I was studying in Adelaide for half the year and spending the other half back in Singapore, it made sense to have something I could throw into a bag and take with me.

Problem was, just as the President of the US needs several support planes to fly behind his Air Force One jets (yes, a 747 can't carry all his crap), my sheer amount of data necessitated a support crew. Long time readers of my blog may remember I dubbed it my Stonehenge of external hard drives. At one point I had 5 desktop sized drives and 4 notebook ones, each needing their own data cables, and in the case of the desktop ones, their own power supply cables too.

In total, they needed 14 cables. 14 CABLES. Tangled up and spread across my desk. They needed their own powerboard!

To get around the problem of insufficient ports, I had powered USB hugs (freudian slip, USB hubs!) and an ExpressCard 34 card that added two more FireWire 800 ports and an additional USB. FireWire drives could be daisy chained like SCSI, so that solved that.

Somehow I made it all work, but suffice to say it was flakey. When I sneezed particularly hard and bumped a FireWire cable as I reached for a box of tissues causing an entire daisy chain of drives to uncleanly unmount, I knew there had to be a better way.

Exibit 1, a horrifying photo from 2009! And at the time I was excited, can you believe it!?

Curds and better Whey

By that time, a family disaster had necessitated moving back in with my old man and sister while we tried to consolidate, console and pick up the pieces. The silver lining was I wasn't living in two different cities anymore!

So I purchased a Mac Pro. Albeit a refurbished unit with the previous generation Xeon CPUs, but I wasn't buying it for performance. That said, it easily outperformed every other machine I owned, and also doubled as a handy space heater when I moved to Sydney! :D

One afternoon I cracked open my hard drive enclosures, shoved them all into that Mac Pro tower, and by that evening I'd replaced four external hard drives with their 8 cables… with a tower and one cable. Over the course of the next six months or so, I gradually upgraded each of the 750GB and 1TB drives to 2TB and 3TB drives. All running internally, at native speed. No snagging data cables, no extra spaghetti power boards. It did far more for my quality of life than it should have!

But nobody buys Mac Pros, Shredder!

I'd argue the iMac is still the best desktop machine in Apple's lineup. The IPS screen itself is worth the price, and you're getting a wonderful computer behind it for free.

The Mac Pro is often billed as a premier workstation class machine for people doing video editing, breaking poorly implemented encryption and running cold fusion reactors. For me though, it's less about the performance and more about being able to shove a ton of crap into it and have it work flawlessly.

People have been whinging about the "dated" Mac Pro case which was borrowed from the original PowerMac G3 in 2003 (of which I also owned at one point). All one needs to do is spent five minutes battling with the cables in a regular PC chassis to appreciate how wonderfully simple it is to add components to a Mac Pro.

Case in point: I recently upgraded my Linux tower, and swapping the hard drive in that case scraped more skin off my knuckles than when I faceplanted near our train station. Was also much less amusing for onlookers as well. "Mummy, why has that man stacked on the fence!?"

No publicity, but so what?

As I've learned from people in Apple retail and from watching Apple keynotes, the Mac Pro isn't bathed in the same degree of limelight as their other products. I'd argue that's to be expected, those who are considering Mac Pros won't be swayed by the same marketing that is used to sell consumer products. If you one of the few who need Xeons and monstrous expandability, an iMac won't suit. It's as simple as that.

Tim Cook's understated response to a customer's concerns about the Mac Pro seem to fit this just fine, me thinks.

That has to be the worst graphic I've ever thrown together. It was lots of fun! :D

Gingerbreadedness

From the review of the Orange San Diego by Mat Smith on Engadget:

The first generation of Intel-powered Android phones has arrived, and while the chip maker doesn’t appear to be claiming that its initial efforts are world-beaters, we’ve been promised a chipset that prioritizes what people want most: capable web browsing, strong camera performance and robust battery life.

Contrary to what Eric Schmidt promised us, and in line with most handsets, it doesn't currently run the latest version of Android. Don't worry, the carrier will provide an update though! Uh huh ;).

The San Diego runs on Android Gingerbread. We’ve been told that Ice Cream Sandwich can already run on this hardware, but it still won’t be seen on these devices until Q4.

And if I may make one more friendly dig at Android, since when have you read a review about an iOS device that also includes this?

It’s difficult to describe what’s been done to stock Android. For every change Orange made, some parts were left completely unaffected — like an increasingly rare stock version of the app drawer. We were able to scrape back most of what Orange had wrought — aside from the dated orange app icons.

So why is a fairly generic, outdated Android device with carrier cruft interesting?

I like chips

The chip dominating the mobile world at the moment is ARM. Compared to the infinitely more complex x86 platform, ARM chips are smaller, draw less power, and have the added benefit of sounding like a limb.

Intel has been trying to make inroads into the mobile market, first with their Atom CPUs to keep ARM off netbooks. They've largely been successful, or at least as successful as one can be in the limited, bottom-of-the-barrel notebook market.

Phones are another story entirely though; every day we read articles about how more and more people are eschewing their computers for phones to browse the net, and an increasing number are being introduced to the net with phones. There's every reason to believe phones will be the number 1 platform for accessing the net in the coming years, if it isn't already.

Intel wants a piece of the action, and this may be their first, low key demonstration of that intention.

To me though, they face two challenges:

1. The architecture itself has so much more baggage attached to it than ARM, they'll always have a competitive disadvantage. Intel have the benefit of extraordinary R&D facilities and funds, but they're ultimately competing with an architecture that's fundamentally simpler and more energy efficient.

2. Whereas Windows on x86 ensured a constant demand for their chips, mobile OSs like Android have largely been built to be platform agnostic. In this way, Intel don't have the guaranteed market in the mobile space they had on the desktop. To be fair though, this cross-platform nature could also work in their favour if the Intel platform is able to surpass ARM.

What's fascinating to me is the news that AMD has licenced certain ARM components, which suggests their lead competitors are going in the opposite direction.

Got a replacement bank card in the mail today with PayPass. For those interested, here is my letter I sent to Westpac this morning!

Sean Livingstone
Bank Manager, Westpac Surry Hills
547 Crown St
Surry Hills NSW 2010
Australia

Dear Mr Livingstone,

Replacement card without PayPass

I recently received a replacement Debit MasterCard in the post. Unfortunately, I was disturbed to read this in the welcome letter:

Your new Westpac Debit MasterCard with PayPass has arrived

Your current Westpac Debit MasterCard is due to expire at the end of the month, so we’re plaesed to present you with its replacement which now includes the security of CHIP technology and the added convenience of the latest in contactless payment technology.

As an IT student and developer with experience in wireless technolgies, I have informed and severe reservations about bank cards with embedded antennas, let alone one that’s tied to my daily checking account.

I would like to request a new replacement card without the SmartPay antenna, as you issued me with previously. Otherwise, I suppose a delicate scalpal job to sever the antenna from the CHIP may be in order.

I appreciate your understanding,

Ruben Schade

For some reason I got into the habit years ago of using Kallen to hold legal letters. I think it started with this in 2009!

Over the course of my education career (by which I mean receiving education, not partaking in education as a career), I've studied UML in four different courses. Or is it subjects. In Australia they're one thing, in the United States they're another thing, and Singapore tends to drift between the two. So much so, that I've already forgotten which to use. Of course, the adequate one is subject to opinion, as a matter of course.

Golf courses

I've studied UML in high school, at two universities, and once in industry as part of a course. There's that word again. With an exam on much of UML tomorrow, I've been burying my face in them once again, plowing through all these different examples, coming up with alternatives, refining and redefining and refining.

As someone who loves drawing diagrams, flow charts, mind maps and other such visual stuff, UML is a natural fit for me. Or at least, you would think so. To me, it has several problems.

And here are those problems

• My first lecturer in Adelaide said “the great thing about standards is everybody has them”. My friend Andrew Cox from the same city has issued similar sentiment, as has my father in an entirely different industry. Needless to say, “standardised UML” no more exists in practical, real world terms than Office Open XML. My high school, workplace and universities all have their own ideas as to what constitutes UML, it’s syntax and it’s applications, and they’re all rigourously enforced.

• Even the software I used is different, from basic tools like Dia and Visio on one end, to IBM Rational software on the other. Unlike, say, a high level programming language where code is portable provided you have an interpreter or compiler, the “code” these tools have you write in are largely incompatible, unless you consider manually transcribing them between tools or using an intermediate format to be acceptable!

• UML’s strict syntax make diagrams less fun! As soon as you introduce rules into something, you limit creatively. While a standardised approach (or at least, the pseudo-standard we have now) ensures those who read and use them can pick them up fairly easily, it also means those attempting to express the functionality, purpose and design of a system are limited by the ideas of someone else. I adore mind maps and flowcharts and use them for practically all my study, so I suppose this is more of a gripe with being turned into a tie wearing, white collar cubicle dweller than anything else ;).

• UML attempts to get around this limiting factor by having a suite of diagrams, each tackling different aspects and stages of the modelling process. While this provides reinforcement along the different stages of the design process, it also introduces redundancy, with much of the information being repeated over, and over, and over again in different ways.

• While UML promises to reduce confusion, often times it adds another layer of complexity. For large projects this may be necessary, but for smaller ones I feel as though it’s often more trouble than its worth. I also feel somewhat uneasy about developing a solution to a problem based on a model, rather than the feedback directly.

• Finally, and this is perhaps the most concrete criticism I can think of, UML was designed around OOP principals, not programming languages or DBMSs. Often times this means concepts in UML don’t translate perfectly into languages or schemas. This introduces the requirement for interpretation, and it’s as soon as you do that that you introduce inconsistency, uncertainty and potential confusion. Like interpretive dance, which I can’t even do.

• Insert ranting about “design by committee” here!

But but but…!

I can already picture the responses I'd get to these concerns by those who use UML for a living. Even standards that are only loosely enforced across industry and academia are better than no standards at all. Strict syntax ensures consistency. While each of the diagrams in the suite may have redundant information compared to the others, different stakeholders and developers would look at only a subset of them tailored to their needs, so that would be less of a concern for them. Work isn't supposed to be fun, and you can still be creative by colouring inside the lines. Abstraction makes implementation easier.

I understand these points, even if I can't entirely appreciate them at this stage. To be honest, I've been more at the development stage of the cycle than the requirements gathering stage. Still, I worry that buried in the hype and promises, there's a lot of hot air and solutions in search for problems in UML. A quick net search shows I'm not the only one who thinks this, not by a long shot!

UML is better than perhaps other modelling solutions we have at this stage, and I can churn them out and understand them fairly well… or at least as well as someone in my position could! However, there's still far more work to be done in bridging the gap between requirements and development. Whoever figures out how to do it better will be a very, very rich person.

I'd suggest taking a long, hard look at the KISS principle. That sounded terribly, terrible wrong for some reason.

Given we're all watching Sakamichi no Apollon (or at least, we all should be!), it only seemed fitting to have an unofficial UTS anime club meetup at the 2012 Jazz and Blues Festival at Darling Harbour in Sydney. Even with my speed challenged lenses and low ISO camera (ahem) I still was able to get a couple of decent shots :'D

From the event website site (well, that last word was entirely superfluous).

Darling Harbour Jazz & Blues Festival

A stellar line up of blues, soul, funk and swing talent from big open air sets to intimate jazz sessions.

The Darling Harbour Jazz & Blues Festival showcases legendary names in jazz and blues, rubbing shoulders with emerging and young Australian musicians.

The Festival’s eclectic programming reflects the broadening of the contemporary jazz music scene incorporating funk, soul, big band swing, hip pop, jazz-rock, R&B and New Orleans jazz sounds.

With exams and assignments weighing down on us like a veritable double bassoon, none of us have the time to go for the full three days of the event, which is a shame. Still, what we ended up seeing (and hearing) last night swung our socks off! For those of us wearing socks.

Firstly, a terribly flattering photo of all of us in our little troupe! Not pictured is Sebastian, given he was taking the photo. An equally flattering photo of him has been included below for convenience.

After meeting up at UTS we headed to Darling Harbour to pick up guides and see what was up. In an attempt to look like a beatnik jazz guy I wore my red beret I bought from a tourist trap store in Paris, but unfortunately a trip to the washing machine had rendered it smaller than it was at the time of purchase and allegedly made me look like a girl. #batseyelashes

We wandered around and watched some pretty amazing acts, before finally making our way to the gigantic big tent to catch the opening of James Morrison. Yes, THE James Morrison!

Suffice to say, he was amazing. When he wasn't playing his trumpet and keyboard at the SAME TIME, or holding a roaring note for so long I was panting in sympathy, he was trolling us with terrible puns and bad jokes! Booting up your keytar [sic] faster by defragging it, oh James XD;

His band was equally stunning. I didn't catch the guest singer's name or the band member on the alto sax, but they were just as much of a treat as James was!

They played all the classics, including some Aretha Franklin, Pink Panther tunes and unashamedly one of my favourite friggen songs of all time, Pick Up the Pieces by those Average White Band folks. Hearing THAT live with such an epic horn section, guitars, drums and keyboards not only made me completely forget about my burning sore throat, but had me doing a nerdy jig on the spot as I hummed along. It was dark, so not too many people saw, fortunately ^^;

The atmosphere was incredible. The tent we were all huddled under on an otherwise freezing Sydney winter night was ablaze with colour almost as bright as the music!

What made it even better though was the company. I've been to several jazz concerts around the place (black tie and informal), but often times by myself :'D. Laughing with Vadim as we deciphered James's bad jokes, watching the baristas make our hot drinks with Clara, poking fun at the French with Cindy, discussing hat fashion and photography with Seb… these are the kind of people that make an outing even more fun and memorable :D

To quote Penn and Teller:

My only regret: I packed my kit lens and not my NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8 by accident! My 55/200mm f/5.6 was able to take some decent shots at the range I needed from where I was in the crowd with VR enabled, but the narrow depth of field and speed of that 35mm could have made some pretty amazing shots. Oh well, better than nothing!

To top it off, we made our way back towards Central and headed to Mappen for dinner. I'd had a giant coffee and had plenty of food at home, so I took advantage of their free water and just sat there looking through all the photos. Photos I knew were all shot in RAW, and would take forever today to go through XD.

Thank you for an epic evening guys! :D

Related reviews!

• Jamie Jakov!

An AC on Slashdot, so take with a grain of salt:

Do you want to know why the government continues with it even though [security measures don’t] work? It’s because insurance rates for airports and airlines would go through the roof if we didn’t have this in place. [..] Our lives are governed by actuarial tables.

I hadn't ever thought about this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Certainly the airlines themselves have a business interest in not have these carcinogenic full body scanners and sexual harassment, because they discourage people from traveling.

For the record, security theater was a term coined by my hero Bruce Schneier to describe security measures that are entirely for show, without any benefit.

All this violent weather in Sydney reminded me of an experience I had years ago with loud noises, avoiding talking to people and the like. Many facts have been admonished, embellished or made up for convenience. Enjoy!

Rowan of Brethrin

Despite having neither the licence nor the skill to operate a motor vehicular device, I piloted the nimble automobile down a lonely, dark stretch of road towards somewhere. A guy's house flew past me on one side, and presumably someone else's house on the other side. The road felt like a tunnel with large, overgrown canopy trees stretching out from the footpath and reaching across to touch the branches of their brethrin on the other side. A rather rude display to be performing in public, if you ask me. Which you didn't, so I'll shut up.

As I was attempting to avoid a fork in the road lest it puncture one of my tyres, I heard a loud crash so loud it crashed. Just like that description.

Bolting out of my chair like a spring loaded… chair, I thrust the headphones I was wearing onto the table and hit the spacebar on the keyboard to pause the simulator. I'd paused it many times before, but not under such frigtening circumstances. Frankly, I was surprised the keyboard had absorbed the impact of my keysmash as nonchelantly as it did. I suppose it had plenty of practice from when I'd been debugging Java late at night. ExcessivelyCamelCasedException THIS!

When I'd calmed down from the shock, I adjusted my invisible tie and strained my ears to triangulate where the sound had emanated. The room was dead silent, save for the oversized cooling fan in my primary desktop computer system which ironically was positioned below my desk.

Just as my blood pressure had returned to as normal a state as caffeine normally afforded me, the crash sound thundered across the room again. This time, with my full and undivided attention, I realised (HEY, AN ANIMATED GIF OF A CAT!) the sound was coming from the front door.

Who's to say front doors aren't side doors? Isn't the front a side?

On my tippy toes, which was rather difficult in awkwardly fitting slippers in the masculine shape of bunny rabbits, I inched towards the door. Croutching on the bunnies, I peeked underneath as I'd done so many times before while attempting to avoid contact with people, but to my surprise I saw none of the telltale signs of a human presence. Feet, mostly. And shoes. None. Neither!

Relieved I wouldn't have to actually speak to anyone, I fumbled with the door knob then inched the door aside.

Laying in front of the door was the unmistakably wooden shape of a tree branch. As thick as a tree branch, and nearly as long, it lay there with a freshy snapped section on one end, suggesting it had snapped off from the tree of which it had branched from at some point. How it had sailed to my front door in the dead of night without human assistance baffled me to the extent that I couldn't figure it out. Unlike all those other times I was baffled, mind.

Still, where did that second bang come from? Oh wait, it did make sense, there was a second branch there. Almost as massive and menacing as it's brother, assuming they branched from the same tree.

Another loud bang, and I took an involuntary nap on the welcome mat. Surprisingly soft, though a little muddy for my tastes. For the next few hours, I supposed it'd have to do.