This weekend (I think, maybe earlier), Slashdot published some statistics about the most active people. Apparently I am in the top four most active commenters for the past month and the past quarter. This is quite depressing.
In happier, and unrelated news, my FreeBSD commit bit was approved this weekend, so I can now cause untold destruction on the Internet at large...
My current phone is a Nokia N80. I've had it a few years and I'm reasonably happy with it, but it has a fault with the charging circuit and it's pretty bulky, so I'm thinking about replacing it. Unfortunately, there seem to be about 3,000 different options with no competent way of way of working out which one is sensible.
I mainly use my phone as... a phone. So, the most important feature for me is the ability to make and receive calls. Because I am a cheapskate, this includes SIP (and WiFi), since my SIP provider charges a lot less than my mobile provider when calling landlines. I really like WebOS in terms of UI, but that seems to rule the Pre out because the only WebOS SIP client is alpha quality and doesn't integrate with the address book. This is something that Nokia does really well - the SIP client is fully integrated, so I can just select someone from my address book and select Internet Call to make the call. No extra skill required.
Beyond that, the only thing I really need is to be able to sync contacts via bluetooth and to use it as a modem via bluetooth - both pretty standard features, I'd assume, since my last three phones have had them.
In terms of smartphone features, I'm not that bothered. A programming environment that supports native code so that I can port my ObjC runtime would be nice - I have no interest in VM-based crap - but aside from that I don't have any strong requirements.
I would, however, like decent battery life and a small size, and ideally a nice camera. The bulk and poor battery life of my N80 means that I quite often leave it at home.
So, any suggestions?
I'm digging G+ more and more. Feel free to add me to your whatever circles. I have a "/.ers" circle.
I did have teh lulz...
I am in Atlanta for PyCon, and you're on Slashdot reading about it. So there. Neener neener neener.
To celebrate 30 years of "Pac Man", at this year's Retromañï½Âa (University of Zaragoza, 8th - 12th November) there's a Pacman programming contest (with prizes!). Information about the contest and rules can be found here:
There's two categories - one for games programmed beforehand (so that people who can't go to Retromañï½Âa can put in an entry) and for those programmed during the event.
I'll myself be off to Retromañï½Âa, not for anything to do with the Pac man coding contest, but to demonstrate and explain the ethernet hardware that I've made for the ZX Spectrum (itself coming close to its 30th anniversary). Indeed that entire week is going to be an orgy of retro geekyness, the weekend leading up to it is R3PLAY in Blackpool (retrogaming event), then I'm off to Zaragoza for Retromañï½Âa, and then on the way back I go via Madrid for a small gathering of retroafficionados in a bar somewhere in Madrid. Three events in less than 10 days.
A little while ago, someone on Slashdot pointed me at the Sale of Goods Act in relation to purchased electronics. The act, for those unfamiliar with it, requires that goods be 'suitable for the purpose for which sold.' This is a fairly broad term, but it basically means that they must be able to do anything that the seller claims that they can do. Under this law, you have 6 years from the date of purchase to file a lawsuit if the item does not match the claims.
This was relevant to me because my MacBook Pro is now out of warranty and the battery is dying. Looking in the System Profiler, its full charge capacity was showing up as 1476mAh after 56 charges. When new, it was 5500mAh. These numbers don't mean anything by themselves, but Apple claims that their batteries retain 80% of their full charge capacity after 300 charge cycles. Claiming this means that a battery that does not retain 4400mAh after 300 charge cycles is not suitable for the purpose for which sold, and they are legally required to refund or replace it (irrespective of the time that has elapsed, although I can only sue them if they don't within 6 years of the time of sale).
I called their support line and was put through to an Indian woman, who explained that the warranty had expired. I quoted the relevant parts of law to her, and (after being kept on hold for a bit), was transferred to someone senior. He very quickly agreed to send out a replacement battery.
Interestingly, he did not ask that the original battery be sent out, nor that I provide a credit card number where I would be billed if the battery turned out not to be defective. I've had two batteries replaced in warranty, and this was standard procedure then, so apparently I get better service out of warranty. I don't have a great deal of use for a battery that only lasts about 35 minutes on a full charge, but I'll probably keep it as a spare.
As always, it pays to know the law. It's a shame that Apple, which claims to be a customer-focussed company, doesn't educate its support team about this though. Possibly the Indian call centre deals with people from everywhere English speaking, while the Irish one only deals with people in the UK and Ireland, so the people there are more familiar with British law, but if I had not quoted the relevant act then I would have been charged £99 for a battery, on top of the £1.50 it cost to call their support line for half an hour.
In the last week or two links to external sites on Slashdot generally don't seem to work unless I click several times. This only appears to happen on Firefox... Chrome is unaffected. I haven't tried IE, Safari, or any other browser. Finally fed up with it, I decided to look through the javascript to see if there was anything funky going on. Looks like there's a script being included from leads.demandbase.com that defines some kind of click tracker. Here's a snippet:
So if you find you've oddly had to click a few times to RTFA, it's not your mouse button dying. Open up adblock and disable everything from leads.demandbase.com and it will be fixed. Links clicked once in Firefox will properly load as they used to. Thanks Slashdot for using an external company for tracking my click behavior. Though perhaps implementing this poorly is Taco's way of giving us a heads-up. Much like the "Idle" section, his overlords may have mandated the addition of this awesomeness to the site and by making it break it alerts us to what we need to block. In which case, a non-sarcastic thanks is due.
I also found this wonderful gem:
Unless my javascript is really rusty, won't this report 99% of cases?
Anyway, pass this information on so everyone can RTFA without the hassle.
It's amazing how people try to rationalize away the phrase "I could care less", much in the same way that Star Wars apologists try to rationalize the use of parsecs when talking about the Kessel Run. Maybe there are black holes to navigate around, and minimizing the distance is the sign of a good pilot, or maybe this, or maybe that... or maybe George Lucas just made a mistake, you know?
So when it comes to people rationalizing away "I could care less" as being some nonchalant way of saying "yeah, I could but I'm not going to bother" I just don't buy it. It's a misquote of the perfectly unambiguous phrase "I couldn't care less". So when I stumbled across a rationalization of that, my mind wandered upon what I think is a pretty damned good analogy of why it doesn't make sense: I could eat more.
I just received mail notification that a fellow user has bought me a gift subscription to slashdot. I'm already friends/fans with the person but his email address isn't visible so I can't thank the person off-/. (wimp, change your privacy settings and deal with the spam!
Not sure what I did to deserve it, but I thank you!
Well, fame at last for my Spectrum +3, Spectranet and Twitter client, it's the only photo on the BBC's article about the Vintage Computing Festival
So the VCF finished yesterday afternoon.
It lived up to and exceeded my expectations, what a fantastic event. Unfortunately, I didn't really get to see all of what was going on since I was manning my own stand a lot of the time (four Ethernet-networked Sinclair Spectrums, with a MicroVAX fileserver - all of this connected to the internet! - plus a Vectrex since people seem to really like them). My stand and Chris Smith's were next to each other (he reverse engineered the Spectrum ULA for a book he's writing, which charts the history of Ferranti's ULA technology and Sinclair's use of it) - we were hoping to get his Harlequin (100% accurate Spectrum implementation consisting of 74HC logic ICs) onto the network too but his stand was so busy he spent all his time talking to visitors!
The Spectrum twitter client went down very well. I think there were about 8 pages of tweets from the Speccy by the end of Saturday. I really ought to have put a counter in the client to give a definitive count of how many tweets had been made.
I picked up a double density disc drive for my BBC Micro while I was there, and also fixed one of my 128K "toastrack" Spectrums (all it had was a bad transistor in the power section and a dodgy keyboard membrane). Unfortunately I forgot my USB lead for the camera so no pictures till I get home.
Probably the highlight of the show was the talk by Sophie Wilson (designer of the BBC Micro and the ARM CPU, that last bit being very highly significant). If I had the choice of seeing Sophie Wilson or Bill Gates at a computer show, it would be Sophie Wilson every time. She may not be 0.1% as famous as Bill Gates, but I think she is actually a lot more important and significant than Bill Gates. Nearly anyone could have been a Bill Gates, he got where he was due to luck and sticking his neck out a bit (at no real risk to himself, he was already backed by a very rich familly) - if Compaq hadn't cloned the PC, and if IBM had been more closed about the PC specification, Bill Gates and Microsoft may have been just another footnote, remembered only for their truly dreadful BASIC on the Commodore 64; once PC cloning happened, for Microsoft to make money off DOS was about as difficult as falling of a log. But on the other hand, ARM only came about through lots of real intelligence and thought and grit and determination - and today ARM ships 1.25 *billion* units per *quarter*, more than every other microprocessor architecture put together. When the ARM was designed, Hermann Houser jokes "we gave the ARM team exactly what they needed, no resources and no money"
And without the microprocessor designers, where would software people be?
It's the UK's first Vintage Computing Festival next weekend, so I've been getting some stuff together for my Speccy exhibit. Of course I've been working on the Spectrum ethernet card, and while things like the network filesystem it provides are handy, I thought I needed something that VCF attendees could appreciate.
A while ago we did a "hack" of a Twitter client (over a pint of beer, in a pub in Oxford - while getting strange looks from all the "normals") but it was just that - a hack - with the tweet and the login details hard coded into a short asm program. This time I've written a proper http library, and some user interface. Most of the work is done by the HTTP library (parsing headers, putting headers into the request etc), and it's all written in C.
If you can't get to the VCF, you can at least watch a video here:
Thanks to a friend via Facebook, I discovered a good food ideas site, called "Cooking for Friends" - or at least, "Cocinar para los amigos" (it was from a Spanish friend). I saw a recipe go past the other day that I thought looked awesome, so I made it last night - just for myself, I like to test recipes out on myself before I try them out on other people
And it is indeed awesome. For the benefit of those who don't know Spanish I'll repeat it here. The original is here:
Mushrooms in a white wine sauce
http://cocinarparalosamigos.blogspot.com/2010/05/champinones.html
It's a very easy recipe to make. All it needs is garlic, a glass of white wine, some grated bread (to thicken the sauce) and parsley. The recipe as made also includes a small amount of chili (I didn't have the little ones that he shows in the video of the recipe, so I just used a small amount of fresh chili I had in the cupboard. I think it needs just a *small* amount, it's not supposed to set your mouth on fire...) I also made half the quantity that the recipe demands, on the grounds that I was trying it out on myself, not trying to do a starter or a side for four people.
Ingredients:
500 grams (1lb) mushrooms
4 cloves of garlic
a little olive oil
a small heap of breadcrumbs (basically, enough to fill a wooden spoon heaped up)
a branch of fresh parsley, chopped finely
a little chili (I've not seen the tiny chilis that were shown in the video anywhere near me, so I used a small amount of sliced chili)
Put some olive oil in a pan, enough to start cooking the garlic and put on the heat, drop in the garlic. Once the temperature has come up and you've got typical "starting to fry" sounds, add the mushrooms. After 2 minutes, add the glass of wine. Give it a stir and allow to simmer for about 10 minutes with a lid on the pan. After 10 minutes, add a little water, the breadcrumbs and the chili. Let simmer for about 20 more minutes with the lid on - the sauce should be thickening nicely from the grated bread and the evaporation of some of the liquids. Then add most of the parsely and stir for a couple of minutes.
Then serve, sprinkle the remaining parsley on top.
This will make a great starter - I'm going to cook it next time I have friends or family over for dinner.
The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.
