Mass Programming Resistance

Since I've been experimenting with using my iPod Touch as an e-book reader, I'm more alert to the overall e-reader market. Amazon's latest Kindle, at $139 for the Wi-Fi only edition, is a pretty tempting gadget.

There's plenty of recaps kicking around the 'net, but I liked Engadget's quick reactions. Here's the highlights:

• Cheaper
• Faster page turning
• Lighter
• Longer battery life
• More storage

The highly useful comments on Hacker News also break down the tradeoffs between the Kindle and other e-book devices/approaches at an OCD level. Of course the device really is dedicated to reading and targeted at folk who read, particularly books, a lot.

Can you say "Moore's Law in effect"? The thing is now pretty doggone close to an impulse purchase for mere mortals. Kindle pricing has moved down into game console cost territory. And the programming is a bit cheaper.

I'm not down on my iPod Touch, but I'm trending towards becoming a computer sherpa (term courtesy Ken Forbus). I'll probably have an app phone by the end of the year along with some kind of pad or e-reader. A phalanx of the Touch, an Android phone, and a Kindle would make a nice combination.

Hey Lee, let me know what you think of the new Kindles!

Link parkin': Since my little side project involves SQLite at its core, Brett Wilson's article provided some good insights on how to get the best out of the little embedded database that could.

Geez I've been using RSS for a long time. Recently I noticed that I had an unruly sprawl of feeds across 3 different Google Reader accounts and NetNewsWire on my personal laptop. Time for some housekeeping.

I collapsed most of the feeds from the Google Reader accounts into one account. The few leftover are work related, so I just left them in a work-specific account. Meanwhile, the collapsed set I now read on my iPod Touch using NetNewsWire for that platform.

That pile of feeds covers a large portion of my broad technology, gadget, and culture interests dating back to my past life. It's a big part of my daily info fix. Reading them on the touch feels a lot more productive. I sit down for one session after work and flick through a big pile of the days items in about 30 minutes. Works better than the intermittent grazing I was doing during the day.

Now I need to make more usage of sending items to Evernote or e-mailing posts from NetNewsWire.

About two years ago, I was lucky enough to catch Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight at the Udvar-Hazy Airbus IMAX Theater. This was after missing the flick on it's first run in the theater. And failing to see it in the downtown DC screen at the Air and Space Museum because it sold out. And passing again when it came to Udvar-Hazy because I thought it would cost $12 for parking, doubling the price of the film. Thankfully, The Dark Knight made a return engagement.

The great thing about Udvar-Hazy is that

1. It's a full fledged IMAX screen, not the watered down mall version.
2. They don't do commercials or trailers. When it's starting time, the movie you paid for starts.
3. At least when I went, the venue was way undersold, so me and about 10 other fine folks got the theater to ourselves. Imagine the lush IMAX rendition of Gotham City completely filling your visual field.
4. Don't be fooled by the Udvar-Hazy posted parking restrictions, parking is free after hours.
5. It's an easy 20 minute ride from my house.

Needless to say, I'm completely stoked that Inception is making an engagement at Udvar-Hazy. A lot of folks seem to like the movie, while there's a vocal segment who don't. Whatever the case may be, seeing it on a massive IMAX screen will be an interesting experience.

An interview with Joey Negro, which deserves its own post, surfaced the name of Pal Joey. In the murky depths of my DJ hind brain, I remembered Pal Joey as being somewhat legendary, but the big hits didn't leap immediately to mind.

Finally got around to looking up Pal Joey on discogs.com and man does he have a pretty impressive discography. Soho's Hot Music is probably the most legendary track (I've got the Outer Rhythm version parked in storage), but there's a host of other significant original, production, and remix efforts across all forms of dance music.

Didn't know he'd gotten his introduction to the scene working at New York's legendary Vinylmania record shop.

Didn't know he'd worked with KRS-ONE on Love's Gonna Get'Cha.

Didn't know he'd remixed Deee-Lite's How Do You Say…Love.

Didn't know he'd remixed The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds.

Didn't know he'd remixed Sade's Cherish the Day.

Didn't know the Earth People tracks Dance and Reach Up to Mars were some of his earliest cuts. Need to dig in to my archives and see if I have these collector's items.

And according to the Pal Joey Music discography he's still going strong.

Photo cribbed from AnandTech

I think I've given up on the HTC Evo. The reviews are a little too mixed with not enough bang for buck over an iPhone 4. The criminal charges against the Evo's battery life seem to be sticking.

But Motorola's Droid X, Verizon's answer to the Evo, looks like it has some potential. First off, I'm not seeing the battery life complaints. Second, you're only in for an extra $20 to use it as a mobile hotspot, albeit for only 2GB a month. The upside is that none of your hotspot bytes count against your mobile smartphone limit, which is unlimited for $30 a month.

The general consensus seems to be it's a good hardware package, decent call performance, with good battery life, but the UI falls a little short. Pricing is closer to the iPhone than the Evo, with similar bandwidth limitations. Seems like a safe app phone choice if you're not into Apple, AT&T, or 4G.

Here's the reviews I've seen so far:

At work I'm stuck with Windows XP, papered over to look like UNIX as much as possible. Luckily our sysadmins have installed a version of GNU Emacs for Windows that works pretty well.

I don't like the default font, whatever it is. I much rather prefer Lucida Console. So any time I reboot the machine or restart Emacs, I had to right click on the main frame and select Lucida Console. You'd think as a tried and true geek, I'd follow the DRY principle on this one. But noooooooo...

I've been doing this little font setting dance for over 3+ years. Pathetic.

Knowing from long experience how arcane configuring Emacs can be, I was dreading a multi-hour session reading Info files and writing Emacs Lisp. But last week I finally hunkered down and decided to nail this one. Only took me about 45 minutes or so combining Google searching and Emacs Lisp experimentation.

Turns out the key is understanding the Emacs frame (window to the rest of the world) parameters and ignoring the face stuff. Faces are Emacs way of specifying font stylings for regions of text. They play nice with Emacs options customization menu. You'd think they would be one stop shopping for text options. But even if you set the default font for the default face, your text won't show up right in every frame.

Here's what you want in your .emacs.el, emacs.el, init.el or whatever:

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(font . "-outline-Lucida Console-normal-r-normal-normal-11-82-96-96-c-70-iso8859-1"))

This says, for every frame opened, use my particular version of Lucida Console to initialize the frame's text font parameter. Then per frame settings and face stylings can kick in afterwards. Generating the font specification is left as an exercise to the reader. default-frame-alist, besides letting you set the default font, also initializes some obvious window geometry and color parameters, as well as some fun stuff like opacity and window bar title.

And with that, I save myself a whopping 10-15 seconds every time I start up Emacs, along with my sanity.

One last thing, I tried using set-default-font and it did not work.

Just as a point of reference, here's the result of (emacs-version) on my work machine:

"GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2004-03-10 on NYAUMO"

So Your Mileage May Vary.

Posted in the hopes that this may help someone else someday.

Just poking around for cheap books in Amazon's Kindle e-book section, I found this collection of Conan the Barbarian short stories:

• Gods of the North (a.k.a. The Frost Giant's Daughter)
• Queen of the Black Coast
• Shadows in the Moonlight
• A Witch Shall be Born
• Shadows in Zamboula
• The Devil in Iron
• The People of the Black Circle
• The Pool of the Black One
• Red Nails
• Jewels of Gwahlur
• Beyond the Black River
• The Hour of the Dragon
• The Hyborian Age

These are all top of the line Robert E. Howard originals, no L. Sprague De Camp to be found. I'm particularly excited to have some version of Beyond the Black River, one of the best Conan stories ever.

Oh and all this for only 99 cents.

Okay, so I went $1 over budget. But I felt like I couldn't have just one book on the Kindle for iPod. It might get lonely. At least Amazon finally got the Tor.com titles up on the Kindle store. Apologies in advance if the titles were hidden on a shelf and obscured from my view.

In any event, taking advantage of the Tor.com special I purchased the following short stories:

1. After the Coup by John Scalzi (iBooks)
2. Down on the Farm by Charles Stross (iBooks)
3. Shade by Steven Gould (Kindle)
4. The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder by Elizabeth Bear (iBooks)
5. Jack and the Aktuals, Or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory by Rudy Rucker (iBooks)
6. Errata by Jeff VanderMeer (Kindle)

On a whim, I started with VanderMeer's Errata. I don't know if it's SF, but it's pretty damn weird. But oddly engaging. And the Kindle iPod reading experience has been pretty good so far.

ArsTechnica's Jacqui Cheng conducts a faceoff between Verizon's MiFi and Sprint's Overdrive 4G mobile hotspots. The results aren't particularly conclusive, but I enjoyed this sentence:

On top of the MiFi's pretty looks, it also performs better at basic tasks like turning on and shutting down. While the MiFi can power on and off and be ready to use within seconds, the Overdrive takes its time powering on—taking a minute or more. If that sounds bad, things are about to get worse.

Not very promising.

Cheng provides loose, basic performance measurements. For uploads and downloads the Overdrive does really well on a 4G network and somewhat worse than the MiFi on a 3G network. So no clear winner. Cheng also throws in a comparison with a tethered iPhone 4 on AT&T's 3G network, which does surprisingly well. Ping times are horrible on the iPhone 4 though.

Frankly, if I had to pull a trigger, for my needs I'd go with an iPhone 4, punt on the mobile hotspots, and use the savings to max out the storage on the iPhone.

The science fiction publisher Tor is running a special of sorts. As an experiment in supplying content for various e-readers, they're making a bunch of previously posted short stories available for 99 cents. Authors include John Scalzi and Charles Stross, two of my favorites, along with Elizabeth Bear and Steven Gould, two I need to check out.

It might seem stupid to pay for content that's already been freely posted and is still available on the Web. But I figure it's worth five bucks to to test drive e-books on my iPod touch, buy at a price that works for me, and support the authors. Also, gives me a chance to try out the iBooks and Amazon stores.

Current score, Apple 1, Amazon 0. I can pre-order the short stories from iBooks whereas the Kindle store is showing neither hide nor hair.

Over and above the fact that the only major (e.g. national or international) sporting event of note was golf's Open Championship, a.k.a. The British Open, I noticed that all of the live coverage was only on ESPN. You got some mop-up "best of" coverage on ABC after the live coverage was over, but otherwise you were SOL. Is this the first "major" event that's gone from at least some over-the-air to cable only?

If you don't have cable or satellite (Internet?) and you're a sports fan, things are looking increasingly grim.

But not to worry, suggests ESPN executive vice president John Wildhack: "The delineating between broadcast (TV) and cable is over. If you asked anyone under 40 the difference … you'd get a quizzical look."

You might be able to get some local team games over the air, but even there much of the product has migrated onto cable. This applies to all sports. On broadcast today, in my market (DC with the Nationals and Orioles), you got FOX MLB on Saturday and a celebrity golf tournament on Sunday. That was your broadcast sports selection for the weekend!

Thumbs up. ESPN having close to comprehensive live coverage, despite the time difference and the wacky Friday weather.

Thumbs down. ESPN had way too many undifferentiated talking heads. I couldn't tell the difference between Tom Watson and Tom Weiskopff. Actual stroke coverage seemed to suffer. Found their Open Championship fillers (voiced by Ian McShane) as overly pompous. On top of it all, they got a pretty undramatic final round. Yawn!

Just for fun, I completed a pretty basic implementation of automatically storing Python lists of integers in an SQLite database. Python's sqlite3 module provides hooks for extending a db connection with functions to automate the conversion of Python types on the way in and out. wirebin provided the serialization and deserialization.

For a braindead performance evaluation of deserialization, I created a million row database, with a single column corresponding to the list datatype. The size of the lists stored ranged from 1 to 1000 elements, elements ranging in value from 1 to 1000. Using Python's builtin timing functions, all rows can be retrieved, using automatic deserialization, in about 5 seconds. A very coarse test, but indications are that it takes on the order of microseconds to pull a list out of the DB. Not bad, and I expect that this would scale linearly, and very slowly, with the number of elements in the list. I need to do a simple timing of serialization and insertion, but I anticipate that should be in the same order of magnitude.

One gotcha that tripped me up is that binary data, e.g. as generated by wirebin, has to be converted into an SQLite binary blob using sqlite3.Binary. You can't just send any old string. And SQLite may silently drop your inserted value if you don't do this conversion. I suspect null characters are the offending culprit. So for a while there, my list objects were going missing, yet I wasn't getting any errors or exceptions. On the way out, you get a buffer object, which can be cast to a string and then fed to wirebin for deserialization. It's all good.

Slouching towards prefuse in Python. Now I just have to figure out the right representations for nodes, edges, and lists of each.

This one had been bugging me for a while. I had a big playlist of dj mix MP3s downloaded from the 'Net. Hadn't listened to the vast majority and wanted to nuke 'em all in one fell swoop. Selecting all and hitting Delete just removed them from the playlist.

Turns out selecting in the playlist and hitting Option-Delete deletes from the iTunes library.

Sanity preserved. Space recovered. Thanks Google. Thanks Mac OS X Hints. Hope this post helps someone else get over this hump.

Chris Heathcote observes that last.fm was looking to hire a "data griot", although I think the position listing has been removed. I'm guessing the job involves data analysis, visualization, and storytelling about the results. I'd sign up for that gig!

The terms data science and data scientist seem like they might be heading for fad territory, but the demand for a particular combination of hard skills is definitely on the way up. I'm not sure how merging those talents with the artistic stylings of a real griot is advantageous in a commercial context, but with an explosion of massive data, I can see an expansion in creative opportunities.

In short, there's a lot more room for guys like Jonathan Harris.