brainsnorkel.com

I can’t review my new iPhone 3GS. Frankly, I haven’t used it enough. I’m still waiting for my old carrier to port my number so I can use it as something more than a very expensive iPod Touch.

One of the first things I did after getting it was to sit down with a couple of our kids and show them the maps, video camera, photos, some Wall-E, Phineas and Ferb and then an iPhone version of Peggle which they had played on PC extensively.

When I had decided that demo time was over my 3 year old daughter insisted that the iPhone was hers. To encourage me to hand it over she started ripping up and throwing things around the house with some impressive, wanton, and very primal, rage.

This experience has brought me to the realisation that slavish iPhone desire is nature, not nurture.

I’m seriously considering buying a decoy.

This (and the clip that follows) has to be the best Colbert segment for some time.

When I recall very good TV series like Six Feet Under and The Wire I feel could go back and watch the final episode any time for a reminder of the quality of the series and the characters in it. Battlestar Galactica is an excellent TV series, but I think I’ll be watching the pilot episodes, season 1, and not the finale.

Tonio sums up all that was good and bad about the series finale (beware, here be spoilers):
Battlestar Galactica Ends

Here’s my take on the end of the best Science Fiction TV series in history: it hit the right emotional notes, and it was reasonably satisfying, but it was not a worthy ending to the series, and I suspect that as we all go back and watch the whole thing through we’ll find a lot of threads left dangling or essentially forgotten by the writers.

I’m in leadership training.  It’s pretty good so far.

Notable occurrences:

1. Though the Chris of 2000 was an INFJ, the Chris of 2009 is an ESTP. Abracadabra!
2. The 2×2 leadership analysis grid keeps reminding me of this…

Christmas can be a long day. Hopefully these two YouTube gems will help pass the time.

How to fold a T-shirt in 5 seconds:

Orange teeth:

It crashes a lot.

I’ve been using Soundbooth to clean up speech from about 10 people recorded in a conference room, on a tiny digital recorder, while it sat next to a projector’s fan, under an air-conditioning outlet, in a slightly echoey conference room, open to a common area where people gather to take the elevator.

Cleaning up the audio was a reasonably fast, if crashy, experience.

Once I had a reasonably clean recording I thought I’d try out the automatic transcription feature. This feature performs some cursory speech recognition on an audio file to produce tags that match recognised words to their location in the audio file along with the speaker’s identity (e.g. speaker 2). As it’s only 75% accurate (for my samples, forgivably, it was much worse) it’s more useful for finding points of interest in an audio file than as an auto-transcription service.

I don’t think it ever completed the transcription task. At some random point it would offer to send Adobe a copy of a crash report.

Though it doesn’t have transcription capabilities, I think I prefer Audacity.

Tomorrow, December 5th 2008, marks the 20th anniversary of my starting work in “the industry.”

This calls for five minutes of reminiscing.

I turned up for my first day of work as a trainee systems programmer at a big Australian bank’s EDP department. I recall being more than a little shocked at having to be at work before 8:06am each day. I was introduced to everyone I’d be working with shortly before being sent off to North Sydney to do MVS and IBM System/360 Assembler training for a few weeks.

At training I learned that the most powerful instruction in Assembly language was the no-op. The coding standard dictated that you sprinkle them throughout your code so that smarter programmers than you could patch your code, in memory, while running by overwriting your no-ops with useful code and then adding a statement to branch to the patch code over the defective instructions.

The bank had some great people. Some were consummate professionals and some were real cowboys.

Towards the end of my time at the bank I was introduced to the pointy-end of the economics of software development and process improvement.

A colleague returned from a long liquid lunch and let me in on the “big secret.”

He said only fools write good code. Code has to break for you to get called in. Being called in gives you overtime and visibility. Overtime is extra money. Being called in is heroism. Develop skill in writing bugs that are serious enough to call you in about, yet easy enough to fix soon after you get into the office. Overtime was paid for in four hour minimum units. Nobody notices people who write reliable code because they never get to perform heroic acts. Notice that the people who get promoted are those that handle high stress situations. Notice that the people handling these high stress situations are generally responsible for creating the high stress situation in the first place.

It was good motivation to find a new job.

Regrettably, I don’t have an iPhone. I do, however, have iPhone envy. I can tell, because I have dreams about accelerometers and iPhone apps I’d like. Also, I have nightmares about dropping my imaginary iPhone.

Given I don’t have the necessary equipment to develop an iPhone application, I hereby give you, The Internet, my idea for an iPhone application. My envy-inspired dreams have resulted in an idea for an App whose sole purpose is to add a little levity to those near-miss moments when you think you’ve accidentally destroyed your iPhone.

My imaginary app patiently waits for the accelerometer to report extreme acceleration events, such as when the phone has fallen to the ground. Shortly after the high-G event, the app plays an audio file that says “Well that was close!”

That’s it.

No additional logic is required for the case when the G force is so great the iPhone stops working. Those moments are best kept levity-free.

From the virtual Cecil B. DeMille’s of Bennelong.

Yes, we’re early. But we did let a month go by after Myer put out their decorations.

To make sure we catch the thrilling finale to The West Wing, J and I are taking Wednesday (US Tuesday afternoon & night) off from work.  Tragic, we know, but we’d be useless at work and drinking games are frowned upon the day after the Melbourne Cup.

I’m sure it won’t be like this time eight years ago when I spent the night in a New Jersey hotel room, still waiting at 3am for a result.  The next day I flew to Orlando Florida to attend a trade show.  My most vivid memory was when, completely unprompted, my taxi driver apologised to me on behalf of his state.

It didn’t help much when I posted it four years ago. Nonetheless, I’m going to roll out Leonard Cohen’s Democracy (video) one more time.

Read the rest of this entry »

As mentioned previously, we recently acquired an Apple TV and a fairly standard 720p 66cm LCD TV.

What problem was I trying to solve?

After spending some time in the US, we have Australian and US iTunes Store accounts. For the last year the majority of our TV came from one iTunes store or another (mostly one). We grew tired of advertising and DVDs. J & I promised that when we gave up our roughly $100/month cable subscription a few years ago that if legal downloadable content became viable we’d be happy to pay at least half that amount on content we could select for ourselves, watch at our leisure, and enjoy without advertising.

We’ve also recently boxed a few hundred CDs and put them in storage. This came about after we realised we’d purchased a shedload of music, but only about one physical CD per year for about 2 years. We needed a more convenient method than an iTunes library on a NAS to access our music collection.

What’s good?

iTunes

We’re paying to be hostages to iTunes DRM. It’s not great. We got over it.

Convenient and sexily-presented access to all of our music

It’s an always-on jukebox of all our favourite hits which is easier to use than a CD player and doesn’t become scratched and unplayable when handled by children or visiting Luddites.

Consumer-grade access to video content

Fewer hours spent fiddling with PCs or digging for DVDs. Just cursor around and watch. Bored? You can drop a few bucks on a hire movie and watch straight away with little chance of there being a big fingerprint on the final chapter that stops you from enjoying your purchase.

What didn’t I know before I bought it that I should have?

Hard disk size

I got the 160GB version, and not the 8040GB thinking that I had to be able to manually carve up our 220GB of content and I’d prefer to have as much of it available as possible to avoid having to make too many decisions about content. Truth is, you don’t really need to go overboard with hard disk space. I have about 40GB of audio, and when you set the Apple TV to decide what to sync for you, it seems to allocate enough space for my entire audio collection and uses the rest of the space on what video it divines I’m likely to want t watch.

Automatic sync settings

Automatic sync works by constantly updating the content of the Apple TV with the iTunes libraries on your network to try to make sure the content you care about is online when the iTunes libraries aren’t. If your iTunes library is online, the Apple TV shows the content of those libraries as available through the menu system and if you play something that isn’t on the Apple TV’s hard disk, it begins to copy the content onto its hard disk and starts playing when it’s confident there won’t be a break in transmission to re-buffer.

The bad?

Getting started

The Apple TV seems to be hard or slow to wake up after a rest. Often you have to poke away at the remote for 15-30 seconds to get it to display or utter the first "bloops" of evident wakefulness.

Very occasionally the Apple TV appears to thrash like a computer and be consistently unresponsive. Twice I’ve had to switch it off and on to restore sanity and responsiveness.

The resync

"While Apple TV is playing back video content, the syncing of content from iTunes is temporarily paused. Syncing will automatically resume shortly after you stop playing video content. " (http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24601)

What this doesn’t tell you is that for some reason, when you’re paused in the middle of an Apple TV-purchased movie, your Apple TV also likes to do resyncs if you accidentally leave your iTunes running on another PC. I suspect it’s zealously syncing where you’re at in the movie so it can restart you from that point on any other iTunes instance. The problem with this is that resyncs while you’re in the middle of a TV show or a movie cause the Apple TV to become unresponsive or sluggish and stuttery for a time. It seems to take upwards of a minute to recover from a resync commenced when you paused a feature-length film. The unit becomes unresponsive, eating remote control clicks or misinterpreting them as click-and-hold commands. I typically spend some time after the Apple TV has recovered from sluggishness trying to find my way back to where I originally paused.

This is probably the biggest disappointment. It seems to me to be a bug. Resyncs should be transparent to the user of the Apple TV and certainly shouldn’t affect usability or response time. Fingers crossed for a fix.

"Automatic" sync almost works as I’d expect

With Automatic sync the Apple TV loads up on video content you haven’t watched yet and content you have watched tends to be deleted to make way for new content. The downside of this for us has been kids’ content. We have Dora the Explorer on high rotation, and the Apple TV liked deleting Dora in favour of other content. Now that Dora has been watched a few hundred times Apple TV has taken the hint, but having to boot up a PC to get Dora on the air was a little more tiresome than I expected. It would be nice if you could explicitly hint that you’d like to prioritise some content for caching on the Apple TV.

Conclusion

Apple TV is visually polished, extremely well integrated with all things iTunes, yet suffers the same poor responsiveness of other computers that pretend to be HiFi equipment (I’m lookin’ at you Media Center PCs). It’s not as polished and predictable as I expected.

On the whole, as an iTunes-dependent family we’re hooked and find it indispensable. Without an iTunes addiction it wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

Apparently Disneyland aims to polarise its guests.

Or perhaps if you weren’t pissed off or ecstatic about the experience they don’t really care if you’d recommend them to others.