Chatter Of The Squirrel

Tech: Google Nexus One

Just concluded a week of Android programming that our department somehow conned out of HR. There’s no conceivable reason why a bunch of techs need to know how to program a phone, but the training came our way via a suspicious ally… So, eat first. Think later.

The trainer was a young man from India, and the venue is at this shitty old place in town: McOrange Institute. The venue had serious plumbing issues, failed airconditioning, a 30yr old elevator that didn’t work half the time, and indescribable odours haunt various corners of the building. We had to move the training over to our own campus. But overall, the training was fun and informative. Although the pace of the teaching had to match the pace of the slowest student, so I felt that many higher level stuff was never covered.

But at the end of the day, our ally managed to procure a unit of the Nexus One for our department for use as our development phone. I was quickest to grab hold of the unit, and had been hogging it all to myself for almost a whole week.

This is the first time I am using a phone costing this much. It’s not technically available in Malaysia, but I’m on the newsletter list of a trader who imported a couple of units from HK. It’s available in the US for US$529. The guy over here sold the Nexus One at RM2400 each.

A simple looking phone. Doesn’t look too flashy, but the big shiny touchscreen already gave me an R+J moment…

HTC manufactured. 1GHz Snapdragon processor. Android 2.1. OLED display. Capacitance multi-touch screen. Thin and solid.

The moment everyone else got done looking at its shininess and tested out the camera… I commandeered the unit and lost no time tossing my SIM card and SD Card in. So, in the order of things I tested…

#1 Multimedia:
I want to know how my music and audio book will sound. The multimedia uses the crappy ringer speaker. Volume leaves much to be desired. Quality will obviously be crap too. Even at full ringer volume, I don’t hear the phone ring in my pocket.

#2 Phone:
Comes with 2 mics. One on the back, one on the bottom. Noise cancellation. But can’t speak for how well it works. Signal reception does seem to be a little bit worse than my Nokia. Loses signal occasionally underground.

#3 Wifi:
Grabs a signal and starts working very fast. Very easy. Just works. And once there’s wifi…

#4 GMail:
Log in GMail, and everything else starts working. Mail starts coming in. GTalk starts working. Even the picture gallery starts to grab everything I’ve uploaded onto PicasaWeb. My Contacts list starts filling up.

#5 FaceBook:
Log in this one, and my Contacts list fills up to the brim with everyone’s email addresses.

#6 Market:
Once you’ve logged in a Google account, the Marketplace opens up for you. Head right there and browse thousands of free apps that downloads and installs easily onto the phone. Lots of useful and show-offy stuff like Google Sky Maps. And a Sudoku game is practically a must. No good, free Kakuro game yet though…

#7 Web Browsing:
Flash support. SUCK ON THAT, iPhone! Everything is smooth. But there’s no multi-touch in Android 2.1. Some patent issue. Apple wants to hold exclusivity to the interface. Just like what they did with the iPod shuffle wheel and UI a while ago.

But with an OTA (Over The Air) update that happened on Friday afternoon, the multi-touch function is suddenly enabled! The hardware is there all along. Pinch zooming and other gestures now available.

#8 Battery:
Takes an insanely long time to charge. About 5hrs for a full charge. It depletes about 50% in 7hrs. Hardly enough, especially with the myriad of things you will want to do with it when you’ve got a web connection. But on the plus side, the battery is replaceable. There’s another inconvenience: you need to remove the battery every time you swab out the SD Card. The slot is on the inside of the device. Pain.

#9 Keyboard:
Not very pleasant to use. The predictive text and such helps a fair bit. But it requires much more concentration to type messages on this as compared to a T9 input. And tapping out long URLs are a particular pain, if you accidentally touch the Search or Back button and lose all your hard work and have to start over again and again…

#10 Voice Input:
There’s a handy little mic button on the keyboard. Tap, and speak into the mic. Voila, voice to text! But it uses the internet for this. Very clever, using off-device processing and database resources to do this. And it’s so responsive that you don’t actually realise that your voice was just digitally encoded, pushed into the internet, parsed by a giant datacenter somewhere, crunched through a very good algorithm, the results matched to a database, and the results pushed back through the internet and back onto your keyboard. It’s like being able to eat French fries that was fried in France and freighted over, that still tastes as good as MacDonald’s French fries. On the down side, this doesn’t work when you have no internet access. And it also censors vulgarities. “Asshole” comes out as “####”.

#11 The Mouse Clit:
I’m inventing a rude name for the tiny trackball interface, to see if the name will catch on. Male rodents have had their genitals maligned for much too long, so I figured there should be equal opportunity for the other gender. Besides, it’s quite apt, descriptively. It’s a little nub at the bottom of the phone that serves little purpose. There isn’t a way to adjust the sensitivity of the clit, and when trying to move the cursor around a line of text, the clit moves it way too slowly. But I can appreciate why such an interface is still very much needed for accurate cursor movements. Cos you can’t use a stylus on this screen, and fat fingers can’t poke exactly where you need things to go. But the sensitivity needs to be very much better for it to be useable. Also, it serves to protect the shiny screen cos it keeps the screen off the surface if you put the phone facedown on a table.

In summary, this is a fine fine tool. Especially if you’re willing to pay for 3G broadband access, so that you can use all the cool shit everywhere you go. All the truly neat stuff needs the net. Very cool to sip coffee with friends, and be able to MSN when everyone starts talking about work.

I want one. But not at this price.

The name of the phone is an obvious reference to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep which got made into the Harrison Ford movie, Blade Runner. In the story, the Nexus 6 is a series of bio-engineered androids made for off-world work. Does Google think it can get that far with five more iterations of its phone?

Tech: Microsoft Hyper-V, unable to connect

Built up my Hyper-V system and the remote management console previously.

Then it broke.

When attempting to connect to the HyperV via the remote management console, I kept getting, “You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer.”

After a bit of troubleshooting, I finally found out that the password to the HyperV machine has expired.

Change the password on the HyperV server. Change the password on the remote management machine. (Remember that the username and password of both machines have to match, if you’re not using Active Directory.) Reboot both computers. And they work again.

Now… something else has broken my KnowledgeTree install. How do I want to fix this?

January Madness

1st January, 2010.
Parents are here, in transit for a couple of days. Sending them off to Melbourne for 3 months to be with their daughter. The angpao damage they will avoid from being in Sibu during CNY will more than cover the airtix to Melbourne.

2nd January, 2010.
CheeKidd & Charis’ wedding. Am the ‘co-coordinator’. Which means I run around clicking mice and queueing music while claiming too much credit for involvement in the wedding. It was an amazing garden wedding and there was perfect weather. Lots of old classmates showed. The event really deserved a bigger chunk of InsaneSquirrel instead of just a small blurb in a list… Maybe later.

3rd January, 2010.
Sent parents off to the airport.

4th January, 2010.
Met up with SoonYee, an ex-colleague from ABRIC. Interesting fella. Claims to have run a Starcraft Academy in the old days, employing deep mathematics to train a clan of undefeatable Starcraft cadets. Discussed a potential online business.

5th January, 2010.
Kuan from Kuantan, posted in KL for a month. Dinner.

6th January, 2010.
Was supposed to watch The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus. Was FFK-ed.

7th January, 2010.
Settled a dinner-debt with WeiYin from UM. And then, a second dinner with Ted at Jln Imbi. Primary school classmate from Brunei. Have only seen him one other time in the last 20 years maybe. He’s fixing his visa so that he can work in Italy stitching designer bags. Had a long chat about the impending dominance of China, and discussed the viability of various contingency plans in case our society devolves into anarchy. It will appear that knowing Chinese medicine and TaiChi will improve the odds of survival. Had to miss a farewell dinner with a colleague even. Figured that the 2.5 decade old classmate was the rarer event.

8th January,2010.
Me time on a Friday night. That’s one evening to myself all alone.

9th January, 2010.
Second attempt to watch Imaginarium with Suan. Couldn’t catch a movie cos she couldn’t catch a train. Then dinner with gamerz.

10th, January, 2010.
Guilted into skipping Kempo in favour of church. Then an afternoon with Moses looking at the 720p HD documentaries that he has been downloading but I can’t copy off of cos they’re such freaking large files!!

11th January, 2010.
My K10D isn’t reading my 16gb SD card. A little panicked, so went out to buy a new SD card. Luckily the issue was that 16gb card, and not the camera. *Phew* And while reading at Borders, I was buzzed by an unexpected call asking for help how to fix the strap on a brand new Canon 1000D.

12th January, 2010.
Dinner with the Technical Marketing Manager of Gigabyte. Another old pri school classmate from Brunei~!! What were the odds? He’s moved to Taiwan since forever, and was in KL to promote motherboards to the local techie media. Again, dinner in Jln Imbi and lots of talk.

13th January, 2010.
Third attempt to watch Imaginarium. Kuan made an excuse how seats were two rows from the screen, and went and bought tix for Old Dogs instead. Crap.

14th January, 2010.
SoonYee again. Portions at Williams have gotten bigger…

15th January, 2010.
Dinner with colleagues.

And January STILL has a lot more in store! This Saturday, an NJC-ian from S’pore days, whom I’ve not seen in 15 years, will be dropping by KL.

THEN, a roadtrip to Malacca on Sunday.

Oh, let’s not forget to mention the mountain climbing on Saturday too….

Movie: Old Dogs

Wild Hogs was a fantastic comedy. So the producers thought that bringing in another combination of old guys together will work equally well.

Wild Hogs worked because you can relate with the characters. There’s that faint possibility that anyone of us might one day go through a midlife crisis and buy a hog and go traipsing into the middle of nowhere.

Old Dogs has Travolta and Robin Williams as two bosses of a big sports company, and Williams suddenly finds himself to be the father of a pair of precocious bastard twins. Not exactly characters people can relate easily with. Not even a social situation that typical decent human beings will find themselves in. There’s an unnecessary scene with Bernie Mac and a technology that turns a person into a human puppet. And a Rocket-Man finale?

Old Dogs is just another serving of Disney family crap that convinces me that American kids just aren’t smacked often or hard enough. It also continues to prepetuate the Disney-generation larvae’s delusions that their mere existing confers upon them a mandate from heaven to rule over everybody around them through guilt and volume.

The only thing halfway amusing is Seth Green. It was amusing SEEING him in a film. He’s funny when he’s playing with his old G.I.Joe toys. Not so much in an actual film.

TV: The Big Bang Theory

Been getting a number of good props for this series, from oft trusted and credible sources. But yet when I sampled a few random episodes from the end of season 2, I was largely unimpressed.

Founded on the timeless formula of 2 neighbouring apartments with quirky room-mates. The gimmick here is the 4 geeks being an extreme condensate of the worst stereotypes of Otaku, MMORPG junkie, Trekkie, comic geek, science geek, sci-fi geek, video-game geek and all other manners of geekdom that the writers never lived and poorly imagined.

Yar, it’s quite amusing that many jokes incorporate random geek stuff. The Picard-Kirk debate. The Hadron Super Collider. MMORPG Raid-speak. Comic book superheroes.

Other elements the writers THINK are funny: the chronic shyness and social awkwardness of nerds, their cluelessness about sports, their lack of appeal to the opposite gender, etc.

The characters and writing is quite juvenile and unimaginative. The jokes are predictable. Admittedly, there was a hilarious ROFL moment when Sheldon divided mitotically, completely blindsided me. But one good laugh like this in 1.5 seasons… Needs More Effort. It’s like, Garfield hates Mondays but love lasagna. Alf likes to eat cats. Good gags. But it gets old.

I enjoyed the early episodes. But towards the end of the first season, it had become evident that the schizophrenic C-3P0 (ie. Sheldon) is the show-stealer. Whereupon the Kramer of the show outshone the Seinfeld. And that’s also where the writers & producers took the path of least resistance, pushed the whole show to C-3P0, and gave up developing any of the other characters beyond their offensive geek stereotype.

It’s like producing Scrubs, with one J.D., a half dozen Todds, and nobody else. The Todd is a gag character deliberately written to be one dimensional for comedic effect. Many of the other characters in the show slowly developed depth as the years went by. Not so with Big Bang. They accidentally found their Kramer, and are so excited about him that they’ve allowed him to be the entire show henceforth. After so many episodes, I can only remember the names of Sheldon and Penny.

I have lots of geek friends. Several of them socially awkward characters. I’ve been mired in borderline neurotic geek conversations many times. Any of them are more animated and more interesting than the writers’ narrow perception of “Geek”.