Musings

I was remarking to Matt over MSN the other afternoon that of the lot of lens filters I’ve got, the GND – graduated neutral density – one hardly ever gets used. The filter is a bit of a last resort if you are facing an over light bright sky and can’t recover sky detail naturally or with a circular polarizer. The graduation for the Marumi GND filter I’ve got seems to have a semi-abrupt transition between the hard and soft edge i.e. there isn’t much of a gradual blend, The pictures taken in a composition with extreme contrasting in broad daylight can look a little funny, so I’ve avoided using the GND filter.

In any case, I decided to bring it out one early morning just to have some fun with it and to try it out stacked with other filters. I had the Marumi GND stacked with a B+W CPL and on my Sigma 10-20mm. Severe vignetting on the widest end – no surprises there – and the usable images only started at about 13mm onwards. Here’s a quickie shot taken:

Looks real odd LOL.

The newest Apple toy to be revealed this morning must had been one of industry’s worst kept secrets. Funnily, when the specifications of the new tablet device was presented, it didn’t get the unanimous and unreserved approval online the company might had been hoping for, though that hasn’t stopped the usual Apple Faithful from gushing all over the device and shouting down anyone who’s questioned the new device’s real usefulness and design compromises.

In the last year the Cupertino boys have got my business for their iPhone and MacBook – which are alright devices but still long ways from being the nirvana devices fanboys rate them to be – the iPad won’t this time after looking at its specifications, never mind that the name is uncomfortably similar to a sanitary object. Why?

As a portable music playback device – it’s too big. My Cowon D2 works just fine, and runs for 40 hours compared to the iPad’s reported 10.

As a productivity device – Never mind that you can’t multitask on the iPad. But I don’t care to use a touch screen to create or edit a word-processed document. OK, so there’s going to be keyboard options, but it’s a separate peripheral… which means more $$$ and having to bring along more devices just to get the same level of productivity you get already with a netbook.

As a portable game device – for iPhone-esque games only. Anything more complex or visual that’s commensurate with the screen size requires the kind of processing that won’t be possible with iPad’s weak processor.

iPad’s 10 hours battery life? Some of the netbooks are already dishing out 8 battery hours, and it’s still improving with newer models and low power processors.

As a communication device. Er, no onboard camera – which means you can forget about video calls.

As an e-book reader. iPad is rated at 10 hours battery. Amazon’s Kindle is rated at 7 days.

So I don’t get it. Just what exactly is this device really for. Is it supposed to be superior to netbooks when the latter can dish out more for less money? It’s too big to be truly portable, and too small and missing integrated I/O peripherals to be useful for anything more than what you already can do on the iPhone.

But that’s Apple for you. The iPad will likely sell millions of units to Apple fans, if nothing else because it’s a fashion statement to own one, never mind its real utility and that it seems neither here nor there. Well, I won’t be one of them this time. I’ll rather just save my money for the next iPhone which hopefully won’t be the same size of this brick!

Interestingly, the parts that go into a computer system haven’t changed too much over the last 15 years since I first tried assembling my first computer in 1995. The parts back then were…

Computer casing
CPU
Motherboard
RAM
Power supply
Storage (e.g. hard disk drive, floppy drive, optical drive)
Sound card
Video card
Input / output peripherals (e.g. keyboard, mouse, display)

… which is fundamentally the same as it is today. The couple of things that have changed over the years include the different connector standards, and that there’s stronger integration or input / output ports between the motherboard and the casing today (e.g. several connections built-into the motherboard are now also duplicated on the computer casing).

In any case, I usually assemble a new PC every 2 years or so. The current one I assembled and had been using since August 2007 is still pretty good for normal application work like emailing, word processing and the like – but slow for other things, including video encoding all the HD videos I take these days, or image processing – especially stitching panoramic shots and HDR processing.

So, on 2010 New Year’s eve, we made a trip to Sim Lim Square to pick out all the components for a new rig and got about assembling it all back together. I was determined too to do a better job than I did 2.5 years ago too – cables and wires were crazily criss-crossing each other in the last work.

Here’s what the new assembled rig looks like on New Year’s day – after spending most of the night and early morning working on it:

It probably looks hugely complex to persons who’re unfamiliar with computer assembly. It’s also not nearly as neat or well-organized as what skilled enthusiasts can do of course, but it’s reasonably alright for someone of my limited skill – especially considering that I only do this every 2 years or so. There’s still a huge mess of cables and wires though. The casing holds six hard drives and optical drives, and there’re two cables for each (one for power, the other for data) – but all of them are sandwiched on the other side of the casing and hidden away from view LOL.

Ling looks at this hobby with indulgence, and also has offered a couple of anecdotes whenever she sees I’m intensely at work assembling a new computer system. When we were driving from Sim Lim Square back home the other day, she mused aloud: “OK; he’s likely going to stay up all night again trying to put it all together. If it works, it’ll all be good. If it doesn’t, he’ll be tearing his hair out again.”

Fortunately, it all worked this time. Cleaning up the old and other computer to replace Ling’s uber slow Acer PC however was a different story, but that’s for another blog post.:)

One of the ideas that I lecture about in Software Engineering is the concept of how one views testing objects. You can either look at an object either in ‘black’ or ‘white’ box fashion. In the former, internal processing details are hidden and opaque, so you’re really concerned only about whether you get correct outputs based on what inputs you feed into the object. ‘White’ box viewpoints on the other hand suggest that you’re looking at the object in terms of processing and its internalized components since it’s ‘transparent’.

Now when you put it into a computer analogy; most people are really quite happy using computers as black boxes – they don’t care what goes inside a thing, as long as the thing works. For this group of users, choosing a new computer really involves just selecting from brochures an assembled system, paying for it, and waiting for the delivery guy to show up.

That’s one of the reasons why Apple operating systems and their machines have been so successful: they hide all the details behind a pretty facade, does what it’s supposed to do well, and absolves its users from having to deal with the underlining hardware. Windows operating systems took a while longer to reach the same level of abstraction, but with the newest iteration – Windows 7 – it’s finally reached parity, and in some ways may have even surpassed the Mac OS.

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There’s a large group of users however who enjoy treating their computer systems as white boxes. These are also the same people who’re frequent patrons of Sim Lim Square, and the activity of assembling one’s own computer today is practically a hobbyist skill with a huge body of knowledge accumulated over the years from enthusiasts.

Why do people bother with it though? Well, building things is a lot of fun. Once you get past the fact that the PC components that go into a system don’t usually just cost spare change, it’s pretty much like assembling Lego bricks otherwise. Many components – whether it’s a wire, a cable, or a computer card – have distinct connectors that it’s actually hard to connect the item in the wrong way.

There’s also a significant aesthetic perspective. Lots of enthusiasts compare notes on how  they go about beautifying the internals of their computer – which interestingly also has a strong effect on how the assembled system performs.

Briefly, computer components contain millions of transistors. They generate a lot of heat, so one of the basic ideas that one has to learn is how air is moved inside a computer casing. Ideally, you want to create airflow in the casing that’ll take in cool air from the outside and push out hot air through exhaust. This isn’t as simple as putting huge fans into a casing and letting them rip though. You don’t want pockets of still air for one, and secondly, fans can cause a din.

And the payoff of spending a couple of hours or an evening of assembling a new computer is incredible. You often hold your breadth when you’re booting up your assembled computer for the first time – and when it boots up properly, it’s hard not to shoot your first up into the air and say “Hell yeah!!” It’s like you’re creating life.

Continued in the next post.:)

It’s come to that time in the year again where I get to look back at some of the most major decisions this year and and with the benefit of a mite bit of hindsight look at how they went. This is gonna be a long post, so it’s gonna be posted in parts.

Switching to the iPhone (Win… maybe). Now that the novelty of the iPhone has worn well-off 7 months after picking it up, I’ve still got mixed feelings of what pundits call the Messiah Phone but thankfully it’s still mostly on the positive side of things. Sure it’s got a great UI and a huge online store which is choked full of both free and paid applications. I used its mobile Mail program a lot, and that it can sync with Microsoft Exchange for work email is a god send. On the down side though, the phone’s still too clunky and prone to mysterious crashes.

Buying a portable HD camcorder (Mixed). The Panasonic HDC-SD20 camcorder I picked up in March this year was on account of Hannah coming along, and also for my San Francisco trip. I think of all the camcorders I’ve owned, I’ve shot more video on this Panasonic unit than all the others combined – especially of Hannah. That’s testament to how useful the tool is. That it takes video in the MPEG4-AVC/H.264 codec saves a lot in by way of storage space, but at the (huge) expense of editing work. Either I fork out money for Adobe Premiere Elements, or I convert the .MTS file to a more editor-friendly codec like .AVI and work from there using free tools.

More seriously though is that the camcorder is awful in lowlight… and a month after I purchased the unit, all the other competing camcorder manufacturers came up with their own line of budget HD camcorders, many with even better specs. Ouch.:(

Buying the huge lemon, whoops iEcologi (Lost). Ling did a lot of homework on this one, and while she was well-aware of its less-than-desirable characteristics (especially weight and effort-to-floor cleanliness ratio) she was still absolutely sold on the utility of this product. We forked out a huge wad of cash for this baby, and since February, the number of times she’s used it can be counted on two hands… maybe. It’s painfully heavy, requires a lot of post-use maintenance, and requires way too much effort to get a clean floor that we could achieve by hand-mopping, Japanese style, in 1/5 of the time spent.

The one thing we can’t do using the latter is sanitation which we don’t need to yet, but Ling says as soon as Hannah starts crawling, she’s going to dust off the cob webs off the iEcologi and use it more often. We’ll see.

The MSI Wind (Win). This one’s easy – considering that this little netbook has accompanied me to San Francisco, spent several nights at Thomson Medical Center, and has been thrown into and taken out of backpacks countless times… and has yet to miss a beat. Ok, so the limited screen resolution of 1024×600 means I have to keep scrolling vertically when I read stuff off the web, but it’s hard to complain for the low price I paid for it compared to the immense amount of photo productivity I’ve got out of it. Why pay a lot of money for portable photo storage when there’re netbooks.

Apple MacBook Pro (In Progress). The new wave of CULV processor-equipped and Nvidia ION-powered with 11.6 inch LCD screen netbooks hitting the shops were really tempting, and was initially my choice for replacement of my NEC Versa E6310. I eventually decided to go with the Apple MacBook Pro though, and even Ling was surprised at my change of heart. At this moment of writing, I’ve only had the unit for a couple of weeks so my evaluation on whether it was a good or bad decision is still in-process.

More in the next post.:)

I first got into network chatting  in 1992 during my first year in NTU. All students were given network accounts and Internet email address. Back then though those network accounts weren’t normallyused for studies. We used them mostly for leisure and social networking at the NTUVAX online forums, and chatting. Yep all the male students in Computer Engineering when bored with practical lessons would be chatting up the girls from Business and Accounting.:)

Internet chatting has come a long way. There was the whole IRC thing which is still very popular in certain circles today, then the wildly revolutionary ICQ in the mid to late 90s, and finally video chats.

I’m a late comer to video chats on account that it’s only semi-recently when I’m convinced that network latency issues have finally been ironed out. The video and audio feeds these days are amazingly good, due in good part to excellent data compression techniques, and also I’m guessing packet reconstruction and buffering at work. Most notebooks – even netbooks – come built in with web cams too, and if you’re using Windows Live Messenger, you don’t need additional software to get video chats.

Ling, Matt and I have been trying out the different video chats services for the last day or so, and they’ve included Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, and Skype. It’s largely on account of the fact that when I’m away for a couple of weeks in December, I’d like to be able to see Hannah still.:)

Of the three, the most convenient to get video chat going is Live Messenger, since so many of us are already using text chats on it. The video images suffered though from bad pixelation. The next we tried was Google Chat which worked better, but for some reason Matt couldn’t get audio though the video component worked just fine.

We tried Skype last, and that worked the best too: we saw enjoyed higher resolutions for the video, and audio had good fidelity. It’d mean though that we’d need to run the separate communication tool on top of the existing Live Messenger, but it’s a small inconvenience.

It’s a lot of fun either way. The first thing I told Matt was that I’m sending him a live video feed of roti pratas being eaten the next chance I get.:)

Well, I’ve already posted about niggling annoyances with my new MacBook. So, to balance things up a bit, here’s part 3 of my series of posts on whether I’m falling in with the crowd of Apple Faithful – or not – and it at least includes a few things that I like about the MacBook.

Very nice body and build quality.

Design is a mixed bag. The single pane glass LCD is  both gorgeous and smart: it’s hard for dust and little particles to sneak in between the bezel and screen, which was a persistent problem with a lot of the other notebooks I’ve owned.

I like the backlight keyboard too. A lot of times I’ve struggled to see what’s on my notebook keyboard when the lights are dimmed. My Thinkpad use a soft light source mounted near the web cam, but the Apple MacBook’s idea is even better.

However: the MacBook design also has numerous fails for me. The number of USB ports at just two is miserly. Even smaller netbooks have 3 USB ports these days. More seriously though… the two ports are placed too closely. A lot of devices I use have USB stubs that are wide, e.g. the Starhub Maxmobile dongle – which means that effectively, I can’t use another USB device when I’m on Maxmobile unless I get a USB extender. !@#!@$%$#@$

The combo audio/microphone jack is a bad idea. The auto-toggling works in OS X, but not in Windows. I’m guessing it’s sloppy drivers on the part of Boot Camp, and I’m not the only person who had difficulty. Hunted around for a solution and found it though – fortunately.

The OS X’s version of Live Messenger has no nag adverts. Nice! No need to use third party software to kill those adverts.

Very nice User Interface in and out. Even the normally drab and all workman like Firefox looks gorgeous in Snow Leopard.

Pretty good battery life. Not quite to the ungodly endurance of some of those Windows 7 / Intel CULV notebooks that are clocking in 9 hours, and a few even 10 hours. But the 6 hours normal use this MacBook offers isn’t too bad. It’s long enough for the Kyushu flight, and longer flights than that I don’t typically stay awake throughout the flight anyway.

But at the end of it, I’m still not a MacBook convert: I’m still solidly a Windows geek. Apart from nifty UIs and that the Keynote software on iWorks churns out nicer presentations than PowerPoint, there’s little else I’ve found that the MacBook can functionally do that I haven’t been able to already do in Windows, and without all the annoyances.

Maybe more time with the new toy will change. Who knows LOL.

Day 2 of using the MacBook. I spent all of last night installing my productivity software and also Vista Ultimate on a Boot Camp partition. And the little irritating nuances are already showing.

The first couple of applications I installed in OS X had no instructions of any kind – just a pop up window with two large icons and no advice what I should be doing. I spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure it out until I went online and found my solution.

I have to throw more money at Apple if I want to project my display onto an external device. Every Intel notebook I’ve owned had an inbuilt VGA output, and in more recent cases, HDMI ones even. Apple has their own proprietary standard – i.e. I have to fork out money for different mini-adapters just to do what I’ve always been able to do for free.

Playback of 1080p HD videos encoded in MPEG4-AVC/H.264 was horrible. Crazily sluggish with dropped frames and artifacts galore. It’s apparently from some sort of compatibility issue between the VLC Media Player – which is one of the few players that can even play these files for the Mac OS X – and the operating system itself. And I’m not alone – plenty of complaints about it here. Ironically, I Boot Camp back to Vista and play the same HD video file using Windows Media Player with the K-Lite Codec Pack… and it does so flawlessly.

I miss the hard disk activity light found in every Wintel notebook I’ve owned. You can tell from a glance the activity level for a program. No such thing on the MacBook, and whether a program is just accessing main memory or driving the hard drive nuts I have no clue.

Couldn’t believe I can’t kill the irritating startup “KA DENG” sound without relying on third party software that I have to hunt for, unless I mute all sounds from the notebook altogether. Seems like showmanship on the part of Apple.

For a notebook that touts itself as dual OS bootable, I’d assume it’d be easy to toggle and restart between OS X and Vista. Hell no. Apple installs an icon in Vista for you to quick restart in Mac OS X, but they don’t give you an icon for doing the reverse. Talk about sending not so subtle messages telling me how I should use my notebook.

One of Windows’ best freebies is Windows Live Writer, a multi blogger platform that lets me compose WYSIWYG blog posts offline, then post them all up when I’ve got a connection. No such luck in Mac OS X – you have to fork out money, and they’re inferior products even.

Thing is: the Apple Faithful would have you believe that the Mac OS X is a superior product to Windows in every possible way. Not so from my experience so far. At best from what I see, it’s going to be great in certain aspects which matter to a lot of people, but unfortunately poorer in many aspects that matter to me.

Oh well. It’s all part of the learning – so the next post I’ll write about the positive stuff in the new experience.:)

The MacBook arrived by DHL Express late yesterday afternoon. I’d placed the order on late Thurs night, and the unit had taken a day to bounce from Apple’s warehouse to DHL’s one, and then finally arriving at the latter’s delivery center at a stroke past Friday midnight.

The sales order from Apple’s web site suggested that delivery would be on Monday, but I decided to try my luck by calling DHL directly and seeing if they would deliver on Saturday. Nicely, they consented, and the notebook with the iWorks – Apple’s software for Office productivity – arrived just after 6 pm.

You have to give it to the Cupertino folks: their products exude style, right even in packaging. Packaging contents were pretty minimalist – quite unlikely unboxing a Wintel notebook where it’s always crammed with CDs, manuals, flyers, promotional coupons, modem cables, demo ware etc.

More to come – soon.:)

Well, no one can now say – hopefully – that I didn’t give Macbooks a chance. My NEC Versa E6310 has undergone abuse. It’s switched on at least 10 hours a day, everyday at work for 2 years now, it goes with me whenever I do a public presentation or talk, and I use it as a scratch notebook i.e. I use the notebook to try out all kinds of demo ware that I wouldn’t dare try on my home PC. The screen has now lost perhaps about a quarter of its brightness, and the track pad has a mind of its own i.e. it never does anything I want it to.

I was initially intending to get another Wintel notebook – one of those 11.6” LCD CULV netbooks in fact – soon to replace the aging Versa when a revelation struck me. Why was I coughing up more money to buy another Windows notebook, when I could use that money to buy something that could at least also provide me some learning value? I mean, for all purposes, my productivity level on a Windows machine is operating at peak relative to my ability to work the machine, and as useful as another Windows notebook would be, I wasn’t going to learn anything new with it by way of working in new operating environments.

That’s essentially the reason why I ordered a MacBook Pro late last night, and am expecting delivery of the unit later today or tomorrow. There’re two 13” MacBooks that are priced quite affordably. One’s simply called the MacBook, the other the MacBook Pro. The former is their cheapest Apple OS notebook now, and in terms of computing specification is equivalent to, and in one spot at least, better than its more expensive by $400 brethren. However, the MacBook has a cheaper body – which doesn’t bother me – and a poorer screen – which I disliked after checking it out at Compass Point’s Denki. The limited color gamut and lower contrast doesn’t matter if you don’t do photo-editing, but I do a lot of that. So, I went with the cheapest MacBook Pro model listed.

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It’s interesting now to see my friends, colleagues and students respond to my Facebook status update. I meant it when I reflected in February this year a sentiment that exists among many of us who’re (supposedly?) experts in the use of technology – that many of us dislike Apple OSes as it forces a person to operate at a level of abstraction that, frankly, is both limiting and mildly condescending. For all the hardware weaknesses, vulnerabilities and general all-round ugliness of Windows up to Vista, there’s a lot more potential by way of software range, hardware variety, and enterprise-level development tools that we use that’s only available for Windows machines and not Apple OS ones, bootcamp or virtualization not withstanding.

And many of us have learned to work round the many Windows flaws. Viruses on Windows? I’ve rarely had anything more serious than a virus warning popping up on my Windows notebooks when I stick one of my student’s thumb drives in, and that’s because I know how to arm and properly defend my Windows environment. And it’s far less of a hassle than the Apple faithful would insist – I actually like the sense of empowerment and ability to install, tweak, and customize all those tools. And between a sanitized environment with a limited outlay of toys versus a sandbox with some risk but I have access to a far greater array of toys that can provide better learning opportunities albeit amidst adversity, I’d always prefer the latter.

That’s basically why I can empathize with some of my colleagues when they write a comment that’s the title of this post. They don’t like Macs. Me though, with this purchase of a MacBook – no one can say I didn’t at least try. I’m pretty certain I’ll like its colorful and unified interface a lot at least. As for productivity, I’m not so sure.

Either way, I can still always leave the MacBook at home to keep Ling occupied while I go back to my NEC Versa dinosaur – which while is rapidly losing its color and is getting crankier by the day from overuse, I still can get it to dance a trick and do what I ultimately need it to help me do – i.e. be more productive.)