Posts by Periquet dels Palots

Kettle & Pot

I find it ironic that Bjarne should complain abot the bad quality of books that teach C++. He should know well, as his own "The C++ Programming Language" is the most unfathomable book ever. It does not pretend to be a learning tool, but a reference tool, I know, but it may as well be written in Sanscrit. The explanations might be a marvel of concission and perfect software engineering, but while I can picture the author jerking off in self satisfaction, for the less gifted like me, they read like infinitely recursive and cross-jumping blabber. Any search for enlightenment tends to become a hopeless expedition into the bowels of the language where the most important discovery is how little you know, how much you ignore, and how difficult it will be to advance.

So, I have not looked at his new C++ teaching book, but I don't think Mr. Stroustrup's teaching abilities are very brilliant.

I use C++ every day, and it tends to make me feel I am very stupid. Maybe I am, and that is why I appreciate languages that make me feel smart.

Saying über is so 2000's...

Über x Retina = Cliché^2

Navs & Small Screens are OK

Navigation is not only for cars (where you do need a large screen for comfort). When you're in the tube, or walking around, particularly in an unknown city, it is immensely useful to have online navigation. And with the phone in your hand, the small screen works OK.

To hell with the cloud!

I have just returned from a long trip that took me to the US and the UK. No internet when away from Spain, unless I want to pay something like 10€ PER MEG. I pay in Spain 12€ per month for unlimited access (cellphone only).

We better hold on to our native apps and storage for a while: at those prices, the Cloud is nothing more than a few stratospheric cirrus. I hope that, like in the real world, they signal a change of weather.

ps/ Funnily, sending SMS from the UK was actually cheaper than sending them from Spain, though.

iPhone bites the dust?

Funny how iPhanboys have jumped at the chance to bite at the heels of Android. Poor things, it will be hard to endure watching how the Apple of their i's loses its stardom. But unlike WM, Android does not suck, and is free, which makes defeat but inevitable.

Anyway, be happy, my friends: the less of you that have It, the more special it will make you feel, compared with the unwashed and unenlightened masses that will do with Android. And His Highess will be able to control you even more tightly. And you will never, ever forget those ego trips you enjoyed when flashing your 2G iPhones in the train. Ah, those were the times!

You can also rest assured that, even if the iPhone had but half the users of Android, it is just one manufacturer, and at the prices it charges it will still be siphoning titanic masses of your cash into their pockets. So all is not lost!

Shoulder surfing?

Oh, please, the risk is not only unknown passersby peering over your shoulders. There are many, many, many occasions when you're sitting at a table with your boss, a coworker, a friend or your boyfriend and you just do not want them to see what your password is.

It is true that password obscuring is often overdone -- like when being forced to type in blind a 50 character long Wifi password, TWICE, when most likely you're alone and not only there is no need to get the password right two times, but getting it wrong once invalidates it.

What should be standard is a button (or key combination) to switch to clear password mode. Obscured should be the default, of course, because it would be rude and or embarrasing to switch to obscured when you are sitting with your boss or coworker... or boyfriend!

(Paris because she surely has in her email many things to hide)

Vodafone's Impressive Creativity

These tariffs must have been concocted at Vodafone Spain. Their spanish unit shows impressive productivity and astounding creativity in this aspect.

They have a seemingly endless stream of new tariffs being disclosed all the time, ever more obscure. It is from difficult to outright impossible to know how much a telephone call will cost: it depends on your contract, the time of the day, the day of the week, whether you are calling a landline or a mobile and what company that mobile is on, the number of calls have you made so far, if you are calling from your home cell, if you are calling to an established clique of Vodafone friends, and much more.

Every parameter can be sliced and diced in several ways, at different prices, with different bonuses, fixed and progressive, making the outcome even less predictable. And with some factors being just impossible to know, like what cellphone company you're calling, the only certainty you have is that it will be expensive.

I've seen Vodafones pricing in the UK, and it is so vastly more simple that makes me want to cry.

Licensing nightmare?

How do multiple MySQL providers mesh with MySQL's strange licensing? MySQL is technically GPL, but unlike other GPL apps, they consider whatever MySQL scripts you write to be MySQL extensions, and thus subject to the same license. Except for PHP or paid commercial licenses. Or something like that.

So it is somewhat as if all programs written in Python had to be GPL unless money was sent to the Python foundation.

How will a second company providing an alternative database that is based on MySQL code cope with that? If MySQL's ad lib interpretation of the GPL stands, MariaDB may be only used for GPL projects, or up to two commercial licenses may come into play.

For the life of me, I cannot understand how this dizzying distortion of the accepted rules has been accepted for years. The world should have moved to PostgreSQL long ago.

Apple FM? Ha!

It all sounds very good, and the iPhone upgrade appears to be going to be well worth it.

Still, i don't believe the FM bit for a second. Never has Apple offered FM radio in its iPods, although it would've been inexpensive and widely appreciated, and I don't think they will start now. A free source of media content that is not under Apple's control? FM radio must give Jobs the creeps.

Color me shocked if the iPhone comes with FM and, if it can *RECORD* from it, please, urgently send to me the paramedics.

More bills? AAAAAAARRRGH!

They can take the data card and stuff it. What's wrong with making it easy to use your cellphone as a 3G modem, using Bluetooth or Wifi? Why tie your WAN access to one device? Why carry on two devices with separately billed WAN connections?

The artificial limitations imposed by the network operators pretend you pay three, four or even five times for the same service: mobile voice, cellphone data, laptop data, home data, and home voice!

With the economy in total disarray, pretending that customers sign up for yet another contract for a service they are already enjoying is beyond ludicrous, it is abusive. What I would like to see is some consolidation and lower prices, not more bills.

(Paris, because she does like to pay)

Silverlight moving target

I think Silverlight is better than Flash -- at least, most of the specs are open. However, it seems like Moonlight will never be enough: by the time they got out 1.0, there were absolutely no Silverlight 1 compliant sites left on the web: all had moved on to Silverlight 2. Now that Moonlight 2 is coming, Silverlight 3 will arrive, making it again meaningless. And on, and on?

It is quite likely that even Windows users are not hitting Silverlight's moving target. What proportion of computers are Silverlight 2 enabled today? Probably not that many.

With this timing, this is against Android

Android is arriving, and it's going to wipe Microsoft out of the cellphone business. It will also kill any hopes it had for media boxes, and hurt Microsoft a lot in industrial computing (handheld terminals, SCADA systems, lab equipment, etcetera).

The forces behind are titanic. Google, China Mobile, Vodafone, Telefónica, T-Mobile, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Sony... Their combined worth is A LOT of money. Microsoft cannot go against all them. By picking TomTom, it has been inexpensive for Microsoft to fire a resounding salvo against everybody that means to use Linux in their products. To me it reads as:

"you might be giants with great technology, but I have plenty of tiny pebbles I can plant in your shoes to make your life miserable -- come to me, and all will be dandy".

Count me in for Android, out for WM

The hardware looks fantastic, but WM6 needs much more than a little make up to make it palatable. I have an HTC Touch, and it can fool you at most for a very few seconds before you realize that Windows CE is just there, almost unchanged for YEARS, with the same bugs and defects it had ten years ago.

As for how many iPhone killers we need before we go to iPhone, well, it is an intelligent comment. However, I don't want to go for iPhone as long as Apple censors contents (iBoobs out, iFart in nonsense), censors functionality in apps, disallows virtual machines, disallows Flash, disallows alternative music shops, disallows alternative software shops, disallows alternative media players, limits communications with your own PC, has no bluetooth stereo profile, has no good support for SMS/MMS, has no multitasking, has a shitty camera with no video, has no cut and paste, has no memory card reader,...

With the other platforms these limitations are either not there, or may mostly be lifted by installing additional software, but the iPhone is Limited by Design (TM).

Silverlight 1?

I installed Moonlight in my Linux computer a couple months ago, but I have never been able to test it because I've yet to find a site that uses Silverlight 1. Everything I've found is Silverlight 2, and refuses to run under Moonlight.

I would've liked to test it with Obama's inauguration, but I did not watch it Live, and the next day all the video links I found in whitehouse.gov were to YouTube, (And I'd say whitehouse.com does not use silverlight, either, but that is another story ;-)