Mac Stories -Beyond the Tablet: Seven Years of iPad as My Main Computer

Seven years after I started (slowly) replacing my MacBook Air with an iPad, my life is different, but one principle still holds true: I never want to find myself forced to work on a computer that’s only effective at home, that can’t be held in my hands, or that can’t be customized for different setups. For this reason, the iPad Pro is the best computer for the kind of lifestyle I want.

While my tablet life style hasn’t been due to health problems and having started in Android land, hasn’t been so focused on dealing with an operating system limiting my abilities, I really agree with the above excerpt. Particularly the part I have added emphasis to.

Working from Android, I’ve had pretty complete file management since the beginning. As much as I prefer apps and their own data, such as Evernote and Play Music over wrangling files around like the stone ages, it’s nice having comprehensive control. I hope that apps on iOS will become more attuned to the file system, because files are kinda nice for sharing some forms of data between applications. As opposed to cases like my experience setting up a custom alarm tone or wallpapers. Being a fuck ton versions late to the party, I got to miss the lack of a file system part and have arrived for the apps still aren’t used to their being a file system part.

Another perk of coming late to the party, is while I experienced Android’s growing pains for multi tasking, I don’t really have to re-experiences them with iOS. Samsung did the whole split screen a lot of freaking years ago, well before Google mucked with it.

Having only scratched the surface on the shortcuts stuff, I have to admit that it’s a large part of what makes Siri interesting, aside from being less of a pain in my Fi phone then Google’s voice shit. I’ll probably be referencing this article later when I screw with shortcuts more.

Accessories are another thing I find attractive about iPads. Android was pretty quick to bring support for things like keyboards, mice, hard drives, monitors, controllers, etc. Aside from Google Play Services combined with Ethernet breaking push notifications for eons, it’s been a pleasent experience using external devices with Android.

What hasn’t been fun is anything form fitting. Aside from largely generic cases adapted to fit specific models, the options have sucked. Turning an iPad into a clamshell ala EeePad Transformer TF101, has been a thing for years on iPad. Some accessories are easier purchased than made at home, if available to begin with. Not to mention how badly Android needs more than a hardware Specific  S-Pen for those of us who demand a real stylus.

Sometime I also need to play with the external monitor truck noted in the end; really I like the concept, and it basically reflects the fact that I’d like better external monitor support without having to run regular PC shit.

WIRED: Forget the Moon—We Should Go to Jupiter’s Idyllic Europa.

I would like to think that I'm not the only one whose first, humorous thought was:

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. 

ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

Come to think of it more than a few years have passed since I red the Space Odyssey books. I do wonder though what we may find out there, even if it's likely to be far less dangerous than 2061 or The Turing Test depicts. Instead I imagine we'll just have a lot of scientists and scholars having a decade long think-orgy and that's probably for the best.

Thoughts on Oracle v Google stuff

Or more specifically after parsing this, thanks Noles ;).

Personally, I think under that context, Oracle will likely win.  I do not believe that a language /should/ be copyrighted but that they technically can be, think about how the types involved might mix for various copyrighted works.


I'll be the first to admit that our system for copyright, patents, intellectual property, trademarks, and the like is a maze with more than a few turns just full of bullshit. But let's think a moment: what is it really about? Money. It's not about fostering innovation (patents) or controlling your property (oi). It's about money. That's it, simple.


Java is a product and a creative work, sufficient to be copyrighted. So is the GNU Compiler Collection and that last book you read.


What is the jist of copyright? Wikipedia as of this writing, defines it as a sub class of Intellectual Property that is generally "the right to copy, but also gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, and other related rights"


Java, as it applies to Android, is not very different than any other language applied to other systems. The devil is in the details as they say. An Android application is a collection of Dalvik bytecode, native code, and resources running under the Dalvik virtual machine: and Android provides a runtime.

The implementation is not "Java" as Oracle ships it. In fact, as Microsoft's various efforts to make a .NET dialect of C++ and projects like JRuby confirm: you can have a fair bit of abstraction between *concept* and implementation. Android developers typically write code in Java to an interface documented in Java. They could just as easily write in any language you can eventually wrangle into Dalvik bytecode! Android applications can and have been written in other JVM languages, and non JVM languages. The interface, well hell, many things in the .NET world are done in C# but you could just as easily use Visual Basic or F#. Really helps to be able to read C# though. Just like how on many systems, it helps to be able to read C and or C++.



That runtime part that Android applications depend on is quite "Java like". Many intrinsic components are provided. C programmer's should think of the stdio library. Because that is the sort of thing that has been "Copied" from "Java". Essential programming interfaces, not implementations but interfaces (as far as Oracle holds right to). GNU implements C's I/O library in their runtime. So does Microsoft in their own. They didn't have to supply crap like printf() and puts(), they could've supplied their own pf() and IoConsolePutLStr() functions! Nether group owes the other jack shit over that. But hey, printf() and puts() are what are widely used: even in other languages!!!!

A lot of things in Androids runtime are also unique. For example, the parts that make it Android specific rather than able to compile under Oracles development kits for PC. The implementation is not copied but the conceptual interface, yes.


So that's a problemo, how far does that level of control and ownership apply to derivatives? And what actually constitutes a derivative work?


Is copying the script of a movie scene for scene, line for line, and reshooting it for your own release and profit, an issue? Yeah. Obvious. Is doing a movie about a train, going to allow whoever owns copyright on some other movie with a train, to sue your ass for it? It shouldn't unless it's close enough to the former, or similarly having a legal problem of some other sort.


It's more of a question like, should Matz and Oracle be able to sue the developers of JRuby for copyright infridgement: because it provides an even stronger resemblance to both Ruby's and Java's programming interfaces than Android's runtime does to Java's. Things like C, C++, C#, Common Lisp, Scheme, and EmcaScript are formally standardized to some extent. Things like Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, and Lua are not. Could Niklaus Wirth (or Apple) have sued Boreland over Delphi?


I do not feel that it is responsible to exercise such strong-arm aggression against users. It's bad for Java, it's bad for business, it's bad for the continuing evolution of the industry, and it's bad for those who have already invested.


And as far as I am concerned, enough programming languages "Borrow" stuff that applications of copyright the way Oracle must be seeking, or not feasible—and may very well fuck up language development for the next decade. Now we have to worry what the fuck we name our classes? What next, companies are going to start exerting control over _our_ works made with their tools?


Thanks Oracle, hope your stock plummets and your employees find good jobs with businesses that offer better job security.

Having glanced at news of the new Kelper card running the Smaritan demo, a job that originally took a trio of 580 GTX cards (can you say expensive and smokin' hot?). I couldn't help but wonder, just how much optimization work may have been invested between NVIDA and Epic Games, to get that monster running on the new card.

Well, turns out from the sound of it, that it probably wasn't quite as bad as I thought it would be or not in the ways I expected it would be. The new FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti Aliasing) technique being one such "Unexpected". The fairly simple write up in the article hints to normal people, why the amount of video memory on graphics cards have been going up so much. Damn, I remember when 32M was just starting to fade away, and when 256M was the going norm' alas, times change.

Anti-aliasing is one of those things, people see in their games video settings (usually) but don't understand. They only can summise it must be "Better" the higher the number gets and that e.g. 16x AA must be better than 0. Ditto for issues like Anisotropic, trilinear, and bilinear filtering. It really isn't hard to understand. Further complicating the life of a gamer,  some games let you choose various types of Anti Aliasing (such as MSAA or CSAA).

Anti-aliasing makes things look "Better" in simple terms. Let's just say that aliasing is a distortion of the image. Something like this: 

The above picture taken from Wikipedia shows the effects of anti-aliasing on the right. SImply put, it makes things better. In some games it can be a lot more noticeable than others, Raven Shield or Call of Duty for example might benefit from AA a lot better than Sonic the Hedgehog or Pong.

The problem is it is expensive. Imagine, you can make things appear less jagged but you must pay a painter to smooth out the image. Now imagine, not only do you have to do this not only for every Frame Per Second of game play, but also for every pixel on screen. On my computer that is 1,920 x 1,080 = 2,073,600 pixels. Most games need at least 25-35 frames per second to be playable smoothly and 50~60 can be noticeably better.

The artist is using your CPU and GPU (graphics card) to do all this work. Because the screen works with "Pixels", little dots, it can be a hell of a lot of work but hey, it's easier to smooth out your neighbors than using a paint brush.

 

Techniques for doing all this shit have varied with time but in essence, they can vastly change the work load on your computer. One way of thinking it, if you can play a game fine in 800x600 with AA, you might be doing more work than playing it in 3200x2400 without it! This site has a great and simple write up about various techniques. 

In general a little anti aliasing is good but you are not likely to notice turning it all the way up to 16x FSAA, give or take your computer might cry.

FSAA should probably be avoided unless you want to boast about your hardware or publish screen shots that look good.

MSAA is close enough that for how much less work it takes to do, it's worth while. 

CSAA or CFAA are available on most decent graphics cards since 2006, and is worth consideration. Think of it as similar to MSAA in the way MSAA is to FSAA. If you have a fairly dark game like SWAT 4 or Modern Warfare 2, as opposed to a very vibrant and colorful game, CSAA is probably worth it.

If you have a lower end graphics card, try using CSAA. If you can _actually_ tell the difference or just want to flaunt your cash, try MSAA.

In most cases, it is "O.K." to use like 2x or 4x AA in a game now. It's not like the old days when the computers just couldn't handle it so much without better hardware. By the time you reach and exceed like 8x (MS)AA, you are probably not going to notice the difference all that much, seriously. If the difference between 16x MSAA and 8x MSAA is so easily seen on your screen and it bugs you, you probably should get a top end graphics card.

How to tell what you should use? Welp, just try a value like 4x Anti Aliasing and see how it impacts your game. If your computer can't handle it, try tuning it down a bit (2x or off). If you can run it fine, hey, feel free to see if you can go up a notch or two.

A little secret though: no one gives a shit as long as the game looks good and plays good. So as long as you don't turn the setting to high, it's all good.

Thoughts on "Why Devs hate PC Gamers"

Was reading this article today and it basically laments that game developers gate PC gamers because of the piracy. While I can't agree with most of the remarks about DRM, even less so being a programmer. I've written a bit in the past about how I feel about DRM.

What I do generally agree with though, is this persons views on pirates. I don't pirate crap. I don't even mind paying for crap if it's worth having. Most games I can't say are worth the release price, so I don't buy them. Personally, the only distinction that I see between console and PC for piracy is that it is harder for the technically innept masses to steal. As the tech-line blurs and development becomes a bit more related, that's going to change. Just look at the current generation of consoles versus say, the original Nintendo.

Another day closer to BattleTech, another Trillion away from Avatar

My post title sums up exactly what I think of this BBC article on how controlling stuff with thought is going. It really is getting impressive, if abit, unlikely that even our childrens grand children will see much more of it than we already have of cloning. The applications for gaming, may invoke memories of Marty McFly being told his old rails shooter was a "Babies toy" for needing the player to use their hands, or at least for people getting on in years a bit <_<. But in all seriousness, until such tech is literally prevasive as game controlers, it's not going to happen, except maybe for the super rich (JP anyone?). Expanding the capabilities of UAVs and other war machines are probably going to be the only thing to cause sufficent surge in funding for such tech to develop massively; which is sad, IMHO, when letting crippled people walk again is a much better cause. Even more so when given the cost, it's less justisifable of a Big Fraking Budget for research, then improving existing means of remote control. I have no doubt however, that the armies model for the Next Gen solider will likely incorporate that level of being "Plugged" in as well, in all due time. I seriously hope though, that a company called Cyberdyne with a suit named "Hal", is some Japanese geeks idea of good humour, and that Skynet is still brewing somewhere beneath Moutain View, Californa. For those not in the know, in the world of BattleTech, "Mech Warriors" have their physical controls augmented by training their 'mech to react to their brain waves; For those living under a rock, Avatar displays remote-mind-control over a syntehic body (so does Surrogate for those that don't do enough Sci-Fi), and Skynet is software that will eventually become self aware and take over the world when it sees how threatening we are to it's continued existence. Three Laws of Robotics, my hairy humanoid ass!

In addition to being sad, this article reminds me that a part of programming, is you will likely read several implementations of fundimental data structures, and write one or two yourself. If you can't figure out how a data structure works (TM). You probably should NOT be using the darn thing.

+1 for git in my book

Parsing this old blog post by Keith Packard, somehow makes me happy that I opted to follow the Git path rather than the Mercurial (hg) path when I left CVS behind. I also like the trailing comment xD.

That being said, git and hg are the only version control systems I really respect, above tar. Perforce and Darcs, I at least consider worth a closer look someday. Just haven't had any excuse to leave Git on my own projects since the first date.


Yeah, I'm a lazy git alright.

Epic Toast Incident

Kristen Gates' pick for this mornings You Choose The News has to be the best report since sliced bread:

TWITTER HEADQUARTERS EVACUATED OVER BURNED TOAST

Twitter's main office in San Francisco had to be evacuated when an employee's burned toast set off the fire alarm. As expected, some employees talked about the toast incident on Twitter. One employee wrote, "Quick math: 30 min fire alarm, 400 employees ~ $2500 for burnt toast. ooops," while another lamented, "Nothing like a Friday building evacuation in the rain. Damn toast."

Wow, you really can spend $2500 on one piece of toast!

I guess an interview with the creator of C++, is worth a showing of the slashdot effect, especially when it involves C++0x?


What I want to know is when the flubber will every major compile support C++0x tolerably, and will it happen before 2020 rolls around lol.

Now who does this make me think of?

I've been reading a rather worrisome article, talking about a proposal for an Internet treaty. Can't say the same for my fellow netizens, but that is a damn scary idea! Politics and the control of the 'net, should have no association IMHO. One might be able to argue that politics is an essential part of every aspect of our existence, whether we accept it or not, while I think it's more so a crock.

The older I get, the more the good things fade away into the history books.

In reading through Steve Yegge's old blog, I found a statement that perfectly summarises what selecting a programming language for a complex project is like:

So... the best way to compare programming languages is by analogy to cars. Lisp is a whole family of languages, and can be broken down approximately as follows:

• Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.
• Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: "the car that's always in front of you."
• Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.

This succinct yet completely accurate synopsis shows that all Lisps have their attractions, and yet each also has a niche. You can choose a Lisp for the busy person, a Lisp for someone without much time, or a Lisp for the dedicated hobbyist, and you'll find that no matter which one you choose, it's missing the library you need.

Except replace the lisp dialects with every language ever written, and factor in portability issues, and you now know what it's like to be a multi-lingual programmer xD.

Now this is what a *real* web surfers experience looks like: What Firefoxs memory leak feature taught me about life


It also reminds me of an old photo of mine:

Having used Firefox since the 1.0.x days, I've also come to find it one of the single most annoying web browsers ever written. Then again, I am also a weirdo who thinks both Internet Explorer and Mozilla should rot in hell... for crimes against the Internet.

If Vista is a dog, I'm a hairy monkey

I just got finished reading an article involving Steve Ballmer and Vista, and I can't help but find it patronizing lol.Windows Vista was a huge success: for Windows 7!

Microsoft did with Vista, something they *should* have done by XP Service pack 2, if not with XP itself. For eons developers have been doing *nasty* things with Windows, and either through compatibility requirements with 9x, or sheare developer incompetence, there has also been a lot of software that, should we say, is little evolved beyond Win32s or the MS-DOS style. Some of the commercial apps I've seen over the years, I am actually shocked will run under XP, let along Vista and 7—despite everyone's gripes, it's one of the things MS gets right.

Most of the more verbose complaints that I've heard about Vista, are not the OSes fault. More often it falls upon the realm of stupid application developers, flaky software, or stupid users. Microsoft has also been about as smart on handling the conversion of users, from a DOS model to a proper NT model, to a more modern NT model (read modern as in post 1960s), as the government is about spending  <_<. Most of the software issues have ironed out by brute force, there is just no choice, because Windows NT 6.1 (7) is not that far from NT 6.0 (Vista).



Considering that it had to happen eventually, either by a painstaking multi-generation (of users) process of evolution and education, and that the general brain damaged failure of Vista to win users hearts,  is almost the quintessential Microsoft recipe for success: a mixture of bait and switch with the old triple-E.



Windows 7 is not Vista, and it makes sufficient adjustments to make most people happy. After enough time of having to deal with Vista, everything but the stupid users (and bogoware) have largely caught up, plus you have the appeasing impact of Win7, mated to the users already knowing how to 'live' with Vista.



The positive aspects of what Vista has done for 7s success, could not have been more valuable, if Microsoft had planned it before the whole blackcomb/longhorn/vienna thing was even worked out. I wouldn't be surprised if it was planned.

Now this article by Paul Graham was one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Although it might not be obvious to outsiders, it's actually rather tastey for its wit ;).

If you've never understand the American + Snakes thing

well now you know!

And for much similar logic, that some months back when an emblem came to mind, one element of it was a snake wrapped around the Spider and sword/axe.

My thoughts on "Debugger Tips: 8 ways breakpoints can save your next software project"

Debugger Tips: 8 ways breakpoints can save your next software project: "Here are eight fairly simple techniques for using breakpoints and other features of your C/C++ debugger that can give you enormous power and visibility into your program.





"

An interesting article that's worth the reading, for anyone who is ever going to get stuck running a debugger. Personally, I prefer log files and analyzing the code in my brain, but when it's a task you can't cram up there in grey matter, or you need to cuddle up to the run time—a good debugger is your best friend.

Thoughts of 'home'

Now this old article from Joel Spolsky makes me think of what it's like to be here, *and* trying to get work done. Managing computer work flow is simple, at best, just tell everyone to go to hell or sign off the IM. After so many years of being on the Internet, I can usually juggle multiple tabs without any real loss to getting stuff done. Having to get up and respond to an interrupt, and usually being interrupted twice more on the way back to my console on the other hand, is something that occurs so frequently I've almost a spider sense about it...


If I had a penny for every time I've been shafted that way, for lack of being able to escape to a private bunker, I would have enough cash to pay off the national debt!


Experience shows me one fact: I am most productive when I'm camped in front of a laptop, all is quiet in the world, NO interrupts, no morons to wait on hand and foot, nada, not even a music stream. Oh, that and realising the clocks changed from PM to AM, and I'm still coding smoothly xD.

In my ever successful attempt at spending sometime "Resting", rather then just working my ass off in front of a computer, since some how there's still nothing else to work on here >_>, I've been fluttering through some articles, mostly over at the Daily WTF!, as those who use the same 'microblogging' platform I do, would have noticed. I also came across a few interesting finds:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html


Although a tad dated by now, but still interesting hehe.