But, intriguingly, I’m wondering if I’ll decide to replace my iPod Touch with the “6th Gen” model or not. As this year’s model is literally the same as last year’s, only with White as an option, I don’t know when the official 6th Gen will come out. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a curious habit of buying even numbered Generation iPods (2nd & 4th Gen iPod Nano, 4th Gen iPod Touch). Conveniently they have also been every two years, with increasing capacity matching the rate I would increase my music library, although recently both my music library and the iPod sizes have stalled…

Anyways, all my non-procrastinating time is dedicated to studying for 2 & 3 Unit maths. So…

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

How on Earth are there 4,550 folders in my Documents library alone? Wait, I know how. Automatically created folders by programs such as iTunes and various games. Which probably end up holding a single 4KB file. Each. Anyways, I see I have a big task ahead of myself. Sorting through the hundreds of photos from my phones over the years is going to be a nightmare. Img0001.jpg, Img0002.jpg… Oh, wait, this phone labeled them Img001.jpg… and this phone labelled them 19102008.jpg, 19102008(001).jpg… I hope last modified puts them in a reasonably accurate order.

But enough about boring you with that. I’ll bore you with the thought that all those files did not include my music library. Thankfully though, that is an awful lot more organised (although I would like to eventually go through them and give the files a unified naming convention). And thank goodness for them being more organised, because there’s 7,178 files alone, measuring a massive 26.2GB. And I’m planning on adding more to that… Wait, I guess it’s kinda obvious to be planning to add more to a music library when new music is continually being released that may interest me.

My Pictures library, which I’m sure has some duplicates in it somewhere, has only 1,521 files (1.16GB) which makes me wonder just where on the computer I put the family photos. I suppose they’re still in the public folder… haven’t checked in a while.

Anyway, onto a different topic, I wish my friends and myself, along with every other student doing the HSC, the best of luck with their/our exams next week. I’m really not looking forward to the next 4 weeks. I am however looking forward to the weeks after those, so I suppose I can use the thought of “one last time” to get me through. Although that won’t help with spewing out 4 English essays and a short story, or remembering 2 years worth of Chemistry which I hate being tested on, but find an interesting subject. Or actually remembering what the stupid IEEE Floating Point standard is and how to work it out. Or remembering those maths formulae on the fly. ARGH!!! Uni is going to feel like this as well, isn’t it?

Anyhows,

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

Anyways, as I type away amazingly quickly (in my opinion. I know that the speed I’m typing at on my iPod is about average for the majority of tech savy people. Ha, an average of an average… Btw, I do believe that I’m still typing faster than the slide keyboard users, although I don’t really have anyone to compare to), I also wonder about the future of computing and how it will effect (or affect?? I never remember which is which) me in the future. Just 5 years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined I’d be lying in my new bed (at the time) typing on a 8.9mm (or so) thick Apple device (if I remember correctly, I had only had my first iPod, an iPod Nano 2nd Gen 8GB Silver, for 1 year by then). The idea of a smartphone was a Nokia N85, and I was amazed at the idea of the Nintendo DS (it had a touchscreen!). How things have changed. Core 2 Duo was just announced that year, the idea of a dual core CPU, for the mainstream consumers, being more efficient than the powerhouse 3.8GHz Pentium 4 (which could cook eggs, look it up on YouTube!) when it’s total clock only came up to 3.8GHz (equal, or approx 1.9GHz per core) was like “Woah! Really?!”… And now we’re looking at the next generation of Intel CPUs with their Tri-Gate 3D transistors supposedly bringing greater power and efficiency than ever before, with each of their new CPU generations improving at approximately 20% clock for clock (as in the 2GHz processor from the new Gen was 20% more powerful than the 2GHz from the last Gen) every year, whilst increasing he number of Hz they run at, and even adding more cores and multitasking ability (hyper-threading for Intel).

Or we look at how the mobile computing Market has evolved, the iPhone redefining how we look at the way we use our phones, tablets, and general portable devices (this iPod being an example). Many people believe that we’re entering the Post-PC era, where the PC will be relegated to a more niche Market of power users (e.g. Computing enthusiasts, developers, digital media creators) whilst mobile devices (e.g. tablets and smartphones) linked with cloud computing will take over from where PCs (and by association laptops, netbooks and ultrabooks) used to (and currently still do) dominate. While I can see what they’re getting at, I can still see how the comparative prices and abilities of what laptops and tablets can do allowing PC to still remain dominant for many years. Speaking of PC vs. Mobile, Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) believes that mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad will be he future dominate forms in the ‘Post-PC’ world, whilst Steve Balmer (Microsoft CEO) believes that the iPhone, iPad and similar mobile devices are still PCs, just in a different form factor, and that it is in fact the interface of the PC which is changing with the times. Speaking of that, some people with really weird ideas are saying that they believe that the trend of modern computing is touchscreen all the way, removing the mouse and keyboard. I think these guys must’ve been misquoted, because there’s no way in their right mind people with credible reputation could believe that a physical mouse or keyboard would be removed from heavy mainstream use. They keyboard is obvious as to why it won’t leave, but the mouse, it has so many useful applications it’s going to stay around for a while longer than these people are imagining.

One thing that makes me wonder about the sanity of the future is Microsoft’s approach to application design in Windows 8. For their tablet oriented OS, they plan on having HTML5 as the big development language. I can see what they’re getting at here: they want to use a widely popular, and relatively easy to use language as a programming base. But it was designed for WEBSITES for crying out loud! They’re just encouraging a growing number of people to believe that they’re great with the bastardised version of HTML5 that Microsoft will end up creating for their OS, and hence assume that they’re awesome at HTML in general, and start making websites that only work properly in Internet Explorer 10 (I do hope I’m extremely wrong with this deduction) without bothering to follow web tutorials and learn the differences between ‘programming’ in HTML5 for Windows 8, and writing a Standards compliant website in HTML5. If Microsoft however chooses to not bastardise it, however, that will be amazing (as amazing as the PR genius that said “let’s not get angry at the Kinect-PC hackers, but instead help them be interested in our Xbox peripheral that isn’t selling quite as well as we’d hoped, by releasing a PC SDK”. Ever since that guy had the brainwave to do that, the Kinect has been selling like crazy as people see and make all the amazing ‘hacks’ for it).

Lastly, before I decide to end this post and remind myself once again how nice it would be to have my own computer in my room to type this on, or a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPod Touch, I’d just like to say I laugh at the people that mistakenly believe that HTML5 will replace Flash. As it currently lacks a agreed upon Audio or Video codec, Flash still controls the video playback realm, and is still the only way to provide animation to a page without complex JavaScript scripts (as the canvas element in HTML5, while animateable, requires every frame to be programmed, as opposed to the scripted and computed ability of Flash to create frames on the fly). Until you can easily create things like Flash games without a third party plugin, Flash is staying in power on the web, regardless of how inefficient it is.

Oh well, time to go to sleep. Got my Physics Trial HSC tomorrow morning!!

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

But the one of the major problems I find with Android at the moment (besides not having it) and what some people on different technology sites have mentioned, is the fact that Android isn’t consistent with its deployment. Because it’s open-source, and because companies are able to do whatever they want with it on their phones, you start seeing all these different phones touting Android (2.2, 2.1, and now/soon 3.0), but when you look at them, they all look and feel different. When I see a HTC phone, I don’t see Android 2.x, I see the stupid HTC Sense software they stick on top. When I look at Motorola, I also see their own software on top. Yeah, sure, underneath it still works like an Android, and when you run third-party apps, you don’t notice the difference, but I just don’t feel that I’m looking at the same OS.

The same problem also happened for me with S60 phones. Nokia designed them one way, and every S60 phone I saw (especially the v5 touchscreen ones), it looked consistent, and they appeared to work the same way. But when I looked at the S60 phones by Samsung for example, I thought “well, that’s an interesting homescreen”. However, apart from that, I got the feel when I entered the menu that it was just another S60 phone; I understood what was going on under it. Now, with Android, maybe it’s just my utter lack of experience with them, but I don’t get that feeling (hence why I’d like to get myself an Android phone).

When you look at the iPhone and the iOS, you find it looking and feeling and working the same on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the iPad and to an extent the Apple TV (or whatever it’s called now). That level of consistency is probably Apple’s biggest advantage in that area. You know as a user that it will handle the same across which ever product you choose (in my case an iPod Touch), and as a developer, you obviously have the same hardware and software to work with.

And then there’s the Windows Phone 7. Wow, it’s going to be an interesting phone OS, especially with the deal between Microsoft and Nokia (sometimes I wonder if the ex-Microsoft exec that took up the job of CEO at Nokia was a plan by Microsoft to move them in to Windows Phone). Windows Phone 7, like Andriod kinda does and Symbian^3 did, sets a (reasonably) high standard for the hardware. A capacitive touchscreen which supports at least 4 points of touch at WVGA ‘resolution’ (480 x 800 for portrait), 1GHz ARM 7 processor, a GPU for DirectX9 hardware acceleration (oh my… really?! DirectX on a mobile device… DirectX sounds like it needs to be completely rebuilt, not continually modified), 256MB RAM and 8GB memory (‘secondary storage’ according to the SDD syllabus), accelerometer, compass, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, assisted-GPS (A-GPS), 5MP LED flash camera, FM radio tuner and 6 dedicated physical buttons. And that’s just the minimum hardware specs! But that’ll mean that you get a good baseline for phones, and the OS layout is set, just like in the iOS, so consistant phone interfaces will be present across all the phone models…

But unfortunately, Windows Phone and iOS don’t quite have the power behind them that a ‘free’, open-source system like Android affords to enthusiasts, particularly ones who like to have ‘custom firmware’ like I do. No offense to phone developers, but they do have a track record of designing horrible iterations of software to run on their phones. Just comparing the performance of my Nokia 5800 with the custom firmware from some guy named something like ‘Urputal’ or something, to say one of my friend’s Nokia 5800 with the standard firmware on it, you can see how people modding their OS to get the proper performance and removal of bugs compared to the slow and relatively uninterested attempts by phone manufacturers are going to love the ease and added benefits of doing so with the Android OS.

But apart from all that spiel there, my holidays so far have been not overly eventful. I finally reworked my SDD major work, so that now the quiz works for addition =] It just doesn’t keep a high score or time you, and doesn’t look overly pretty. I need to work on those before it’s due… well, duh. Stupid statement there. Now keeping track of ‘high scores’… that would require learning to write to and create files… too much effort for now maybe.

So, now it’s back to relaxing.

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

The E7, a successor to the Nokia E71 & Nokia E75, is rather similar to the Nokia N8. Whilst it may not have the 12MP camera with Xenon flash, or as many fancy colours or the fancy ‘N’ in front of the number, or ability to use memory cards, it does have a 4″ screen (.5″ larger than the N8), a hefty 8MP Dual-LED flash camera, and a slide-out qwerty keyboard. About the only differences you’ll notice between the two devices besides their names. That and the fact that the E7 is slightly larger & heavier.

But those are both High-end smart-phones. What about the lower end smart-phones (ironically, they’re still high-end phones compared to the truly low-end phones available still)? The C6-01, a Symbian^3 upgrade to the original C6 merely adds a AMOLED multi-touch glass screen, new Symbian^3 features (minus the HDMI-to-TV, USB-on-the-go & compass), a 8MP Dual-LED flash camera and a new shape. Maybe this is what we can expect for the really low end smart-phones of next year?

The Nokia C7 is kinda a mix between the E7 & C6-01. It has plenty of the E7/N8′s features, whilst looking and feeling like the C6-01. It also boasts the 8MP camera, but unlike the C6-01, has 8GB built-in memory & can use a MicroSDHC card (I assume it can also use a MicroSDXC with a firmware update…). If this is a more middle range option, I wonder what the X range would boast with Symbian^3??

I’m interested in all this because I look at the phone market, and see Android with it’s 600%+ growth a year for the last 2 to 3 years, Symbian with it’s 20%+ growth (considering it is 57% of the market, that’s still huge), Apple with it’s glorified iPod Touch pushing boundaries and inspiring a new wave of phones from competitors… I think: Thanks to the iPhone, all this is happening. Now, what new, innovative and useful ideas can the phone industry give me in my new phone in 2 years time?? You say all these wonderful things (Steve Jobs the most. I saw a mock-up picture someone did. 2007: the iPhone. 2009: the iPad. 2011: the iBoard. 2013: the iMat =] That was brilliant), but when will they come to fruit? I know the technology exists for many of these things, I’ve seen the demos, I know Japan has many ideas already running in large-scale, so when can I expect technology to finally make my life easier??

Yeah, I know, it already has. And yeah, the reason many of these wonderful new techs aren’t out there is the cost of setting them up. Like a good capacitive multi-touch screen (say 23″) is something like $3000 at the moment!! Whilst the IR screens are a lot cheaper, they don’t feel as responsive, accurate or as good as a capacitive. And they don’t detect as many touch points, but that’s not as big a issue yet. OLED screens are still expensive & small (well, at least if you want a large colour OLED screen with a blue that doesn’t die out in 6 months). I still have ADSL2+ Internet in a country that boast some of the best tech in the world (then again, all they do is boast, as fairly few places in Australia actually have the good tech such as fast computers, fttp Internet, colour laser printers… I need to get an Australian English dictionary for this… It took me 4 blog posts before I realised that the spell checker was using US spelling…

Anyways, I know wonderful technologies exist, and I want it to be more readily available… Oh and I want my NBN Internet as well… While I’m waiting for it though, I’d like my mum to actually stop talking about getting a new Internet plan and actually shop around for one. She keeps saying when our contracted commitment to Telstra ends, she’ll get a better plan for us ($90 for 25GB is just silly now…). Our contract ended 2 months ago… Maybe I need to remind her more often.

Anyways, I haven’t said this in a while!

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

P.S. If any of you were wondering, I bought my new iPod Touch on Sept. 11. At least I’ll remember which day I bought it really easily.

Anyways, next week is exams, and the new iPods official release today in the US, so I wonder how long before they start turning up in Australia. I’d expect the Apple store in Sydney or Castle Towers to have them first (BTW, the Apple store in Castle Towers was selling the iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano and iPod Touch at discounted prices… I noticed the iPod Touch 32GB (3rd Gen) was priced at $339 (that’s $60 off the RRP. Funny how people only sell the Apple products a few dollars below the RRP, where-as they seem to sell everything else at least 5% lower than the RRP)… I wonder what the catch was =/ Anyhows, I look forward to the new iPod Touch turning up. I want to buy it. I seem to be following a pattern of buying a new iPod every two years at the moment. Except that I don’t plan on replacing my current iPod Nano, just supplementing it with the iPod Touch (iPod Nano for music, iPod Touch for videos & apps!! I just wonder how I’d do the syncing two iPods from the same iTunes. Yes, I’m gonna use iTunes, because I’m not bothered using anything else, and the iPod Touch works best with iTunes). Wow, so many iProducts mentioned there. It’s like Apple never realised the iRevolution fad kinda died out… well, they are brand names, so maybe that explains it.

I just feel annoyed currently at the Communication’s policies of both parties. I say “YAY for NBN!”, but I also say “You have a good point there” to the Liberals. Whilst installing an independent FTTH system for a National Broadband system is most certainly the best idea there is, the cost of it, and the way it’s being managed (by bureaucrats, the 2nd worse type of managers) probably (and most likely) isn’t. $43 billion??? You sure it’s gonna cost us this much?? How much of it was spent on ‘consultancy’?? about 20%? Because that seems to be all Kevin Rudd ever did.

However, the Liberal’s proposal, spending $6.3 billion to ‘encourage’ the private sector to expand, upgrade and install new services, is the most dismal, lazy and stupid idea I’ve ever heard. Especially as they don’t actually have any plans on how to ‘encourage’ the private sector beyond grants as incentives for rolling out something. They want competition to encourage the rollout of faster and better internet in Australia. What competition?? We only have 22 million people. See what we currently have with competition? Now, tell me what I should expect in 8 years time on the Liberal’s plan. I don’t hear Telstra, Optus or any other telco planning on giving my area Cable or Fiber internet in the next 20 years. Bella Vista has cable internet, and they’re only 600m East of where I live!! Kings Langley has cable internet, and they’re only 400m South West!!!! So what makes you think a few incentives to the tune of a few million each will encourage the only two telcos with the size to do any cable laying are going to give me FTTH for my internet, phone, TV and gaming needs??

Yeah, well I’m done on that. I’m getting bored about yelling about it to the internet. Personally, I’d like to see an amalgamation of all the parties to be in power: the best ideas of all of them, with the worst ones thrown out the window. Unfortunately, that in itself is impossible. So, all I can do is keep on dreaming…

On something completely not related to politics, I would like to invent/develop/create/purchase a collapsible, capacitive multi-touch (4+ points of touch), 19″ OLED widescreen. The technology is available, it’s just stupidly expensive, and no vendor would even consider producing it, so it would have to be a custom order/design. The hardest part would be getting the flexible capacitive OLED screen, especially a 19″ one. Never mind building it, or making sure the thing doesn’t break with the slightest shake. I can forsee many problems with my idea besides those above, but I’d still like to have it. Imagine a 2nd screen you can keep in your bag, multi-touch input, low power, compact and portable. I suppose the bulkiest part would be where you keep the ports and where everything folds into.

EDIT: more raging. When the Liberals suggested increasing the use of wireless internet to cover broadband (woah, wait, you want me to pay $100 a month for 4GB a month?! I can get better on ADSL2+ from Telstra, let alone TPG), they were asked what spectrum they were going to use to deploy it on (people doing Physics will remember that the window for wireless technologies is getting smaller and more crowded). Mr Smith (the Liberal) said they could use the old Analogue TV radio spectrum. Immediately, flags start popping up exclaiming that this guy has no idea what he’s talking about (that, and the fact the this policy was only announced at 11am this very same day, and the press conference this debate was at was at 1pm the same day…)… *FACEPALM*

Anyways, I’d done now. Time to get back to studying =]

TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!

So… as I watch Firefox trying to save a draft of this post while my ADSL2+ router says that the DSL signal has been lost and blah blah blah (seemingly awfully cheap 2wire Gateway free from Telstra). Ohk, maybe it’s just the awful phone lines we have in Australia, maybe it’s heaps of people using the same wire for the same thing (wouldn’t surprise me), maybe it’s the router, or maybe it’s just inherent in the technology and the distance I live from the exchange, but does it have to drop the signal so many times a day?? If that wasn’t annoying, the router hijacking your browser and saying “Connection Lost” or “Resolution Successful. Please restart your browser” certainly makes me lose my temper. I feel like (and this is getting violent) getting a sledge hammer and smashing it to pieces because of all the pain it’s caused me and others. I mean, it says to restart the browser so that you can use the DSL connection again, as if the browser was incapable of realising that the connection was temporarily lost, when if the connection is lost, then resolved, and I haddn’t tried loading a page during that process, then nothing pops up!!!! I think the real reason 2wire added that was because they realised that the router, after hijacking that, just loved to keep on hijacking the browser. Instead of fixing the hijacking (or even out right removing it), they decided to tell the user to restart their browser, get them all annoyed, frustrated and later angry (like I’ve sometimes got) at having to restart the browser, waiting for it to close (Firefox can take a surprisingly long time to close, you know. And I don’t mean like the window closing, I mean waiting for the entire process to close. Why does the computer take so long to close a program after closing the window?) and then opening it up again, and waiting for it to load up everything, and then load all the tabs you had open. Waste hours of my life, and everyone else’s life, or just a couple of hours of yours where you remove a bug and make people happy and buy your products again… which is better programmer? Yeah, I’m not buying a 2wire router again if I can avoid it. This Telstra router (probably a bad example to have learnt from) has made me afraid and annoyed of 2wire routers now. Cisco, you look like a good brand, I’m gonna try you next.

Now that I’ve finished ranting about every thing. I just want to say: screw it! I’m not bothering to make this site look the same in all browsers. I’m designing this theme I’m working on for browsers which support nice portions of CSS3. In other words, I’m supporting the better browsers of Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Internet Explorer and Opera can go and try to impress someone else. I can’t be bothered trying to design a site and create countless images for backgrounds to try and make it look like the CSS3 I want, when I can use CSS3 and say ‘stuff Opera and IE’. Although, I’m sure Opera does have CSS3 support for the features I’m going to use, they just don’t seem to render it when I add the CSS for it (even with the vendor extension of -o-… like, when I put -o-border-radius like it supposedly was in 2008, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t render it with obvious ones it won’t use like -khtml-, -webkit-, -moz-, but it doesn’t even work with just plain border-radius)

Anyhows, before I write a massively long post about nothing (oh wait, I just did), I’m gonna finish off with saying that the band comp today was reasonably good. Many people were missing (we only had 4 flutes turn up, and the bass guitarist didn’t show) and so we sounded lacking, but we apparently still managed a bronze, so that was ok. I felt extremely nervous up on stage, and I’m sure I sounded nervous playing, especially my solo. Even after all these years of performing, I still feel extremely nervous. Maybe it comes from me feeling subconsciously under prepared from lack of good, solid practise.

Well, TTFN!! Ta Ta For Now!