I’m talking about integrated circuits. In the case of an external hard drive enclosure, sure, the aesthetics etc. are all very important. But at the core, performance will be derived almost entirely from the single little chip on the PCB that provides the hard drive interface on one side, and the USB/eSATA/FireWire interface on the other. There are many manufacturers of these chips, each with many different versions. Give me the manufacturer and product number, and I can look up all of the information I need, including specific features supported by the chips, quality comparisons, re-programmability, etc. Also, I can compare different enclosures from different manufacturers — if they both use the same chip, I’m going to go with the one that looks better; if they use different chips, how can I know which one is really better?

In particular, it broke my two-finger scrolling. I spent about an hour hunting down help on the internet, learning about SHMConfig and VertTwoFingerScroll, making several configuration file manipulations, and waiting for several reboots. In the end, I found the solution, and it was much simpler than all of that: System->Preferences->Mouse.

You see, I have become so ingrained with the idea of editing configuration files manually that it didn’t even occur to me to look in the preferences dialog! One expects their existing behaviour to remain the same, and all of a sudden changes — what happened? xorg.conf must have been overwritten! Linux proponents like to say that configuration files give the maximum flexibility, and that if you want to try Linux you should be sufficiently comfortable with editing them. However, the overall user experience needs to be kept in check. If you are going to have a configuration file and a GUI dialog, do not make them exclusive — they both have to work, and they need to remain consistent with each other.

I came back about an hour and a half later after playing said hockey to drop off my gear. I was not totally surprised to see the elevators still not working, the emergency lights still on, and the regular lights as well. My computer was still running. While I was in my apartment opening my bag to let it air out, the power went out. Oh well, nothing I can do about it now. I shrugged and went outside to meet Dwyer, who was waiting in his car (again). An interesting note: the main lights in the hall were still working, so it was only my unit or a set of units whose power was out.

After work a bunch of us went out for sushi, after which I arrived back at my apartment at around 8:30pm. I noticed that my super was in his office, which is rather strange for a Friday night, but not really surprising considering the strangeness of the day. The elevators were still not working, however the emergency lights had gone out, while the main lights remained active. I went up to my apartment to find that all was well. I sat down to watch CSI and right in the middle of the episode, the power went out. This was about 9:30pm, and this is when things got kind of funny.

I suppose since the emergency lights had been on all day their batteries were dead — the halls were pitch black; as in, you couldn’t see your fingers an inch from your face. I grabbed my camera and headed outside to snap some shots of an unlikely totally-dark building. Note that it was only my building — all the other buildings and street lights etc. on Bathurst were working fine. I took some shots, I missed a few really cool ones (like walking behind a person in a black hallway who was carrying a candle), and headed back to my apartment. I messed around with taking flash pictures (including some tricks I’ve picked up) for a while, but ultimately around 10:30 (with the power still out) I decided I may as well just go to sleep.

When I woke in the morning I found that the power hadn’t come back on until ~12:30am, so that’s about a 3 hour outage. Whee!

More weirdness

That’s not all, though! The water is freaking me out now. At one point yesterday (I don’t recall exactly when this was), I flushed the toilet and noticed that I did not hear the reservoir refilling. Lo, when I opened wide the cold-water tap in my sink, nothing! The hot water tap was working, but the water was stone cold. My kitchen sink (on the other side of the unit) was working fine. Later, the water began working again. This morning, however, things are curiouser and curiouser — the hot water tap is working fine, and with scalding water, however when you open the cold water tap, you get the merest of dribbles — of hot water! Sure enough, the toilet reservoir is also filling with hot water.

Sigh.. I hope this is all over soon =/

• running the Android operating system,
• doubling as a portable media player to replace my aging iPod 5G,
• be Linux-friendly,
• be pocketable, sexy, and all-around desirable (”geek-cred”), and
• be a performance monster.

When rumours began circulating of Google’s Nexus One smartphone, I thought to myself this is it! Today Google hosted a press conference to detail the phone and announce its immediate release. The phone is everything I never wanted.

Performance

Engadget has a review up of the Nexus One. To say the least, they are unimpressed with the performance delivered by the hyped-up 1 GHz Snapdragon powering it. It certainly doesn’t look faster than the iPhone 3GS, and if you can’t shut the fanbois up, then what is the point?

Sexiness

The Nexus One is a handsome phone. I suggest you check out Engadget’s hands-on gallery for an idea of what the phone actually looks like, especially in comparison to the iPhone. This is almost exactly what the phone looked like when I first saw blurry-cam shots of it a few months ago. Here are the things that I told myself they would absolutely have to change prior to releasing the phone; note that all of these features remain in the retail version.

1. Get rid of the trackball, it is utterly useless when dealing with a fully touch-screen interface.
2. If you absolutely, positively must keep the trackball, don’t increase the phone’s chin to support it! Collapse the trackball and buttons into a single row to save space.
3. Change the colour scheme; this drab brown-grey is tiresome to the eyes.
4. Expand the screen to the edge of the device; large bezels are ugly!

I will grant the Nexus One a few points for thinness (11.5 mm), aspect ratio (more phone-like than the iPhone), and general pocketability.

Other Disappointments

There are some other things that displease me with the current state of release of the Nexus One. First, pinch-to-zoom and other multi-touch gestures are disabled for all pre-installed applications and the core operating system. Although these are available to downloaded apps, it would be nice to have these now-common gestures available in the core of the OS. Second, you cannot put apps onto the uSD card; they are limited to the built-in 512 MiB of flash ROM, which they share with the OS itself. Third, the pricing is still fairly stiff despite being available as an unlocked GSM phone, and does not really seem to directly compete with the iPhone on a dollar for dollar basis.

Lastly and most importantly, the Nexus One is not available in Canada — lolwut? Even if you purchased the phone by proxy, it would only work on our local GSM networks in EDGE mode. Le sigh.

I recently had a brain fart that has resulted in a rather convenient scheme: Gmail! Add the bottom of your inbox you may find a line that reads like

This account is open in 1 other location (123.456.789.012).

As long as you leave your home computer logged into Gmail, then wherever you are, if you need emergency access to your home IP address, you can just look it up in Gmail.

Concerts

Incidentally, I will be attending two Matthew Good shows in the coming months to support the release of Vancouver — November 28th at the K-Rock Centre in Kingston, and December 18th at Massey Hall in Toronto.

Update

It seems some of the folks involved in Matt’s website — notably Dale Mugford, who posted this — are having a little contest give-away, so see attached the contest banners:

Seeing as I don’t see all that many visitors here, I hope that they are not tracking referrals to Matt’s site as part of the contest. See you folks in Kingston and Massey — front row, five centre seats and second-to-last-row, eight off-centre seats respectively.

As you recall, we have two one-dimensional ropes at our disposal that each take one hour to burn. The key thing to note is that if you light both ends of a rope, the two flame fronts will bisect the remaining burn-time of the rope — e.g. for a one-hour burn-time rope, the two flame fronts will meet thirty minutes later. From here it is a short step to realize that if you had lit one end of the other rope at the same time, then it would have thirty minutes of burn-time left once the first rope burns all the way through. At this point, you light the second end of the second rope. The two flame fronts bisect the remaining burn-time, counting out another fifteen minutes.

Alternative solution

Calden’s solution was quite a bit different. He assumed you had something tall — like a tree — to hang the rope from, as well as something heavy — like a rock — to hang from the rope. Suspending the rock from the tree using the rope, he formed a pendulum. Setting the (ideal) pendulum oscillating, he then lit one end of the other rope, counting the number of oscillations of the first rope in one hour. To count out forty-five minutes, he simply let the first rope go for three quarters of the oscillations as were present in one hour.

You are given two one-dimensional ropes. Each rope takes exactly one hour to burn, however the time is not distributed evenly through the ropes (e.g. if you cut one rope in half, one of the halves could burn in 59 minutes while the other half takes only 1 minute). How can you use these two ropes to measure 45 minutes of elapsed time?

You can send your answers to mail@scott.armitage.name, with the subject heading “Puzzle #1″. In about a week or so, I will post the solution to the puzzle, along with credit to those who wrote in. Please provide sufficient detail in your e-mail, and try to avoid resorting to the internet.