WhistlinDixie

A New Frontier

Back in December 2010, I took the plunge and joined the smartphone revolution. Having a strong distaste for all that is Apple and running my online life through Google, I decided to go Android. The fact that I wanted to create apps for my phone also helped influence my decision as you need to own a Mac to write apps for the iPhone and all I have are Windows machines.

It wasn’t too long before I had a project that I wanted to appify: CyclingTrainerBuddy. This program started its life as an exercise to brush up on my C#/.NET in preparation for an interview for my first post-college job. I intended to port the application to Java, then to Android, in my free time during my second year of grad school. The timetable for my Java port was pushed ahead a little when I needed to submit a code sample for a job as a Java programmer. While I said in my interview that I intended to port the Java version of the program to Android, I have yet to do so more than a year later. My lack of enthusiasm around this is likely due to the fact that I have no practical way to mount my phone to my bike during workouts.

Fast forward to today. I’m a moderately heavy podcast listener and use Google Listen as my podcatcher. Unfortunately, Listen has been all but abandoned by Google while it was still a beta in Google Labs. It has some annoying bugs and what I consider to be a suboptimal interface. In addition, its conversion to support Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) UI paradigms was extremely lazy. This all adds up to an app that, while it is a good starting point, fails to achieve its potential.

While there are other podcatchers on the Market (or is it Play now?), most have no free trial. This gave me all the motivation that I needed to write my first Android app: Yogi. At the moment, it is nothing more than a bulleted list of features that I want to implement, but I hope to make this into something that I can offer on the Market that people will actually use. I plan to detail my journey into Android app development on this blog, so keep your eyes open for new content soon.

Aside: This blog was previously hosted by my former boss, @badger4life. He let me on his hosting free of charge with the condition that I chronicle the neat tech stuff that I run across or do in my spare time. Up to now, I never lived up to my side of the deal, even though I have not shared his hosting for a few years now. Hopefully he’ll find the content to follow interesting.

Crashy Crashy, Not Cool

Starting back on the 18th of May, I started getting frequent crashes of rundll32.dll on my laptop. This corresponded with me updating a bunch of drivers on my laptop. They seemed quite random, but always seemed to happen in response to actions that I made. Today I finally got fed up with it and decided to try to fix it since the last round of Windows Updates from last Tuesday didn’t fix the issue.

I first looked at the Reliability and Performance monitor, only to see that it didn’t give me anywhere near enough information to do anything. (In case you are curious, my index dropped from 6.60 to 2.96 while I had this problem, though I have also experienced a few blue screens while trying to sleep the lappy. Stupid HP drivers.) From there, I decided to Google for the answer, and happened upon a forum posting about a similar problem. At the end of the thread, Comodore mentions that you should run the command sfc /scannow. I was not familiar with this command, so I looked at the help for it and found out that it looks at all of the files that Windows protects and replaces them with the correct Microsoft versions if they are wrong. I went ahead and ran the command (it took about 20 minutes to run). When the command completed running, it reported that it had found issues and had successfully repaired all of them. I took a look at the log file, and it looks like it had to repair a lot of files. To make sure that all bad versions would get out of memory and be replaced by the good version, I rebooted my computer.

So far, I have not received any more of these rundll32 crashes, so it looks like it worked. I’ll keep an eye on it, but it looks like this problem is fixed.

I Hate Lotus Notes

And so do a large number of its users. One user quipped (and I paraphrase) that, of all the people he worked with, only a few disliked Notes; the rest hated it. It is so bad that it has spawned a Notes hate site. It is dedicated to all of those stupidities that Notes exhibits, such as non-standard UI and crappy email and calendar applications.

According to someone with IBM (the makers of Notes), they made the UI different to create an identity so that users would know that they were using Notes. This is stupid reasoning. Users want to use your application. This is nearly impossible when it does not follow any UI paradigms that they have learned from using PCs for their entire life. Nothing acts like you expect, hotkeys are completely different, terminology is misused or made up (WTF is a hotspot?), and basic organization is from another world. I am an experienced computer user and am used to somewhat obtuse UIs (due to being a programmer and user of free open source software), but even I am completely stumped by Notes. I often have to go ask questions of other people who have been with my company for longer than myself, including my floor’s Notes wizard, and even they can’t answer my questions. And these shouldn’t be difficult questions. That is how bad Notes’ UI is.

Not only is the UI bad, but the built-in email and calendar applications are horrible. When I worked with UPS, I got to use Microsoft Outlook (with Exchange running on the back end). While I was not a huge fan of it, I realize now what a blessing it was to have got to use it after being forced to use Notes with my current employer. In the back end, Notes is really just a bunch of funky object-oriented (not relational) databases. This means that the email application is just a bunch of databases (or perhaps just one) that are replicated from the Domino server to your computer. This is not how email works and this leads to counter-intuitive UI for dealing with emails. For example, in Outlook, your Sent Items folder was a folder, just like your inbox. If you wanted to move an email from your Deleted Items folder to your Sent Items folder, you just click and drag. In Notes, this is impossible. Actually, you can’t drag anything to the Sent Items folder. This is because the Sent Items folder is actually a database view: a dynamically generated list of emails. It is not a physical database like the other folders. Database views, by nature, cannot be inserted into since they are nothing more than saved database queries. Of course, you cannot tell this by looking at the UI because the Sent Items folder looks just like every other folder in the email application.

There are many other issues with Notes that I won’t go into. Instead, you should check out the Lotus Notes Sucks site. While the author might be a little too harsh, he is still right on the mark when he concludes 81 times that

The Mistake With IE8

If you have been following the development of IE8, you have most likely heard the debate over whether IE8 should default to super standards mode or to IE7-compatible standards mode. The outcry from the community has led Microsoft to change their stance from being IE7 compatible by default to super standards by default. Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software gives a very good description of what the argument is about and why Microsoft’s current position will most likely end up biting them in the butt.

Slow File Copies On Vista?

Jeff Atwood sheds light on why file copies only seem slower on Windows Vista.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001058.html

So Many Hard Drives, So Little To do

Holy crap, Batman! That’s a lot of hard drives!

Cheap Electronic Whiteboard

Via ExtremeTech

Johnny Lee, a student at Carnegie Mellon University, has devised a way to turn a cheap WiiMote into an electronic whiteboard using a common video projector and some infrared light pens. The best part is that he is releasing the software to do this free of charge.

An interesting thing that I learned from this is that the WiiMote is actually the infrared sensor and the WiiBar is the emitter. In my limited experience with the Wii, I figured that it was the other way around, though it does make more sense to have it be the way it is.

A Rose By Any Other Name…

Last Tuesday, Bob Zitter, the CTO of HBO said in an address at a cable broadcaster’s conference in Las Vegas that the only problem with DRM is its name. He believes that by simply changing the name to something more positive, like Digital Consumer Enablement, will convey to consumers that DRM is a good thing because it will let you do things with content that you could never do before.

The thing that he failed to mention is that DRM is all about restrictions, not enablement. (In fact, the Free Software Foundation even officially defines DRM as Digital Restrictions Management.) Content producers can use DRM to prevent you from doing things that you could normally do, like making a backup copy of a DVD or listening to your music on any computer you like. It is DRM that takes away our fair-use rights to make backup copies of material that we have purchased and that keeps your music library (that you purchased in part through iTunes or some other online service) locked on your computer and prevents you from moving it to another computer without first "de-authorizing" it on your computer so that you can move your license over. Do you see this technology enabling you to do anything?

Zitter mentioned things that this new DCE could enable you to do, like burning television shows to DVD or distributing content in high definition. What he fails to mention is that, in a world without DRM, almost every example that he mentions would be possible to do without breaking any laws, such as the DMCA.

The real kicker is that this DCE that HBO wants to implement would force you to use a digital interconnect between your set top box and your TV, which, at this point in time, leaves HDMI as your only option. Many people still use analog connections, like component, which are also perfectly capable of transmitting high definition video. Currently, HDMI cables carry a price premium over component cables. (On a recent trip to Circuit City to get a new DVD player for my grandma, I noticed that the cheapest HDMI cable that they had in stock was a 3ft cable for $89.99!) In addition, not only does your HDTV need an HDMI connection, but it and your set top box will also need to support HDCP over the HDMI connection, which TVs older than about two years do not support.

In the end, whether you choose to call the technology DRM or DCE, it is still doing the same thing: preventing honest, paying consumers from using content that they have purchased in a way that they want. It still doesn’t stop pirates from making illegal copies because there has yet to be devised a way to distribute encrypted content without having to give the end-users a way to decrypt it. Maybe one of these days the music and movie industries will finally realize how futile their efforts are and how much angst they are causing their customers and stop placing ineffective and flawed copy protection on everything.

Firefox Finally Plays WMV

The Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft has released a plugin that finally makes Firefox consistently play WMV files. The plugin requires Firefox 2.0 and Windows Media Player 11. (Sorry to all of you who refuse to upgrade from WMP 10.)

Prior to this plugin, getting WMV files to play in Firefox was a crapshoot at best. I’ve personally never gotten it to work, even with trying it on multiple computers and on multiple Windows installs on my laptop. I guess some people have, but the success rate was not exactly great. I’m glad to see that MS actually put the effort into making Firefox, the biggest competitor by far to Internet Explorer, work consistently with their video formats.

The Power of Validation

You can now rest easy at night because by entire now validates against XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I had been a bad boy up until now, telling the browser that my page was valid, but in fact not being so. For instance, I was bad and didn’t give any of my images alt attributes so that screen readers could give meaning to the images. Also, I was bad and started ids with numbers instead of alpha characters (a-z and A-Z). Anyway, all of these problems are now fixed and each and every page is valid according to the W3C HTML Validator.