slaingod

I recently updated to the Droid…on the day it was released (11/06/2009). Lo and behold, Verizon decided it was in my best interest to make my new monthly charges retroactive to the beginning of my monthly pay period, to the tune of an extra $12.

America’s Choice 450 Refund 10/29 - 11/28 -39.99 Nationwide Basic 900 10/29 - 11/28 59.99 Email & Web for SMARTPHONE 10/29 - 11/28 29.99

So I am using a 5 year old piece of crap Samsung flip-phone right now, that cuts out on audio all the time. I basically just use it for text messaging. My previous phone, the Verizon/Audiovox XV6700 was still doing just fine, but the USB connector broke, and though I had done some soldering on it to get it to charge again, that too eventually failed.

So I am looking into getting a new smartphone, but I am having a hard time finding the right one. My primary uses are for reading ebooks, and texting. This means that getting the best display possible and a QWERTY keyboard are high priorities. A screen keyboard might be able to suffice, but isn’t ideal.

So there are 4 major smartphone OS’s that I can look at: Windows Mobile, iPhone, Palm’s webOS, and Google’s Android. I have experience with Windows Mobile, but I am well aware of its limitations, as I have done some development for it. The other 3 are basically on par with each other in that they are modern, being actively innovated and updated, and have better development possibilities.

The real limiting factor for me is that I really want to get an AMOLED display, which is the new hotness, top-of-the-line display technology. Samsung seems to be the major provider for devices using these screens. So right away iPhone and Palm are out, since their phones do not have these displays and other manufacturer’s can’t make them for them. If either of these did have an AMOLED display option, I would grab one immediately.

That leaves Android and Windows Mobile. Android again would be the preferable choice, but to-date their phone designs have been horrendous. New phones are ‘on the way’ but they either lack the AMOLED display, or they lack a keyboard.

The Samsung i7500 looks decent, but is missing the keyboard. And is most likely never going to be released by a US carrier…the bane of all decent cell phones.

Finally there is the rumored Samsung Omnia Pro, which will have AMOLED and QWERTY… but runs Windows Mobile…sigh.

I guess I can just get a hold-over phone sans contract and just wait another year til AMOLED is on the Palm/iPhone. Makes me sad though.

okay, so maybe that was a little dramatic for a title. Along the lines of my discussion of searching for the perfect shopping cart, this is the fruitless culmination of my grand search for a game controller that has a thumbball (i.e. trackball manipulated with your thumb) in the place of the traditional analog right stick. Sadly any mention of this idea on message boards tends to bring out the ‘sky is falling’ people who think that will ruin first-person shooters on the console. To be honest I could care less what they think, as it’s more of an issue of playability for me rather than just trying to get that little extra edge. I have what you would call I guess mild RSS, in that I can’t really use a mouse at all for more than a few minutes at a time without causing tremendous pain to my wrists. I basically worked around this through the years by using various other methods of input. It is pretty amazing that once you step away from the standard mouse concept that there really are a crapton of other options out there, at least for basic computer usage. But there is one glaring exception to this: the inability of any company to bring a game controller with a trackball to the market. The sad part is that, for those of use who care, we would pay almost any price for a solution. I have even looked into building one myself, as I do have some small experience with electronics.

So this is a documentation of my own journey of trying to find an acceptable substitute in this lack of market satisfaction.

so let’s back up. I’m not a huge gamer though I do get obsessed with a game on occasion. And I’ll play through a game from start to finish in a few days time once a month or so. But at the moment I’m really having a hard time finding a usable controller configuration for my needs. A few years ago was a little more into playing first-person shooters I had a game controller called the Panther XL, which combined a trackball and a joystick. It actually worked pretty well, where the trackball was used to manipulate where you are aiming, and the joystick was used for movement and firing. Sadly the Panther XL suffered from poor quality and tended to break frequently. It also really didn’t solve the whole pain problem I was suffering from as you tended to be flexing your wrists to a certain degree to reach the trackball properly. and most computers don’t come with game ports anymore.

Fast forward a few years, and panther XL no longer exists. my initial spelunking came across a site discussing the exact product I’m looking for, along with links to a promising product that fit the bill perfectly along with cool pics, but unfortunately has yet to make it to market, and probably never will. this product was called the paradox or reflex game controller from a company/person called BodieLobus. It seems they were accepting pre-orders for a year but have since returned any monies for the pre-orders.

I came across a number of other products before finding the fragFX controller from a company called Splitfish. they had mockups of another controller called the glideFX, which was also along the same lines except the controller was split into two parts with the trackball being on the right portion of the controller and left analog stick and D. pad being on the left. This product looked promising as well as there were mentions that it would be available over the summer of 2008, but when I contacted them by e-mail recently they said the product was essentially shelved for now.

I still haven’t come up with a final solution yet, but I just purchased a 3D Connexion/Logitech SpaceExplorer (there are special community-provided gaming drivers in the forums) trying to fit part of the bill. I was able to find a deal on it at Dell, for like $190 delivered, and I plan on using it for things other than gaming. Essentially my goal would be to use that in some sort of handheld trackball for a first-person shooter games. At least on a PC. For the console I might be able to use the same setup in combination with an XCM XFPS keyboard/mouse converter for the PS3.

UPDATE: So I got my 3d SpaceExplorer but I also ordered an AlphaGrip iGrip, realizing that I don’t really need an analog left stick for FPS, though it is nice. I also got an XBOX360 when Dell had a $50 off sale for the Pro model ($270 delivered with tax, 2 games, 60GB). The AlphaGrip will be used with PC FPS’ for now, once it comes in, as there are plenty of those, and the AlphaGrip would probably require the XCM XFPS for most PS3 and all XBOX360 games. Will let you know how it works out.

Other links and products you may find interesting if your needs are slightly different from mine:

Zalman FPS FG1000 Mouse

Cheap handheld trackballs

There are some decent ones like those in these pictures that could be useful in combination with a Joystick/keyboard/space explorer or space navigator.

Doing it yourself DIY - Build Your Own Helpful Links:

Touchpad replacement of RIght Analog Stick

Adding a trackball to a ps3 controller

Great Parts place

DIY SIXAXIS Airplane model

BenHeckendon Links:

Put the PS3 guts into an XBOX 360 controller

Completely customizable controller

That’s it for now! I will let you all know how it works out!

I recently purchased a new Samsung LCD for my main workstation. It’s a little smaller than my last, weighing in at 40 inches versus 42 for my old monitor which is now downstairs. The big new thing about this monitor compared other LCDs is that it has LEDs for backlighting rather than the typical florescent tube. This means it runs cooler but more importantly has much better black levels. And I can confirm that they really are pretty awesome. You really do notice it on titles playing and fade in on intros like the Lord of the Rings.

There is one crippling flaw in this TV though: the lack of DPMS, otherwise known as Display Power Management Something, which is what your computer uses to turn off the monitor when it goes to sleep or when your screensaver turns on, etc. That in today’s age a TV that can be connected to a computer does not have this functionality is a travesty. For power savings and environmental concerns alone this should be in every TV/monitor sold today, but the various revisions of the Energy Star requirements continue to let HDTV’s that aren’t marketed as computer capable to slip through the cracks. It is the one horrific blemish on an otherwise stellar monitor.

I did a great deal on it though, only paying $1400 delivered. The new models were coming out but none of the new models delivers LEDs for backlighting at the size that I need. Plus the one great thing that started all this was that my old monitor had a slight but noticeable dark line running down the middle that was driving me batshit.

I recently had to downgrade from x64 to x86 on Vista, to deal with a number of problems, like my scanner not working, Eclipse issues, and just general pain in the ass stuff that always made it just a little more difficult than it needed to be. So I’m giving up 800MB of RAM for my scanner, which I have to hack the drivers for anyway since shamefully HP doesn’t provide drivers for older hardware. Scanner tech simply does not change that much from year to year, and building drivers shouldn’t be that hard if they are competent at all. Spending another 400$ when the Automatic Document Feed scanner I have still works fine is a retarded ‘solution’. Anyway, I am still being annoyed by Vista x86.

So this is my own version of ‘Vista Annoyances’ only without the solutions generally:

• Vista tries to reconnect network drives before the network is connected, which is retarded. It dutifully points out that it can’t reconnect all network drives. And rather than simply connect when it does find the network, I am forced to open up Windows Explorer and click on the disconnected drive to have it reconnect.
• Sleep simply doesn’t work. Oh, it puts my system to sleep alright. Just nothing I do will turn it back on once it is in sleep mode. This probably corrupted my Search Index when I had to hard reboot my system, so I was getting ‘Search Indexer’ had to close error messages every minute or so. Lovely.
• Windows’ continued inability to deal with network folders in Windows Explorer. How many billions of times do their users have to sit there wondering why there folder tree won’t expand while a green bar goes across the top of the screen. Reboot seems to be the only option here… See reconnect bitching.
• UAC: User Access Control. Does it really need to pop up two dialog boxes? One to ask me if I want to acces, the other to actually access? Is there really no way to combine those into a single dialog? Seriously? I know the general mantra is to just disable UAC, but I run pretty fast and loose on my system, with minimal reliance on AntiVirus software, and maximal reliance on questionable software, so I figure a little insurance may be worth the pain. But damn…
• Years and years later, and the Taskbar still cannot do what I tell it to. It won’t remember that I like 2 rows of programs. It won’t rememebr that I use Autohide. It won’t show the Taskbar half the times when I move my mouse to the bottom, I have to prress the Windows button to get it to show. Why in god’s name must the Quick Launch toolbar resize handles make me guess if my icons are going to all be visible when I lock the task bar, or if a few will be in a side menu.
• Dear god enough with the Windows System Tray Notification Area (say that 5 times fast) popup notices! Nothing more annoying than when those things popup and simply don’t go away. Or take FOREVER.
• Just because I like a lot of ‘recent programs’ to show up in my Start menu, why does the stuff on the right side of the start menu also have to move all the way to the top? Wouldn’t it be better to stay closer to the Start button if possible?

More soon…

I know this is sacrilegious, but there is some serious lameness going on in ActiveRecord I’ve dealt with lately. Maybe I’m drawing outside of the Rails lines (going off the tracks?), but ActiveRecord seems to go out of its way to make things a pain in the ass.

AR::Base#sanitize_sql being a ‘protected’ method has always been a burr in people’s sides. This means you can’t call it yourself on your own piece of SQL. Presumably it is done this way so people HAVE to do it the Rails way, whether that means duplicating a bunch of code, or taking a lot more time for a one-off project, etc.

Currently I’m working a report generator for Flex, where the Flex app handles the SQL generation and passes back an XML version of the sql options like:

<query>
    <name>
    </name>
    <sql>
        <select>
            <![CDATA[Date(created_at) as date]]>
        </select>
        <select>
            <![CDATA[count(id) as total]]>
        </select>
        <from>
        </from>
        <conditions>
        </conditions>
        <group>
            <![CDATA[date]]>
        </group>
        <having>
            <![CDATA[date >= :start_date and date <= :end_date]]>
        </having>
    </sql>
</query>      

Now we can argue all day about the best way to do this, but the reality is that only Admin authenticated people are going to see these reports, so the fact that someone could send arbitrary sql against the database is outweighed by the Flex-ibility of being able to dynamically adjust the query values in Flex without having to create a custom server-side method for each report. It is easier in my case to let more readily available/cheaper Flex programmers handle this than more expensive Ruby coders.

Getting this accomplished in Rails led to 5 workarounds in the code:

  def replace_named_bind_variables_no_quotes(statement, bind_vars) #:nodoc:
    statement.gsub!(/:(\w+)/) do
      match = $1.to_sym
      if bind_vars.include?(match)
        bind_vars[match]
      else
        raise ActiveRecord::PreparedStatementInvalid, "missing value for :#{match} in #{statement}"
      end
    end
  end

  def query

    # from_xml puts it in something like { queries => {query => [{name, sql}, {name,sql}....] }}
    queries = Hash.from_xml(params[:queries])['queries']['query']
#     logger.dbg queries.inspect

        # generate the report structure
        report = []
        queries.each { |data|

            query = data['sql']
            logger.dbg query.inspect

            # Now we need to get around a bunch of ActiveRecord lameness....
            # Presumably it is done this way to satisy someone's idea of 'how you should do things'
            # rather than, 'let's help them do it, no matter how they want to get it done'

            # first, AR doesn't do bind variables for anything but conditions...
            replace_named_bind_variables_no_quotes(query['group'], params) if query['group']
            replace_named_bind_variables_no_quotes(query['having'], params) if(query['having'])

            # second, we need to join the select clauses, as :select doesn't accept an array...   
            query['select'] = query['select'].join(', ')

            # third, AR doesn't support a separate HAVING clause, you have to attach it to GROUP BY
            if query['having'] and query['group'] # you always have both...
                query['group'] = query['group'] + " HAVING " + query['having']
                query.delete('having')
            end

            # fourth, we need to intern the keys so that they pass 'inspection' by AR
            interned_query = {}
            query.each { |key, value|
                interned_query[key.intern] = value if(value != nil) # AR doesnt like :conditions => nil either...
            }
            logger.dbg interned_query.inspect

            # fifth, we need to use Creative instead of just ActiveRecord::Base because there is a bug/weirdness in reset_table_name 
            # where it can't find the abstract_class
            report << [data['name'], Creative.find(:all, interned_query)]
        }

    # output the results xml
        str = ''
        xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:target => str, :indent => 1)

        xml.result {
            report.each { |query|
                xml.query {
                    keys = []
                    xml.name query[0]
                    xml.cols {
                        exemplar = query[1].first
                        exemplar.attributes.each { |key, value|
                            xml.col key
                            keys << key
                        }
                    }
                    xml.rows {
                        query[1].each {  |row|
                            xml.r {
                                keys.each { |key|
                                    xml.v row.attributes_before_type_cast[key]
                                }    
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        render :xml => str

  end

Ok, so this post is a little premature, but it just has to be said.  The reason the Windows Mobile (WM) is dying on the vine lies firmly on the shoulders of the .Net Compact Framework( the C# library used for many application ) and the main WIN32 CE  API in general. Now this is a little unfair of a characterization, because Apple has yet to release its SDK for the iPhone, but it is obvious that it is running a real OS.  So many things have been stripped out of the Windows Mobile OS, that it is an effort in frustration to do even the simplest things.  The documentation is a nightmare as well, with everything from the full .Net Framework listed with the Compact stuff, and there are no/few examples. To be fair also, as with all Microsoft products, backwards compatibility is always one of the main skeletons in the closet.  WM has been around for 10 years now, and that legacy, along with the WIN32 legacy in general, has really held it back. But there is also this sense that they said: “This is what we think you should do, so we won’t give you any other way.”

Here is a hit list of issues that I’ve come across:

• There is no Rich Edit control, only a RichInk control.  And for some retarded reason they decided not to support full justification in the RichInk control, so almost no WM apps do either, from PocketWord on.  This means if you want justified text (like for an eBook reader), you have to roll your own.  It would have taken maybe another 100-200 bytes to support it.
• Little transparency support.  Any decent design takes advantage of transparency these days, and I am spending an hour googling trying to figure out why my toolbar buttons look like shit.
• No animation support.  Think Flash here (move button A to X,Y over 1 second and add a drop shadow) .  I imagine that Vista Aero has some better animation now, but WM has none. 
  
• Just plain missing API calls, like OemToChar, and some other Unicode/Wide character support.  I’m trying to compile an unrar DLL for WM and it just isn’t pretty, even though unrar doesn’t use much craziness.
• The WebBrowser control is completely crippled.
• And because it is all closed source you can’t see a damned thing about how it is done. This would solve almost any problem out, there, making the Compact Framework source viewable so you could make your own versions without having to start from scratch. [Updated: I have since discovered that you can look at a lot of the underlying NETCF (and .NET Framework in general) source code using .NET Decompilers like Reflector.
  

I have a C/Win32 API app I need to modify, and I would like to port it to C# but it is turning into a nightmare. And of course I would even consider getting an iPhone once the SDK comes out if they had a Verizon version, but I get no GSM reception in my apartment in NYC. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATED: So I’ve gone ahead and just started from scratch with my project (an eBook reader), in C# NETCF v1.0. I’ve got pagination down within 30 seconds for a 300 page paperback on a mobile device, and it now does full expand/squeeze justification of the text.

So this is a note to all of the uploaders of the world.  Your efforts are much appreciated…but…I do have a few gripes about some of the more annoying and time consuming aspects of poorly uploaded files. All of these fall in the ‘if you spend the 30 seconds to do it, then you will save hundreds or thousands of other people that 30 seconds and the added frustration’ category.

 General

• It is OK to use spaces in file names. No, really.  If you are using an OS that doesn’t handle spaces in the filenames, then you probably aren’t reading this blog. Underscores (_) are NOT spaces.  There was probably some rational against using spaces in file names years and years ago, but that ship has long since sailed.  The ONLY possible issue I could see is if you are using bash or some other shell that escapes spaces with a slash (\).  Or maybe you have a MIRC server script that is older than you are.  There really is no excuse.
• When creating PAR2 repair volumes, do NOT put other crap into the volume set that isn’t part of the final product.  That means, I shouldn’t need to have an SFV, and NFO, a 100mb sample file, or any other garbage besides the RAR files to get my download to repair.

MP3s

• If you are going to go to the trouble of uploading MP3s somewhere, have the decency to put accurate id3 tags in the files. Seriously.  It just wastes a ton of time for a ton of people to have to redo them.
  
• It is a good idea to upload par2 files with your mp3s, so people can fix them.  This mostly means NNTP these days, since p2p does a good job of validating these days.
• If you do upload par2 files, then please name them appropriately…don’t name them .par2.  Because, sadly this seems like a common issue, and you just end up with overwritten par2 files.  Or ‘D.par2’ isn’t really helpful either.
• Rip your stuff at least at 192 VBR.  That’s pretty much the sweet spot for size/quality.  Go higher if you want, but definitely don’t upload stuff at 128 CBR.
• Don’t tag your mp3’s with spaces between the characters. ‘R E D   H O T   C H I L I   P E P P E R S’ is not really helpful.  Maybe it’s a UNICODE thing, but how often do you actually see unicode in id3 tags?
  

Movies

• Along with the spaces thing…File names no longer need to by 8.3. You can use literally hundreds of characters if you want.  ‘tia-ree.iso’ is sooo not helpful. Why not just name it ‘Resident Evil Extinction.iso’ instead?  Then we won’t have to waste time mounting the iso’s and opening our media players just to see what it is. I have no problem with including a group name in the filename, just make the whole thing actually useful.  ‘Resident Evil Extinction.DVD9.TIA.iso’ is fine too.
  
• Do NOT ask me to join some IRC channel just so I can find out what your 5GB upload actually is,  I like the idea of being able to go somewhere and request something, and think it is a handy way to add value to some of the larger USENET groups, but still, just leeching shouldn’t require me to join an IRC channel.
• Don’t release a 9GB HD rip of something.  If your encode went over, then suck it up and reencode it to DVD9 size (which is more like 8GB).  Same with 5GB files and DVDR size.  Maybe in another year or so, when harddrives are 10 cents a GB, that would make less non-sense, but until then, lets stick to the program.
• Don’t have your release NFO files have spaces between everything: ‘h t t p : / / u s . i m d b . c o m / s o m e t h i n g’ just pisses everyone off since the are just going to have to type the name now anyway rather than deal with the spaces.
• This one may just be me, but I actually prefer RAR volume sets that have ‘part001’ in the name, only because it means that the only RAR file you care about, the first one, shows up first in a directory listing, rather than what happens with ‘R01’, etc.
• Learn how to post in USENET so that the files are ordered properly in an alphabetic list!  Starting your post with [001/100] is not acceptable. It just leads to dozens of uploads being ignored. Always put the title of your upload first, like ‘The Bourne Ultimatum.rar [001/100]’ so the files stick together and are easy to select without having to use search filters.
  

TV

• Consistency in naming would be nice. ‘tds’, ’the daily show’, ’the.daily.show’, ’daily_show’: just go with ‘the daily show’ and be done with it.  ‘s01e21`, ‘01x21’, ‘121’: Executive decision here, go with s01e21.  It isn’t any better or worse than the others. but just stick with one.
• Don’t put the episode name into the file name, unless you are releasing an entire season at once, especially on bittorrent.  Everyone’s uTorrent RSS feed regular expressions break if you start throwing stuff other than the show name and episode number in there.

These are all minor things, I know. But like so many ‘little things’ in life they add up. So take this with a grain of salt, but it’s something I needed to say. :)

Ok. so I’m finally getting fed up with the crazy prices for Aveda Anti-Humectant Pomade(AAHP).  It’s not that I can’t afford it, it’s just the principal. It’s the only product I’ve found that tamed my wooly mane, and back when I first started using it, it was $10 a jar for 2.5oz.  Now it is approaching $20 a jar.  One would think that as Aveda has become more popular, that economies of scale would kick in and the price would at least be able to maintain.  In fact, it probably has, but in the standard ‘if it’s expensive it must be better’ mentality surrounding all things beauty, inflating the prices is probably part of the marketing strategy.

In response, I’ve decided to go on a hair product odyssey, trying out everything that drugstore.com has in the pomade/wax section in the $5-6 range.  Since I spend over $100 a year on the AAHP, I’ve got a little leeway to see if I can’t find something else that’s as good. So if you see me having a bad hair day, you know the reason.  If anyone out there in the Intarweb has any thoughts or recommendations, let me know!

Update:

So far, the only product that I’ve found that even comes close is Canu’s Shea Butter, lol.  It’s basically like putting petroleum jelly in your hair.  It does a pretty good job, not quite as good as Aveda, but at a quarter of the price. Though it makes me think of those hair/AstroGlide moments.

I actually found a site that sells raw ingredients for beauty products: The Personal Formulator. They have most of the main ingredients for AAHP, Capric/Caprylic Triglycerides for 12$ for 32oz., Isopropyl Palmitate for 8$ for 32oz., and others.  I’m almost tempted to try my hand at making my own since the price is so nice: $1 for 2.5oz-ish versus $20.  If I get up the nerve and actually try it, I’ll let you know.

So in my dealings with clients and filling out the forms of websites in general, one thing keeps bugging me over and over:  sites that ask for your birthday using drop down list for month/day/year and sites that use drop down for state selection for your address.  There are some basic usuability issues here that really drive me nuts, if the web designers thought about it for more than a minute.

First off, why do you even need to know my birthday to begin with?  I guarantee that 90% of the people just go straight to the drop down list for year, set it to something over 21 and go on their way.  It isn’t like ‘birthday’ is any more legally helpful than simply asking for your age.  Why not just let the user enter ‘35’ for their age and be done with it.  I bet you would find that you end up getting a lot more accurate information out of your users in that situation. Typing two numbers is sooo much easier than dealing with drop down menus. If you want to keep the age up to date, all you need to do is keep track of the date they set their age, and adjust it accordingly when you retrieve it. Barring that, if for some reason you just have to have birthday info, then why not at least provide an easy way for the user to put in ‘4’ for the month, ‘16’ for the day, and ‘1982’ for the year?  Again it is just that much easier to do.

With states, the same thing applies.  I live in New York (NY), but apparently I can’t be trusted to type ‘NY’ for my state (2 keys).  Instead, I have to click the drop down, then scroll through 50+ state abbreviations (if say PR for Puerto Rico, etc. is included), and then click my state.  If I accidentally click the wrong one, I have to do it all over.  Or if I want to use a ‘shortcut’, I have to press N 5 times to get past the other ‘N’ states, and usually I have to go through it a couple of times because I overshoot, since just typing ‘N’ then ‘Y’ as a shortcut doesn’t actually work in most browsers.  The only other thought is that maybe the web developers are using this as some sort of easy data validation, to prevent someone from putting in ‘NX’ or something.  But that is precisely what server-side validation should do for you, not rely on the client to send ‘clean’ input.  Someone could easily call your registration method directly (without using a web form), so you had better implement server-side validation anyway.

Oh well, it is the little things that get to me, when you have to do them over and over and over…