iphoting's Sink

Love this song:-

I went to the mothership today and was pretty impressed. Intimidating access controls with undulating terrain to protect its inhabitants.

Also, for the first time in my life, I get to operate a 36" wide colour printer, that prints on rolls of white paper. I mean, these prints would easily cost hundreds and we’re just clicking print as though it is free.

In addition, I was rather impressed with Photoshop CS2’s performance on windows while dealing with 2 GB huge tiffs. Photoshop displayed a responsive progress bar below on all image operations as they tend to take a few minutes for a file that huge.

For those of you curious, the image on average was over 50k inches wide and tall, approximately (but strangely) at 1 pixel per inch. We had to resize it down to usable sizes as they only had 36" wide paper available then.

Oh well, I still love my job. Everyday is a different day.

Andy Matuschak has written a great post on difference between user-friendly software and developer-friendly software.

A typical response to my reasoning goes something along the lines of: “Yeah, but with Beryl, Linux looks even better!”

The thought process is typical of people trying very hard to promote the Windows Mobile operating system.

The computer scientists I talk to just don’t understand that user interface is about how the program acts, not how it looks. And really, I think that’s why there’s so much terrible software out there: these are the people who are building it!

And you’ll keep getting “touchscreen” phones that require a stylus or sharp fingernails. These should be called pokescreen instead.

In five minutes, you’ve got to leave for a doctor’s appointment, but there’s this thing you’ve really got to get done first, and you need iFoo to do it.

Try making a phone call in a rush with a keyboard-less WM phone.

WM might have improved, but the philosophy isn’t realigned yet. They ought to take a good read of the post. There is a reason why the iPhone takes off rapidly.

Some days back, there’s this news article about the passing of someone who was an alumni and hated the organisation. Apparently, there’s this additional piece of information which I cannot confirm reliability nor would the state media publish.

The Last Email from Dr Allan Ooi.

All I can say is to rest in peace.

My experiences with meetings in this organisation has always been nasty. Although the protocol for running a meeting is well established and neat, the participants are annoying. In my honest opinion, many of the people who attend such meetings don’t spare much thought for others and are usually rather inconsiderate.

Despite having a clear agenda, people can still veer off-course and go on rambling on things which are irrelevant, wasting everyone’s time. Take the last one that I’ve endured as an example, the meeting was scheduled to begin at 4.30 pm ended up starting at 5.30 pm thanks to late comers. With no dinner nor night snacks prepared, people can still be distracted by minor matters, wasting everyone’s precious time. A simple 2 hr long discussion finally ended at 10.30 pm, exceeding the stated time by 4 hours.

I have to admit that I haven’t met everyone in this organisation, but from my interaction with people drawing a salary there, it is always negative. More on them in another post.

With the release of iTunes 8.1 by Apple this morning, the little publicised Party Shuffle feature has been rebranded as iTunes DJ with a few new features added. The most significant of which, in my opinion, is the ability for Guests to ‘Request a Song’ via the Remote application on their iPhones or iPod Touches.

I mean, it’s exceptionally useful in a multi-user scenario where the control of iTunes is best done in a wireless and distributed manner. Guests can look through your media library and choose music that they would like to be played next in the special iTunes DJ playlist. If there are multiple Guests, the voting option can be enabled to allow popular suggested music be played first.

If there’s a web-based interface for iTunes remote, it’ll be perfect.

Reading through articles on Space Exploration and Travel have never failed to amaze me. Inventions amount from the Shuttle Transportation System, and the Hubble Space Telescope, to the most impressive, Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity; surely this list isn’t exhaustive but it is just a sample of what USA Space programme can deliver.

Mission transcripts are pretty exciting too, especially that of those where faults and unexpected events have occurred. Apollo 13 was one such mission. The ingenuity of the people planning, operating, and living the mission are simply beyond description. Life-and-death situations with real time-pressing problems are documented to seem like they can be easily solved in just a couple of hours or days.

The amount of detail put into planning is also tremendous. In the Mars Exploration Rovers missions for example, every aspect of the 500 million km journey is thought out and planned, all the way to landing the craft artfully onto the surface of Mars.

Really, this dwarfs all the planning that we employ in everyday life, but it is just as important.

What about those that don’t even plan ahead?

I don’t believe that it is just me, but driving is an extremely mentally exhausting activity, especially along urban town areas where pedestrians and cars are of a plenty. It’s worse when your vehicle employs manual transmission. I have to admit, before I had started driving myself, I always thought that driving a vehicle is simple, not just in looks.

Add in the inching traffic and gentle up-slopes, your legs would be as tired as though you’ve walked up the slope yourself. The amusing ‘proper’ method when starting a vehicle on a slope is to apply the handbrake and maintain half-clutch position. Release the handbrake and your car inches forward (gracefully). The hard part is to repeat this procedure 3 to five times and on the last time, your other free hand is busy turning the steering wheel right and you’re just looking out for incoming vehicles and stray pedestrians.

I have to admit, although it’s tiring, it’s pretty fun.

A 2 hour long driving session at night after a long day at work is enough to knock me out the moment I’ve reached home.