varunnangia.com

From an email I wrote today, names changed to protect the innocent:

So today two important computer related things happened.

First, I think I may have mentioned that a Windows desktop that exists for the sole purpose of being able to let [my flatmate] and I access the corporate VPN and let us telework had died randomly after trying to update some weeks ago. Not sure what happened – it asked to reboot after installing updates … and never came back up. So I booted it up and discovered that there was a built in system recovery feature and allowed it to wipe the drive and start over. It took its sweet while, but it came back up – and the first thing that happened was that the setup wizard crashed. If I had no knowledge of computers, I wouldn’t have known what to do – there was a giant white screen with a frozen “HP” logo. As it happened, I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del, terminated the process and went on my merry way. Which brings me to item the second: crapware. It took eleven reboots, two hung Symantec uninstaller, a hung HP uninstaller, a failed Microsoft “Works” removal tool and 4 hours of my time to get the machine to a state I would consider usable. I’m currently (6 hours into my adventure) trying to install service packs. It turns out that unlike any other operating system in the world, which would allow you to skip installing intermediate service packs and go to the latest release, Windows requires you to download, in order, SP1 (434MB) and SP2 (380MB). I’m waiting for those downloads to complete. If this is anything like the last time I installed SP1, that will mean an hour of my time and two reboots; if this is anything like the last time I installed SP2, that will mean 45 minutes and a reboot (possibly two). After that, I will need to install software to make the computer usable (Office, Office updates, Virus Scanner, Virus Scanner updates, iTunes, Picasa…) All told, I’m looking at maybe another 3 hours or work.

Second, today [my flatmate] bought a MacBook – one of those $800 Microcenter ones. She asked me to set it up. I started at 10.11pm to do so: setup (worked perfectly, by the way) – about 5 minutes; no crapware to remove, and it finished downloading the latest version of Mac OS X, and all the updates in a single go, installed them, rebooted once – about 17 minutes. Office installation took the longest time, because again, to get from Office 12.0.0 (which is what shipped) to Office 12.2.3 (the latest version), it downloaded 12.1.0, 12.2.0, 12.2.1, 12.2.3; time wasted to install Office: about 50 minutes. So it took twice the time to install Office than setting up and updating the computer. And, of course, the whole Mac installation took less than 1.5 hours – versus, six hours and counting on the PC.

In short, if you’re still using Windows, it’s because you value your time at $0. There’s no other explanation for why on EARTH it should take so long to get a computer to a working state. Truly, unbelievable.

Ugh.

The short take away: avoid Windows. Unless your time is worthless.

So two thoughts about iPad:

1. I hate Flash. With a tremendous passion. It is a bug-ridden, resource-hungry abomination that has encouraged bad design to proliferate around the web. That said, if you have a “wicked fast” processor, especially one that isn’t “wasting” cycles on things like managing the overhead of multitasking, there’s no excuse not to have Flash. By all means, leave it off by default – I know, I would – but the choice to not have Flash should be up to the user, not Apple.
2. The more I look at iPhone OS X, the more convinced I am that Apple’s perfect OS in Steve Jobs’ – or whomever is running the OS side of things – mind was System 7. If you’ve never had the … pleasure of running an OS that was not multitasking or multithreaded, you’ve not enjoyed the fun that we System 7 users had; a “favourite” memory that comes to mind is of waiting for minutes or hours for Word or Clarisworks to spool a print job. It was enough to push me to Windows and leave me firmly there until OS X 10.3 “Panther” came out.

In short, let’s say I have a budget of about $1000. I can get for $829 an iPad, with 1GHz ARM processor, 64GB of storage, a 9.7″ screen, a lot of nifty sensors, a 3G radio and the ability to run one task at a time. Or, for $999 – or $799, if you’re shopping at Microcenter these days – I could get a MacBook, with a 2.0GHz dual core x86 processor (remember here the law of x86 inevitability), a 13.3″ screen, 160GB of storage, a beautiful multi-touch trackpad, and the ability to run an absolutely arbitrary number of apps. Oh, and, let’s not forget, I could use Flash on sites where I didn’t have Flashblock running. To me this is a no-brainer: go for the MacBook. You’re trading off a 3G radio*, a bunch of sensors, some amount of portability and some 3 hours of runtime, for a lot more computing power, more storage and the ability to multitask. I’m sure there are people for whom the iPad makes sense. I’m not one of them.

*: Given that WAN is powered by AT&T, it’s highly debatable you actually have a 3G radio. The last conversation I had with an AT&T rep had this choice line from me: “I’ve lived in countries where the annual income is less than what you take home in a week, and they had better networks than you can dream of.”

A lot of people have asked about my Tweet earlier that I had to call the police on an on-duty Metro employee, so I figure it’s just easier to post here.

About two years ago, I found a phone on the Metro, a $400 Treo Pro. I called the number marked “Home” on it, told the very grateful person that I had found it and that I was leaving it with the station manager.

When I tried to turn it in, I made the mistake of mentioning that I had called the person, at which point of time, she told me it was my problem, since I had broken Metro protocol by telling the person I had found the phone. I assume, given my experience before and since with Metro, that makes it harder for some Metro employee to “keep” the phone. Mind you, this was in the first two weeks of the “‘Scuse me, is thaaat your baaag?” announcements.

So I asked her what would be the protocol if I hadn’t mentioned that I had called the person. She accused of us of lying, etc. I had had enough of this BS, so I started to leave the phone on her desk. She picked it up and HURLED at me, striking me on chest. I had had enough. I called the Fairfax County Police, who told me to call Metro Police, the latter being useless scumbags.

Long story short, the woman ran off before the police came – at 6pm for “lunch” – and then when she got back, basically lied through her teeth with the help of her subordinate, making up a bullshit story about my lying to her about calling the person and then claiming that I hadn’t. (Remember, I said, “What would you’ve done had I not said I had called the owner?” – a hypothetical question). Eventually John Catoe showed up along with the line manager for the Orange Line, took the phone, and Metro Police essentially forced me to leave mid-conversation by shoving me out of the station. I took the station manager’s name, filed a complaint in writing, nothing ever came of it, of course. I’ve seen her since at “work” so I assume fully that she was either commended for her “honesty” or she got a free phone out of my efforts.

And of course, they continue to announce that if I see someone leave something behind, I should tell a Metro employee. I don’t any longer. If one day one of those phones is hooked up to a bomb, I hope that they name it after the station manager that taught me never to help Metro make itself safer. Also, that weekend, I got my US driver’s licence. So that I never again have to go on the Metro if I don’t want to.

I was visiting an office colleague today while our highly competent IT team was trying to ascertain just what was wrong with my computer. For the first time, said office colleague’s office mate was there and since work had come to a stand still thanks to my dead computer, I sat down to talk for a while. One comment led to another and I stopped for a second to consider the math of one of the statements. (I believe it was about the carbon capacity of the ocean and I thought about what was the fastest way to measure the liters of water in the ocean).

I remarked that I had to stop to think about this. The office mate said something to the effect of “Wow what a nerd you are” to which I happily told her the story of my college’s unofficial motto: “Where fun comes to die”. Upon which I was asked in disbelief, “Why are you admitting this?”

Why indeed. Consider: I read sci-fi, I play video games, I listen to opera and techno, I can out pun all but one person that I know, I devour knowledge, but most of all, I understand technology in a way few people do. Most people think an internal combustion engine or a computer or why the sky is blue are magic; I know enough to explain the mechanism to someone else. I’m decently good at math and I grok a fair amount of physics, economics and a few other fields to not be so that I am not confused when people far ahead of me try to teach me a thing or two. And I am not afraid to ask questions.

I pride myself for knowing more than most people. And I enjoy verbal swordplay and banter. And I enjoy intellectual discourse. And challenging mental problems. And reading. The pursuit of more knowledge is the single greatest joy of being alive.

So you know what? I am a nerd/dork/geek and proud of it.

If you are too, take the word back. It’s about our quest for information. Not their label for something they don’t understand. Not their label for those of us who revel in the quest for more.

Edit 1: And one more thing – I list the stuff above not because it makes me a genius, but because it tells you a little bit about my quest for knowledge. More information about a lot of things is infinitely preferable to more information about a few things. These are just some of the “nerdy”/”dorky”/”geeky” fields I look for information about – and from there, learn to tell others about. If that makes me a nerd/dork/geek, I am proud to be one.

I was thinking about this on the way back from work today: what’s the end-user cost of (worthless) DRM? And I realized, well, it’s whatever it takes to get around it. So I decided to illustrate this with an example, using our monopoly cable provider and its BS DRM as the inspiration, since I’ve been trying to work this out. Let’s use a simple example. Cox, one of the worst companies on earth, is required by law to carry all local broadcast channels unencrypted over its cable network. They don’t, of course, and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a lot of FCC regulations and at least a couple of laws, but that’s a story for another day. So I want to take a copy of an HD program (House, for example) with me on my iPhone to watch on the train to work. Top Gear is also on at the same time, so I want to record both shows and take them both with me when I go. And for the examples, I’m assuming you’re doing this for a year. Okay. Here’s how it would work in an ideal world.

I plug my iPhone into my DVR, and get a copy of the show automagically transferred over in a beautiful, iPhone-compatible H.264 format. Cost: cable ($50/month) + DVR ($25/month) + BS Cox Charges ($25/month) = $100/month = $1,200 for the year. Of course, that’s not reality. For one thing, Apple locks down transfers to the iPhone more securely than the Treasury does its gold (and I do have a bone to pick with Apple for that). For another, this solution comes free of charge with eternal life, unicorns and world peace. So, the reality is, you’re going to need something to talk to both the DVR and the iPhone. Enter a computer.

Okay, not that much more complicated, because by law, Cox is supposed to provide an unencrypted stream of local broadcast channels out of the DVR to any device that wants it over IEEE1394 (aka “FireWire”). Except, of course, they don’t. They encrypt everything, except the SD versions of Fox, NBC, ABC, PBS and CBS (and possibly Univision). So even though the cost of this is about $1,200 (for the cable + DVR) and $600 (for the computer) = $1,800 for the year, you can’t actually do this.

In fact, to do that simple scenario of recording Top Gear and House at the same time, here’s what I need to do:

I need to get two set top boxes (one per channel), two Hauppauge HD-PVRs (one per channel) to record the unencrypted component data, a beefy encoding machine, a network and my iTunes machine. Total cost? Cable: $1,600. HD-PVRs: $500. Encoding machine: $500. Network: (let’s assume I have this, otherwise) $100. Mac: $600. That tots up to a staggering $3,200, or $3,300 if I don’t have a network for one year. This is beyond my willingness to pay, and beyond most people’s technical skills. Can you imagine if your parents or aunts and uncles asked for a copy of the latest Top Gear and you told them this is what you had to do?

So what do most people do? Well, for a cost of $(amount spent on computer), they do this, because it’s simpler, easier and it just works, thus only causing DRM to harm those legitimate consumers:

And that, in a nutshell, is why DRM sucks.

Yesterday was supposed to be Nokia’s big day. After losing market- and mind-share to nimbler, newer competitors like Apple, Research in Motion and Google, yesterday was supposed to be the launch day for Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to RIM’s AppWorld, Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store, as well as Microsoft’s upcoming Skymarket. All of these essentially boil down to something I’ve been saying for a while, starting with my experience with Maemo 4.0: you can build all the potential into the platform from the get-go, but if you don’t provide end-users with an easy way to access the potential through applications (not packages!), there’s no point in building that potential in. So, I woke up yesterday, eager to try out the Ovi Store and, boy… what a day it was.

For the first 16 or so hours, though, I was sure that the Ovi Store was going to fail just because people would give up on trying to use it. After the first 16 hours, I am sure that it will be a modest success, but only if Nokia steps up and monitors the content far more carefully than they have to date. A chronology of my experience is after the break, but the main takeaways thus far:

1. Nokia needs to monitor its content more. Far too many fraudulent and bogus applications are making it into the list of applications. Nokia’s reputation is suffering and will continue to suffer as long as Nokia does not play a more active role in removing demo applications masquerading as the real thing. (For example, MojosMobile should be banned from ever putting an application on Ovi Store again.) I, for one, will never purchase another application from Ovi Store again, since I have no guarantee of receiving what I expected and there is no way to request a refund.
2. Nokia has done an admirable job of abstracting away the different hardware, screen type and other such issues. I am duly impressed. Some would rather have every single such detail available, but these people are the exception and not the norm, as long as all the applications, whatever the format, end up in the same place, or in a logical place for the application, as appropriate. In fact, the more that this is abstracted away, the better.
3. Nokia needs to tweak the UI some. I can’t think of a single reason that I would want to enter letters and other non-numeric characters in my credit card number or security code fields; entering the date was an exercise in madness. Ditto the discoverability of categories.
4. Launch day means lots of traffic. Nokia should have better planned the launch day of the Ovi Store and brought far more server capacity online than it had.

But so far, I’m modestly impressed – even in its early days, there looks to be a lot of promise. That’s not to say it was all fun and games though; chronology follows after the break, and it’s mostly negative.

Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, my flatmate got herself one those nice little HP Slimline computers. For $340, it was a good deal, and with another $30 out of pocket, and twenty minutes of poking around inside, said computer was rocking twice the memory (with which Vista became usable) and a gigabit Ethernet card (which is sort of mandatory around this house). All in all, she was pleased with it and I was convinced it was a good deal.

Fast forward six months and the computer just sort of blue screens out of the blue for the first time. Convinced that it happened because of a faulty SD card or SD card reader, I toss the card, call it quits. Then it happens again. And again. And again. Which brings us to two weeks ago where the computer wouldn’t even start before blue screening (or, when running in Ubuntu, kernel panicking). All the more odd was that it was every conceivable sort of blue screen – ranging from IRQ errors, to initialization errors, to kernel errors, to the weirdest one of all: an Intel-only error (0x1000007F) that I’ve not seen since the early days of Win2K on a Pentium Pro. The kernel panics were equally weird – but mainly seemed to concern the bus.

I go through the usual culprits (bad RAM, bad PSU are my chief suspects) with no problems, and then out of nowhere it occurs to me that the computer has an Nvidia 6150. And since it was a compact-form factor, it in fact has a Nvidia mobile chip. For those of you lucky enough not to know what that means – basically, just about every NVidia mobile chip manufactured from mid-2007 onwards was not soldered properly and high heat would cause the solder to melt, and the chip to fail. Which, when I reflected on it, made perfect sense: the computer would be doing something computationally demanding, the fan would spin up, and eventually, it would get hot enough for something to affect the Nvidia chip – causing the utterly random blue screen.

Naturally, the motherboard (an Asus GL-6E “Acacia” board) is not covered by HP’s warranty extension for the dying 6150s; that’s only for another bunch of Asus boards. Thus, a little after a year, the computer is quite dead, which really offends me. Or as I put it to my flatmate, “He’s dead, Jim“. And given the weird design of this class of computer’s motherboard (halfway in between a Mini-ITX and a MicroATX), I can’t find an identical replacement* – meaning that the computer is already destined for the garbage heap.

And then they say that we’re getting better at making these things.

*: I can replace the board with a non-HP part – the Zotac GF8200-CE will accommodate (or so I believe) the 65W AMD Brisbane-core processor, the RAM and the hard drive without a fuss. But since Newegg has become really uptight about taking returns**, I can’t even take the $100 chance that I could buy this board and revive the computer.

**: In fact, I’ve basically stopped doing business with Newegg since they became a pain to give money to. Last purchase was in early 2007, and it was an extremely specialty part that couldn’t be gotten anywhere else (RAM for a printer). I fully believe that Newegg has jumped the shark.

So, usually I praise HP’s hardware (their software is a different matter) – it’s proved to be pretty durable and reliable despite my best efforts to ruin said hardware. I’ve really not had any significant trouble that HP warranty coverage hasn’t quite happily fixed or replaced. And indeed, this laptop has had a couple of issues over time, all covered by HP.

Some time ago, though, this laptop of mine developed one of those aggravating problems that’s never covered by warranty – the fan started to rattle. While I’m not an audiophile or one of those people that needs dead silence in order to work, once the fan started rattling like a thirty year old car, I knew it was time to replace it. This is not an easy task on this particular HP laptop – you essentially need to disassemble the entire laptop, right down to the case. However, given experience in replacing Apple iBook LCDs (now there is a pain) I felt up to the challenge and got to work by purchasing the replacement on eBay for $50 less than buying the part from HP directly. In fact, it went off very well – I turned off the computer around 10:04AM and it was back on by 11:17AM, according to the system’s log.

However, in doing so, I discovered one thing that seriously boggles the mind: the reason the fan started rattling in the first place was because the fan was dislocated from it’s usual spot. It was dislocated from said usual spot because usual spot was utterly clogged with dirtballs. Dirtballs that are stuck there because – get this – the air guide is a piece of plastic covered in glue stuck to the direct the air from the fan towards the CPU and the heatsink, as illustrated in a badly befitting cross-section diagram below:

Not only does the ball of crap eventually eat back into the fan so that the fan can’t spin properly (leading to the rattling fan issue), it also prevents badly needed cool air to go over the CPU and heatsink, both of which were a toasty 60C when I opened the computer this morning. I can’t even begin to count the ways that this situation could be avoided – starting with using glue only where necessary, as opposed to covering the entire air guide with glue. However, if HP seriously thinks this is good engineering, then I think it’s time I reconsidered buying HP – this engineering effort would have earned me a fail in fifth grade, and that was a long time ago in Mr. Montoya’s class.

When I go buy things, usually, I don’t go by other people’s testimonials – I go out, find something that meets the criteria I’m looking for, and then go and buy it; the entire transaction is pretty quick. In the last ten years, I’ve bought one or two things because people online say that it’s worth the extra money. That was the case with Zagg – a company that makes “high-end” screen covers. With a bunch of devices from here and there in need of covers and armed with a 50% off coupon, I hopped on over to their website and bought five covers for five devices that needed covers:

• My original Apple iPhone.
• My Blackberry 8830.
• A T-Mobile G1.
• A Nokia 5800.
• A Nokia N78.

They arrived about ten days later in a sturdy box with a cryptic mailing label. Before I opened the box, I spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out what was in the box – lest it be the latest anthrax delivery mechanism. I opened the box to find five battered, bruised, and outright crushed boxes, each containing ShieldSPRAY(TM), an Install Squeege and tucked away behind all the marketing, thin bags containing the MILITARY GRADE (O RLY?) screen covers. Well, normally, at least. Two of the boxes had no squeegees, one had no ShieldSPRAY(TM) and in three of the five boxes, the bags containing the screen protectors had fallen out and were sitting on the bottom of the shipping box. Not a promising start, but I thought, hey, what could go wrong? Much, as I was to learn.

• Apple iPhone cover: this was by far the easiest to install. You sprayed on the ShieldSPRAY(TM), a cleaning surfactant/distilled water combination to remove the grease, and stuck the thing on. Took about a minute. However, after I put it on, I discovered that not only was the touchscreen response significantly diminished, glare had increased. Well, I knew that would happen going in, but I had hoped it would be less pronounced an effect.
• Blackberry 8830 cover: try as I might, I couldn’t get the cover to neatly wrap around the top curve of the properly. Either there was a crinkle on the top, or the cover failed to adhere. It was also nigh impossible to remove the little cut-out for the headset speaker. I ended up pulling out an X-Acto knife and trimming the top and cleanly removing the cut-out. Okay, so these things happen.
• T-Mobile G1 cover: The protector adhered reasonably well, with the exception of the fact that it’s about 2-3mm too long and thus sticks out. Again, note the diminished response and glare issues. There’s also a weird… texture to the material and thus it looks like your screen is underwater.
• Nokia 5800 cover: This is where the disaster really began. It’s clear that Zagg did not just not bother to measure the screen size (or curvature!) correctly, they also didn’t consider the problem caused by trying to give a single piece for the screen; net result: the bottom area, around the buttons, simply doesn’t fit, with giant air bubbles. Part of the problem arises from Zagg’s screen cover material – it’s slightly stretchy, which means that when you follow their directions and attempt to squeeze the bubbles out, you end up stretching the material out. There’s also no appropriate tool provided for these narrow edges, and while installing, you live in perpetual fear of tearing the thing. Hey Zagg, how about measuring the things you’re selling fitted covers for?
• Nokia N78 cover: I don’t have a cover on it. Not because Zagg didn’t ship the item, but because the cover’s adhesive refused to adhere to anything – EXCEPT the tissue you are forced to use to clean off the excess liquid SpraySHIELD(TM) if you follow their directions. I ended up tossing it out after 15 minutes of trying to get the tissue material off the screen.

So, what’s the verdict? Let’s give the Apple iPhone full marks, the 8830 a half mark and the T-Mobile G1 a 3/4. The Nokia covers, both of them, were FAILs. The 5800 cover, I’ll generously give a zero to; the N78, though, is a -1. Total score? 1.25/5. I’d also deduct points for their environmental friendliness if I weren’t in a good mood – I have five four squeegees, five three bottles of ShieldSPRAY(TM) (of which, less than a third of one bottle was used),  and five paperback-book sized crushed boxes. Hey Zagg, if you’re shipping an order all together, send only ONE of the squeegees and ShieldSPRAY(TM) and all the screen covers together, in a CRUSH-RESISTANT box. Had I been shopping around in person and seen the crushed boxes, I would’ve skipped your company all together, figuring you’d rather make a couple of extra bucks than ship a decent product.

Verdict: Zagg – selling premium crap to suckers who shop at Sharper Image since 2005. Avoid.

I sat in on a class with Saskia Sassen for about two weeks in college – and disagreed with on almost every point and finally, got out of the class, since every class ended with me arguing with her. One of her points, though, resonated with me, and is still foremost on my mind: globalization has a profound impact on the people see themselves. I disagreed with her at the time, because I felt that in my experience, people often used their identity to show others how they were unique, and different from the globalized norm.

One of the more interesting things that I’ve noticed this year is the Americanization of the word. By which I mean others beginning to identify their experiences and themselves in terms of American events. This is true, most of all, for India. For example:

• The horrific attacks in Bombay at the end of November were called “India’s September 11″.
• The Satyam accounting scandal is being called “India’s Enron”.
• Watching ski-jumping, a decidedly non-American sport, several of the competitors called Vierschanzen their “Superbowl”.
• In explaining the deadly assault that killed Palestinian women and children seeking refuge in a UN School, an Israeli official called it “unfortunate collateral damage”, which are precisely the words used by an American military spokesman to describe the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.
• One of the more interesting ones I recently heard is “Viet Nam was America’s Afghanistan”, though to be temporally correct, “Afghanistan was the Soviet’s Viet Nam”.

I am not sure why this has happened with increasing frequency lately. Saskia would probably say something having to dumb it down for American media boffins to understand, while Bobby Pape would probably argue it has something to do with explaining to Americans – the main audience for these sorts of things – why it matters. What I am sure about, though, is that in trying to compress these events in to American-centric soundbites, not only are the individual triumphs and tragedies minimized and missed, they also fail to account for the subtleties and nuances that result in vastly different end points from what appears to be a common beginning.

So call the Bombay attacks what they were: an attack on Bombay, not “India’s September 11″. Call the Satyam scandal what it is: a fraud perpetrated on Satyam investors and employees, not “India’s Enron”. It’s bordering on the insulting that the differences, the tragedies, the triumphs and the nuances are all shoveled under the carpet in the name of a soundbite.