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Since I have at least one reader from Sydney – hello, again – this post should be up by midnight, 1st January, 2008 in that time zone. In fact, just to make sure, let’s use Kiritimati‘s timezone – which is a bizarre UTC+14 (did you know a date persists for almost 50 hours?) Happy new year and may your year be not just happy, but prosperous as well.

Or as they would say in India, “Health, wealth and prosperity in the new year”.

Posting should begin normally again tomorrow, 1st January after the break I’ve taken. More tomorrow.

I’m going to take a break until January 1st or so. I need to get some other work done, recollect my thoughts and rewrite the three or so entries which got eaten by a data corruption bug of my making. So I’ll be back then. Until then, some blogs to read picked from my favourites in my Google Reader:

• Applepeels – approx. weekly writings from a former Apple employee.
• Atmaspheric Endeavours – the feed with daily links is as interesting as the writing.
• Ionarts – classical arts review in and around Washington, DC.
• Modern Mechanix – scans and transcriptions of old “futurist” magazines.
• Mobile Opportunity – some of the best analysis of the mobile industry.
• No Impact Man – written by a family which decided to zero their carbon footprint.
• Sepia Mutiny – a very American look at South Asia.
• Symbian Guru – some site difficulties right about now, but otherwise interesting stuff.
• The Old New Thing – a sarcastic and witty old-time Windows code-writer.
• Zero Punctuation – very NSFW weekly gaming review out every Wednesday.

And there are more in my blogroll to the right. Until then, ciao and best wishes for the upcoming year.

Looks like the last two days worth of posts did not publish for some reason. Let me see if I can fix it and have them up. I think there’s something uniquely special about my SQL database that keeps doing this. Gah.

Edit, 4.15PM: It appears two posts have been eaten. So I shall have to retype them. I may have one still offline, though. Very strange.

A few months ago, I went laptop shopping with a friend to a place that rhymes with Worst Guy. As it happened, a few weeks before I went to this retailer, they had been caught showing different prices on their internal and external websites, with the deliberate intent to deceive customers – so think of a conversation as follows:

Customer: I saw it for $80 on your website.
ScumSales Agent: No sir, you must have seen it for $100 and forgotten. See, here’s our website!
Customer: Huh, I could’ve sworn…

Then the customer would buy it, go home, find that the price in the store was too high, but it would be arguing over small percentage and they would feel ridiculous.

Armed with this knowledge, I printed out the list of laptops and off we went. The first store didn’t have the $849 laptop my friend was looking for in stock. The second store had it. I asked the price and was told it was $899.

$899, eh? What about this here printout that shows it as $849?

The following Q&A session followed.

1. The model was different. Then why do they have the same exact model numbers?
2. The in-store model is not part of a bundle offering. What bundle offering, exactly, since its not listed on the printout?
3. The online price was outdated. It changed in the past 45 minutes?
4. Yes, the online price has changed now. Then could you explain why it clearly states the $849 price is still showing on my internet connected tablet?
5. The online price was wrong. Well lucky us you price match the price that’s currently shown.

After this, the guy gave up and “corrected” the price as follows: “Well, I see that you’re upset by this price difference so for no additional cost we’ll give you a one year Product Replacement Plan – a $80 value!”

“The same Product Replacement Plan that we refused earlier because we intend to buy a longer, global warranty from HP?”

This went back and forth until I finally said, “Look – here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to take the laptop and go home. We’re going to call the credit card company and order a chargeback for $50+ tax. In addition to the fact we’ll get the laptop at the price your website offers it at, we’ll also bring you closer to the 1% chargebacks limit that credit card companies allow and you will loose your right to accept credit cards. Or you can price match. Take your pick.”

Suffice to say, my friend got her laptop for $849. But to think what would have happened if I didn’t know. Caveat emptor indeed.

I discovered a place that sells Blu-ray movies for just about the same as regular DVDs here, so I picked up Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (henceforth, “HP5“, because my hand tires of typing the whole spiel again and again) on Blu-ray for the extra $1.10. And since there’s no way I can write a review of HP5 longer than five or six sentences, I am just going to do some combine-the-posts.

For those of you comfortably watching from the sidelines of the Blu-ray versus HD-DVD battle, the technology involved in the two is functionally identical, down to the frequency of the blue laser used at 405nm. Where the difference lies is how deep individual layers of the disc are located from the surface, which is enough to make the two otherwise identical formats the same. There are some other differences too – HD-DVD can store a maximum of 17GB per layer, Blu-ray stores 25GB per layer, and there are some negligible differences in the software side of things. On the manufacturing side of things, apparently HD-DVDs can be built on the same lines as regular DVDs, making them theoretically easier – read: cheaper – to manufacture than Blu-ray discs; I have not yet seen any price differential that suggests this. Mainly, however, the biggest feature they share in common is irritation.

The primary cause of this irritation, of course, is because some studios have chosen HD-DVD, others Blu-ray. Effectively, there seems to be little to no difference in the quality of these discs, with some movies looking better on one format, and others on the other format. I strongly suspect the reason for this is that as yet there have not been any movies that: (a) require anywhere near the disc space of either format; and, (b) there haven’t been any movies that have yet been optimized for either format. So given that it’s hit or miss, the audio and visual quality differences between the two is basically a wash. So much for Blu-ray versus HD-DVD in the pre-recorded media field.

Where I have thought Blu-ray has had an advantage thus far is in the ease of making Blu-ray discs. While I have seen Blu-ray writers available for some considerable time (at least a year), I have yet to see a single HD-DVD writer. Indeed, I find it ironic that one can buy blank HD-DVD Recordable media, but not a drive to use the media in. Neither do either of the formats allow you to make a copy. While theoretically there is a managed copy mechanism present in the HD-DVD specification to allow copies for either device-shifted uses and backups, I have not seen this ever implemented. Both formats have had their respective encryptions broken within a few weeks of their releases, forcing multiple firmware updates, thus illustrating the basic principle yet again: DRM is a hindrance only for legal users and no defence against those determined to break the security of the discs.

The real joy of HD-DVD and Blu-ray is in watching it instead of a regular DVD. More than the video quality – which I feel is only slightly better than that of a regular DVD because of the aforementioned lack of optimization – the “wow” is in the audio. And what a surprise it is. Like video games, for the first time I have a decent sense of audio movement and positioning. It’s hard to describe, but easy to illustrate. For example, in the battle scene inside the Ministry of Magic in HP5, there is a moment when Lord Voldermort sends shards of glass flying towards Dumbledore and Harry. At the last moment this is converted into sand by Dumbledore. With the regular DVD there is no sense that the glass has a different sound from the sand. With the Blu-ray disc, though, you can tell there are two different materials, because the left side is making a whistling noise while the right side is making a shushing sound. That was the truly “wow!” moment for me.

Ultimately, though, I don’t see the need for the discs. I have long been a proponent of getting rid of the discs and moving to an all digital format. Indeed, given a way to store video with all the options offered by DVDs (subtitles, multiple angles, etc.), I would not today have a single DVD around. I seriously doubt that either format will take off in a major way, serving as a niche market for audiophiles and videophiles. Most people are happy with the quality of DVDs and those who want more are usually well connected to the internet and have legal ways to download better quality videos than DVD offers. In countries where broadband connections are not as prevalent, there is also a preference for the cheaper option – which DVD remains compared to the next-generation discs.

I suspect by the time this format war is settled, everyone who wants better than DVD quality video and audio will have access to it through a broadband connection, and those who don’t have such a connection will continue to be satisfied with DVD quality audio and video. In essence, this war will be an expensive footnote on the road of optical media development.

Much clearer, much easier to read, and much less generic. I like this look better. Leave any thoughts in the comments.

I was bored and started looking through my blog stats when I came across some interesting statistics:

• 30% of my regular readers are in the United States.
• 20% are in Canada.
• 15% are in the Philippines.
• 12% are in Russia.
• 10% are in the UK.
• 8% are in India.
• 5% are in Australia.

Australia? I can’t think of anyone I know in Australia who would read my blog regularly. Hello, person people from Sydney who doesn’t don’t just read the one entry that everyone comes here for!

Walking around the house a few days ago, I decided to count how many devices connect to the internet. There are my three laptops, my flatmate’s two (five so far), three consoles (eight), the Chumby, the N80 and the N800 (11) and my flatmate’s Nokia 7370 (a dozen). When my project is done, there will be 13. Plus there is a handful of networking gear – the cable modem, the router and the switch. We are by far more networked than most people, but yet, I find it interesting how many devices do not yet benefit from the network.

Consider one pet peeve of mine going back to the dark ages, before Virtual Asia brought internet to the Philippines: clocks. I’ve always found it the most irritating of things that clocks are out of sync with each other. Whether it’s the blinking VCR, or the slowly dying wall clock battery, or the wrongly set watch or computer time, I find it necessary that all my clocks show the same time (at least, to within a minute or so). It’s not hard these days – there are a half-dozen major network time protocol servers out there, all of which have times within a second or so of each other (possibly excluding the very messed up time.apple.com server). That, plus low power mesh networking, should mean that I should never, ever have to set another clock again in my life. Press a button – and presto, the right time! How easy that would be – yet no one seems to be developing such devices yet.

Another use of networking – keeping track of things. If I walk out of the house and discover I don’t have my, say, tablet with me, I want to be able to ask my phone to locate my N800 tablet. With one sort of networking or another, plus the internet to connect my phone and home network, I should be able to tell that the tablet is either at home or elsewhere. Or I could wonder what game is currently in my Xbox, or what movie is loaded in the DVD player – all questions that are answerable given a network connection. Or I could ask my Chumby to check if my sister is online on Skype and get up to talk to her. What about an iron that turns off if you run out of the house carrying that networked phone.

Finally, ambient devices are things I’d like to see more off, especially if, unlike the first generation of devices, relies on internal networks, rather than outside, access. I would love to have an umbrella that glows to tell me to take it on the way out. What about a jacket that tells you it’s cold and you need to wear it? Or a charger that tells you your music player is low on battery? These things benefit from network access and I for one would love to see more of them.

The usefulness of networks cannot be underestimated, especially when it’s combined with devices that intelligently communicate with each other over networks. The intelligent communication exists at many levels already – I gave the example of the network time protocol as one useful contribution. Location is another. So is ambient information. Warnings and home automation is another major – and rapidly growing – field. So the next time you walk around your place, look to see how many electrical or electronic devices could benefit from network access. It’s remarkable what potential you’re likely to see.

A year is a long time in computing. Ten is almost unimaginable.

That’s why I find it increasingly hard to accept that the current crop of smart phone operating systems are based on a philosophy that’s at least ten years old: smart phones are accessories to a main device, the computer. Thus, despite being more powerful today than the most powerful of computers of a decade ago, they do not benefit from the lessons learnt on the desktop front, and they have primitive, crippled operating system.

Even relatively recent smart phone operating systems – the Symbian/S60 platform dates from 2001, Windows Mobile and the Blackberry OS are of comparable age, the Palm OS is ten-plus years old – have taken a piecemeal feature creep growth pattern instead of bringing a revolutionary and fully functional operating system to the table from the get-go. (Until I see the SDK, the iPhone fails to meet my primary smart phone criteria – smart phones are expandable with native applications.) So gradually, we’ve added the ability to use multiple applications, view the web (mostly) as it was meant to be, and read and write complicated documents on the go. However, all this progress seems to be defined primarily by what it’s not – a truly open and revolutionary, ground-up development that copies the best elements of design we’ve learnt on the desktop and ports it to a mobile platform.

For example, I have yet to see a complete and comprehensive approach to a widgets set. While most application developers take a pragmatic approach and try to make their applications at least somewhat visually resemble the built in applications, it’s jarring to find the menus on the opposite side, or the OK and Cancel buttons in the reverse order. The problem is paradoxically worse because of the general consistency of the built in applications: while I – and most people – are tolerant of applications that do not visually resemble the rest of the UI on a full desktop OS, it’s jarring to see an application that is incorrectly “oriented” on the mobile platform. (Consider, for example, how accepted iTunes is on Windows, or OpenOffice on Mac OS, or Firefox on Linux.) There needs to be a consistent and well-defined set of icons and UI guidelines that should be enforced. At the very least, one should not have the experience of running Safari under Windows – where every dialog button is the wrongly oriented. Where phone manufacturers can help is by developing clearer UI guidelines, sticking to these guidelines themselves, and by promoting these practices amongst developers. Creating ways that applications can break out of such a box in a controlled fashion is also desirable.

Second, most applications on smartphone OSes seem to store data and settings on a per application basis. While I applaud the use of something other than a centralized registry – witness what convolutions were needed to “virtualize” the Windows registry in Vista – that many settings need to be basically set and reset for applications on a per-app (or worse, per-launch) basis is annoying at best, and a detriment to using applications at worst. For example, one setting I have yet to see implemented well on any smartphone OS – Blackberry maybe an exception, since I’ve not used it recently – is connection settings. Both Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60 struggle with the concept of a primary connection and a fall back. I am either forced to set each application’s connection when it starts up or find that the phone is trying to connect to a no-longer available connection. How hard would it be to create a single, universal dialog box in the settings that says “try the home wireless network first, the data network second, and if you can’t find one, prompt the user”? This is basic desktop functionality and has been for the better part of a decade now, and it’s frustrating that phones haven’t learnt from this hard-earned experience, even in their latest iterations

What about global search? As far back as Palm OS 1.x, I remember using a global search function that ran through and found all instances of the phrase in all databases. Yet, this functionality simply does not exist in most modern phones. In Symbian/S60 phones, every application has a per application search. In Windows Mobile, the built-in databases are searchable from the home screen; additions are not. If there is one defining feature of the newer desktop operating systems, it would be the instant search – whether it’s Beagle in Linux, Spotlight in Mac OS X, or the search in Windows Vista. Or – where are the schedulers? I would love to have the ability to run an application at a specific time, without it being loaded perpetually in memory, taking up space that would be better suited to running other, more pressing, software. This is basic functionality that dates back to the beginning of cron, but I have yet to see an easy and effective version available for any smart phone OS.

In using modern day smartphones, it’s hard not to get frustrated with the software limitations on the hardware. This is more true of Windows Mobile than it is of Symbian/S60 or the Blackberry OS, but the latter two can also learn from the experience that has been collected from the desktop world. To a some extent, some ideas – pre-emptive multitasking, highly secure memory, paging – have been ported from the desktop world to the mobile world.

Ten years ago, the inevitable question was – how long can Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola survive against Microsoft, when the vast juggernaut of applications and functionality were on the desktop and not the mobile phone platform? Now the question is more on the lines of – how long can Microsoft and Apple survive against the rising tide of mobile phone usage? The answer to the latter question is determined by the willingness of the mobile phone manufacturers to embrace the open development model that characterizes the desktop OS scene. They will undoubtedly run into issues with network operators when they do so, but given that we are talking about smart phone OSes, not feature phone OSes, it’s likely that technically minded users will go for the features and the open OS and not the phones of the masses. But, the longer that phone manufacturers wait, the more time Microsoft will have to bring its desktop OS experience to bear on the mobile phone arena. Microsoft, after all, is nothing if not persistent, and they can rely on their desktop monopoly long enough for the fruits of their mobile platform development to bear out; other developers – Nokia, Symbian, Palm, RIM, Motorola – cannot.

In developing countries, quite often the mobile phone is the first pipeline to the internet. In parts of Europe and in Japan and South Korea, mobile phones have replaced desktop and laptop computers as the primary connection to the internet. As the next generation of smart phone operating systems are developed, keep in mind that mobile phones are replacing computers as the preferred way of connecting to the internet. In ten years, then, I would predict that the majority of the world will access internet primarily though their phones. If it has taken ten years to reach where we are now, it’s time to begin at least having the philosophical discussions that will culminate in the operating systems that our phones run in 2018 and beyond.

Hence why I’m two days or so late on my posts. In the meantime, I just wanted to say – it’s arrived! It’s arrived!!

This is the Five Disc Complete Collector’s Edition in Blu-ray. I will watch and review it soon. In the meantime, here’s what’s included:

Disc 1: The Final Cut in 1080p.
Disc 2: Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner Documentary.
Disc 3: The 1982 US Theatrical Version, the 1982 International Theatrical Version and the 1992 Director’s Cut.
Disc 4: Enhancement Archive.
Disc 5: The Workprint Version.

I wasn’t a fan of Blade Runner until I read the book in college. Then I began to appreciate it a lot more. Philip K. Dick is a genius.