Author: admin

Loft computing

Joe Beda gives us a glimpse of Google’s internal project methodology.

They seem completely dedicated to knowledge reuse. They have only one codebase; everyone pools their programming code in one repository.
Project teams are completely transparent. Project members share information, strategic decisions, resources or even people without the tangles of office politics.

It’s like an open source software foundation, but internalized. It’s fitting that an Internet company works like, well, the Internet.

Loft computing, or completely seamless, barrier-less IT environments could prove beneficial to other companies requiring fast dev turnarounds.

P.S. Google also employs the services of a master chef who once cooked for the Grateful Dead and the Waldorf-Astoria. He apparently knows how to make a gooood southern fried chicken.

Future sound of Toronto

V once told me that good quality audio was like crack for your ears, and colour me a believer. After hearing Juice had snagged up a 4.0 home theatre system, I inquired to V about snagging the basics: two 6.5″ front speakers, a 100W (continuous) subwoofer, and a 5-channel A/V receiver to plug everything into. Everything in black ash, made and designed in Canada.

My speaker...but in black When the padded truck comes for me, my excuse will be this: they had a sale on and I got a great deal, and I simply can’t ignore a good deal, can I? 😉

Last Saturday, V came over to hook everything up. I’ll still have to grab a Toslink cable to enable DTS and Dolby Surround on the PlayStation 2, but the sound changes are already quite apparent just by using the FM tuner on the receiver.

The speakers output sound that is incredibly clear and rich. Even at -50dB, I can make out the words to a song. When watching the news, I can hear the wind wooshing through the reporter’s microphone as he interviews the village idiot on the street.

The subwoofer generates rumbling lows that sound like a passing subway train, not like a tuned Honda Civic with incontinence. My system is in the value segment, and it’s the best sounding thing I’ve ever owned. I sound like an audiophile magazine, but you get the drift.

Oh, and V got the speaker company’s founder to sign the back of one of my speakers. How cool is that!

Some things I’ve learned about setting up home theatre systems:

* The sound industry fudges numbers even more than the video industry. Power ratings on equipment is usually rated PMPO (the wattage that is achieved just as the amplifier explodes) or when the speaker is playing a 1kHz blip. My receiver can push 50W to 4 channels continuously, in normal listening ranges, without distortion.
* The receiver will get hot. It doesn’t like enclosed spaces.
* Speakers can be hooked up with lowly lamp cord, AWG24 wire, or even unravelled strands from CAT 5e cabling.
* Get the cheapest toslink cable you can find. Digital cable is digital cable; it either works or it doesn’t. You don’t need that $200 Monster FX-4000 Ultra Super Great cable.
* To get uncooperative screws into speaker stands, rub their threads beforehand with a little wet soap.

Small vectories

Remember when spaceship shoot’em ups cost $70 and took up an entire cartridge? Now they’re free for the PC, and they work with your gamepad too! (They are also all Japanese made, go figure)
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* Cho Ren Sha 68K Translated as “Ultra Rapid Fire”, you’ll be blasting baddies Raiden-style.

* Warning Forever It’s just you and the “boss”, but what makes this game unique is that the bosses adapt to your attack patterns. For example, if you destroy a boss with close-range frontal assaults, the next boss will feature armour and rotating turrets on its bow.

* Torus Trooper A game of chicken, and a road to ruin. Travel as fast as you dare, while blasting or avoiding enemies.

In the PlayStation2: Katamari Damacy. It was only $26 on Amazon.ca, and what a wacky addictive game it is. Very therapeutic to first be dwarfed by banana peels, and then eventually roll your way to success and crushing oil tankers with your fearsome, trippy katamari ball.

It worked for Magnums and malt liquor

McDonald’s will pay rappers dead presidents if they mention the Big Mac in their, er, “songs”. And, I’m assuming, they don’t sing “Back that ass up.”

The one thing that surprised me was that there is an advertising firm (Maven Strategies) dedicated to getting gangsta thugs to name-drop as they bust rhymes.

I think Micky D’s should pay royalties to Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock for their shout-out in “It Takes Two”. After all, Base eloquently waxes: “I like the Whopper, fuck the Big Mac!”

Another satisfied Microsoft customer!

Last month, I posted on the Neowin Forums that Microsoft was suing David Zamos, an Ohio chemistry student, for selling his two unopened academic version copies of Windows and Office on eBay. He earned $143.50.

To whit:

Microsoft, which reported $38 billion in sales in the past year, alleges that Zamos’ eBay sales amount to unfair competition.

In the company’s suit, its lawyers accuse Zamos of copyright infringement for the eBay sales and contend the sales have “resulted in losses to Microsoft and an illicit gain of profit” to Zamos.

Further, the corporate lawyers said, “Microsoft has suffered… substantial and irreparable damage to its business reputation and good will, as well as losses in an amount not yet ascertained.”

But instead of bending over like a good corporately-owned citizen, Zamos taught himself law and countersued, creating an escalating game of legal chicken.

I’m glad to find out from Network Compendium that Microsoft’s lawyers blinked. IP lawyer Robert Chudakoff, who just a month before threatened to illegally seize Zamos’s sole possession, a Ford Escort, and throw him into bankruptcy, called Zamos and sweetly asked to settle.

Zamos probably won due to the negative publicity. However, there may be another reason; once again, the legality of a software EULA has escaped the scrutiny of the justice system. Most EULAs are lengthy, jargon-filled documents viewable in a tiny dialog box on your screen which you cannot read until you’ve torn open the package and popped in a CD – and MS lawyers had insisted Zamos had broken it when he resold his software, despite the fact he never opened the box.

Another interesting thing of note is that Zamos had initially attempted to return the software to Microsoft, who refused, despite that fact MS’s EULA explicitly allows this. I guess getting a Windows refund still requires going to court (as Linux users discovered in 1999).

I wonder what Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble would say about this.

I was born with beta firmware

When a spider is born, it already knows how to spin a perfect, spiral web. Cats already know how to catch small fast-moving succulent critters, clean themselves vigorously, and act snooty.

It’s called instinct. But why don’t humans have any sophisticated pre-programmed instructions? We’re supposed to be the kings of the jungle! Even a stupid gazelle can walk within minutes of its birth. By its first hour, it’s already begging its parents for a cellphone.

Instead, for the first several years of our lives, we are only capable of extremely low-level tasks, such as complain loudly and pee on ourselves. Which is good if one is pursuing a career in professional sports, but not very useful for much else.

Michael Crichton in the novel Jurassic Park idly proposed that having more complex instincts uploaded into our foetal brains would only make our heads bigger, which would make giving birth more difficult. Which I hear is somewhat painful.

But maybe it’s like embedded electronics vs. full-fledged computing stations. Animals get their survival mojo all hard coded at birth, like CMOS chips. Therefore, they have a short list of preset instincts that can be run from stable, finely-optimized firmware in their heads.

Meanwhile, humans are given a blank slate, like a stick of RAM. We can be flexible with what we stick in our brains, and grow neural pathways to respond to challenges and situations as we encounter them. It means we end up being an illogical, forgetful, belligerent species – just look at politics – but it means we also have a greater capacity to learn. A spider will never learn how to weave a web shaped with the likeness of Andy Warhol, for example. But we can learn to make Campbell’s Soup.

Moral of the story? Don’t stop learning, don’t take it for granted.

Tale of two transits

In Toronto, riding the public transit in 2005 means being hit with yet another 5% fare increase and yet another impending union strike, while enjoying the same miserable service. Keep in mind that this is after the Ontario government gave the TTC several million bucks (I wrote about what the TTC should do with it here).

I can’t help but look up for guidance – or rather, looking toward the north, toward York Region. The York Region Transit services these far-flung affluent suburbs, where it is not uncommon to see Boxsters and Benzos parked outside the local WalMart. Apparently, the YRT has been widely successful with its automated fare machines and clean-smelling buses; the YRT reported its fourth straight year of increased ridership.

And they’re not stopping there. In September, the YRT will unveil VIVA, their express bus rapid transit system. Everything about VIVA will be cutting edge: the VanHool low rider buses will be equipped with bucket seats, GPS systems, and stoplight changing transponders. Bus stops will have lights, automated fare kiosks and LED displays indicating when the next bus will arrive. To increase efficiency further, the buses will run on an honour system.

This dream network, which will cover everything from Aurora to Markham, will cost York Region $11 million this year, but they are confident that it will boost ridership levels by one-third. And that’s not all; YRT plans to replace the bus rapid transit with LRT or subway trains in twenty years.

Maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges here, but it appears one transit authority has its buses in a row, and another doesn’t.