Microsoft's Secret Tablet

Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret Tablet - Microsoft courier tablet - Gizmodo

The video makes it looks pretty cool. I like the ability to use a stylus as well as fingers. Some of the UI ideas look interesting.

via theAppleBlog

The Best Camera

Chase Jarvis Blog: The Best Camera: iPhone App Book Community

Marketing, but well done.

An interesting blend of iPhone app, book, and web site/service.

When Will We Get Computers That Don't Crash?

I just had Mac OS X crash totally, twice in a row. I suspect it was downloading some video podcasts in iTunes that did it (at least that's what's in common to the two crashes).

I can understand applications crashing. But surely to goodness by now we should have operating systems that can handle misbehaving applications. Don't we have hardware process isolation? Do I have to run my applications in VM's just to get sufficient isolation? (not that that is complete protection either!)

Similarly, people continue to give (and accept) misbehaving hardware as an excuse for systems crashing. Again, surely to goodness the operating system could be written to survive misbehaving hardware/drivers. Especially when most hardware interfaces in a standard way through USB. I've crashed my Mac importing photos. People say, "oh yeah, there are problems reading SD cards via USB". Why is that "acceptable"? Surely enough time should have been spent on the USB driver to make it crash proof?

And even if a device driver has obscure bugs (they always will), why is this able to take down the whole operating system?

I don't understand why the state of the art hasn't progressed further than this.

jSuneido Milestone

As of this morning, all the standard library tests run successfully in jSuneido!
(Other than a few that are not portable e.g. because they call Win32 functions.)

In some respects that's a huge milestone. In other respects it's just another arbitrary point in the progress of the project.

I'm pretty sure (I'd bet money on it) that if (when) I run other tests, e.g. the test suite from our accounting package, that I'll uncover more bugs. That's the next step but I'm procrastinating so I can enjoy the feeling of accomplishment a little bit longer.

Hopefully getting the other tests to pass won't take too long. Then I can finally tackle one of the main points of this project - multi-threading. jSuneido is currently multi-threaded but with no protection against threads interfering with each other. So using it multi-user will crash it pretty quickly.

One of the steps is to identify shared data structures and replace/convert them to concurrent versions.

But doing that naively is not going to work well because there will be too many bottlenecks that will end up serializing execution. So it'll be safe, but it won't scale.

So I'm going to have to redesign a few areas but I think I know what to do and it shouldn't be too hard.

Windows 7 on Parallels on Mac

I just installed Windows 7 (Professional 32 bit) on Parallels (4.0.3846) on my iMac (OS X 10.6.1)

The install went smoothly and relatively quickly.

You still can't use Aero (fancy effects like transparency) under Parallels but that doesn't bother me too much.

My first challenge was that I couldn't see the task bar in Coherence mode (mixed Mac and Windows). A quick Google search found other people with the same problem. Eventually I discovered that there is a menu option to show it (Applications > Show Windows Task Bar). I wonder if it wouldn't be better to show it by default and let the people who want to hide it go hunting for the menu option.

My network icon in the taskbar shows a yellow exclamation mark warning, with a tooltip of "No internet access", but I seem to be able to access the internet fine through Internet Explorer and Windows Update worked fine. When I run the troubleshooter it tells me everything is fine and asks what my problem is. I guess I just ignore the warning. Hopefully Parallels will fix this at some point.

Windows 7 has dropped the Quick Launch bar. Instead you can "pin" things to the task bar. Except that I couldn't. I tried dragging and using the right click context menu. No errors or anything, it just didn't work. More Google searching showed other people with the same problem but no clear solution. Someone suggested setting up a new user account. This didn't really make sense, but I tried it and it worked.

I guess the default initial Administrator account doesn't let you pin anything to the task bar. It would be nice if it gave you some kind of message.

If the default initial Administrator account is not a regular account, why doesn't the Windows install process create a regular account for you? Maybe because of installing via Parallels "unattended" method? I'll have to ask someone who has installed Windows 7 on a PC.

One of the few features that the Windows task bar had that the Mac OS X dock didn't was the ability to toggle between showing and hiding windows by clicking on the task bar icon. (A Windows Feature I'd Like on the Mac) Sadly, this feature seems to be gone in Windows 7. (Unless there is a way to enable it somewhere.)

I've been using Vista on Parallels, but I probably would have been better off with XP because it needs less resources. (That's why Netbooks come with XP.) I'm hoping Windows 7 will be less demanding than Vista. (It's supposed to be.)

Apple Updates

It's been a busy couple of days for me with Apple updates.

First, Apple released Snow Leopard (the new version of OS X) ahead of schedule, while I was on holidays. The day after I got back was a holiday but I headed for London Drugs who I knew would still be open. Unfortunately, they were all sold out. The next day I tried a few more places including Neural Net (our local Apple oriented computer store). They were all sold out!

Obviously the demand for Snow Leopard was higher than expected, even though there are no really big new features.

In a way the delay turned out to have a positive side. While I was waiting I decided I might as well get the "Boxed Set" which includes the latest iLife and iWork. I'd been thinking about buying iWork anyway and my Mini had an old version of iLife, so it seemed like a good deal. Even better, Neural Net had the Boxed Set Family Pack in stock :-)

Although there were some people recommending waiting to upgrade in case of problems, most people seemed to say it was ok. I updated my MacBook first and when that went smoothly, went ahead and updated my iMac and Mini. So far I haven't had any problems, but I haven't done too much.

OS X finally includes Java 6 :-) so I wondered if there'd be any glitches with Eclipse and jSuneido, but so far so good.

Coincidentally, iTunes 9 was released yesterday so I updated that on all my machines. iTunes finally has a Wish List :-) I always wondered why they didn't have this. Was it because they wanted people to buy right away? But then why would Amazon have a wish list?

The wish list is somewhat hidden. To add items you use the pull down menu attached to the Buy button. The annoying part about this design choice is that items that only have a Rent button (certain movies) can't be added to your wish list. To actually view the wish list, the only link I could find was at the very bottom of the iTunes home page under "Manage". The help describes a different location - under Quick Links on the right hand side - which seems like a better location. It's almost as if they still aren't sure about the feature so they're making it somewhat hidden.

Another major new feature in iTunes 9 is "Home Sharing" which lets you move your media between your different home computers. This should help me keep my living room Mini's music library up to date with purchases (which I mostly make on my main iMac).

You can only use Home Sharing between computers you have "authorized" for your iTunes account. (You're allowed to authorize up to 5 computers.) Originally authorization was for DRM protected music. Since I refused to buy any DRM protected music I never had to worry about authorization. Now I do. I find I have authorized 4 out of my allowance of 5 computers. At least one of those was a machine I no longer own (my old MacBook). I don't think there's any way to un-authorize a machine after the fact (you have to remember to do it before you get rid of the machine or reinstall the OS) As far as I know, the only solution Apple offers is that you can un-authorize all your machines, allowing you to re-authorize the ones you want. (But you can only do this once a year.)

After some searching I found the setting to automatically copy music purchased on other machines. I turned it on and waited. I knew I had purchased music since I last synced my library. Nothing seemed to be happening. I made sure iTunes was running on both machines. I left it for an hour in case it was a slow background task. Nope. I'm guessing that it only works for music you purchase after turning on this option. I guess it all depends how you interpret "automatic". No big deal, it was easy enough to view my iMac library, sort by date added, shift-select all the new stuff and drag it over. I'll have to wait till I purchase some new music to see if it actually syncs automatically then.

On top of all this, Apple released iPhone OS 3.1. I installed it, but there doesn't appear to be anything too exciting in it.

The other big announcement from Apple yesterday was the new version of the iPod Nano with video camera, microphone, speaker, FM radio, and pedometer (!?). I was surprised that the camera was video only, but according to comments by Steve Jobs, this was due to size/space limitations. The FM radio even has a "pause" feature like DVR's. It was nice to see Steve back up on the stage after all his health problems.

The iPod Touch (I keep wanting to call it the iTouch) is now being targeted as a game machine. I would never have predicted that, but then again, I very rarely play games so I tend to forget what a big market it is.

iPod Shuffle Won't Shuffle

I had an older model iPod Shuffle that I used for running. It started to get flaky and eventually died totally.

So I bought a new model, smaller and sleeker, and more memory.

But ... I listen to podcasts when I'm running, not music, and the new iPod Shuffle won't shuffle podcasts.

Even if it would sort by date I could live with it. But it sorts by source, and I don't want to listen to all the podcasts from one source all in a row.

And although I like the controls on the headphone wire, you have to double click to skip tracks and it is a frustratingly slow process to skip all the podcasts from one source just to get to the next source. Good luck if you want to find a particular podcast.

I started doing some research and I read that you could skip between playlists. Ok, I'll put each podcast source in a playlist and then I can skip through them. Except you can only put music in playlists, not podcasts, despite the fact that they're all just mp3 files.

Ok, I'll just move my podcasts over into my music section so I can put them in playlists. Except you can't. For some reason, iTunes goes to great lengths to prevent this. Even if you remove the file from iTunes and then try to import into the music section, it's too "smart" and puts them back in the podcast section. There are various work-arounds but I don't want to have to do this every time I get new podcasts.

Why stop you from shuffling podcasts? Sure, not everyone will want to shuffle, but that's no different than music. After all, the one and only control on the body of this iPod is whether to shuffle or not!

Why stop you from putting podcasts into playlists? Again, I can't think of any reason for blocking this.

It's probably a similar issue as with the K7 flaw - going overboard in trying to keep people on the correct path, refusing to accept that your (the designer's) idea of the "correct" path isn't necessarily the same as your users.

Judging from all the stuff on the web about this, it obviously annoys a lot of people. Come on Apple - listen to your users!

Pentax K7 Flaw (IMO)

I just traded in my Pentax K10D camera for the new Pentax K7. Overall I'm pretty happy with the upgrade, but there's one thing that really annoys me.

Both the K10D and the K7 have a "Green" mode where everything is automatic and many settings are ignored (forced to safe, default settings).

But in the K7, Green mode now forces saving the images as JPEG - RAW is not allowed.

I shoot in RAW 100% of the time - it gives me a lot more control over the final images, and using Lightroom (or Picasa) it's just as easy to handle RAW as JPEG - there are no extra steps or things to deal with.

This means I can't use Green mode on the K7. It's not the end of the world because "Program" mode can also be used fully automatically. You just have to be remember to put settings back to "normal" after changing them. On the K10D I'd use Program to do something different, but I could just flip back to Green mode without worrying about what settings I'd changed. I'd only have to worry about it when I went to Program mode. Now, staying in Program mode, I'll have to be more careful.

I'm sure Pentax had reasons for doing this, but I think they made the wrong decision. Beginners who can't deal with RAW are going to leave their camera set to JPEG. Anyone who is advanced enough to change their settings to RAW presumably did it deliberately (like me) and doesn't want it overridden by Green mode. Besides, given the cost of this camera, the market is not beginner newbies anyway.

It's a fine line between "protecting" users from shooting themselves in the foot, and being over-protective and stopping them from doing valid things. This time I think they went over the line.

Tethering iPhone to MacBook

It was so nice out today, after a less than stellar summer so far, that I decided to take my laptop and go sit outside somewhere for coffee. The spot I picked (Pacific Gallery & Cafe) doesn't have wireless so it seemed like a good time to figure out how to tether my MacBook (13" unibody) to my iPhone (3Gs) for internet access.

It didn't turn out to be so easy. First you have to enable bluetooth on both devices (I hadn't brought a cable or that might have been an easier approach). Then you pair the devices. This went ok other than a little searching to find the appropriate settings.

But after pairing successfully, you're still not connected. Pulling down the bluetooth menu from the menu bar showed the iPhone but Connect to Network was grayed out (disabled). My network preferences showed a Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network) but it said the "cable" (!?) was disconnected. Not very helpful. In the Bluetooth preferences the tools menu (the "gear" at the bottom) had a Connect to Network that wasn't grayed out, but it also didn't seem to do anything.

If I picked the MacBook on the iPhone the Bluetooth preferences on the MacBook would switch to connected and then immediately switch back to unconnected.

Of course, I googled for the problem. A lot of the results were about how to get around AT&T not allowing tethering. But I was on Rogers (in Canada) and they supposedly do allow tethering.

Apart from the AT&T results, there seemed to be quite a few people with similar problems, but no real consensus on a solution. Some people claimed if you simultaneously hit connect on both the MacBook and the iPhone then it would work. It didn't for me. Some people suggested removing the bluetooth devices from both the MacBook and the iPhone and re-pairing. That didn't seem to help either.

Finally, one person said to restart the MacBook. That worked! I had to laugh because when people ask me about computer problems one of the first things I always suggest is to restart. But I don't expect to have to do that on Mac OS X.

The sad part is that even after I got it working it was too slow to be usable. I couldn't even bring up Gmail because it would time out. Pinging the name server was giving a response time of 4 seconds (4000 ms)! The iPhone was showing 5 bars and a 3G connection, but obviously I wasn't getting a good connection. Browsing on the iPhone was also very slow so it wasn't just the tethering.

I'll have to try it again when I've got a better 3G connection. I'm not sure if it's going to work easily in the future or not. Some of the people reporting problems had it working for a while and then it quit so I'm not totally optimistic. Maybe using a cable will be simpler. I wonder if the dedicated USB cell "modems" work better. (I would hope I'd be able to use my existing data plan?)

New Camera with Projector

Nikon | Imaging Products | COOLPIX S1000pj

I'm not sure it's something I'd use a lot, but having a projector built in to a camera is a cool feature.

Reading the fine print, the projector is only VGA resolution which is not too impressive.

If you were using the camera to record your whiteboard, it might be handy to be able to redisplay it with the projector.

Anatomy of a feature

inessential.com: Anatomy of a feature

Interesting description of all the little details that are behind even the simplest feature, that most non-programmers have no idea of.

via

iPhone Competition

The Zii Egg looks like a pretty cool gadget.

• touch screen
• gps
• vga camera for video conferencing
• hd camera
• wifi and bluetooth
• sd card slot
• hd video output
• runs open source Google Android OS
  

So far it's not a phone, but that's probably coming.

via

Apple nabs 91% of "premium" computer revenue

Apple nabs 91% of "premium" computer revenue in June - Ars Technica

via

The Cathedral and the Pirate

The Cathedral and the Pirate

Microsoft and Windows 7 versus Google and Chrome OS.

Postino

Postino for iPhone - send real postcards with your photos :: AnguriaLab

One of the great things about the iPhone (and iPod Touch) is the diversity of apps. This is a cool one I just encountered. (via)

Java Regular Expression Issue

I'm still grinding away on getting all the standard library tests to succeed on jSuneido.

I just ran into a problem because "^\s*$" doesn't match an empty string!?

Nor does "^$"

Nor does "^" (although just "$" does).

I find if I don't enable multi-line mode, then all of those match, as I'd expect.

Pattern.compile("^").matcher("").find() => true

Pattern.compile("^", MULTILINE).matcher("").find() => false

But I need multi-line mode to make it work the same as cSuneido.

I've tried to find anything in the documentation or on the web to explain this, but haven't had any luck. It doesn't make much sense to me. The documentation says:

By default, the regular expressions ^ and $ ignore line terminators and only match at the beginning and the end, respectively, of the entire input sequence. If MULTILINE mode is activated then ^ matches at the beginning of input and after any line terminator except at the end of input. When in MULTILINE mode $ matches just before a line terminator or the end of the input sequence.

The only thing I can think of is that it's applying "except at the end of input" even when there is no line terminator. I guess it depends whether you parse it as

(matches at the beginning of input) and (after any line terminator except at the end of input)

or

(matches at the beginning of input and after any line terminator) except at the end of input

To me, the first makes more sense, but it appears to be working like the second.

So far I've been able to handle the differences between Suneido regular expressions and Java regular expressions by translating and escaping the expressions. But that's tricky for this problem. I guess I could turn off multi-line mode if the string being matched doesn't have any newlines. Except I'm caching the compiled regular expressions so I'd have to cache two versions. And it also means an extra search of the string on every match. Yuck.

Of course, my other option is to port cSuneido's regular expression code, rather than using Java's. Ugh.

Backwards compatibility is really a pain!

Firefox 3.5 Early Feedback

Firefox 3.5 came out the other day and of course I immediately upgraded. I had been tempted to try the release candidates, but I depend on my browser so much these days that I didn't risk it. Ideally, I'd probably wait until the new version had been out for a while before upgrading.

For the most part, I don't really notice the difference. I don't doubt it's faster, but I haven't really noticed the difference. It seems most people don't notice when something acceptable gets faster, it's when something gets slower that you notice.

One minor annoyance is that when you only have one tab open (and you have the option turned on to still show tabs when there's only one), there is no longer a close button. Probably the thinking was that there is no point in closing the last tab. But I actually used that feature quite a lot when I wanted to keep my browser running, but I wanted to close e.g. Gmail so I wouldn't be distracted.

On the Mac it's not so bad because I can just close the browser window (on OS X this leaves the program running) and then click on the dock to open a fresh window when I need it. But on Windows, if you close the window, you exit the program.

There are workarounds available - obviously other people found this annoying too.

It's good for me to run into this problem from the user perspective. I tend to ignore our customers when they complain about minor "improvements" I've made. I have to try to remember how annoying it can be when you're used to working a certain way and it's taken away from you for no apparent reason.

I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was a little shocked when I ran 3.5 for the first time and it told me about all the add-ons that weren't supported. Luckily, none of them were show-stoppers for me or I would have had to figure out how to go back to the previous version.

It would be nice if the installer could tell you which add-ons were incompatible before it started the install process so you could cancel if necessary. Otherwise it would be a painful process to go through each of your add-ons and try to find out if it runs on the new version.

I guess another option would be to use portable version of Firefox to test add-ons. But even then, you'd be faced with installing them one at a time since there's no way to sync add-ons yet (that I'm aware of). Maybe I need to look at something like Add-on Collections.

One of the add-ons I was surprised wasn't supported on 3.5 yet was Google Gears. Which means I've lost the off-line support in Google mail, calendar, docs, reader, etc. I assume they're working on it.

I've also switched back to Weave to sync Firefox between my multiple computers. I used it for a while before, but switched to Foxmarks because it seemed better. But Foxmarks has turned into Xmarks and doesn't seem to be focusing on synchronization. And Weave has improved a lot. (I originally used Google Browser Sync but that was discontinued.)

One annoyance with these kind of sync tools is that the obvious time to check for changes is when you start the browser. But if you have a master password, then every time you start the browser it asks for your password, which is annoying and also not very good for security.

Gmail Labels

Official Gmail Blog: Labels: drag and drop, hiding, and more

Finally Gmail is improving the label facility. I like the idea of tagging my emails, but previously it was quite awkward when you got too many labels. There was no way to hide labels for old projects or to make commonly used labels more accessible.

I'm guessing they imagined people would have a handful of labels, similar to the handful of built-in ones. But look at any tagging system, like Delicious or Flickr, and you'll see large numbers of different tags, not just a few.

There were workarounds like renaming labels to move them up or down the alphabetical list. Or addons like Gmail folders (which tended to break when Gmail made changes).

The drag and drop is nice, but to me the big improvement will be the ability to hide old labels and to normally only show the frequently used ones.

Google Update

Google Open Source Blog: Google Update, regularly scheduled

It has always seemed ridiculous that so many programs run their updater as a background process, even though they only have to run periodically (e.g. once a day or week). I realize they probably don't use a lot of cpu or memory and they're probably swapped out most of the time, but if nothing else starting them all slows down the boot process.

As a programmer, I can understand the desire to keep control, but these are updaters, not critical operations. The software itself can always check for updates as well.

It's nice to see at least Google switching to running their updater as a scheduled task.

3D Video Stabilization

Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization
via John Nack

I thought the image stabilization in iMovie '09 was cool, but it looks crude next to this stuff.

I wonder how long it'll be till we see this technology in video editing software, or even in cameras themselves.

Too bad you can't do this kind of software image stabilization for still images. But recovering from a fuzzy image is a lot tougher problem. Maybe if the camera shot multiple images (almost like a brief video) then you'd have enough information.