Al Hoang

Now this idea is really cool. Books being developed Wiki Style. We’ll see how far this one goes. Another useful resource is
WikiPedia which is an Open Content style effort to create an encyclopedia via a Wiki. Now that’s really sharing information.

The phone people came today to install the phone lines. ADSL is in the works and I asked the guys about putting in a line into one of the other rooms where it would be MUCH more convenient to leave the ADSL modem when the ISP folks come however after a very long discussion (most of which I didn’t get and needed some translation help) about this they ended up confusing the hell out of me and everyone else involved about how hooking up a connector upstairs and downstairs would cause problems for either the telephone or the ADSL line.
In the U.S. I’m pretty sure I’d be taking the cluestick to the technician however being the clueless foreigner I shrugged my shoulders and thought “hmm maybe this is how it gets done here?”.
Needless to say I got hit by FUD and ended up wasting a trip by the phone technicians since they ended up not giving correct information and some confusion on my end of things.
I’m so glad that trying to interact with the phone company here is about as confusing as in the U.S. And just to add more insult the extra costs to have them come back JUST to activate the bottom jack will be 3 times today’s cost since today was the ‘firstcomer’s discount’. What a bunch of…

Moral of the story: Don’t trust the phone company

Got this link one from Slashdot. Seems some researchers have been able to refine the electronic paper technology to display moving pictures hence movies are possible. That’s really cool however…
I’ve been waiting some time now for these e-paper ideas to actually hit the street for the consumer. Moving pictures is cool and all but I’m hoping that they can put this technology into the hands of consumer technologists since this is the killer type of user interface I’ve been really looking forward to. There’s lots of exploration in the technologies that we interact with now but I really think display technology has to jump to something like this before mobile computing can really be taken seriously.

I was talking with a friend of mine about classic video games and he brought up E.T. (I date myself by uttering that game) as being one of the ‘worst games ever’. Considering I actually derived some entertainment and PLAYED E.T. and made progress on it I disagreed.


I found one of the most opaque and probably lousy games was the SwordQuest series from Atari. I could not figure out how to do ANYTHING in the game. I mean I ran around and did stuff but progress? Nope. I really liked the comic idea story tied in with the game however the actual game itself really stunk. However, on that note I decided to poke around for the old game and found this site tribute. What a blast from the past. Maybe after a couple of decades I can finally understand how the game was supposed to be played.

I like playing with Squeak every once in awhile and doing a little bit more exploration of what you can do with it. But each time it’s been just light bites. I spend more time reading up on Squeak and tracking down the piles of URLs and papers on the Squeak Mailing List than actually doing any programming.
So I have a pile of passive knowledge on Squeak but very little actual active knowledge in working with Squeak. So I try to fix this a little bit at a time. However I started working through the Programming Morphic Tutorial available on SqueakMap and I ended up struggling on one of the exercises for hours because of lack of practical knowledge in interacting with a SmallTalk/Squeak system.
The example shown was easy. There’s a drawing method that can be overridden to draw specialized displays for objects in Squeak’s Morphic system. The example was showing how to draw a circle in the middle of the Morph. The exercise was to make a square morph look like a cross. “Gee that’s easy” I thought then I started playing around with different methods. However, when it came to figuring out what was available I ended up looking through as much of the system as possible for the right methods and classes to deal with it. However, once I found somethign that was named right I had no friggin’ clue how to actually USE them. Some examples in the Class comments would have been really nice. Or perhaps a Squeak in a Nutshell and Squeak with Examples book nearby.

I’m sure to an experienced SmallTalker they’d solve the problem in a matter of seconds and ask “What’s the problem?”. Too bad I’ve A) Never met an experienced SmallTalker and had the pleasure of Pair Programming with them to understand how they interacted with SmallTalk B) Quick accessible documentation or a clue on how to mine the existing documentation quickly. I gave it my best shot however after hours of exploring other parts of the system and finding lots of neat things I realized I was finding lots of other neat parts of Squeak but never actually getting the exercise done.

I don’t mean to be too annoyed about this. Squeak is an awesome system and the documentation issue is known. It’s just that it seems newcomers must go through this process of floundering around for hours until they finally grok things. (Or they’re lucky and have been taught SmallTalk in a course or by some experts). And it’s always frustrating to spend hours looking for something you know people will say is ‘easy’ but darned if I can find it on my own. (I also know that I’m not the first one to complain about lack of documentation but I guess sometimes you just have to vent).

Neal Stephenson launches a Wiki to explain his new novel Quicksilver. Very cool.

Neal Stephenson + Wiki = Very Cool

Lots of good things have happened since I wrote Making Movies with the iSight, in which I explained how to use QuickTime Broadcaster with Apple’s new webcam. In this article I’ll show you new iSight video tricks and easier ways to make movies than with Broadcaster. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com]

I want an iSight now…

Do you want to control your Mac, or one that you’re responsible for, from a remote location? If you’re running Mac OS X, you can take advantage of a variety of built-in Unix and AppleScript tools to control your computer from afar. Harold Martin shows you how. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com]

This shell script will allow you to turn on or off the system-wide services for all applications. For each application, you can turn all of its services on or off. By disabling unused services, you will have a much less cluttered menu, and maybe faster login (is it faster?). All modifications to the info.plist files in your applications are backed up in your applications. [Studio Log]

Here’s an article on getting Japanese running on FreeBSD. I’m REALLY glad the author took the time to document what he did since I find the process frustrating too. It’s bad enough that the path to UNIX tends to be unfortunately a little obscure. Even worse is when you try to multilingualize it since to start off all the best information will tend to be in the target language.

But the article above explains it in English for English speakers trying to Japanese enable their environment.

This link is classic Greenspun all the way. But it drives a good point home about Java.

“The final third, which seems to be struggling the most, is using Java Server Pages (JSP) with Oracle on Linux.  JSP is fantastically simpler than “J2EE”, which is the recommended-by-Sun way of building applications, but still it seems to be too complex for seniors and graduate students in the MIT computer science program, despite the fact that they all had at least one semester of Java experience in 6.170.”

The title is Do Yourself a Favor and Stop Learning but it rings true about a topic I’d like to relabel as ‘Learn the Right Things’.

I still spend quite a bit of time learning ‘garbage knowledge’. I classify that as knowledge that won’t have a useful impact on my immediate career nor is it solving any of humanity’s problems (although it tends to satisfy my thirst for knowledge). However, one thing I’ve been working on is trying to focus what I spend my very finite amount of time to learn things that are relevant to activities I need to get done (ex. learn enough JavaScript to be able to debug why some web page busted) and also try to keep some time for activities that can span over a longer period of time but have some decent payback. (Really sit down and understand the intrinsics of Network Security and break some stuff on the way to see why X, Y, Z is important)

Needless to say, it’s a hard process and I think it is part of the territory for a knowledge worker. There’s far more knowledge than you can ever absorb in one human lifetime. The best you can do is figure out how to use what is out there that is best for your situation. And pray that something you picked up pans out sometime in the future.

Got this stuff from ArsTechnica more articles on OutSourcing from CIO Magazine.

• Offshore Outsourcing backlash
• Hidden costs of Outsourcing Offshore

Both look interesting and I’m reading through them for the CIO’s view of this although the ‘hidden costs’ article title sounds more like ‘I didn’t do my homework on changing our business processes’ rather than a discovery.

The horrors! Getting booted from a store for whipping out a Tablet PC and fiddling around with it. Gee, if you’re THAT bored waiting for someone why not go outside the store and fiddle with the thing? I like geeking out but I certainly feel like an idiot whipping out a PDA or some hi-tech gadget in the middle of an area where people do not usually bring in hi-tech gadgets. Maybe it’s just me…

I’ve been thinking about this counter-intuitive idea of ‘Genius does not scale’ and came across this story on ‘ArsTechnica” on Who Killed Apple Computer?. It’s a very interesting reflection on the failures of Apple in the early 90s. The view comes from someone who actually worked at Apple from ‘87 to ‘97 which gives it more credence.

One thing I applaud is his admittance of his part in helping Apple’s downfall. However, one theme he brought up is how there were tons of really bright individuals all building wonderful things. Too bad all of them were doing it in their own Ivory Tower. Bleh.

Anyways, this brings me back to my thoughts on the more ‘really smart people’ you gather together the more impossible it is to actually build something. I think there’s another saying. “Everyone wants to be the chef not the busboy”.

On a related note, I keep reading in business rags about how companies are deploring that they have people that aren’t creative/original/with brains/blah blah blah. Well, my thoughts on this are.. if EVERYONE in your company was creative with tons of brains all trying to drive something innovative your company is toast.