Random thoughts
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Phone line working again
Last Wednesday, my home office phone line all of a sudden stopped working. The telecom provider tried to reset devices along the route to my home to no avail, so they promised that someone would look into the problem and call me back within 48 hours (on my other line, of course).
Time went by, and at Friday night nobody had called, and my phone line still was not working, so I called again. After enjoying some 20 minutes of "All service representatives are currently serving other ..." I spoke to someone who admitted that nothing had been done about my problem, and nothing could be done about my problem as it was now out of hours and technical staff would be back on Monday morning, I would get a call.
You probably guessed the response when I called again Monday morning, the problem ticket was still untouched and we scheduled an appointment for an on-site check this morning. My phone line was still dead and my mood had shifted from annoyed to resigned already. Around 2 a.m. in the morning, just about before going to sleep, for some reason I tried one more time and—my phone line was perfectly fine again! (This is like me feeling much better already when I have an appointment scheduled with a doctor, all the symptoms just go away and I question the need to see the doctor. Electronic devices seem to work the same way.)
The one week phone outage had a positive side effect though: Desperately trying to regain the convenience of a desk phone with a headset and a mute button, I successfully connected my mobile phone to my desk phone via Bluetooth. To my great surprise, this works perfectly fine. I can easily accept mobile calls on my desk phone, and choose between land line and mobile phone for outgoing calls ... nice!
Time went by, and at Friday night nobody had called, and my phone line still was not working, so I called again. After enjoying some 20 minutes of "All service representatives are currently serving other ..." I spoke to someone who admitted that nothing had been done about my problem, and nothing could be done about my problem as it was now out of hours and technical staff would be back on Monday morning, I would get a call.
You probably guessed the response when I called again Monday morning, the problem ticket was still untouched and we scheduled an appointment for an on-site check this morning. My phone line was still dead and my mood had shifted from annoyed to resigned already. Around 2 a.m. in the morning, just about before going to sleep, for some reason I tried one more time and—my phone line was perfectly fine again! (This is like me feeling much better already when I have an appointment scheduled with a doctor, all the symptoms just go away and I question the need to see the doctor. Electronic devices seem to work the same way.)
The one week phone outage had a positive side effect though: Desperately trying to regain the convenience of a desk phone with a headset and a mute button, I successfully connected my mobile phone to my desk phone via Bluetooth. To my great surprise, this works perfectly fine. I can easily accept mobile calls on my desk phone, and choose between land line and mobile phone for outgoing calls ... nice!
Labels: technology
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Nostalgia
After several months of battery problems I finally had my Nikon D80 repaired; late autumn seemed like the perfect time, not much outdoor activity and photo shooting opportunities any more, and we had most family visits in October already and I definitely wanted the camera repaired while still covered by warranty. I recently got my camera back with the electrical system repaired, and so far it has been working nicely again.
Today I picked up some photographs which I had taken with my old Minolta Dynax 7xi SLR on November 1, and what can I say, I was very pleased with the results. Not that the D80 is a bad camera, it is an absolutely fantastic piece of technology, fast and easy to use and absolutely suitable for taking great pictures, but there is something about photography the old-fashioned way too besides the differences in resolution, dynamic range, depth of field, etc.
First, with film you don't end up with dozens of very similar pictures because you only take the one or two that look most promising. There are probably as many good pictures in the gigabytes of digital cruft accumulated on my hard drive, only they are harder to find and who really goes through and cleans out all the not-really-that-great-but-still-acceptable pictures taken digitally?
Second, there is the lack of immediate feedback which helps. Yes, that's right. Admittedly, I did miss the nice bright screen showing me what the picture looks like when I shot on film, so I had to make an effort to get everything right instead of going through several iterations, trying to judge picture quality from an LCD screen.
Third, picking up photographs at the store, flipping through prints which bring back recent memories is a ritual I have become so used to after more than two decades of doing it that I do miss it.
(If you want to know more about the technical aspects, Ken Rockwell has written a great article Film vs. Digital explaining pros and cons, with some eye-opening crops of analog and digital photos. Norman Koren has even more technical details in Digital cameras vs. film although the Website has not been updated in years.)
Back in 1998 John Patrick, then IBM's Vice President, Internet technologies, in his keynote speech at the WWW7 conference in Brisbane talked about how Internet technology impacted our lives and would change expectations. If memory serves, one of the examples he mentioned was the 1 hr photo lab and that people would not be willing to wait for a full hour to see pictures, they would want them right away (and students asking for a T1 at work, too).
Less than ten years later, broadband connectivity is widely available and is cheap, or sometimes free, photography is mostly digital and there are few labs offering decent film developing these days.
Neither would I want to go back to 56K dial-up at EUR 30 per month plus charges per minute, nor would I want to pay per picture (prints for a single roll of film cost another EUR 30), nor would I want to miss the convenience of my digital camera, despite my nostalgic, misty-eyed views.
Today I picked up some photographs which I had taken with my old Minolta Dynax 7xi SLR on November 1, and what can I say, I was very pleased with the results. Not that the D80 is a bad camera, it is an absolutely fantastic piece of technology, fast and easy to use and absolutely suitable for taking great pictures, but there is something about photography the old-fashioned way too besides the differences in resolution, dynamic range, depth of field, etc.
First, with film you don't end up with dozens of very similar pictures because you only take the one or two that look most promising. There are probably as many good pictures in the gigabytes of digital cruft accumulated on my hard drive, only they are harder to find and who really goes through and cleans out all the not-really-that-great-but-still-acceptable pictures taken digitally?
Second, there is the lack of immediate feedback which helps. Yes, that's right. Admittedly, I did miss the nice bright screen showing me what the picture looks like when I shot on film, so I had to make an effort to get everything right instead of going through several iterations, trying to judge picture quality from an LCD screen.
Third, picking up photographs at the store, flipping through prints which bring back recent memories is a ritual I have become so used to after more than two decades of doing it that I do miss it.
(If you want to know more about the technical aspects, Ken Rockwell has written a great article Film vs. Digital explaining pros and cons, with some eye-opening crops of analog and digital photos. Norman Koren has even more technical details in Digital cameras vs. film although the Website has not been updated in years.)
Back in 1998 John Patrick, then IBM's Vice President, Internet technologies, in his keynote speech at the WWW7 conference in Brisbane talked about how Internet technology impacted our lives and would change expectations. If memory serves, one of the examples he mentioned was the 1 hr photo lab and that people would not be willing to wait for a full hour to see pictures, they would want them right away (and students asking for a T1 at work, too).
Less than ten years later, broadband connectivity is widely available and is cheap, or sometimes free, photography is mostly digital and there are few labs offering decent film developing these days.
Neither would I want to go back to 56K dial-up at EUR 30 per month plus charges per minute, nor would I want to pay per picture (prints for a single roll of film cost another EUR 30), nor would I want to miss the convenience of my digital camera, despite my nostalgic, misty-eyed views.
Labels: photography, technology
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
PHONETIC.FON
The amazon.de Web site has had a problem which has bothered me for some time: The search field on the homepage rendered at about half the usual height and text appeared invisible or white on white, so it was impossible to see text:
It wasn't that bad, I am a pretty solid typer and got the search terms right without seeing what I was typing, most of the time; still an inconvenience when trying to modify a search term, especially when the site starting redirecting search responses to addresses that no longer contain the search term, but not bad enough to spend time figuring out what was causing this.
Today one of my colleagues mentioned that he had found a solution to the problem: the PHONETIC.FON file seems to be the culprit, and indeed renaming that file has solved the problem nicely:
(A quick search for PHONETIC.FON sure enough turned up a page Why Do My Fonts in Netscape Navigator Look Funny? in the Netscape Unofficial FAQs.)
It wasn't that bad, I am a pretty solid typer and got the search terms right without seeing what I was typing, most of the time; still an inconvenience when trying to modify a search term, especially when the site starting redirecting search responses to addresses that no longer contain the search term, but not bad enough to spend time figuring out what was causing this.
Today one of my colleagues mentioned that he had found a solution to the problem: the PHONETIC.FON file seems to be the culprit, and indeed renaming that file has solved the problem nicely:
(A quick search for PHONETIC.FON sure enough turned up a page Why Do My Fonts in Netscape Navigator Look Funny? in the Netscape Unofficial FAQs.)
Labels: technology, webdevelopment, windows
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Smart advertising
Samsung deserves credit for smart advertising. Countless times I have spent hours at an airport, desperately crowding around the few power sockets in the wall with a bunch of other folks charging their cell phones, laptops and media players. I even got to the point of bringing warning signs to place around the cable since for some reason the chairs were never closer to the power sockets, and sitting on the floor typing for a while made my wrists hurt.
But now relief is here: I am sitting at JFK airport now, as usual traffic on the SPB was light and I am here way too early, but no more sitting on the floor, looking for power. Throughout the terminal, there are Samsung mobile recharge stations, well-designed poles with power sockets and even a small round table to put the power supplies and other equipment on. No more tripping over wires, no more fierce looks when using power for more than a few minutes ... there is plenty of power now, for everyone. The poles are effective for promoting Samsung products too: The latest Samsung mobile products are featured on the poles, at eye height, not just printed ads but real devices behind a glass cover.
When was the last time you saw advertising that was useful and looked that good?
But now relief is here: I am sitting at JFK airport now, as usual traffic on the SPB was light and I am here way too early, but no more sitting on the floor, looking for power. Throughout the terminal, there are Samsung mobile recharge stations, well-designed poles with power sockets and even a small round table to put the power supplies and other equipment on. No more tripping over wires, no more fierce looks when using power for more than a few minutes ... there is plenty of power now, for everyone. The poles are effective for promoting Samsung products too: The latest Samsung mobile products are featured on the poles, at eye height, not just printed ads but real devices behind a glass cover.
When was the last time you saw advertising that was useful and looked that good?
Labels: advertising, innovation, technology, travel
Sunday, July 15, 2007
iPhone update
So after nastiblogging about the iPhone yesterday I managed to get my hands on an iPhone when I was at the Westchester mall yesterday afternoon. What can I say, I still think that the poor battery design, the lack of high-speed Internet connectivity and the limitation to one carrier per country make me think that this isn't a cell phone I would want. But it does feel very, very good. The user interface is amazingly simple and straightforward, no long-winded multilevel menus, no key sequences to remember, the browser works well and rendered www.ibm.com nicely, including the recently added dynamic components. The touchscreen keyboard works pretty well for text thanks to error correction (but otherwise requires some practice and probably even then it won't match the speed of a tactile keyboard).
Labels: technology
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Do I want an iPhone?
The New York Times has two entertaining videos by David Pogue about the new iPhone, the pre-release The iPhone Challenge: Keep It Quiet and I want an iPhone.
What is all this hype about? I guess it holds true that good design is still good business, and Apple certainly knows good design, at least when it comes to user interfaces. Not allowing the user to extend the device or even just change the battery may follow the Apple philosophy that users don't need to care what's inside, but requiring customers to send in the phone, wait three business days, pay $85.95 to get the phone "repaired" as Apple calls it and have all your data deleted during that process is not good design.
Dear Apple folks, please try harder!
What is all this hype about? I guess it holds true that good design is still good business, and Apple certainly knows good design, at least when it comes to user interfaces. Not allowing the user to extend the device or even just change the battery may follow the Apple philosophy that users don't need to care what's inside, but requiring customers to send in the phone, wait three business days, pay $85.95 to get the phone "repaired" as Apple calls it and have all your data deleted during that process is not good design.
Dear Apple folks, please try harder!
Labels: technology
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Wabisabilabi
While sitting at Vienna airport and waiting for my flight to New York, a newspaper article about a security startup caught my attention: The Swiss company Wabisabilabi has established a market place for security exposures with the intent to give security experts "fair compensation for their discoveries".
Googling for the easy to remember company name (Vienna airport now has wireless connectivity and unlike other airports this is offered for free, nice!) I stumble across a good number of articles which sound very similar to the press release, I mean, article I just read ... becoming the EBay of zero-day exploits, finally a market place for security issues.
The first two search results are obviously the new site that's going to make the world more secure. Not that they have figured out how to give pages meaningful titles yet:
On to the press release at https://www.wslabi.com/wabisabilabi/news.do -- mistakes happen but finding a typo in the first press release of a company looks odd. Equally odd is their math: "Recently it was reported that although researchers had analyzed a little more than 7,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities last year, the number of new vulnerabilities found in code could be as high as 139,362." Exactly 139,362, huh?
Not much information about the company either, looks like a British Limited company although there is no company registration information on the site (or at least I haven't found it). I guess I will sign up anyway and see what they have to offer.
Googling for the easy to remember company name (Vienna airport now has wireless connectivity and unlike other airports this is offered for free, nice!) I stumble across a good number of articles which sound very similar to the press release, I mean, article I just read ... becoming the EBay of zero-day exploits, finally a market place for security issues.
The first two search results are obviously the new site that's going to make the world more secure. Not that they have figured out how to give pages meaningful titles yet:
On to the press release at https://www.wslabi.com/wabisabilabi/news.do -- mistakes happen but finding a typo in the first press release of a company looks odd. Equally odd is their math: "Recently it was reported that although researchers had analyzed a little more than 7,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities last year, the number of new vulnerabilities found in code could be as high as 139,362." Exactly 139,362, huh?
Not much information about the company either, looks like a British Limited company although there is no company registration information on the site (or at least I haven't found it). I guess I will sign up anyway and see what they have to offer.
Labels: security, technology
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Timely communication
Apparently IEEE offered some incentive last year for renewing the membership before year end which I had completely forgot about, or not even noticed when I renewed my membership. This morning I received a friendly invitation to claim my free eBook:
"Because you renewed your IEEE membership by Dec. 31, 2006, you are eligible to download an IEEE-USA eBook at no cost!"
Nothing terribly wrong with this, although I wonder why it takes an engineering organization 178 days to send an e-mail with a download link.
"Because you renewed your IEEE membership by Dec. 31, 2006, you are eligible to download an IEEE-USA eBook at no cost!"
Nothing terribly wrong with this, although I wonder why it takes an engineering organization 178 days to send an e-mail with a download link.
Labels: technology
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Nikon D80 battery woes continued
The battery problem I had last week is back and occurring with increasing frequency, so apparently it wasn't the lens mount. Nikon support suggests to have both the camera and battery checked, which probably means a few weeks without the camera. It may be faster to get another battery first (I need a spare anyway for traveling) and see if the new battery works any better.
Labels: photography, technology
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Nikon D80 battery woes
So far I have been pretty happy with my Nikon D80, but a weird problem has started to show up more frequently: At first the battery appears full, then after taking one picture the battery shows as almost empty and the camera refuses to take pictures. Turn the camera off and on, and the battery appears full again ... pretty annoying.
Google doesn't find any reports of exactly this issue, but some Websites suggest that this may be a problem with the lens mount. For some reason the lens waggles a little and seems to have been in awkward position causing this behavior, and joggling the lens seems to indeed resolve the battery problem.
Now the lens shouldn't waggle in the lens mount but that's a different story ...
Google doesn't find any reports of exactly this issue, but some Websites suggest that this may be a problem with the lens mount. For some reason the lens waggles a little and seems to have been in awkward position causing this behavior, and joggling the lens seems to indeed resolve the battery problem.
Now the lens shouldn't waggle in the lens mount but that's a different story ...
Labels: photography, technology