equivocal ramblings

Yeah, I caved and got myself a 1GB flash based MP3 player:

(Mine’s black)

Sound Quality

As usual for a Sony product, excellent. It comes with AVLS — Sony’s fancy acronym for what basically artificially limits the volume to levels below that which would render you deaf by 30. Custom and preset equalizers, some form of normalization (not sure how it works, but it seems to) and of course, a decent pair of headphones. Not much more to say really.

Aesthetics

To say it looks good is an understatement. From the semi-transparent skin, to the flush screen, it’s all good. The front panel itself is actually a transparent plastic piece, with all wording and logos printed beneath it. Below the panel is then the actual layer that gives it colour. Quite a nice, subtle effect.

The flush screen is just awesome. It looks like they somehow managed to integrate the screen into the actual surface of the player — you can’t see the usual screen boundaries even if you try. The only hint you get that it’s just an effect is in the dark when you can see the backlight glowing around the square plate.

It comes in a really handy form factor too. It’s somewhat larger than the average thumbdrive, which makes it really easy to just slip into your pocket and forget about.

Interface

With a screen that small, I expected something of a headache when it came to navigating the various menus. Surprisingly though, most of the time it works well. I’ve not had to resort to reading the manual at all. The one irritating thing about the player was that it defaulted to beeping with each action (Next, Previous, Stop, Open menu etc.) but that was easy enough to turn off — Options -> Advanced -> Beep | Off.

The Software

SonicStage, the application used to manage the player quite frankly not going to win any awards. It’s alright for it’s stated job, but you won’t see me using it to play music regularly. Thankfully, there are various third party applications that work fine at managing the files on the player, and quite a few of them are Java based, which makes this player Linux compatible. Shocking eh?

Verdict

Overall, a good buy. Sony needs a kick where it hurts for the disaster of SonicStage, but since there are many applications that do a good job of music management, it’s not so bad.

Today, as I wept with despair at the difficulties of reading Flash 8/Flash Media Server 2 documentation with Adobe’s PDF tools, ivan (from #joiito on freenode.net) pointed me in the direction of Foxit Reader, an alternative PDF reader.

Now, to say that this reader is awesome would be an understatement. It loads in less than a seconds, and opens PDF files in a flash. The best part though is seeking/searching in a PDF file is instantaneous. No delays, no waits, no hour glass icons. It’s a little creepy how they’ve managed to make it look almost exactly like a lighter version of Acrobat though…

It is blazingly fast. I highly recommend this if you need a speedy PDF reader.

I’ve been living in Windows for about… 5 months now, and this is what I’ve done in that time:

• Re-installed Windows XP twice — the first time, spyware was at fault, the second it was a random glitch that rendered the system unbootable and unrepairable
• Investigated various anti-spyware and anti-virus software, installed, removed, configured, updated, purchased subscriptions.
• Battled weird/random I/O bottlenecks involving lots of disk thrashing

I had none of those problems when I was running Linux. Yet, I do foresee one problem with Linux — I’ll never be able to leave the machine logged in if I step out of for more than five minutes. If one of my family attempt to use it, they’ll want Windows XP (and don’t suggest they use Linux — doesn’t work).

Interesting choices await me once again.

Interesting developments have taken place recently in the Mono world.

1. .NET/Mono compatibility exists now (not just something someone with intimate knowledge of the Mono internals can achieve…)
2. MonoDevelop is starting to actually be an IDE!

Maybe it is time to start working on that feed parser library again… Maybe an RSS client that I actually like using too…

Last night I installed the ICQ instant messenger and was thoroughly disgusted by what appeared to be a monstrosity of a user interface. Remembering that there was interoperability between AIM and ICQ, I decided today to download AIM and give that a shot.

Here is what I saw (Clicky for a larger version):

And I was shocked. The AIM of today is a far cry from the AIM of last year. This new client sports a custom skin; usually this is a bad thing, but I think they may actually have come up with one of the better examples of non-standard interfaces.

What was really shocking was that the client came with something called AIM Explorer — a web browser of all things. The first time I noticed it was when I attempted to recover my password, and I just stopped and stared for a few minutes.

It actually looked pretty okay, but after a few minutes of usage, I realised — this is what the Internet Explorer team is trying to do and failing misreably at. I mean, its subtly animated, got little glow effects, its blueish (duh), its got Firefox style tabs, and interestingly enough, it’s got anti-spyware/adware detectors for common stuff. Oh, and a working feed reader (Clicky for a larger version):

Lets not forget the thumbnails that appear when you move your pointer over a tab… Yes folks you read that right. Thumbnails. That work. That don’t slow you down. That aren’t ridiculously useless. Shocking.

Did I mention it’s based on Internet Explorer? Yeah, that part sort of got me off-guard too. The first browser to come out of AOL/Netscape not to suck, and its IE based, and beats the living daylight out of what the IE Team is pushing.

What iTunes needs is a “Now Playing” playlist. The idea is very well done in Rhythmbox (CVS), and basically its just a list where songs are enqueued when you double-click them in the library.

A very simple, yet effective feature. In iTunes, I currently have to drag and drop it into a playlist, and this just involves so much more effort than a simple double-click.

I gave hosted publishing a try over at Wordpress.com, and after checking it out and trying to work with it, I’ve decided it isn’t meant to be. Something about not being able to choose my software, my own design, my own customisation, my own code if I so chose… it just troubles me.

Maybe I’m just spoilt, having good hosts, and free reign of the server.

As is typical with all good things, there is always a catch (or three). iTunes fulfills all my music playing, ripping, tagging and management needs and manages to look good doing it.

But.

There’s that but, sadly. iTunes is also one of the most sensitive applications on my desktop when it comes to resource availability. If there’s a song playing, and I fire up a large Java application I get more hops, skips and jumps than kids at play do. At first I thought it was an operating system specific thing, but after installing a fresh copy of XP, it still persists. Doesn’t happen anywhere else other than iTunes either. Winamp keeps chugging along, even under assault from the heaviest of Java based applications.

Sigh

Explorer Destroyer seems to be a rather interesting and fanatical take on converting the unwashed masses over to Firefox. Check it out.

This syntax exam is the most useless I’ve seen. First of, it doesn’t have anything on syntax, but focuses on semantics (as mentioned by Evarlast).

All of the questions were rather obscure, and therefore useless in real life — who actually ever comes across something like $empty = ""; $x = (bool) empty($empty); anyway? If I did, I’d flame someone…