After I met with the founder of Jemstep, I realized that his product was not for me, but a large group (probably even the majority) of Americans would find it to be a great product fit. When William Bernstein visited Google, he asked for a show of hands as to how many people in the room had sizable 401(k)s or IRAs as a percentage of their total portfolio. Nobody raised their hands. He said, "This is completely atypical of American society, where most people's financial assets are largely tied up in their 401(k) or IRA."
The net result is that my approach, and the approach of many of the products I introduce such as Wealthfront, are completely targeted towards people like me. When most of your financial assets are in after-tax portfolio, tax-loss harvesting becomes important, as does qualifying for long term capital gains taxes. When much of your assets are in IRAs or 401(k)s, however, then asset location becomes important.
Jemstep does the hard work of figuring out what the correct asset location for every asset is, and managing multiple assets across all counts. Unfortunately, because everything is done through TrustE, Jemstep cannot place trades for you, or actually manage your disparate accounts. What this means is that you have to manually enter the trades, and deal with the tax consequences thereof. This is in contrast to Wealthfront, which does place trades for you, etc.
Jemstep is fairly cheap. It charges about $70 for an unlimited sized portfolio, and correspondingly less if you have less than $500,000 in assets. But it does a lot less for you than Wealthfront, and you're still stuck with whatever transaction costs are involved. It also doesn't do any of the sophisticated tax-loss harvesting that Wealthfront does. For folks with large taxable portfolios, Wealthfront's fees more than pay for themselves when you take into account tax loss harvesting.
This all sounds really negative, but it isn't. If you're the beneficiary of a tech IPO, or just won the lottery or sold your business, this service is not for you. If you have a huge legacy portfolio in taxable accounts that are unconsolidated, you might want to try Jemstep, but my suspicion is that you're best off slowly migrating your account to Wealthfront, and Jemstep is at best a stop-gap. However, if you're middle-aged, and have a large tax-sheltered portfolio, then asset location matters a lot to you and you're better off with Jemstep than with Wealthfront, especially since it's unlikely that you're able to move your 401(k) to Wealthfront while you're working at the same employer for the next few decades.
In short, I'd suggest checking out Jemstep, but only if your tax-sheltered portfolio is a significant percentage of your net-worth (more than about 20%).
Friday, May 30, 2014
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Review: The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
On my Facebook comment thread about the new rent vs buy equation, folks mentioned The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City as a good book about the new urbanism and the desire of young white people to live in cities. The Sunnyvale Library had it available for a Kindle checkout, so I got instant gratification.
The book's thesis is that wealthy, affluent white people are going to move into the big cities, while poor black people, Hispanics, and Asians are going to be stuck out in the suburbs. In one section of the book, he claims that Chicago in the 2020s is going to much more like Paris than it would be like Chicago in the 1970s. Hence, the term "Great Inversion".
The crux of the argument lies amongst several factors:
The book then visits several cities or cities in the making, and we a grand tour of Wall Street's recent change into a residential neighborhood, Houston's increasing density, Phoenix's repeated failures to get a genuine downtown area, despite wishing fervently for one, and Denver's experiments with urban areas. Nowhere is the Bay Area explored, which I found disappointing since the gentrification in San Francisco is currently a hot button issue here, and I'd love to find out what Ehrenhalt thinks would happen there.
One thing in common, however, is that none of the suburban "in-fill" attempts to create a city-like area out of a suburban area have worked, or achieved what's considered a traditional cityscape with residential, retail, and offices all intermingled with mixed use and high pedestrian traffic being the norm. This is not surprising: the car is all important in the suburbs, and it would take a brave developer to risk alienating Americans' love affair with the car.
Undermining Ehrenhalt's predictions are the polls that he quotes. For instance, early in the book he says as much as 41% of young people want to live in a city, but they still expect full use of a car. Fundamentally, cities like San Francisco have such poor public transportation systems that you'd still need a car to go anywhere interesting. Either that, or you'll need to have an employer sponsored bus. This says to me that American cities just aren't there yet, and getting there would take enormous political will that I just don't see happening in the near future.
Ehrenhalt acknowledges that significance of public transit and transportation in all the success stories. Chicago in particular had several neighborhoods exploded in popularity mostly because of the presence of good transit.
What about schools? Urban city schools have particularly poor reputations in California. Ehrenhalt takes a 2 prong approach to this. First, he claims that city dwellers mostly aren't the type to have children anyway. Secondly, he suggests that schools becoming good are the last step in the inversion process. In other words, the demographics of wealthy, white people gentrifying the inner city will drive school scores up as the last step of the process. I'm particularly skeptical of the latter argument, since my experience with wealthy white people in San Francisco is that they just send their kids to private school. Heck, even in Palo Alto where the public schools have a great reputation, wealthy white people seem to do that anyway.
Ultimately though, Ehrenhalt's biggest weakness is that he's extrapolating the recent past into the future. It's quite conceivable, for instance, that the introduction of the self-driving car and electronically controlled traffic could essentially turn public streets and highways into the ultimate public transit system. If those become mainstream, it could very well be that suburbs once again become desirable, since you now have easy access to all the amenities of a city, while still having a bigger home with access to open spaces for kids to play with, or for cycling, hiking, etc.
In any case, Ehrenhalt's right, then the anti-gentrification San Francisco activists definitely have a lot to be worried about. As for myself, I look forward to the day when it would be possible to ride a bike in San Francisco and park a bike outside a restaurant for a meal (or watch a movie or play) without it getting stolen. Without that condition, city life has no appeal whatsoever to me, and American cities are nowhere close to that.
The book comes recommended as interesting reading that's thought provoking. For me, the biggest weakness is that it gets very dreary after a while if you're not a city lover --- after a while, all the big cities just blur together. And seriously, I still have a hard time wondering how anybody can like Paris. It's a boring city that no longer has very good food, and has lousy cycling (though the motorists aren't nearly as hostile as those in San Francisco).
The book's thesis is that wealthy, affluent white people are going to move into the big cities, while poor black people, Hispanics, and Asians are going to be stuck out in the suburbs. In one section of the book, he claims that Chicago in the 2020s is going to much more like Paris than it would be like Chicago in the 1970s. Hence, the term "Great Inversion".
The crux of the argument lies amongst several factors:
- Suburbs are designed for cars and do not have a bustling enough street life.
- The children who grew up in the suburbs and cul de sacs have all grown up and moved to big cities in order to go to school, and now would rather stay in the big cities.
- People are getting married later, and having children later.
- Only 25% of households by 2030 will even have children, which is way down from previous decades.
The book then visits several cities or cities in the making, and we a grand tour of Wall Street's recent change into a residential neighborhood, Houston's increasing density, Phoenix's repeated failures to get a genuine downtown area, despite wishing fervently for one, and Denver's experiments with urban areas. Nowhere is the Bay Area explored, which I found disappointing since the gentrification in San Francisco is currently a hot button issue here, and I'd love to find out what Ehrenhalt thinks would happen there.
One thing in common, however, is that none of the suburban "in-fill" attempts to create a city-like area out of a suburban area have worked, or achieved what's considered a traditional cityscape with residential, retail, and offices all intermingled with mixed use and high pedestrian traffic being the norm. This is not surprising: the car is all important in the suburbs, and it would take a brave developer to risk alienating Americans' love affair with the car.
Undermining Ehrenhalt's predictions are the polls that he quotes. For instance, early in the book he says as much as 41% of young people want to live in a city, but they still expect full use of a car. Fundamentally, cities like San Francisco have such poor public transportation systems that you'd still need a car to go anywhere interesting. Either that, or you'll need to have an employer sponsored bus. This says to me that American cities just aren't there yet, and getting there would take enormous political will that I just don't see happening in the near future.
Ehrenhalt acknowledges that significance of public transit and transportation in all the success stories. Chicago in particular had several neighborhoods exploded in popularity mostly because of the presence of good transit.
What about schools? Urban city schools have particularly poor reputations in California. Ehrenhalt takes a 2 prong approach to this. First, he claims that city dwellers mostly aren't the type to have children anyway. Secondly, he suggests that schools becoming good are the last step in the inversion process. In other words, the demographics of wealthy, white people gentrifying the inner city will drive school scores up as the last step of the process. I'm particularly skeptical of the latter argument, since my experience with wealthy white people in San Francisco is that they just send their kids to private school. Heck, even in Palo Alto where the public schools have a great reputation, wealthy white people seem to do that anyway.
Ultimately though, Ehrenhalt's biggest weakness is that he's extrapolating the recent past into the future. It's quite conceivable, for instance, that the introduction of the self-driving car and electronically controlled traffic could essentially turn public streets and highways into the ultimate public transit system. If those become mainstream, it could very well be that suburbs once again become desirable, since you now have easy access to all the amenities of a city, while still having a bigger home with access to open spaces for kids to play with, or for cycling, hiking, etc.
In any case, Ehrenhalt's right, then the anti-gentrification San Francisco activists definitely have a lot to be worried about. As for myself, I look forward to the day when it would be possible to ride a bike in San Francisco and park a bike outside a restaurant for a meal (or watch a movie or play) without it getting stolen. Without that condition, city life has no appeal whatsoever to me, and American cities are nowhere close to that.
The book comes recommended as interesting reading that's thought provoking. For me, the biggest weakness is that it gets very dreary after a while if you're not a city lover --- after a while, all the big cities just blur together. And seriously, I still have a hard time wondering how anybody can like Paris. It's a boring city that no longer has very good food, and has lousy cycling (though the motorists aren't nearly as hostile as those in San Francisco).
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Review: Michael Jackson: The Experience (PS Vita)
Michael Jackson: The Experience is a touch screen game for the PS Vita and the evil empire's Apple's mobile products. The pricing on the game reflects the wildly differing nature of the console vs. app store experience. On Amazon, the Vita game is $13.95, but since there's nothing stopping anyone from selling used Vita games, I picked one up for $8 when there was a sale. The app store version is ostensibly $0.99, but comes with only 4 songs and charges you $1 for each additional song. Given that there are 15 games on the PS Vita, picking it up for $8 used was a much better deal.
The nice thing about the game is that the songs are not locked. What this means is that you can play any of the songs at once, without having to "unlock" them by performing to a certain standard. The game basically has you swiping, tapping, or drawing patterns on the screen in order to make the Michael Jackson avatar move to the beat, so you essentially need to be able to hear the song in order to play. That means headphones are a must, since the Vita's tiny speakers aren't going to give you high videlity.
The songs are great. This is Michael Jackson, so you'd expect it. I'd not heard a lot of the songs before, so this was my introduction to some of the other songs in his opus. I did not expect to enjoy songs like Smooth Criminal or Billie Jean, but I did. The game comes with 3 difficulty settings, but alas, I'm not so good a gamer that I can make it through the hardest difficulty setting. Along the way you get to win trophies, medals or other in-game awards to keep you coming back for more, but the songs are the main thing in a music/rhythm game and this game delivers.
As a handheld experience, this game's ideal, since each play lasts only as long as the song. The boot up experience takes quite a while though, and as some have mentioned, the game's scenes are rendered rather than using the original Jackson videos as backdrop, so you do lose a little bit. (The rendering is essential so the on-screen avatar matches your taps and swipes)
But heck for $8? Just buy the game. It's fun.
The nice thing about the game is that the songs are not locked. What this means is that you can play any of the songs at once, without having to "unlock" them by performing to a certain standard. The game basically has you swiping, tapping, or drawing patterns on the screen in order to make the Michael Jackson avatar move to the beat, so you essentially need to be able to hear the song in order to play. That means headphones are a must, since the Vita's tiny speakers aren't going to give you high videlity.
The songs are great. This is Michael Jackson, so you'd expect it. I'd not heard a lot of the songs before, so this was my introduction to some of the other songs in his opus. I did not expect to enjoy songs like Smooth Criminal or Billie Jean, but I did. The game comes with 3 difficulty settings, but alas, I'm not so good a gamer that I can make it through the hardest difficulty setting. Along the way you get to win trophies, medals or other in-game awards to keep you coming back for more, but the songs are the main thing in a music/rhythm game and this game delivers.
As a handheld experience, this game's ideal, since each play lasts only as long as the song. The boot up experience takes quite a while though, and as some have mentioned, the game's scenes are rendered rather than using the original Jackson videos as backdrop, so you do lose a little bit. (The rendering is essential so the on-screen avatar matches your taps and swipes)
But heck for $8? Just buy the game. It's fun.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Review: Killzone Mercenary
I was once dispatched by Jeff Rothschild to help out Id Software on Quake's networking code on DOS. After I was done with the work, I was invited by Carmack, Romero, and Cash to a friendly LAN game of Quake. "We'll give you all the weapons and come after you with axes." That match barely lasted 15s, with me dead and all I was carrying gone. As you can imagine, I'm not a great first person shooter (FPS) gamer, nor is the FPS my favorite choice of genre.
However, I'm cheap and love a good deal, so when PSN had a sale on Killzone Mercenary and I saw the rave reviews online, I picked it up. I tried the first mission and died very quickly, and so dismissed it as being too hard for a noob like me until I bought my brother a PS Vita Slim for his birthday. Unlike me, he's a FPS aficionado, and so I started playing the game again in the hopes that we could do a multiplayer game one of these days. Surprisingly, the PS Vita Slim has been sold out on all on-line stores, so if you want one my advice is to place an order with Amazon and then be patient while it ships. This is surprising news because up until now the PS Vita simply has not sold well at all.
First of all, the graphics on Killzone is gorgeous. The lighting is superb, the textures brilliant. The sunrise or sunset scenes are beautiful, and the game play graphics is so true to form that the first few times I hit a cut-scene I kept on fiddling with the joystick and buttons expecting to have control over the character!
The storyline is even interesting for a FPS. The conceit is that you're a mercenary working for pay, hired (initially) by one side to help out in a war. This is supported by the game: everything you do from shooting an enemy, interrogation, or hacking into a system has financial implications. You can then spend your booty on weapons, ammunition, and armor upgrades at the frequently found vending machines in the game that also double as checkpoint save locations. The storyline has several twist and turns, and soon you end up working for both sides and discovering how untrustworthy your initial impressions were.
In addition to the primary, secondary, tertiary weapons (grenades), and armor, there's also a special type of weapon system called a Vanguard. This is additional gadgetry that you might see in a modern battlefield today, giving you the ability to pilot a killer drone, cloak you, or call down artillery strikes. These are very expensive, so don't expect to buy more than a couple on your first play-through. They add to the game somewhat but maybe if you have all of them you might not find the game challenging.
Once I got through the first mission, the rest of the game was fairly addictive. In fact, at one point I zipped through several missions without even realizing it, and found myself at the last mission under-equipped to face my enemies. At that point I had to quit out, go back to some earlier missions, and replay them with an eye on making extra money so I could buy the appropriate weapons to finish the game. With Bioshock, I complained that this was too much of a chore, and gave up on the game entirely. Killzone, however, is fun to play and the gameplay is designed to let you flip back to previous missions and play them again without having to go through the campaign again linearly, so this was a minor annoyance at worse.
There's a multiplayer mode, which I tried. But as mentioned previously, I suck at FPS games. I think my contribution to the multiplayer game is to be a target to be shot at and a source of loot. It's definitely not something I'd try for fun. The flaw here is that because I'd nearly played through the single player game before trying multi-player, my in-game rank was pretty high, and so instead of getting put in with other newbies, I was placed with experienced players and pretty much got wiped out every time.
Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun and could see myself going back and playing the single player game again at a higher difficulty level or to try out the special missions. I'm also interested in getting some of the stronger weapons to see how it impacts the game. I'm also now interested in going back to try out other Killzone games on my PS 3.
Coming from a non-FPS fan, this is high praise indeed. If you own a PS Vita, buy this game even if you normally wouldn't play an FPS. Highly recommended.
However, I'm cheap and love a good deal, so when PSN had a sale on Killzone Mercenary and I saw the rave reviews online, I picked it up. I tried the first mission and died very quickly, and so dismissed it as being too hard for a noob like me until I bought my brother a PS Vita Slim for his birthday. Unlike me, he's a FPS aficionado, and so I started playing the game again in the hopes that we could do a multiplayer game one of these days. Surprisingly, the PS Vita Slim has been sold out on all on-line stores, so if you want one my advice is to place an order with Amazon and then be patient while it ships. This is surprising news because up until now the PS Vita simply has not sold well at all.
First of all, the graphics on Killzone is gorgeous. The lighting is superb, the textures brilliant. The sunrise or sunset scenes are beautiful, and the game play graphics is so true to form that the first few times I hit a cut-scene I kept on fiddling with the joystick and buttons expecting to have control over the character!
The storyline is even interesting for a FPS. The conceit is that you're a mercenary working for pay, hired (initially) by one side to help out in a war. This is supported by the game: everything you do from shooting an enemy, interrogation, or hacking into a system has financial implications. You can then spend your booty on weapons, ammunition, and armor upgrades at the frequently found vending machines in the game that also double as checkpoint save locations. The storyline has several twist and turns, and soon you end up working for both sides and discovering how untrustworthy your initial impressions were.
In addition to the primary, secondary, tertiary weapons (grenades), and armor, there's also a special type of weapon system called a Vanguard. This is additional gadgetry that you might see in a modern battlefield today, giving you the ability to pilot a killer drone, cloak you, or call down artillery strikes. These are very expensive, so don't expect to buy more than a couple on your first play-through. They add to the game somewhat but maybe if you have all of them you might not find the game challenging.
Once I got through the first mission, the rest of the game was fairly addictive. In fact, at one point I zipped through several missions without even realizing it, and found myself at the last mission under-equipped to face my enemies. At that point I had to quit out, go back to some earlier missions, and replay them with an eye on making extra money so I could buy the appropriate weapons to finish the game. With Bioshock, I complained that this was too much of a chore, and gave up on the game entirely. Killzone, however, is fun to play and the gameplay is designed to let you flip back to previous missions and play them again without having to go through the campaign again linearly, so this was a minor annoyance at worse.
There's a multiplayer mode, which I tried. But as mentioned previously, I suck at FPS games. I think my contribution to the multiplayer game is to be a target to be shot at and a source of loot. It's definitely not something I'd try for fun. The flaw here is that because I'd nearly played through the single player game before trying multi-player, my in-game rank was pretty high, and so instead of getting put in with other newbies, I was placed with experienced players and pretty much got wiped out every time.
Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun and could see myself going back and playing the single player game again at a higher difficulty level or to try out the special missions. I'm also interested in getting some of the stronger weapons to see how it impacts the game. I'm also now interested in going back to try out other Killzone games on my PS 3.
Coming from a non-FPS fan, this is high praise indeed. If you own a PS Vita, buy this game even if you normally wouldn't play an FPS. Highly recommended.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Review: RAVPower 10400mAh Power Bank
It is one of my biggest complaints that Apple-Envy in the gadget world has made products with replaceable batteries almost a thing of the past. For phones, I've managed to only buy phones that let you replace the battery, but for tablets, the PS Vita and even the Microsoft Surface, that's simply not been possible.
Our Nexus 10 and Nexus 7 tablets have been in use for over a year now, and the battery life is definitely not what they were when they were new. As a result, when there was a sale on the RAVPower 10400mAh external battery, I bought one at $25.50. You have to be realistic about external batteries. There's power conversion inefficiency between the battery's internal voltage to supply the external 5V available to the USB slot. Most chargers are not better than about 80% efficiency, and this is not the fault of the battery manufacturer. Similarly, you also can't expect to squeeze all the power out of an external battery since once the voltage at the output drops below the voltage of the battery of the target device, no charging can happen. So if your device says it's at 10400mAh, realistically you're not going to get more than 7-8000mAh out of it.
The device is about the size of a pack of cards. It's much smaller than a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10, but is much thicker than my Nokia 521 or Galaxy Nexus. I wouldn't call this a pocketable device, but it's definitely not a hassle to bring it on a long plane flight, for instance. It has 2 USB A slots and a micro USB b slot for charging. It comes with a carrying pouch with 2 micro USB to USB A cables. These cables are coiled, so you can't confuse them with data-capable cables (they are power only), and they're useful because you can stretch them without breaking them. Their inclusion is a nice touch on a budget device.
The Nexus 10 has a 9000mAh battery. Sure enough, from a fully drained device, I drained the RAVPower and only got the Nexus 10 to about 75% charged. The Nexus 10 stayed in use during part of the charging period, so this is about what I would expect. What is impressive about the RAVPower is that I tested it with the PS Vita and the charger worked. This was a surprise because the Vita requires a high charging current as well as specific pins shorted out on the charger and as a result does not work with all external batteries.
The USB slots on my sample were mislabeled. The 1A slot was labeled as 2A, and vice-versa. If you do get one you should check both slots to see if that's what happened with your sample. This is no big deal since once you learn that, you learn which device to plug into which slot.
The battery takes a long time to charge (via a micro-USB input) if you've drained it completely. I estimate the charge time at 12 hours, though my experience with these types of battery is that it charges rapidly to about 80% and then trickle charges to get the last 20%. While charging, the battery does not serve power to the USB slots, which is a pity, since I can see scenarios under which it would be useful to charge this device and 2 others at the same time from one USB slot. Adding that feature would have both increased the price as well as make the battery take even longer to charge, so I can understand leaving it out.
Batteries are essentially consumable devices, with most batteries lasting no more than 300 charge cycles or so (less if they're frequently fully discharged and recharged, or stored some place warm). As a result, you should delay buying one for as long as you can. However, if you have an old tablet, buying one of these battery packs is much cheaper than buying a new tablet or the time cost of replacing the (difficult to extract) battery yourself. If that's your scenario, then I can recommend the RAVPower external battery pack. They come on sale rather frequently, so I'd advise setting an alert on camelcamelcamel or Slickdeals.
Our Nexus 10 and Nexus 7 tablets have been in use for over a year now, and the battery life is definitely not what they were when they were new. As a result, when there was a sale on the RAVPower 10400mAh external battery, I bought one at $25.50. You have to be realistic about external batteries. There's power conversion inefficiency between the battery's internal voltage to supply the external 5V available to the USB slot. Most chargers are not better than about 80% efficiency, and this is not the fault of the battery manufacturer. Similarly, you also can't expect to squeeze all the power out of an external battery since once the voltage at the output drops below the voltage of the battery of the target device, no charging can happen. So if your device says it's at 10400mAh, realistically you're not going to get more than 7-8000mAh out of it.
The device is about the size of a pack of cards. It's much smaller than a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10, but is much thicker than my Nokia 521 or Galaxy Nexus. I wouldn't call this a pocketable device, but it's definitely not a hassle to bring it on a long plane flight, for instance. It has 2 USB A slots and a micro USB b slot for charging. It comes with a carrying pouch with 2 micro USB to USB A cables. These cables are coiled, so you can't confuse them with data-capable cables (they are power only), and they're useful because you can stretch them without breaking them. Their inclusion is a nice touch on a budget device.
The Nexus 10 has a 9000mAh battery. Sure enough, from a fully drained device, I drained the RAVPower and only got the Nexus 10 to about 75% charged. The Nexus 10 stayed in use during part of the charging period, so this is about what I would expect. What is impressive about the RAVPower is that I tested it with the PS Vita and the charger worked. This was a surprise because the Vita requires a high charging current as well as specific pins shorted out on the charger and as a result does not work with all external batteries.
The USB slots on my sample were mislabeled. The 1A slot was labeled as 2A, and vice-versa. If you do get one you should check both slots to see if that's what happened with your sample. This is no big deal since once you learn that, you learn which device to plug into which slot.
The battery takes a long time to charge (via a micro-USB input) if you've drained it completely. I estimate the charge time at 12 hours, though my experience with these types of battery is that it charges rapidly to about 80% and then trickle charges to get the last 20%. While charging, the battery does not serve power to the USB slots, which is a pity, since I can see scenarios under which it would be useful to charge this device and 2 others at the same time from one USB slot. Adding that feature would have both increased the price as well as make the battery take even longer to charge, so I can understand leaving it out.
Batteries are essentially consumable devices, with most batteries lasting no more than 300 charge cycles or so (less if they're frequently fully discharged and recharged, or stored some place warm). As a result, you should delay buying one for as long as you can. However, if you have an old tablet, buying one of these battery packs is much cheaper than buying a new tablet or the time cost of replacing the (difficult to extract) battery yourself. If that's your scenario, then I can recommend the RAVPower external battery pack. They come on sale rather frequently, so I'd advise setting an alert on camelcamelcamel or Slickdeals.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Review: New York Times Web + Tablet Subscription
After not having a great time on the Kindle subscription to the New York Times, I tried the web + tablet subscription on the $1 trial plan. I tried using the subscription on both Windows and Android tablets.
The Android app was frustrating. For instance, occasionally while reading an article the app would refresh. That's OK. But it would refresh back to "Top Stories", losing your place in the article and your entire context. Navigation was slow, and the app was slow to load data. Using the web browser on my Nexus 7 to visit nytimes.com was also slow, and the website continuously forgot my login, forcing me to login multiple times. The plus was the the android app made it extremely easy to share to Google+, Facebook, etc. The minus was that the android app made it impossible to copy and paste quotes from the article I was reading, which was also frustrating.
The Windows metro app was much less frustrating as a reading experience. It never refreshed randomly, always loaded quickly. Navigation was a bit unintuitive as you had to swiped down from the bottom or top to switch sections, but that's apparently a new UI gesture unique to Windows tablets, so I just had to get used to it. The minus, however, was severe. You absolutely couldn't share articles from the Windows app to Google+ or Facebook. What a crock.
Ultimately, however, the biggest problem with the New York Times is that you always feel like you're paying for yesterday's news. I almost always got better news faster from other sources (usually blogs or topic-specific websites), and for analysis, blogs seem to provide more intelligent and cogent analysis written by people smarter than English majors.
As a result, I've canceled my subscription and switch to getting news on the internet.
The Android app was frustrating. For instance, occasionally while reading an article the app would refresh. That's OK. But it would refresh back to "Top Stories", losing your place in the article and your entire context. Navigation was slow, and the app was slow to load data. Using the web browser on my Nexus 7 to visit nytimes.com was also slow, and the website continuously forgot my login, forcing me to login multiple times. The plus was the the android app made it extremely easy to share to Google+, Facebook, etc. The minus was that the android app made it impossible to copy and paste quotes from the article I was reading, which was also frustrating.
The Windows metro app was much less frustrating as a reading experience. It never refreshed randomly, always loaded quickly. Navigation was a bit unintuitive as you had to swiped down from the bottom or top to switch sections, but that's apparently a new UI gesture unique to Windows tablets, so I just had to get used to it. The minus, however, was severe. You absolutely couldn't share articles from the Windows app to Google+ or Facebook. What a crock.
Ultimately, however, the biggest problem with the New York Times is that you always feel like you're paying for yesterday's news. I almost always got better news faster from other sources (usually blogs or topic-specific websites), and for analysis, blogs seem to provide more intelligent and cogent analysis written by people smarter than English majors.
As a result, I've canceled my subscription and switch to getting news on the internet.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Review: NOS4A2
NOS4A2 is Joe Hill's Stephen King pastiche novel. That's not how it's sold as, but that's how it struck me. It could be because I haven't read Joe Hill before, or it could be that I've always associated this style of supernatural horror with Stephen King.
The story revolves around Vic "The Brat" McQueen. As a child, she discovers that her bicycle is no mere symbol of freedom, but can also carry her places. By focusing her mind on what she wants to find, she can call up "The Shorter Way Bridge", which connects her to other places near and far, which invariably lets her locate things previously lost. Early on in the novel, she meets up with Maggie Leigh, a librarian in Iowa, who teaches her the rules of supernatural magic as applies to Joe Hill's world.
In the mean time, supernatural serial killer Charles Talent Manx has been collecting children and their mothers for nefarious purposes. It is inevitable that the two characters will collide, and of course they do.
The nature of the collision surprised me, though it shouldn't have, given the amount of foreshadowing provided at the start of the novel. McQueen loses her bike, and then rediscovers it as senior in high school, looking for trouble. Her first encounter with Manx leaves her emotionally scarred and Manx in prison.
Over the next few years, McQueen's life falls apart as she makes one bad decision after another. Then Manx returns and goes after McQueen and her son. The rest of the novel feels familiar, if not quite 100% predictable.
There are a few great ideas in this book. One of them is McQueen's "Search Engine" series of puzzle books for children. It's such a compelling idea that I'm surprised no one has executed it in real life. Another is McQueen's husband. In fantasy literature, we usually get spouses who don't understand or don't believe in the supernatural, deepening the protagonist's sense of isolation and desperation. Instead, McQueen's husband is a comic book geek and motorcycle mechanic who is the first person to believe her story and not declare her insane. It's a refreshing change from the usual stereotype and I thoroughly enjoyed that.
The climatic scenes of the book are compelling reading, if mostly unbelievable. I do understand Hill's desire to put McQueen through hell so we can sympathize with her, but unfortunately, the amount of physical damage McQueen sustains, given her past characterization, leads the reader to think that there's no way she could have gone on. It sounds like a minor nit, but at that point it felt as though McQueen was no longer a character but a puppet being directed by the author.
In any case, I'm not sure I can recommend this book. I picked it up for $2.00 at the Kindle store, and at that price I got my money's worth as far as summer reading is concerned. It's not worth it at $9.99. On the other hand, if you've never been exposed to this style of supernatural thriller, this is a perfectly fine and competent introduction to the genre, though perhaps Christine or Duma Key would be better.
I'll leave you with a quote from the novel to help you decide:
The story revolves around Vic "The Brat" McQueen. As a child, she discovers that her bicycle is no mere symbol of freedom, but can also carry her places. By focusing her mind on what she wants to find, she can call up "The Shorter Way Bridge", which connects her to other places near and far, which invariably lets her locate things previously lost. Early on in the novel, she meets up with Maggie Leigh, a librarian in Iowa, who teaches her the rules of supernatural magic as applies to Joe Hill's world.
In the mean time, supernatural serial killer Charles Talent Manx has been collecting children and their mothers for nefarious purposes. It is inevitable that the two characters will collide, and of course they do.
The nature of the collision surprised me, though it shouldn't have, given the amount of foreshadowing provided at the start of the novel. McQueen loses her bike, and then rediscovers it as senior in high school, looking for trouble. Her first encounter with Manx leaves her emotionally scarred and Manx in prison.
Over the next few years, McQueen's life falls apart as she makes one bad decision after another. Then Manx returns and goes after McQueen and her son. The rest of the novel feels familiar, if not quite 100% predictable.
There are a few great ideas in this book. One of them is McQueen's "Search Engine" series of puzzle books for children. It's such a compelling idea that I'm surprised no one has executed it in real life. Another is McQueen's husband. In fantasy literature, we usually get spouses who don't understand or don't believe in the supernatural, deepening the protagonist's sense of isolation and desperation. Instead, McQueen's husband is a comic book geek and motorcycle mechanic who is the first person to believe her story and not declare her insane. It's a refreshing change from the usual stereotype and I thoroughly enjoyed that.
The climatic scenes of the book are compelling reading, if mostly unbelievable. I do understand Hill's desire to put McQueen through hell so we can sympathize with her, but unfortunately, the amount of physical damage McQueen sustains, given her past characterization, leads the reader to think that there's no way she could have gone on. It sounds like a minor nit, but at that point it felt as though McQueen was no longer a character but a puppet being directed by the author.
In any case, I'm not sure I can recommend this book. I picked it up for $2.00 at the Kindle store, and at that price I got my money's worth as far as summer reading is concerned. It's not worth it at $9.99. On the other hand, if you've never been exposed to this style of supernatural thriller, this is a perfectly fine and competent introduction to the genre, though perhaps Christine or Duma Key would be better.
I'll leave you with a quote from the novel to help you decide:
“Chris and me never exactly killed ourselves spoiling you, Vicki. I was afraid to. Now I don’t even think a parent can. Spoil a child, I mean. I didn’t figure nothing out until it was too late to do me any good. I never seemed to have much of a feel for parenting. I was so scared of doing the wrong thing I hardly ever did the right thing.” (Kindle Loc 3460)
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Review: A Troublesome Inheritance
A Troublesome Inheritance is a book about evolution and race. It's a thought provoking book and well-worth reading, though I found it disturbingly plays into stereotypes about races and individuality.
To begin with, the author makes what I consider are uncontroversial claims:
The big stretch in this book is when he claims that as a result of the cultural forces at play, the Western nations therefore evolved stronger tendencies towards novelty seeking, while the Asians evolved stronger tendencies towards conformity. This sneakily promotes some fairly obvious stereotypes again, with very little evidence. We simply don't know enough about genetics at this point to understand how personality is molded, and which parts of personality is determined by the environment, and which parts are what you are born with.
Now, there are some other claims that I think are quite believable. For instance, why have there been a preponderance of Jews in the sciences and other intellectual fields? Why are so many major award winners (Nobel prizes, etch) Jewish? There's quite a bit of evidence that there's been quite severe selection in the Jewish gene pool for IQ, which has also come along with a number of disadvantages such as genetic diseases unique to that race. This is entirely believable, especially since some of the genes creating those genetic diseases have also been linked to higher IQ.
The net result is that while I think this book is worth reading, especially in his debunking of say, Guns Gems and Steel, some of its wilder claims are a bit hard to believe. I can certainly see some politically minded folks seizing on this book as an opportunity to advance their causes. I fully expect certain sections of this book to be debunked in later research. But I'd recommend this book for everyone to read, bearing all these caveats in mind.
To begin with, the author makes what I consider are uncontroversial claims:
- Human evolution has not stopped, and evolution can work rapidly over as few as 20-30 generations.
- Human evolution and civilization goes hand in hand. For instance, in a large scale urbanized civilization, violent criminals are heavily punished, leading to aggression being bred out of the gene pool in relatively short order. In other words, humans have domesticated themselves over time.
- There's a strong relationship between geography and the type of civilization that evolves.
Unfortunately, he also makes several claims that I find difficult to believe, though he asserts that his notes at the end of the book provide research results that are strong.
For instance, he claims that the rise of the propensity for hard work, discipline and savings is due to wealth. Wealthy people during medieval times produced more surviving children. Since not all children can stay in the wealthy tier, some must therefore descend into the lower tiers, thereby introducing their genetic propensity for hard work, thrift, non-violence, and literacy into the rest of the gene pool, where they would later dominate. The evidence for this would have to be very strong before I can believe that it's a significant part of evolution during modern times. For instance, a lot of wealth isn't due to hard work, but being at the right place at the right time. This connection between wealth and all those factors might not be as strong as the connection between wealth and political/inter-personal savviness.The big stretch in this book is when he claims that as a result of the cultural forces at play, the Western nations therefore evolved stronger tendencies towards novelty seeking, while the Asians evolved stronger tendencies towards conformity. This sneakily promotes some fairly obvious stereotypes again, with very little evidence. We simply don't know enough about genetics at this point to understand how personality is molded, and which parts of personality is determined by the environment, and which parts are what you are born with.
Now, there are some other claims that I think are quite believable. For instance, why have there been a preponderance of Jews in the sciences and other intellectual fields? Why are so many major award winners (Nobel prizes, etch) Jewish? There's quite a bit of evidence that there's been quite severe selection in the Jewish gene pool for IQ, which has also come along with a number of disadvantages such as genetic diseases unique to that race. This is entirely believable, especially since some of the genes creating those genetic diseases have also been linked to higher IQ.
The net result is that while I think this book is worth reading, especially in his debunking of say, Guns Gems and Steel, some of its wilder claims are a bit hard to believe. I can certainly see some politically minded folks seizing on this book as an opportunity to advance their causes. I fully expect certain sections of this book to be debunked in later research. But I'd recommend this book for everyone to read, bearing all these caveats in mind.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Notes for New Cyclists
Arturo will be joining me this year on the Tour of the Alps. Since he wasn't a serious cyclist prior to this Saturday, I had an opportunity to see first hand what techniques that experienced cyclists know that new cyclists don't necessarily find intuitive.
- Easing up on a shift is something that most experienced cyclists do. It's hard to explain, but I found that "go slightly faster than usual and then ease up as you shift" came across much better than "ease up as you shift." Speeding up a bit is useful because on a climb, you don't want to lose so much momentum that you have to put a foot down, and you tend to need to shift just as you hit a grade change.
- Quick releases on brake levers are not obvious.
- When the chain drops, the best way to put the chain back is not with the finger, but with a stick. If a stick is not around, use leaves or grass so your fingers don't get dirty.
- Don't have a death grip on the handlebars. Lean on the bars when you climb, don't necessarily grip them.
- It's possible to shoot photos on the bike while moving. But don't do it until you're very comfortable with riding and with the bike. And don't try it with a phone that relies on a touch screen!
- Kool-Stop Salmon brake pads. Enough said.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Field Test: Dell Venue 8 Pro 32GB
On my recent Pigeon Point qualifier, I got a chance to field test the Venue 8 Pro in an environment where I had no other choice of computing device. It was a cycling trip, so weight and space were both at a premium, eliminating the Surface Pro as a choice even if it had been an option. I could have brought the basic Kindle or the Venue 8 Pro, but the prospect of being able to upload rides and run Lightroom while at Pigeon Point won out. especially since we knew that Pigeon Point had wifi internet and the Venue 8 Pro had a Kindle app.
The device was certainly light enough and compact enough that it fit in my saddlebag with no problems. The battery life on the Venue 8 Pro is so good that I don't even bother turning it off for the 6 hour ride to the lighthouse. It showed up at the other end with still a 99% battery life. The first test was uploading tracks to Strava. I used an OTG cable and a mini-USB cable to connect the Venue 8 Pro to the Garmin Edge 800. The interesting thing about this tablet is that it comes with 2 web browsers: the "Modern" IE, and the Desktop IE. The two are different beasts, despite having the same name! The "Modern" IE, for instance, doesn't support plugins such as the Garmin communicator, so you must use the desktop IE, which is a real web-browser, for all intents and purposes. With that in place, the upload went without a hitch. The only complaint I have for this process was that the Venue 8 Pro, like any real PC, charged the Garmin while it was uploading data. This drained the Venue 8 Pro's battery sufficiently in such a fashion that I had no idea whether the battery life at the end of the evening at 49% was due to excessive charging of the Garmin Edge or because of my use of Lightroom.
Lightroom demands lots of storage, especially if you're going to be uploading 20MB pictures from the Sony RX100 during a long tour. As a result, I opted for a 64GB micro-SD card on the Venue 8 Pro for storage. At $39 for a UHS-1 on Amazon, this won't break the bank is would provide a reasonable backup for all your photos while you're touring. However, what I didn't account for was that the write speed to micro-SD storage on the Dell Venue 8 Pro was slow. Basically, you cannot expect better than 8MB/s write and 23MB/s read from even a UHS10 card. For me, that meant that on top of the Lightroom and OS overhead, it was taking about 30s per photo to upload from the camera to the tablet. And yes, you need the above mentioned OTG cable as well as a memory card reader. Once on the tablet, due to the write speeds to storage mentioned, do not expect snappy performance out of lightroom. In particular, trying to do photo editing while importing can be quite frustrating, as is manipulating lightroom with a finger. With a stylus, you can at least get some precision without toting a mouse along. Being able to run an ND grad filter on photos output by the RX100 is unique to the full Windows 8 tablets, and since your best photos take place at sunrise or sunset, I expect this distinguishing feature to be something that most serious photographers would consider essential.
One unexpected hitch came with exporting the photos. There's no easy way to select multiple photos with the finger and then export, so what I did was to export one photo at a time. Since Lightroom was happy to queue up my exports, this was surprisingly fast and easy once I had the photos filtered in library view. Again, writing the exports took time, but it was easily done in batch mode and once it was done I could upload to Facebook in a batch.
Skype also has both a "Modern" UI and a desktop version. The "Modern" version here worked fine, so I didn't bother with the desktop. However, the bandwidth at the hostel was so low that I couldn't tell whether the video was pixelated because of the bandwidth or whether I ran into a limitation of the tablet. Given that the machine was hardly CPU bound, I'd be inclined to blame the bandwidth.
My friend the Google employee was concerned that I'd turned to the dark side (though I'd always been a Windows user, even back when I was working for Google), but then I showed him the "Modern" IE and asked him to try out web browsing on the device. 3 web pages later, he was impressed. The tablet definitely runs circles around existing Android tablets for web-browsing.
I didn't get a chance to use the Kindle app, but I doubt if I'd have any problems with it, either reading, downloading, or purchasing.
All in all, if I was going on a self-contained cycle tour in Europe and had to carry everything in my saddlebag, there are only 4 pieces of electronics that are worth carrying (my CPAP machine doesn't count, since you mostly aren't a CPAP user). The Garmin Edge 800, a phone, a camera, and this tablet. Obviously, the tablet is the most optional of the devices, but it substitutes well enough for a laptop and any other tablet doesn't come close to the functionality of this tablet while maintaining a relatively low weight. I do wish that the device had better write speeds to the microSD card, but on tour, I'd simply just run the import overnight and deal with the editing the next day.
All in all, I'd recommend this tablet to a cycle tourist, and if Dell or Microsoft came up with a tablet with better write performance to secondary storage (or a reasonable price on more primary storage), I'd advice a cycle tourist to check those out.
The device was certainly light enough and compact enough that it fit in my saddlebag with no problems. The battery life on the Venue 8 Pro is so good that I don't even bother turning it off for the 6 hour ride to the lighthouse. It showed up at the other end with still a 99% battery life. The first test was uploading tracks to Strava. I used an OTG cable and a mini-USB cable to connect the Venue 8 Pro to the Garmin Edge 800. The interesting thing about this tablet is that it comes with 2 web browsers: the "Modern" IE, and the Desktop IE. The two are different beasts, despite having the same name! The "Modern" IE, for instance, doesn't support plugins such as the Garmin communicator, so you must use the desktop IE, which is a real web-browser, for all intents and purposes. With that in place, the upload went without a hitch. The only complaint I have for this process was that the Venue 8 Pro, like any real PC, charged the Garmin while it was uploading data. This drained the Venue 8 Pro's battery sufficiently in such a fashion that I had no idea whether the battery life at the end of the evening at 49% was due to excessive charging of the Garmin Edge or because of my use of Lightroom.
Lightroom demands lots of storage, especially if you're going to be uploading 20MB pictures from the Sony RX100 during a long tour. As a result, I opted for a 64GB micro-SD card on the Venue 8 Pro for storage. At $39 for a UHS-1 on Amazon, this won't break the bank is would provide a reasonable backup for all your photos while you're touring. However, what I didn't account for was that the write speed to micro-SD storage on the Dell Venue 8 Pro was slow. Basically, you cannot expect better than 8MB/s write and 23MB/s read from even a UHS10 card. For me, that meant that on top of the Lightroom and OS overhead, it was taking about 30s per photo to upload from the camera to the tablet. And yes, you need the above mentioned OTG cable as well as a memory card reader. Once on the tablet, due to the write speeds to storage mentioned, do not expect snappy performance out of lightroom. In particular, trying to do photo editing while importing can be quite frustrating, as is manipulating lightroom with a finger. With a stylus, you can at least get some precision without toting a mouse along. Being able to run an ND grad filter on photos output by the RX100 is unique to the full Windows 8 tablets, and since your best photos take place at sunrise or sunset, I expect this distinguishing feature to be something that most serious photographers would consider essential.
One unexpected hitch came with exporting the photos. There's no easy way to select multiple photos with the finger and then export, so what I did was to export one photo at a time. Since Lightroom was happy to queue up my exports, this was surprisingly fast and easy once I had the photos filtered in library view. Again, writing the exports took time, but it was easily done in batch mode and once it was done I could upload to Facebook in a batch.
Skype also has both a "Modern" UI and a desktop version. The "Modern" version here worked fine, so I didn't bother with the desktop. However, the bandwidth at the hostel was so low that I couldn't tell whether the video was pixelated because of the bandwidth or whether I ran into a limitation of the tablet. Given that the machine was hardly CPU bound, I'd be inclined to blame the bandwidth.
My friend the Google employee was concerned that I'd turned to the dark side (though I'd always been a Windows user, even back when I was working for Google), but then I showed him the "Modern" IE and asked him to try out web browsing on the device. 3 web pages later, he was impressed. The tablet definitely runs circles around existing Android tablets for web-browsing.
I didn't get a chance to use the Kindle app, but I doubt if I'd have any problems with it, either reading, downloading, or purchasing.
All in all, if I was going on a self-contained cycle tour in Europe and had to carry everything in my saddlebag, there are only 4 pieces of electronics that are worth carrying (my CPAP machine doesn't count, since you mostly aren't a CPAP user). The Garmin Edge 800, a phone, a camera, and this tablet. Obviously, the tablet is the most optional of the devices, but it substitutes well enough for a laptop and any other tablet doesn't come close to the functionality of this tablet while maintaining a relatively low weight. I do wish that the device had better write speeds to the microSD card, but on tour, I'd simply just run the import overnight and deal with the editing the next day.
All in all, I'd recommend this tablet to a cycle tourist, and if Dell or Microsoft came up with a tablet with better write performance to secondary storage (or a reasonable price on more primary storage), I'd advice a cycle tourist to check those out.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Review: Brother ADS-2000
I decided to try for a paperless office a couple of years back. The idea is to scan everything that comes in the mail, OCR it making it searchable, and then shredding or discarding the mail. You can do this with a flat-bed scanner, but you'd die of boredom feeding the thing one sheet at a time. The correct solution is a high speed sheet-fed scanner. We chose the Brother ADS2000.
The device is compact, about the size of a fax machine. It comes with a few accessories but we almost never used them. I've successfully dumped about 100 pages at a time into the ADS2000, and the scanner can do them at very high speed. The machine came with a ton of software, but I lost the disk pretty early on, so I pretty much only scan using my copy of Adobe Acrobat, which does the OCR after scanning, albeit at a slow, single-threaded pace.
The machine does jam, especially if the documents you feed it are old or pressed together hard because they got stuck together for one reason or another. But by and large, the machine works, and my son has abused it a lot but it still keeps on ticking. If you're dedicated to going paperless, I'd definitely recommend the Brother ADS2000.
The device is compact, about the size of a fax machine. It comes with a few accessories but we almost never used them. I've successfully dumped about 100 pages at a time into the ADS2000, and the scanner can do them at very high speed. The machine came with a ton of software, but I lost the disk pretty early on, so I pretty much only scan using my copy of Adobe Acrobat, which does the OCR after scanning, albeit at a slow, single-threaded pace.
The machine does jam, especially if the documents you feed it are old or pressed together hard because they got stuck together for one reason or another. But by and large, the machine works, and my son has abused it a lot but it still keeps on ticking. If you're dedicated to going paperless, I'd definitely recommend the Brother ADS2000.
Monday, May 05, 2014
Review: Nokia Lumia 521
As previously mentioned, I've settled on the Nokia 521 as my European phone for the year. I ended up using it earlier than expected, however, as I noted that our Ting phone bill rising due to unexpectedly high data charges from my Galaxy Nexus. Since I had a prepaid T-mobile SIM lying around, I deactivated my Galaxy Nexus, went to the T-mobile store, and moved the SIM account into a micro-SIM to install it onto my Nokia.
The move came at the right time, as we ended up going to Yosemite for a few days. Unlike Google Maps, Nokia's HERE mapping and navigation applications work even without a data plan. If you've ever used Google Maps' offline feature, you know what a crippled application it is when bereft of a data plan. You can't search, you can't re-route when you go off course, and god help you if the phone ever rebooted in the middle of the drive. Well, Nokia's HERE Maps and navigation applications are a breath of fresh air compared to that. Even in the middle of a National Park (where no data availability is to be had for any carrier), navigation is a cinch and works. To my surprise, search, and POI (point of interest) locations like gas stations, etc are also available. I'm impressed and very pleasantly surprised. On top of that, you can even download map prior to leaving the country for foreign destinations.
There are a few glitches, but no more than my Galaxy Nexus had. The one big flaw is bluetooth pairing. For whatever reason, audio pairing (as opposed to phone call pairing) is spotty and requires an explicit connection very time. I have no idea why that is, but there's no way to fix it. Fortunately, the speakers of the Nokia 521 are more than loud enough for navigation purposes.
Speaking of phone calls, Nokia here demonstrates that they really understand how to put together phones that work for voice calling. After years of having gotten used to crappy Samsung calls, phone calls through the Nokia 521 are crystal clear, and the 521 receives far better signals than any other T-mobile phone I'd ever had. I had previously assumed that my home was a T-mobile dead zone, but the Nokia 521 happily receives and makes phone calls in my home. Either T-mobile's network has improved (unlikely) or Nokia really knows how to make a phone that can make and receive calls.
The battery life is also nothing short of amazing. I'd gotten used to never going out the door with the Galaxy Nexus without also carrying along 2 spare batteries in addition to the extended battery that's already in my phone. I broke that habit with the Nokia 521. Not once did I run out of battery during the course of a normal day, and even when cycling out of cell coverage for a day, the Nokia's battery never dropped past 80%. I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I checked the battery life after a day of riding in the Santa Cruz mountains.
All in all, I'm very happy with this phone as a primary use phone, and when my prepaid minutes run out and I come scrambling back to Ting and the Galaxy Nexus, I'm going to miss the Nokia 521 badly. Highly recommended.
The move came at the right time, as we ended up going to Yosemite for a few days. Unlike Google Maps, Nokia's HERE mapping and navigation applications work even without a data plan. If you've ever used Google Maps' offline feature, you know what a crippled application it is when bereft of a data plan. You can't search, you can't re-route when you go off course, and god help you if the phone ever rebooted in the middle of the drive. Well, Nokia's HERE Maps and navigation applications are a breath of fresh air compared to that. Even in the middle of a National Park (where no data availability is to be had for any carrier), navigation is a cinch and works. To my surprise, search, and POI (point of interest) locations like gas stations, etc are also available. I'm impressed and very pleasantly surprised. On top of that, you can even download map prior to leaving the country for foreign destinations.
There are a few glitches, but no more than my Galaxy Nexus had. The one big flaw is bluetooth pairing. For whatever reason, audio pairing (as opposed to phone call pairing) is spotty and requires an explicit connection very time. I have no idea why that is, but there's no way to fix it. Fortunately, the speakers of the Nokia 521 are more than loud enough for navigation purposes.
Speaking of phone calls, Nokia here demonstrates that they really understand how to put together phones that work for voice calling. After years of having gotten used to crappy Samsung calls, phone calls through the Nokia 521 are crystal clear, and the 521 receives far better signals than any other T-mobile phone I'd ever had. I had previously assumed that my home was a T-mobile dead zone, but the Nokia 521 happily receives and makes phone calls in my home. Either T-mobile's network has improved (unlikely) or Nokia really knows how to make a phone that can make and receive calls.
The battery life is also nothing short of amazing. I'd gotten used to never going out the door with the Galaxy Nexus without also carrying along 2 spare batteries in addition to the extended battery that's already in my phone. I broke that habit with the Nokia 521. Not once did I run out of battery during the course of a normal day, and even when cycling out of cell coverage for a day, the Nokia's battery never dropped past 80%. I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I checked the battery life after a day of riding in the Santa Cruz mountains.
All in all, I'm very happy with this phone as a primary use phone, and when my prepaid minutes run out and I come scrambling back to Ting and the Galaxy Nexus, I'm going to miss the Nokia 521 badly. Highly recommended.
Sunday, May 04, 2014
Review: If You Can: How Millenials Can Get Rich Slowly
If You Can is William Bernstein's financial planning booklet for people starting out in their careers. It is normally $0.99 at the Kindle Store (free today), but you can download it for free from Bernstein's website. At 27 pages long, it is short and can be read in a couple of hours. However, if you actually do do the homework in the book (which only of reading other financial books), the claim is that you will know more than most financial professionals about investing.
The prescriptions in the book are fairly straightforward: save money (at least 15% of your income), pay off all debt, invest in a diversified portfolio (the suggested 33% even splits between domestic stocks, international stocks, and bonds is a fairly good one), learn a bit about finance and financial history, rebalance your portfolio about once a year, steer away from financial professionals who will try to steal your money and only buy indexed funds (preferably Vanguard ones).
Of course, straightforward doesn't mean easy. Being able to do all of these would qualify you to manage money not just for yourself, but for any one and any institution. Similarly, doing all of the homework assignments isn't easy, since it's actually substantial reading. Here's the reading list:
In any case, the irony of all teaching is that the people who need it the most won't show up in class, hence the people who need this booklet the most probably won't read this book. But if you're the kind of person who gets asked for financial advice, in the interest of saving your time and your breath (since sadly, this type of advice is more frequently ignored than followed), this is a great little free booklet to point people at so you can talk about more interesting things.
Recommended.
The prescriptions in the book are fairly straightforward: save money (at least 15% of your income), pay off all debt, invest in a diversified portfolio (the suggested 33% even splits between domestic stocks, international stocks, and bonds is a fairly good one), learn a bit about finance and financial history, rebalance your portfolio about once a year, steer away from financial professionals who will try to steal your money and only buy indexed funds (preferably Vanguard ones).
Of course, straightforward doesn't mean easy. Being able to do all of these would qualify you to manage money not just for yourself, but for any one and any institution. Similarly, doing all of the homework assignments isn't easy, since it's actually substantial reading. Here's the reading list:
- The Millionaire Next Door
- Common Sense on Mutual Funds
- Devil Take The Hindmost
- The Great Depression A Diary
- Your Money And Your Brain
- How A Second Grader Beasts Wall Street
- All About Asset Allocation
In any case, the irony of all teaching is that the people who need it the most won't show up in class, hence the people who need this booklet the most probably won't read this book. But if you're the kind of person who gets asked for financial advice, in the interest of saving your time and your breath (since sadly, this type of advice is more frequently ignored than followed), this is a great little free booklet to point people at so you can talk about more interesting things.
Recommended.
Thursday, May 01, 2014
Review: How to Win Friends and Influence People
How to Win Friends and Influence People is currently $2.99 on the Kindle store. I'd gotten this far in life without reading the book, but a friend of mine told me she used a technique from the book and it worked, though she felt slimy about it afterwards. That's intriguing enough to get me to buy and read the book.
This is a great book, as far as being an effective politician and getting what you want from people goes. Fundamentally, the book is all about helping you tell people what they want to hear, as opposed to what reality is. For example, in one anecdote, the manager of a singer who refused to get on stage simply lied to him over and over again until he did so. In another example, Dale encourages you not to tell people that they are wrong, but to pretend that you could be wrong and asking to check the facts. In certain circumstances, that could easily win you favors, sales, and deals. In other circumstances, it could make you look like an easy pushover and mark, and you will get out-maneuvered by more politically savvy folks, especially if you're an engineer. Dale Carnegie, however, doesn't tell you how to distinguish between those circumstances. For instance, if Galileo had read this book, he might easily have avoided the Roman inquisition. It would have done immense harm to the scientific enterprise, however, so I'm glad the world is not full of people who've read Dale Carnegie's book.
People occasionally ask me for advice on their careers. Given that I'm completely oblivious to office politics, I'm a bad person to ask. But I do refer them to books such as Career Warfare. It's quite clear to me that How to Win Friends and Influence People is also a great book to read if you want to succeed at a large company, where perception is much more important than reality. Keep in mind, however, that if you're an engineer, you're a much worse liar than anyone who's not an engineer, so some of these techniques absolutely will not work for you.
Highly Recommended.
This is a great book, as far as being an effective politician and getting what you want from people goes. Fundamentally, the book is all about helping you tell people what they want to hear, as opposed to what reality is. For example, in one anecdote, the manager of a singer who refused to get on stage simply lied to him over and over again until he did so. In another example, Dale encourages you not to tell people that they are wrong, but to pretend that you could be wrong and asking to check the facts. In certain circumstances, that could easily win you favors, sales, and deals. In other circumstances, it could make you look like an easy pushover and mark, and you will get out-maneuvered by more politically savvy folks, especially if you're an engineer. Dale Carnegie, however, doesn't tell you how to distinguish between those circumstances. For instance, if Galileo had read this book, he might easily have avoided the Roman inquisition. It would have done immense harm to the scientific enterprise, however, so I'm glad the world is not full of people who've read Dale Carnegie's book.
People occasionally ask me for advice on their careers. Given that I'm completely oblivious to office politics, I'm a bad person to ask. But I do refer them to books such as Career Warfare. It's quite clear to me that How to Win Friends and Influence People is also a great book to read if you want to succeed at a large company, where perception is much more important than reality. Keep in mind, however, that if you're an engineer, you're a much worse liar than anyone who's not an engineer, so some of these techniques absolutely will not work for you.
Highly Recommended.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Review: Android Studio
Since helping my wife with her Nutrition Tracker App, I'd had a chance to try both Eclipse and Android Studio for android app development. Both of them run on Windows, my preferred platform, but it didn't take 3 days with Eclipse before I got frustrated with frequent crashing, features not working, and a lousy layout tool. I found Android Studio and downloaded it and soon persuaded my wife to switch to it.
Android Studio is based on IntelliJ IDEA. Back at Google when I was doing Java work, I avoided it like the plague, preferring to stick with Emacs and gtags. That's because Google's Java source base was so big you couldn't possibly load it into IntelliJ on the puny workstations of that time (yes, Google only supplied machines with 2GB of RAM in 2003), and even if it had been possible, those machines would have slowed to a crawl under the load of processing that much code. IntelliJ/Eclipse die-hards were resorting to wacko tricks like subsetting Google's code base so it could load into IntelliJ and then writing plugins into gtags for accessing the rest of the source code. I have no idea what Googlers do today, but my suspicion is that things haven't gotten much better.
For small Android projects like Nutrition Tracker, however, an IntelliJ is just about right. If you're unfamiliar with the Android API, it would supply you with method name completion, tell you which arguments to supply in which order, automagically add imports, allow for automatic refactoring tricks such as moving methods, renaming variables safely, and moving inner classes out of their outer classes, shifting classes between packages, etc. The layout tool helps you avoid having to learn the lame layout XML language, so you can actually try to make things work (as opposed to making things look pretty and usable --- I think Emacs is a great UI, so I have no expertise on those topics).
Android Studio is slow. It's slow to startup, it's slow to compile, and it's slow to run the debugger. A typical edit-compile-debug cycle would take around 10-20 seconds in order to build a tiny app. Note that I'm not complaining about Android Studio's massive use of resources while I'm editing. I think that's entirely appropriate. I want all my 4 cores/8 threads to be utilized in order to make my coding experience faster and more pleasant. I don't even mind the startup, since it doesn't need to happen that frequently, and it's a one time cost. But the Gradle build system is not only a resource hog, but it introduces additional latency into my think-time, so I begrudge every second it's spending traversing dependency graphs instead of actually compiling code. I have no idea why the Android Studio engineers chose a clunky system like Gradle, as opposed to rolling their own and integrating it fully into the IDE. I never want to edit the gradle build files manually, but the system forces me to. What's more, the syntax is really obscure and the documentation is inadequate.
For instance, when doing an android release, the documentation only covers Eclipse. Worse, the documentation lies to you. It tells you to modify your Manifest file, and I did. Until I kept scratching my head as to why that never worked. It turned out that you had to modify the Gradle config, since the Android Manifest XML file was ignored in the presence of Android Studio. Well, that took so much googling around that I can't remember what search term I used to uncover the Stack Overflow answer any more.
The source control integration is also funky. It supports Git, Mercury, and Subversion, but not Perforce. Given that Google uses Perforce internally, I surmise that Google's internal projects do not use Android Studio. This does not bode well, since that will mean that Android Studio's most serious problems (build performance) will most likely never get addressed because its non-existent internal customers will not feel the pain.
For quick and dirty Android projects, Android Studio is probably the best there is. If you're serious about building an Android app, however, my suggestion is that you use Emacs and roll your own build system that's decently fast. Otherwise, the benefits from using an IDE will be swamped by inordinately long compile/edit/debug cycle times. Note that though my machine is old, it's still decently powerful compared to even the fastest rig today, let alone the kind of laptops most "hip" developers favor, so it's unlikely you can solve Android Studio's problems by throwing more hardware at it.
Recommended only for non serious Android projects. It's a great tool for getting started quickly though, so use it to bootstrap yourself into doing Android development if that's one of your goals.
Android Studio is based on IntelliJ IDEA. Back at Google when I was doing Java work, I avoided it like the plague, preferring to stick with Emacs and gtags. That's because Google's Java source base was so big you couldn't possibly load it into IntelliJ on the puny workstations of that time (yes, Google only supplied machines with 2GB of RAM in 2003), and even if it had been possible, those machines would have slowed to a crawl under the load of processing that much code. IntelliJ/Eclipse die-hards were resorting to wacko tricks like subsetting Google's code base so it could load into IntelliJ and then writing plugins into gtags for accessing the rest of the source code. I have no idea what Googlers do today, but my suspicion is that things haven't gotten much better.
For small Android projects like Nutrition Tracker, however, an IntelliJ is just about right. If you're unfamiliar with the Android API, it would supply you with method name completion, tell you which arguments to supply in which order, automagically add imports, allow for automatic refactoring tricks such as moving methods, renaming variables safely, and moving inner classes out of their outer classes, shifting classes between packages, etc. The layout tool helps you avoid having to learn the lame layout XML language, so you can actually try to make things work (as opposed to making things look pretty and usable --- I think Emacs is a great UI, so I have no expertise on those topics).
Android Studio is slow. It's slow to startup, it's slow to compile, and it's slow to run the debugger. A typical edit-compile-debug cycle would take around 10-20 seconds in order to build a tiny app. Note that I'm not complaining about Android Studio's massive use of resources while I'm editing. I think that's entirely appropriate. I want all my 4 cores/8 threads to be utilized in order to make my coding experience faster and more pleasant. I don't even mind the startup, since it doesn't need to happen that frequently, and it's a one time cost. But the Gradle build system is not only a resource hog, but it introduces additional latency into my think-time, so I begrudge every second it's spending traversing dependency graphs instead of actually compiling code. I have no idea why the Android Studio engineers chose a clunky system like Gradle, as opposed to rolling their own and integrating it fully into the IDE. I never want to edit the gradle build files manually, but the system forces me to. What's more, the syntax is really obscure and the documentation is inadequate.
For instance, when doing an android release, the documentation only covers Eclipse. Worse, the documentation lies to you. It tells you to modify your Manifest file, and I did. Until I kept scratching my head as to why that never worked. It turned out that you had to modify the Gradle config, since the Android Manifest XML file was ignored in the presence of Android Studio. Well, that took so much googling around that I can't remember what search term I used to uncover the Stack Overflow answer any more.
The source control integration is also funky. It supports Git, Mercury, and Subversion, but not Perforce. Given that Google uses Perforce internally, I surmise that Google's internal projects do not use Android Studio. This does not bode well, since that will mean that Android Studio's most serious problems (build performance) will most likely never get addressed because its non-existent internal customers will not feel the pain.
For quick and dirty Android projects, Android Studio is probably the best there is. If you're serious about building an Android app, however, my suggestion is that you use Emacs and roll your own build system that's decently fast. Otherwise, the benefits from using an IDE will be swamped by inordinately long compile/edit/debug cycle times. Note that though my machine is old, it's still decently powerful compared to even the fastest rig today, let alone the kind of laptops most "hip" developers favor, so it's unlikely you can solve Android Studio's problems by throwing more hardware at it.
Recommended only for non serious Android projects. It's a great tool for getting started quickly though, so use it to bootstrap yourself into doing Android development if that's one of your goals.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Why it now makes sense to build your own PC
I've always been tempted to build my own PC. I'm no stranger to the tools, since my internship at Geoworks effectively required me to take apart and put together the machine I was given at work. But until recently it made no sense. Machines were increasing in performance significantly, so every 2-3 years it made sense to get a new machine. When you're getting new machines that frequently, it doesn't make sense to build your own, since the beige box vendors can get you much lower prices, and the cost of your time to swap motherboards, CPU sockets, etc., in and out would swamp the ability to bring over your hard drives, etc. Given Moore's law, every 2-3 years you'd have to buy all new hardware anyway!
I recently took a look to see if it was worth replacing my 5 year old desktop. To my surprise, the answer was "no." Looking at the CPU benchmarks, it looks like a "modern" i7-4770 would clock in at less than twice the performance of my 5 year old i7-920. In the old days, 5 years would have been enough to get at least a quadrupling of performance. Not even getting a doubling in 5 years would have been unthinkable. Part of it is that Intel's no longer getting any competition from AMD. Part of it is because getting up past about 4GHz would overheat a PC, so the easy way out of just merely increasing clock speed is out. Increasing the number of cores have already hit diminishing returns as far as most PC users are concerned (I'm an exception: I regularly process video).
The flip side of this is that the base operating system hasn't been using more hardware resources recently. Windows 8 is actually less resource hungry than Windows 7, which would have been unthinkable in the old days. Thanks to Microsoft's desire to compete in the tablets space with Apple and Google, Windows 8 actually runs decently on a tablet with just 2GB of RAM. This gave me the courage to replace my wife's 4-year old X201 with a Microsoft Surface Pro with half the RAM. My wife didn't even notice the missing RAM, despite running the resource hungry Android Studio, which is enough to spin my desktop PC's fan up.
This has several implications for users and developers:
I recently took a look to see if it was worth replacing my 5 year old desktop. To my surprise, the answer was "no." Looking at the CPU benchmarks, it looks like a "modern" i7-4770 would clock in at less than twice the performance of my 5 year old i7-920. In the old days, 5 years would have been enough to get at least a quadrupling of performance. Not even getting a doubling in 5 years would have been unthinkable. Part of it is that Intel's no longer getting any competition from AMD. Part of it is because getting up past about 4GHz would overheat a PC, so the easy way out of just merely increasing clock speed is out. Increasing the number of cores have already hit diminishing returns as far as most PC users are concerned (I'm an exception: I regularly process video).
The flip side of this is that the base operating system hasn't been using more hardware resources recently. Windows 8 is actually less resource hungry than Windows 7, which would have been unthinkable in the old days. Thanks to Microsoft's desire to compete in the tablets space with Apple and Google, Windows 8 actually runs decently on a tablet with just 2GB of RAM. This gave me the courage to replace my wife's 4-year old X201 with a Microsoft Surface Pro with half the RAM. My wife didn't even notice the missing RAM, despite running the resource hungry Android Studio, which is enough to spin my desktop PC's fan up.
This has several implications for users and developers:
- Rather than buy a mid-range machine and planning to replace it every few years, it might be cheaper to build a high end machine and upgrade components. Given that CPUs and motherboards are no longer going to have to be trashed every few years, you might as well get a chassis that supports easy hard drive and SSD replacements/expansions, and GPU upgrades, if you will run GPU-intensive activities.
- I/O standards do make a big difference, but any PC with a free slot will let you upgrade to USB 3 and other standards, so again, expand-ability might be more important than "planning to throw it away."
- An adequately high end machine will probably last a good 10 years in this environment (i.e., a i7 4770k wouldn't be obsolete for 10 years), which means that it makes sense to put money into a high quality power supply, since the higher quality power supply would provide cost savings when you plan to run a machine for that long. This is in contrast to the "buy-and-replace" strategy, where spending $20 more on a better power supply wouldn't pay for itself in power savings.
- This also seems to be applying to laptops, though laptops do benefit from the power efficiency gains of the latest processors, so if battery life matters to you, an upgrade every 4-5 years might make sense. The way most people seem to use laptops (constantly plugged in and never actually used as a mobile device), I think most people should replace laptops every 10 years, getting new batteries every 3-4 years or so, assuming that their device supports it.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Review: Nuun Active Hydration
I've long been a user of Cytomax as a supplement for my water bottles. It's cheap, easy to use, and keeps the cramps away adequately. I'm a heavy sweater, so having an electrolyte drink is pretty much a necessity. Unfortunately, they recently changed their forumla to use stevia instead of sugar, which means that it's no longer the same as before. In any case, even prior to the formulation change, Cytomax had other problems for on the go use. It was difficult to carry, didn't provide a convenient way to meter usage, and I usually ended up doing without rather than bringing it on tour.
Endurolytes were our go to source for touring. They're essentially salt pills, and eating them a handful at a time was good enough to eliminate Mike Samuel's cramps during a particularly hot tour of the alps. They're relatively low density, so you really have to pop them like candy to have any effect. And of course, being capsules, you essentially have to stop to eat them, unlike Cytomax.
I recently ordered Nuun at a website in order to top up an order to receive free shipping. It comes in a tube and each tube has about 12 tablets. You use 1-2 tablets per bottle, solving the metering problem. Since it dissolves into your drinking water, it's particularly suited for touring cyclists who don't like to stop just to take capsules. It's considerably more expensive than Cytomax, though with Amazon's subscribe and save option along with Amazon Mom and my reduced riding load nowadays, it's still quite affordable.
The taste is much weaker than Cytomax, and that's a good thing. I frequently do get sick of Cytomax if I use too much, but this minor fizzing flavor is just right for me. My biggest problem with it is that it's not calorie dense at all. Come on guys, if you're designing an electrolyte for cyclists and runners, don't skimp on the calories!
In any case, I've turned on a subscription and will now use it for bicycle tours. Recommended.
Endurolytes were our go to source for touring. They're essentially salt pills, and eating them a handful at a time was good enough to eliminate Mike Samuel's cramps during a particularly hot tour of the alps. They're relatively low density, so you really have to pop them like candy to have any effect. And of course, being capsules, you essentially have to stop to eat them, unlike Cytomax.
I recently ordered Nuun at a website in order to top up an order to receive free shipping. It comes in a tube and each tube has about 12 tablets. You use 1-2 tablets per bottle, solving the metering problem. Since it dissolves into your drinking water, it's particularly suited for touring cyclists who don't like to stop just to take capsules. It's considerably more expensive than Cytomax, though with Amazon's subscribe and save option along with Amazon Mom and my reduced riding load nowadays, it's still quite affordable.
The taste is much weaker than Cytomax, and that's a good thing. I frequently do get sick of Cytomax if I use too much, but this minor fizzing flavor is just right for me. My biggest problem with it is that it's not calorie dense at all. Come on guys, if you're designing an electrolyte for cyclists and runners, don't skimp on the calories!
In any case, I've turned on a subscription and will now use it for bicycle tours. Recommended.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Why I can't help PMs, Sales People, or Marketing folks negotiate
Occasionally, I'll get a sales person, product manager or program manager, or even a marketing person ask me to help negotiate their compensation package. With one exception, I invariably turn all of them down. The reason is this: negotiate is a core skill for product managers, program managers or sales people, while the core skill for engineers is being able to design and code, with negotiation being secondary. In fact, one of the ways an engineering manager adds value to an engineering team is negotiating on their behalf with other engineers and with product management and/or UI designers.
If you look at how we train engineers, it's pretty clear that negotiation is out of the picture. Engineering exams aren't graded on style, readability, or collaboration. They're graded on correctness of solution, ability to apply principles and data structures to new areas, and of course, whether or not your project works. What negotiation there is in the engineering curriculum is informal: you might be asked to work in teams to turn in your homework (as a former instructor, I can say with confidence that this is usually so that we only have CLASS_SIZE/N papers/projects to grade, rather than CLASS_SIZE). As a result, engineers are singularly unprepared to negotiate their compensation in a way that sales people, PMs, or marketing types are not.
There's also a fairly subtle effect going on when engineers negotiate their compensation package. Most engineers are in a position to find a new job only because they're unhappy with their old one. Why are they unhappy? Usually it's because the old position did not make full use of their abilities: either they've been stuck in a junior position for years (I've heard horror stories about engineers at Google being stuck at SWE 3 for 5 years, despite performing way better than their grade), or because they've not been given raises, or both. In these cases, usually the managers have consciously or unconsciously beaten down their egos and repeated told the engineers that they're not worth much in the market. One of the things I do is to get such engineers to interview and receive multiple offers. The change is almost immediately visible in such candidates: they gain confidence as they realize that they are valuable employees, and this has an effect when they negotiate. The extra confidence enables them to negotiate and get better deals from their employers. Sales people, product managers or program managers, for whatever reason, seem to be immune to such beat-downs, retaining a healthy ego even when consistently denied promotions.
My negotiation service is unique because it's an irrational thing to do. The real money in compensation negotiation is on the other side of the table. Recruiters and head hunters get 30% of your salary (i.e., your entire engineering salary for a year * 0.3) for getting you to join their client companies. That's why there's no competition for what I do. There's no engineer who'd be willing to match what corporations pay in order to get a better deal.
If you look at how we train engineers, it's pretty clear that negotiation is out of the picture. Engineering exams aren't graded on style, readability, or collaboration. They're graded on correctness of solution, ability to apply principles and data structures to new areas, and of course, whether or not your project works. What negotiation there is in the engineering curriculum is informal: you might be asked to work in teams to turn in your homework (as a former instructor, I can say with confidence that this is usually so that we only have CLASS_SIZE/N papers/projects to grade, rather than CLASS_SIZE). As a result, engineers are singularly unprepared to negotiate their compensation in a way that sales people, PMs, or marketing types are not.
There's also a fairly subtle effect going on when engineers negotiate their compensation package. Most engineers are in a position to find a new job only because they're unhappy with their old one. Why are they unhappy? Usually it's because the old position did not make full use of their abilities: either they've been stuck in a junior position for years (I've heard horror stories about engineers at Google being stuck at SWE 3 for 5 years, despite performing way better than their grade), or because they've not been given raises, or both. In these cases, usually the managers have consciously or unconsciously beaten down their egos and repeated told the engineers that they're not worth much in the market. One of the things I do is to get such engineers to interview and receive multiple offers. The change is almost immediately visible in such candidates: they gain confidence as they realize that they are valuable employees, and this has an effect when they negotiate. The extra confidence enables them to negotiate and get better deals from their employers. Sales people, product managers or program managers, for whatever reason, seem to be immune to such beat-downs, retaining a healthy ego even when consistently denied promotions.
My negotiation service is unique because it's an irrational thing to do. The real money in compensation negotiation is on the other side of the table. Recruiters and head hunters get 30% of your salary (i.e., your entire engineering salary for a year * 0.3) for getting you to join their client companies. That's why there's no competition for what I do. There's no engineer who'd be willing to match what corporations pay in order to get a better deal.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
First Impressions: Microsoft Surface Pro
Our trusty X201 had been getting long in the tooth, and Xiaoqin decided to try some Android development. If you've ever tried Android Studio, you'll know that it's a CPU intensive process since it's based on IDEA IntelliJ. The build system associated with Android Studio, Gradle, is also a massive CPU hog, and introduces no small amount of latency to the process. I never thought I'd miss the days of Visual Studio, but it's quite clear that compared to Microsoft's tool set for development, Android is quite a bit behind, and extremely unstable. Of course, in terms of market share, the positions are exactly reversed.
After trying out a Surface Pro in the store a year or so back, I vowed never to buy a conventional laptop again if I could buy a Surface Pro-type device. Fortunately, Microsoft was having a sale on refurbished Surface Pros, so I was able to pick up a 128GB model for $450. You can find them for about $500 if you're willing to put up with a 64GB model. With USB 3 and a microSD card slot, it's probably no big deal if you can't find the 128GB model.
As a laptop, it's quite impressive. It's about 50% faster than the older X201, and 3X faster on boot up, hibernation, and recovery from hibernation, with boot times going from 30s to 10s. And yes, this is with the X201 upgraded to an SSD. There are a few strange fit and finish issues, such as the mini display port slot not being very deep, so when inserting a standard cable there's a little bit of chrome sticking out. The tablet comes with a pen, but there's no place to put it except in the magnetic charging port, and the magnetic charging port isn't strong enough to retain the stylus without loss if there's any pressure whatsoever on it. Since this is an expensive Watcom digitizer stylus, you really do want to keep track of it!
Running Lightroom is fast as you might expect, with no hitches and the Surface Pro had no problem driving the 27" HP monitor with a 2560x1440 display. One nice mode you can run is to have the touch screen run the Start screen, while the big display runs the desktop. This gives you a nice touch UI for the touch part, while having the desktop to do real work. Of course, Microsoft had to glitch this up---in this mode, desktop apps still launch onto the small screen instead of automatically selecting the big screen. It's this kind of inattention to detail that gives Apple its edge over Microsoft, though I've found Macs to have their share of problems when using multiple screens.
The device has a fixed, 4GB of RAM, but surprisingly, until I told Xiaoqin about it, she didn't even notice it didn't have as much RAM as her old device. At least part of the reason is that Windows 8 Pro actually consumes fewer hardware resources that Windows 7 did. The other part of it is that in recent years, software developers just haven't been able to assume more than 4GB of RAM anyway, so as long as you're single tasking or running just one web browser and an application, you're generally OK.
As a tablet, the Surface Pro is quite hefty, though not as hefty as the X201. It makes up for that, however, with power. I'd already written about how much faster the Dell Venue 8 Pro is than my Nexus 7. Using the Surface Pro is instantaneous. The Type Cover is also a joy to use, giving you keyboarding performance akin to what I'm used to with the X201.
The real revelation, however, is the stylus. I'd never tried any of the previous PCs in tablet mode, other than my use of the Wacom Bamboo tablet for producing Independent Cycle Touring. But while I hadn't noticed, Windows' handwriting recognition has become nothing short of amazing. My handwriting can compete with any doctors' for sheer inscrutability, but the Surface Pro handled my cursive with aplomb, as long as I was writing common English words. Write something not in the dictionary, and just like any other machine translation program, and you end up with gibberish. There was no training period, however, and I could pick it up and use it. You could even turn on Chinese handwriting recognition, though Xiaoqin pointed out that Pinyin is faster and much easier to use with a real keyboard. Unfortunately, having multiple languages on the machine is problematic if you use a keyboard, since Microsoft used Windows-Space to switch between languages, and Xiaoqin found it far too easy to hit that combination by mistake. In past versions of windows we tried to change the language key bindings but to no avail, so we gave up and uninstalled the language pack instead.
All tablets are compromises. The Surface Pro does not have great battery life. 3-4 hours with Android Studio and that's it for the battery. When fully powering Android Studio, the device also gets hot enough to turn on its fan, which sounds like a low hissing noise. It's quieter than the X201, but still noticeable if the room is otherwise quiet. Next to my Core i7 920 box going full bore, of course, it might as well not make any noise. At no point would you burn your hand grabbing the Surface Pro, however, so there aren't any safety issues.
Long term, the biggest concern about the Surface Pro is the battery. With the machine running hot, and the battery fully charged most of the time in desktop mode, I would be surprised to see more than 3 hours of battery run time after the first year, and 2 after the second year. Most laptop batteries get abused this way as well, but the Surface Pro has a non user-serviceable battery, with the only option being the $200 power type cover. Fortunately, for the price (which is much less than what I paid for the X201 way back when), we can treat the Surface Pro as a disposable computing device. This is much more of a concern nowadays, however, than it would have been 10 years ago. 10 years ago, you'd expect to replace a machine every 3 years. Now, an adequate machine (which the Surface Pro most definitely is) could have a potential life time of 5-6 years. At the rate Intel is improving (or not improving) CPU performance, I'm likely to keep my desktop for another 2-3 years at least!
There are a few accessories that I would recommend for the Surface Pro. The first is a Type Cover. We tried both the Touch Cover and the Type Cover in the store, and the Type Cover was hands down the winner. Secondly, you need a USB 3.0 hub if you're going to attach a debugging phone as well as a wireless transmitter for wireless keyboard and mouse. The Surface Pro comes with bluetooth, but it was easier to just use the existing Logitech mouse and keyboard than to shop for new ones. USB hubs can be powered or unpowered, and we got an unpowered one for convenience when traveling. It'll make the device drain that much faster, but having one less power adapter to carry will be essential.
In any case, so far, I'm liking the Surface Pro far more than I expect, and Xiaoqin hasn't asked for the older X201 back. I'm expecting not to send this back to Microsoft after the 30 day return period.
After trying out a Surface Pro in the store a year or so back, I vowed never to buy a conventional laptop again if I could buy a Surface Pro-type device. Fortunately, Microsoft was having a sale on refurbished Surface Pros, so I was able to pick up a 128GB model for $450. You can find them for about $500 if you're willing to put up with a 64GB model. With USB 3 and a microSD card slot, it's probably no big deal if you can't find the 128GB model.
As a laptop, it's quite impressive. It's about 50% faster than the older X201, and 3X faster on boot up, hibernation, and recovery from hibernation, with boot times going from 30s to 10s. And yes, this is with the X201 upgraded to an SSD. There are a few strange fit and finish issues, such as the mini display port slot not being very deep, so when inserting a standard cable there's a little bit of chrome sticking out. The tablet comes with a pen, but there's no place to put it except in the magnetic charging port, and the magnetic charging port isn't strong enough to retain the stylus without loss if there's any pressure whatsoever on it. Since this is an expensive Watcom digitizer stylus, you really do want to keep track of it!
Running Lightroom is fast as you might expect, with no hitches and the Surface Pro had no problem driving the 27" HP monitor with a 2560x1440 display. One nice mode you can run is to have the touch screen run the Start screen, while the big display runs the desktop. This gives you a nice touch UI for the touch part, while having the desktop to do real work. Of course, Microsoft had to glitch this up---in this mode, desktop apps still launch onto the small screen instead of automatically selecting the big screen. It's this kind of inattention to detail that gives Apple its edge over Microsoft, though I've found Macs to have their share of problems when using multiple screens.
The device has a fixed, 4GB of RAM, but surprisingly, until I told Xiaoqin about it, she didn't even notice it didn't have as much RAM as her old device. At least part of the reason is that Windows 8 Pro actually consumes fewer hardware resources that Windows 7 did. The other part of it is that in recent years, software developers just haven't been able to assume more than 4GB of RAM anyway, so as long as you're single tasking or running just one web browser and an application, you're generally OK.
As a tablet, the Surface Pro is quite hefty, though not as hefty as the X201. It makes up for that, however, with power. I'd already written about how much faster the Dell Venue 8 Pro is than my Nexus 7. Using the Surface Pro is instantaneous. The Type Cover is also a joy to use, giving you keyboarding performance akin to what I'm used to with the X201.
The real revelation, however, is the stylus. I'd never tried any of the previous PCs in tablet mode, other than my use of the Wacom Bamboo tablet for producing Independent Cycle Touring. But while I hadn't noticed, Windows' handwriting recognition has become nothing short of amazing. My handwriting can compete with any doctors' for sheer inscrutability, but the Surface Pro handled my cursive with aplomb, as long as I was writing common English words. Write something not in the dictionary, and just like any other machine translation program, and you end up with gibberish. There was no training period, however, and I could pick it up and use it. You could even turn on Chinese handwriting recognition, though Xiaoqin pointed out that Pinyin is faster and much easier to use with a real keyboard. Unfortunately, having multiple languages on the machine is problematic if you use a keyboard, since Microsoft used Windows-Space to switch between languages, and Xiaoqin found it far too easy to hit that combination by mistake. In past versions of windows we tried to change the language key bindings but to no avail, so we gave up and uninstalled the language pack instead.
All tablets are compromises. The Surface Pro does not have great battery life. 3-4 hours with Android Studio and that's it for the battery. When fully powering Android Studio, the device also gets hot enough to turn on its fan, which sounds like a low hissing noise. It's quieter than the X201, but still noticeable if the room is otherwise quiet. Next to my Core i7 920 box going full bore, of course, it might as well not make any noise. At no point would you burn your hand grabbing the Surface Pro, however, so there aren't any safety issues.
Long term, the biggest concern about the Surface Pro is the battery. With the machine running hot, and the battery fully charged most of the time in desktop mode, I would be surprised to see more than 3 hours of battery run time after the first year, and 2 after the second year. Most laptop batteries get abused this way as well, but the Surface Pro has a non user-serviceable battery, with the only option being the $200 power type cover. Fortunately, for the price (which is much less than what I paid for the X201 way back when), we can treat the Surface Pro as a disposable computing device. This is much more of a concern nowadays, however, than it would have been 10 years ago. 10 years ago, you'd expect to replace a machine every 3 years. Now, an adequate machine (which the Surface Pro most definitely is) could have a potential life time of 5-6 years. At the rate Intel is improving (or not improving) CPU performance, I'm likely to keep my desktop for another 2-3 years at least!
There are a few accessories that I would recommend for the Surface Pro. The first is a Type Cover. We tried both the Touch Cover and the Type Cover in the store, and the Type Cover was hands down the winner. Secondly, you need a USB 3.0 hub if you're going to attach a debugging phone as well as a wireless transmitter for wireless keyboard and mouse. The Surface Pro comes with bluetooth, but it was easier to just use the existing Logitech mouse and keyboard than to shop for new ones. USB hubs can be powered or unpowered, and we got an unpowered one for convenience when traveling. It'll make the device drain that much faster, but having one less power adapter to carry will be essential.
In any case, so far, I'm liking the Surface Pro far more than I expect, and Xiaoqin hasn't asked for the older X201 back. I'm expecting not to send this back to Microsoft after the 30 day return period.
Tuesday, April 08, 2014
Review: Flower
I picked up Flower as part of the Journey Collector's Edition, but if you pick up the digital PS4 edition, you'll get it for the Vita and PS3 as well. Given that Journey is a great game, the collector's edition is worth getting as it gets you the soundtrack as well as a few other specials.
You play the wind (or maybe the spirit of Spring) in Flower, picking up flower petals by making flowers bloom. That's it. It's a simple mechanic, made only more difficult because rather than using joystick controls, the game uses motion controls using the Playstation controllers. (I bet most of you didn't know that the Playstation had motion controls that weren't associated with the Playstation Move, did you?) That's not a good thing, because those controls are imprecise, but on the other hand, this is not a game that calls for a lot of precision.
The first few minutes of the game feels puzzling. You almost feel like you're in a tech demo, rather than a game, as there seems to be no purpose. Then after a while, the game picks up and you learn that yes, there actually is a goal, other than floating around swirling petals and admiring the scenery, and there's even a story. It's not a very human story, as there's no dialog, but you also notice attention to detail at the game's level. For instance, there's background music to the game, but you add to it every time you make a flower bloom, and depending on how you control your speed, you can bloom flowers at varying rates, so you're contributing to the soundtrack as well as the game play. This is so beautifully and naturally done that I didn't notice it until I missed making a flower bloom at one point and then the music sounded different. Not wrong --- there's no real punishment for mistakes, but different, giving the game a different mode. Very well done.
The game's story leads you through 6 chapters, though you can go back and replay any of them in any order. Bowen loved the first and second chapters, and made me replay the first 3-4 levels over and over. They are beautiful, and the controls are a sheer joy. The 5th level is where it gets serious and you can actually take damage, and it can be much more confusing as to what you're supposed to do. However, even that level is not very long, and you're unlikely to get stuck in it. The final stage is enjoyable once again and a lot of fun, even exhilarating, and all too short.
As an experience, Flower isn't as strong, long, or contemplative as Journey. However, it is short, and very accessible for even toddlers. I can recommend it for everyone, but do not consider it as much of a "must play" as Journey is. Judging by the trajectory of the developer, thatgamecompany, I'm looking forward to seeing what they produce for their next outing. I don't think there's anyone else doing the type of games these folks are doing.
You play the wind (or maybe the spirit of Spring) in Flower, picking up flower petals by making flowers bloom. That's it. It's a simple mechanic, made only more difficult because rather than using joystick controls, the game uses motion controls using the Playstation controllers. (I bet most of you didn't know that the Playstation had motion controls that weren't associated with the Playstation Move, did you?) That's not a good thing, because those controls are imprecise, but on the other hand, this is not a game that calls for a lot of precision.
The first few minutes of the game feels puzzling. You almost feel like you're in a tech demo, rather than a game, as there seems to be no purpose. Then after a while, the game picks up and you learn that yes, there actually is a goal, other than floating around swirling petals and admiring the scenery, and there's even a story. It's not a very human story, as there's no dialog, but you also notice attention to detail at the game's level. For instance, there's background music to the game, but you add to it every time you make a flower bloom, and depending on how you control your speed, you can bloom flowers at varying rates, so you're contributing to the soundtrack as well as the game play. This is so beautifully and naturally done that I didn't notice it until I missed making a flower bloom at one point and then the music sounded different. Not wrong --- there's no real punishment for mistakes, but different, giving the game a different mode. Very well done.
The game's story leads you through 6 chapters, though you can go back and replay any of them in any order. Bowen loved the first and second chapters, and made me replay the first 3-4 levels over and over. They are beautiful, and the controls are a sheer joy. The 5th level is where it gets serious and you can actually take damage, and it can be much more confusing as to what you're supposed to do. However, even that level is not very long, and you're unlikely to get stuck in it. The final stage is enjoyable once again and a lot of fun, even exhilarating, and all too short.
As an experience, Flower isn't as strong, long, or contemplative as Journey. However, it is short, and very accessible for even toddlers. I can recommend it for everyone, but do not consider it as much of a "must play" as Journey is. Judging by the trajectory of the developer, thatgamecompany, I'm looking forward to seeing what they produce for their next outing. I don't think there's anyone else doing the type of games these folks are doing.
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