TerraBytes of Music
This certainly was a full and exhausting week. After all the pains and troubles I'm finally lifting my spirits through the fulfillment of what was always somewhat of a childhood dream. I've finally got enough storage capacity on one of the home servers to store my music collection on hard drives instead of DVDs.
The primary advantage of this will be that I will be able to find a song and play it much faster as I don't need to go through the whole procedure of: search CD database - find CD - insert CD - find song on CD - play it. Another big advantage will be that I will be able to stream all these songs straight from the server from anywhere in the world to my laptop, iPhone, etc (see ORB post).
Having many high capacity hard drives in the same system also gave me the opportunity to test the various types of RAID (Redundant Array of Intependent Disks). As a note to my future self and anyone else pondering using RAID I recommend against stripe arrays (RAID 0). The long story short is that if a single byte of information gets screwed up on one HDD in the array you risk losing ALL the data on ALL the HDDs. The speed gain just isn't worth the risk.
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| Christian Nasulea - 20.06.2008 | |
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The Clones are Here
In my many encounters with all sorts of hardware recently, I came accross a couple of very interesting pieces of technology. We'd been discussing the fact that the Chinese can replicate anything for some time, but it was just theoretical, speculatory, and rumour-based. That is until we came accross two clones, of two modern-day mobile communication icons.
The iPhone clone was pretty impressive. A bit thicker than the original, without the multi-touch touchscreen, far less memory and a menu that's lightyears away from Steve Job's real model, it packs a lot of features which still make it an interesting choice for a phone with Internet access.
The Nokia N95 clone was even more impressive as it has exactly the same external dimensions as the original. It's about 30g lighter as it lacks the 8GB internal memory, and is obviously constructed of lighter more inexpensive materials. It also has a low resolution camera instead of the original 5 megapixel but other than that it's almost the same. The microphone on the clone is actually better and louder. If it weren't for the obsession of the Chinese with Times New Roman and serif fonts in general even the menu would have probably been identical. All of this for 1/4 the price.
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| Christian Nasulea - 15.06.2008 | |
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Communication Difficulties
I've been criticized recently on account of my poor Yahoo! Messenger communication skills. Not just messenger actually, it seems I don't convey the full set of signals in an adequate manner when using some communication channels (e.g. phone, messenger, sms). Allegedly, my communication through these channels is cold and flat making me seem uninterested, uptight or even hostile.
To make it easier to understand I'll refer to the break down of communication into its components as described in Professor Albert Mehrabian's model.
Professor Mehrabian said that:
7% of meaning is derived from the actual words used
38% of meaning is paralinguistic (tone or the way in which the words are said)
55% of meaning comes from body language (mostly the facial expression)
While this statistic is far from being 100% applicable to 100% of the situations I think it's a pretty good illustration of why things may get misinterpreted on the phone and, even more so, on messenger and other forms of written chat. After all, looking at the numbers above it seems only 45% of the communication gets through the phone line and a puny 7% through messenger.
Granted, the matter is certainly far more complicated but I take the opportunity to excuse myself this way, to all who might have felt mistreated, patronised, ignored or insulted by my digital communication manners.
All those not accepting this explanation and the real-world state of fact, please be advised I will make the necessary adjustments by closing the obviously unsatisfactory communication channels, like phones, and accepting your communications only via smoke signals, jungle drums and messenger doves.
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| Christian Nasulea - 14.06.2008 | |
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iPhone's Absolute Control
The following is an ad / promo that made me spend my money faster than you can say "m". BEHOLD! Touchpad Pro, the wireless control solution that lets you use your iPhone as a remote for your PC. The word "remote" really doesn't do it justice.
In case your mind is already on holiday (like mine) and you didn't grasp the complexity of the matter let me spell it out a bit more clearly. With the fully activated version of Touchpad Pro on your iPhone, the one that includes Screen View, you can control a computer from pretty much anywhere in the world where you have an Internet connection on your iPhone.
Let's take an example. You are carelessly lying on a beach when you get a desperate call from the office. It's your semi-computer-literate janitor whom you've left in charge of things while the whole company is taking July off. He wants to add some photos to a post on the corporate blog but, poor man, he doesn't know how. Thankfully you have your trusty iPhone with you, which means that not only can you log on to his computer and do it for him, but he can also see what you're doing and you can see what he's doing wrong, so next time he won't need to interrupt your surfing.
A big thanks to J. Sherwani for thinking it and making it.
Useful Links:
Touchpad Pro Official Website
J. Sherwani's YouTube Channel
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| Christian Nasulea - 07.06.2008 | |
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Windows Vista Normality
As I'm approaching the end of another series of very interesting software tests I'm proud to report that my Windows Vista Ultimate folder on drive C has a size of 17.9 GB (19,301,998,592 bytes) and contains 16831 folders and 78157 files.
This is after cleanup and according to all sources: NORMAL.
Therefore I move to recommend a drive C size of 60 GB for development purposes and professional users. Vista Ultimate Rocks!
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| Christian Nasulea - 07.06.2008 | |
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Things to Know about Low Cost Flights
I'm going to Rome on a visiting spree in a few weeks, at the end of June.
Why Rome? The idea was to go somewhere I'd never been before, taking
into account the best offer available for low cost flights at the
moment.
Booking the tickets turned out to be a great learning experience. For
one thing I know ticket prices increase as the departure date
approaches. Low cost companies have refined this to an art. The day I
booked the tickets prices went up by 62 RON between 8:30 am and 1:00
pm. Since I bought six tickets that meant I paid 100 eur more because I
booked at noon instead of booking in the morning. Anyone need a better
example of opportunity cost?
Now let's talk about extra charges. You might know food on the plane is
not included (a sandwich is about 5 EUR, which you pay to the flight
attendant). You might also know you have to pay to bring along luggage,
other than the usual 7 kg hand-luggage (another 60 RON / bag). You
might even know that you have to pay the taxes for electronic payment
yourself (another 30 RON / person in our case to handle the Visa
transfer). But did you know that on the invoices even plane fuel is
outlined separately? Security is also a separate item as are several
other things. Since they do show up separately I guess they'd really be
willing to cut back on some pretty essential things to reduce costs. I
don't know about you but I like my planes fully fueled... and with
wings... and pilots!
Now, to complicate things a bit, we had a cancellation in our group.
Formally, low cost companies have a no refund policy, but if you ask
they will tell you they can refund your ticket if you pay a small
cancellation fee. The fee is 60 eur / person / flight. So, in our case
120 eur to cancel a reservation on a 2-way trip to Rome, which (seen
how this is a low cost flight) is more than the refundable base price
of the ticket. So, just in case I used to many words and I wasn't
clear: NO REFUND.
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| Christian Nasulea - 05.06.2008 | |
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Provita Down Hill
Today we decided to tackle the freshly reconstructed road descending towards Provita. As Bogdan joined us, today we were 5 instead of 4 and we had Ioana with us driving the support car. A perfect setup.
Unfortunately, minutes after we set off, a thunder storm hit the area with heavy rains and hale. You can't imagine the disappointment. As we were heading back the sky cleared just as we approached the top of the hill again and we were able to do a single descent from the top to the bridge at the south exit from Breaza.
It was wet, slippery and very steep. We got very, very dirty, especially those of us without mud-guards. Anyway, it was very fast and loads of fun.
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| Christian Nasulea - 01.06.2008 | |
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Mountain Biking Poiana Stanii
Yesterday we went mountain biking from Cota 1400 in Sinaia to Poiana Stanii and then all the way down to the park downtown.
It was extremely fun.
Besides
getting reacquainted with biking I learned a lot about the logistics of
the thing. This is really a team sport, not just because it's good to
have someone with you, considering all the risks of injury, but also
because where you don't have one-way means of transportation (e.g.
bike-capable cable cars) you need accompanying vehicles to take the
bikes to the starting point, to get the cars back at the end and so on.
The new complex in Poiana Stanii is great. We only spent about an hour
there but the owner gave us a tour of the facilities. If you won't be
impressed by the incredible scenery, then the excellent accomodation
and all the entertainment equipment (ATVs, Hummer, Snowmobiles etc.)
might convince you to give it a try.
As we were heading back up the mountain by car to pick up the
Transporter we encountered a mother bear with two cubs. And guess what
was waiting for us at the top, just a few meters away from the car?
Another very big bear. Glad we didn't run into them earlier, while we
were on our bikes.
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| Christian Nasulea - 01.06.2008 | |
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Armoured
This was an exam-filled week, I'll still need many days to recover from. I actually fell asleep on Tuesday at the Movieplex during Speed Racer.
Today is a much brighter day, despite all the work and tiredness, as I finally got around to go and pick up my new bike armour. The enclosed picture is a preview of what it looks like on the SixSixOne website. You just have to trust me when I say it's much cooler in real life.
Just as my Trace snowboarding helmet the pressure suit brings with it witty, wise words of advice, reminding that it's not an artifact of invincibility.
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| Christian Nasulea - 30.05.2008 | |
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Exam Running
Last time I slept was a long time ago. It seems I've been working on
PhD stuff for projects and presentations continuously for ages. I've
had help, too, and there still isn't enough time.
Oh well, on
top of everything, today I find myself in the bizzare situation of
having two exams start just one hour apart... at fairly different
geographical locations. So, I guess I'll just go in, write for a few
minutes and then quickly get up and run to the next room for the next
exam, making sure I've still got a bit of breath left to be able to at least whisper for the presentation part of the exam.
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| Christian Nasulea - 27.05.2008 | |
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