A Tale of Broken Packages

Now, you are probably going to think this is about mishaps with a shipping company. Boohoo! My UPS package arrived damaged… Sad Face… None of that: UPS is reliable as ever, as are the other shipping companies (FedEx, DHL, USPS, what have you). No, the packages I am talking about are Linux/Ubuntu packages.

One of the major advantages of using a distro like Ubuntu is that someone else figures out what works with what and makes packages available for you to download and install semi-automatically. It’s really easy and a lot more fun than the super-crappy way you install software on Windows. Instead of downloading an installer that tells you to shut down all applications before starting and then goes through a hundred screens of questions that you really don’t care about (Where do you want the software installed? Do you want the software to report usage statistics?), in Ubuntu you just say, “I want Amarok,” and there it is.

An Eating Day at the Beach

Oh, Sun Diego, shall I count how many ways I love thee? Well, it’s really just one: I can go to the beach any time of the year. Really, I live and work close to the beach and frequently I’ll just head out for lunch, or in the late afternoon.

What if you wan to spend the whole day at the beach, though? What are the challenges of a day in the sun from a dietary perspective?

Rethinking Traditions

A confession: I don’t like signing emails. I find it stupid. You know the message is from me, after all your email client tells you that before you open it. What’s the point of salutation and signing? What does, Sincerely, Cinserely tell you that you didn’t already know?

Turns out there was a good reason for the signing. That’s from the days of snail mail and before there was such a thing as a typewriter: the presence of a signature was the only certain way to know who wrote you a letter. I remember the days when you’d get one, and you’d turn it over to read who sent it. If I had known I would feel old just for admitting I had ever read a hand-written letter, I would have believed everything science fiction told me.

Is USB the New Outlet?

I just got a refurbished Garmin Edge 705 (review to follow) along with a bunch of craptastic free sample gadget from China. The thing they had in common? Instead of having dedicated chargers, they all came with an AC/DC converter to USB.

It used to be that you were flooded with dozens of different chargers. After a while, you’d forget which charger belonged to which gadget and you had to label them. Every time you’d move, then, you’d have this monstrous mess of chargers that you couldn’t get rid of, because you had long forgotten what gadgets they belonged to.

YHIHF: Do Internet Shopping Companies Ship by Access?

It’s been a few months now that I noticed something odd going on. Whenever I buy something on certain online shopping sites, nothing happens for a while. Then, when I log on to check what’s happening with my order, mysteriously it ships on the same day.

It all started with this deal site. I ordered a refurbished computer, and while the site stated they were shipping within two days, after four I had no email confirmation, no tracking number, nothing. When I went to the site, it said it was undergoing construction, and that sent me into Scam Prevention Mode. I sent them an email demanding an update and alerted my credit card company.

The Revenge of the Bland

American cuisine focuses on the bland. I don’t know what it is, but apple pie, turkey, mashed potatoes, hamburgers, steak, casseroles, and what you have tend to be light on the spice, measured in the flavor, balanced. No Poblano peppers, no extravagant ginger, sensuous garlic, taste-explosive mole. American cuisine, at least the fast food version, has conquered the world because it’s not offensive to anyone.

The downside: you can’t control how much you eat. Popcorn is bland – so bland that you can just stuff it down your mouth until well after feeling sick, because why not? Milk chocolate is bland – and have you tried putting down that bag of M&Ms? French fries are all crunch, salt, carbs, and fat – bland and unstoppable. Let’s not even talk about cereals, mac&cheese, or marshmallows.

Comparing eBook Readers

The local Best Buy has a display with different eBook readers, so I got a chance to hold them all in hand and compare them. Nice way to entice customers, by the way!

Price wars are all the rage right now. The new Nook reader came out, and the price dropped to $149 (no 3G). Amazon followed suit and dropped the price of the Kindle to $189 (with 3G, compared with $199 for the nook 3G). Sony interestingly still sells ebook readers, and those were on display, too.

The Role and Importance of Quality Assurance (QA)

There is a moment where the young and enthusiastic learn that seat-off-the-pants is quick but eventually leads to catastrophe. You can tell at which stage engineers are by asking them what they think of QA: if they think it’s an occupation for the lesser divinities of programming, they aren’t there yet; if they have enough experience, they will think of QA engineers as demi-gods whose verdict makes and breaks months of coding.

MeeGo to Become Default OS for Nokia Smartphones?

To my complete surprise, I found an article on Slashdot this morning, in which Reuters was quoted as saying that Nokia is going to ditch Symbian on the N series of phones. Instead of the trusted in-house OS, Nokia is moving their flagship product to MeeGo.

For those of you who don’t know, MeeGo is the merger or Nokia’s very on Maemo project and Intel’s Moblin. All three projects have the same aim: to provide a full Linux distribution for mobile devices. Nokia’s main aim is the smartphone market, while Intel started out thinking about MIDs and netbooks.

Kindle and Calibre

I’ve been using Calibre on and off to get content to my Kindle, and I have to admit the software is gaining a lot in functionality as it matures. The version label (currently 0.6.42) doesn’t do functionality, stability, and ease of use justice at all, and I highly recommend it to anyone with a Kindle, regardless of use.

What do I do with it? I mainly add all those files I couldn’t otherwise read on Kindle. Calibre allows me to easily do the following: