Tims Logbook

There are plenty of reviews out there, this is not a review. since I've only played with the Pre for about 10 minutes at the store on launch day. I came into the store very well informed.

When the sales drone started his speel, I cut him off, explained I've been following it since CES, and he just handed it to me and walked off.

At first, it was sorta broken, presses weren't registering, apps barely launched, but after a reset it all seemed fine, another rep said it was probably provisioning, which sucks CPU or whatnot, anywhoo, it finally settled down into a usable state, so I dove in. I really already decided NOT to buy one just yet, cuz the reviews hit on a few show stoppers. I wanted to see these in person though, and also to try out the keyboard.

1. I'm gonna have to call BULLSHIT on the Copy & Paste. Copy and paste inside edit fields only is so half-assed, I wonder why they even bothered. Since every app is a browser, I'd figure they could just fix this in 'one spot' and get true copy and paste everywhere at some future point. Anyway, this is 'broken' or 'incomplete' such that it's a show stopper.

3. Rate plan BS. I'd be fine to go to 'simply everything' for $79, but they told me I can't... cuz i have 2 phones. Even if one of those phones is as stupid as a rock, I'd need to buy simply everything family.. which is $130 fucking dollars. Uh, no. Until I find a CSR that gives a shit to keep me as a customer, I won't be upgrading. Either that, or I have to cut off my friend who pays me $10 for her line, I somehow doubt she wants to pay $70/mo.

4. Minor, but still annoying. Word completion when typing is pretty much non-existant. My WinMo phone gives me 3 'best guesses' as I start typing, which is pretty sweet.

5. Minor: Accelerometer doesn't work in all apps. Why not? This isn't a freaking iphone. If I want to read my mail in landscape, then by joe I should be able to do that.

6. Minor: the 'phone' app itself is sorta week. I just have large freakin buttons that STAY ON AFTER I CALL. Just like my winmo phone, I have to 're-invoke' the keypad after dialing, which annoys me.

1. Type-to-search. This is very much like Vista/W7s start menu search box. Use it to quickly pull up apps or contacts. I sorta like using this over the launcher! Keyboard has to be open though. It seems to not be 'enabled' all over, like, uh, email?
2. Overall look: colorful, slick, 'finger friendly'. The UI is pretty easy to use (especially after the dozens of videos I've watched). Things bounce, scroll, and otherwise fly aorund quickly. The cards-as-apps metaphor WORKS. The middle button pulls you out to see cards, so instead of it being a 'home' or 'windows key', its more of the 'task manager'. If I owned one of thsee, I'd probably leave contacts, calendar, email, and the phone apps all the time. Then just flip between them.
3. The web browser is super fast on EVDO, and zooms & scrolls are fast and smooth. Renders everything but flash just fine. Even javascript intensive pages.
4. Youtube and sprint TV apps played back video that was decently sharp, zooming out with the silver button paused video though. ( I sorta wanted it to keep playing audio at least)

So, Who is this phone for? I figure it's for people with a 'just-a-phone-phone', who might want to bring their social network with them whereever they go. Average joe iphone users might be happy to switch just for the multi-tasking, and river-pebble form factor. Anyone with a serious investment in iphone, such as a heavy app user with a $100 library would find it hard to make the switch. This certainly won't make converts out of any typical apple zealot, as they are all claiming 3.0 update gives them 'all of what the pre can do'. Which is a half truth, but apple dorks are fine with half-truths. An average joe win-mo user might also like it, since it's not really that clunky to move around in, WinMo power users like myself will have to wait for the apps or SDK to show up. that copy-and-paste shit needs to get fixed though.

Haven't posted much recently cuz I've been busy at work. But now I've had a few days to work on my projects and make stuff.

New Engine Monitor design, I dropped bluetooth in favor of the auto-magic meshing of Zigbee (and cheaper cost). A new generic resistive transducer section for oil temp, oil pressure, fuel pressure, and whatever else has a resistive output (MAF, Manifold pressure, etc). Totally programmable. RPM and fuel flow inputs.

I found this great ULP (user language program) for Eagle, called PCB-GCODE, it outputs trace *outlines* in gcode, which is a hell of a lot better than my old routine of exporting a bitmap, and import into Dr Engrave (since that software is CRAP for this sorta thing). The gerber exporters always exported 'where the copper is', not 'where I need to cut out the copper', so that's why pcb-gcode is so awesome, it writes out a path for where to cut away the copper.

Ok, so the MDX-40 doesn't accept g-code. No problem, the g-code that this script spits out is pretty simple stuff, so I whipped up a C# app that converts the gcode file to RML-1, which is what my CNC mill speaks natively. Fortunately, I was able to track down an RML spec a while back, and it too is a pretty simple protocol. 4-5 hours later, I had a decent converter. I made the first boards with it today, and it worked perfectly.

The other improvement was the 60 degree conical endmills from Think and Tinker. Fast shipping and decent prices sweeten the deal. I sorta eyeball the depth, but if done right, these puppies make a very clean trace outline at decent feedrates. I could probably mill some very fine pitch packages with these. (TSSOP or better)

I found some blogs on autodesks website detailing many of the new features in the 2010 version. I'm very impressed, and looking forward to using it. While I'm just a hobbyist/light user, MAX continually comes in handy for making models (on the CNC Mill), and doing quick shader tests or visualizations.

1. Open a new file of the size I want.
2. Go to the channels and add new channel, Alpha appears
3. Edit the alpha channel to black for the transparent parts
4. use Save For Web, pick PNG-24, check the transparency box, and save.

It just strips off the alpha channel, and saves it as opaque.

This is what I really needed to do:

1. I have to make a new doc
2. copy my image into a new layer
3. delete the background layer <- super important
4. add a layer mask
5. activate the layer mask, and *thats* where I draw my 'alpha channel'/transparency.

FFS, maybe if I have an alpha channel, USE THAT AS MY TRANSPARENCY. It also seems bonkers that 'PNG-24' can contain transparency... I'd think that might be PNG-Alpha or PNG-32 perhaps?

The usual annoying background music (all these demos are held in a discotech or somethin'). The marketing demo guy is just running through the same script like what was shown at CES, but he has a few more details.

I really dig the 'gesture area'. What this does is separate 'actions on your data' versus 'navigation between tasks/apps'.

This is very similar to the old school letter/script recognition zone on older palms or the transcriber on WinMo.

• In the web browser, the user is able to add any webpage as a button on your launcher.
• Sharing a webpage is as easy as clicking on 'share...' in a drop down menu. It will then set up a email with a snapshot of the page and the link. I wonder if other 'share providers' could be added?
• Palms 'Synergy' is so damn obvious, and it just seems to work. For all those social networking web 2.0 folks, it's a killer app. I'm not super hooked into these sorta websites, but I can see it being very useful. Hopefully It'll allow good ol' outlook or windows contacts. Though no mention of that (beyond supporting 'exchange'). Apparently, this stuff links to emails and IM clients.

I did the switch over today from my old dual processor Xeon 550mhz (Pentium 2 era), to the Dual processor Opteron 250 box (2.4ghz 64bit).

Mail, web server(Apache), java apps, and now the asp.net functionality is all working.

With great power, comes great new apps, such as:

• Orb - Like sling box, but free. Transcodes video and pushes it out over the web to my cellphone. I Couldn't run it before cuz a p2-550 cant transcode anything fast enough.
• Zune - WS2003 doesn't allow much in the way of multimedia. Since my server is always on, I can transfer my library to my server, and use the wireless sync on my zune.
• Virtual Box - My server is also hosting a linux (Ubuntu) distro. It's like two computers in one!
• Windows Media Center - Well, I don't really use this much, turns out the stock windows media player sharing does most of what I wanted anyway, still, it's there if I need it.

Now I have to get BIND9 running, and I can switch off and retire the old server.

I'm really sick of seeing this over and over again. Perceptive Pixel and Jeff Han was showing off this stuff in 2006 at TED, and built a company with patent portfolio around it. Microsoft Surface uses multi-touch, HP SmartTouch PC has it. W7 has it built in. So on and so forth.

Engadget did a great write up on this, so stop the rampant "OMG, APPLE WILL TOTALLY SUE PALM! The G1 doesn't have multi-touch cuz they were scared of apple, blah blah blah."

As for the G1, it looks like the hardware just isn't 100% there, and if android is going for universal adoption, they have more things to worry about, like supporting the inevitable onslaught of cheap non-touchscreen phones.

• Hulu
• Netflix streaming website
• TV network websites
• Joost
• Xbox Live and Zune Marketplace
• Amazon Unbox

Reading EDN magazine this month, I came across a article recommending using a 24-bit ADC instead of a op-amp and lower precision ADC on a sensor. After running the numbers as an exercise, I realized that this was a great idea.

The problem I was trying to solve involved a 'bunch of random transducers' on the other side of a MUX. Stuff like fuel pressure, oil pressure, and so on, basic engine health sensors. All of these have widely differing resistances, and sometimes small ohm ranges. (i.e. 66 to 180 degrees is only a 20 ohm shift, from 80 to 120ohms)

So I was looking at an op-amp stage driven by a digital pot, which would allow me to set the gain, and offset voltages. As well as provide additional VREF-/VREF+ directly through the dividers on the digital pot.

However, all this can be replaced with one 24-bit ADC, and a bit of math, i.e. software. Since most MUXes have around 80ohm resistance, I could just forgo any sort of divider, and simply provide a 2.5V reference. I computed about 100,000 steps based on the example above, which is closer to 16.5 bits of precision, instead of the original 12 or 10 bits of the ADC I was targeting. (Built into the MCU)

Not only is the effective precision well, overkill, the board layout is dramatically simplified. Well worth the cost of the 24-bit ADC, ($10 retail for small quantities).

• rackmounts use tiny, fast spinning fans, which means they are LOUD fans. It made me jump when I turned it on. I've tracked down some quieter opteron fans, though I wish I didn't have to spend more money on it. $250 or so is getting into 'brand new' SBC+case territory.
• Older mobos have old bioses that may not work with 64bit OSes, especially brand new OSes. So some things, like RAID1 may not work, because the mobo company has abandoned it. Whats worse, the bios update utils require a dos boot disk to run. a DOS BOOT DISK, like, a FLOPPY. It's nearly impossible to get one. Luckly, my new HDs ($30 for 250gb SATA), had a win98 command.com on them, so they basically booted enough for me to run the BIOS update code. I also found out that this particular mobo can take a USB drive and emulate a floppy... I found this out much to late to save me all this grief.
• hard drives are really fragile, I had a few lined up (trying to build a RAID), and clumsily knocked one over... while it was spun up. It makes nasty grinding noises now. That's $30 down the drain. Hopefully by next year I can abandon spinning media altogether.
• any non server version of windows won't have DNS, so I'm trying to get BIND9 to work, at least I can get source to it, cuz it's basically not even reading it's named.conf file.
• Perforce Server doesn't run on 64-bit W7, and yes, the Perforce guys know about it. No fix as yet. But W7 is 'unsupported' as yet, which makes sense considering it's in it's first beta. Trimbo suggested I use GIT instead of P4. Maybe I'll have to try that out.

I visited the MS website for Windows7 beta, and it keeps wanting to install silverlight. Ok, no problem. Click on the link... failed to install.

Here's a tip microsoft, BUILD IN SILVERLIGHT INTO IE, SHIP IT WITH YOUR OS. PUSH OUT UPDATES ON WINDOWS UPDATE Why is this so hard?

I'm getting sick of all these damn plugins. Can I just get them installed and updated magically without me having to fiddle with them?

I've also noticed a ton of churn on Flash recently. Seems like every other week there is a new flash plug in to download.

Can we just get flash pre-installed with a browser, along with silverlight, SVG, and PDF, then call it a day?

How do these guys make money again? Oh, they don't? No ads, no fees, They are burning through money sending out SMSes.

Speaking of SMS. can we just kill these now? I'd hope all new phones could just use an TCP/IP based messenging system instead of the ridiculosly overcharged SMS system, which as it turns out, costs carriers *nothing*.

Looked like a driver issue. I simply had to switch to emulating a Intel PRO/1000 MT desktop adapter, (leaving NAT as the default mode), and W7 was able to get to the intrartrons no problem.

I was able to get a 32bit and 64 bit key from the official site. I'm thinking about getting a new HD for my desktop and install W7 x64 on it. I just checked prices, I can't believe how cheap 1TB is nowadays.