IPOD Touch 3G

I got an IPOD Touch (32G) for my birthday and so far I am really enjoying it. Apple really do value their customer's user experience. It was very responsive, syncing with Itunes was very easy, the quality of the materials used was topnotch, acceptable battery life, nice headphones (though it doesn't have noise cancelling but it feels like it. I bought it in a store in Trinoma, (for got the name of the store), for 2k less than what others are selling them for. The applications currently installed are all free from the app store (US). How I got the account is another story.

I am currently looking for ways on how to develop apps for it. I would post anything I found useful.

Making PCBs

Making PCBs: "How to make really really good homemade PCBs"

Very informative article on PCB making.

My Nokia E75

Just bought a Nokia E75 phone replacing my 6120. It has a slide out QWERTY keayboard which I find very useful when writing long SMS and emails. The email feature was very easy to configure, I have a wireless access point at home, so I used it instead of my mobile phone provider's 3G. The phone was well built, the keyboard slides in and out with a very nice snap to it which I like. Here is a news article about the phone with good images at Softpedia.com. The PC suite, which was very easy to install, has improved a lot from the last time I used it on a previous phone. I had the phone's bluetooth enabled and paired with my laptop, thus I do my messaging through my laptop. Battery life was okay. There's a lot of positives on the phone which made me to not mind the negatives :) The negatives would probably be the alpha-numeric keypad isn't illuminated properly, another would be the numbers on the slide out keyboard. To be able to type in numbers you would have to press the shift key every time. It would have been nice if there was a 'shift lock' key.

Phase Change Data-Sheets Elusive (Mannerisms)

Phase Change Data-Sheets Elusive (Mannerisms): "So is phase change a kind of 'techno-Ponzi' scheme whereby techies keep getting money out of investors for promising to deliver a technology tomorrow which, of course, never comes?"

Numonyx got mentioned in the blog post, of course they got mentioned since they are the only company claiming they have a product. Come to think of it, the author have a point. A technology 40 years in the making and haven't productized yet smells fishy to me. Intel itself as mentioned by Mike Mayberry vice president of the Technology and Manufacturing Group in the recent annual Research@Intel Day

Intel's Mayberry sketches in the roadmap for Intel process evolution - Practical Chip Design - Blog on EDN - 1690000169: "And of course there is memory. Mayberry said that Intel is working on three novel memory technologies in parallel: floating-body memory, phase-change memory, and seek-and scan probe memory. These are listed in approximate order of difficulty and density—with floating-body being fairly near-term and seek-and-scan pretty researchy. Asked about density, Mayberry estimated that a floating-body cell would be about 0.01 µm2, while a phase-change memory cell could in principle be even smaller: about 4 minimum feature lengths on a side. Intel has created seek-and-scan memory arrays in which the individual bit cells are about 9 nm on a side, he said. As of today, Intel has delivered some engineering devices of the phase-change memory to prospective customers, purely to get their feedback on what characteristics they would like to see in such a device. There appears to be no productization plan for any of the three any time soon."

Ubuntu server on a Dell D800 Latitude

I have a spare Dell D800 Latitute PC which I had installed with Ubuntu 9 Server. So far I don't have any problem with it. I also installed TightVNC on it and launched a vnc server which I access remotely using a Lenovo Y430 (Vista). Right now I only access the vnc server session within my home network, I haven't tried accessing it outside. Will let you know once I have tried it.

The whole process was hit and miss :) this was the first time I have tried installing Linux, but it was good experience. I tried using Ubuntu Desktop first but I can make VNC work in it (if any body knows why please let me know).

Next thing I would try would be to have multiple users on the same box. I am not an IT guy (ASIC design and verification engineer) so please bear with me as I go through this.

Chapter�5.�Textuality

Chapter�5.�Textuality: "It's a well-known fact that computing devices such as the abacus were invented thousands of years ago. But it's not well known that the first use of a common computer protocol occurred in the Old Testament. This, of course, was when Moses aborted the Egyptians' process with a control-sea.
-- Tom Galloway rec.arts.comics, February 1992 "

Compactness and Orthogonality

Compactness and Orthogonality: "The purpose of emphasizing compactness as a virtue is not to condition you to treat compactness as an absolute requirement, but to teach you to do what Unix programmers do: value compactness properly, design for it whenever possible, and not throw it away casually."

Compactness and Orthogonality

Compactness and Orthogonality: "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information [Miller] is one of the foundation papers in cognitive psychology (and, incidentally, the specific reason that U.S. local telephone numbers have seven digits). It showed that the number of discrete items of information human beings can hold in short-term memory is seven, plus or minus two. This gives us a good rule of thumb for evaluating the compactness of APIs: Does a programmer have to remember more than seven entry points? Anything larger than this is unlikely to be strictly compact."

Encapsulation and Optimal Module Size

Encapsulation and Optimal Module Size: "Brooks's Law predicts that adding programmers to a late project makes it later. More generally, it predicts that costs and error rates rise as the square of the number of programmers on a project."

Origins and History of the Hackers, 1961-1995

Origins and History of the Hackers, 1961-1995: "“Given a sufficiently large number of eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”."

I think this also applies to hardware design.