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Spring 2011 CSC263 notes
This semester I made thorough use of the Wacom Bamboo tablet received for Christmas, particularly for note taking in most of the computer science courses. Here are the almost complete notes for the Spring 2011 CSC263 course with Sam Toueg (missing amortized analysis notes):
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OMGOMGOMG
(via xanaxnicolesmith)
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Activate the most recent versions of MacPorts
sudo port outdated | awk 'NR > 1 {print $1" @"$4}' | xargs -L 1 sudo port activateSometimes, things don’t go quite as expected with MacPorts, and you end up having to rollback to previous versions of libraries using
port activate [portname] @[version]Then, after a while, you realize it didn’t really help, and you’d like to update all the ports back to the most recent versions. I didn’t find a built-in command to do that, and the above awk-ward piece should do the trick. -
a new series about my neighbourhood.
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the house of god — a new series about my neighbourhood
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Kobo mini review
I didn’t get to spend much time with the Kobo, unfortunately. Unlike the heavier touch screen Sony PRS-600 my friend’s got, the Kobo looked appealing with its uncluttered design, clean UI and beautiful sharp screen. Due to probably the lack of the touch screen, the fonts also looked sharper than the Sony, something that must certainly hold true for other non-touch readers. The black version I got helped focus eyes on reading with the additional uncluttering contrast. The rubber backing proved to be handy in holding the reader upright without it sliding out of the hand, something that happened to me a number of times with the Sony. The list of positives ended as a few issues become quickly apparent..
Interface
The first thing I noticed after opening up the attractively simple packaging was that navigating around a book is rather tedious. Aside from longer response times than the Sony, the Kobo, as of the current firmware 1.4, offers no way to either jump to a particular page in the book, nor bookmark a given page to quickly navigate to later. That basically translates to you being fucked if your 500 page PDF book lacks a table of contents which a lot of PDFs out there do, unfortunately.
Preloaded books
The Kobo comes with a 100 preloaded books, which certainly seems like a plus, until you realize you can’t get rid of them easily. And since the UI lacks any sort of “jump to book title starting with letter X” or fast scrolling functionality, once you’re done uploading your books, you’re left to scroll through pages and pages of preloaded public domain material until you find the desired books you’ve just uploaded.
PDF
Adobe PDF files show up under the Documents tab of the reader. Since most PDFs are likely to be too large for the portrait orientation, going into landscape mode seems like the right thing to do. Zooming in doesn’t work too well here, though, as there is no zoom slider present: you’re left with “too much” or “not enough” as far as zoom settings go. Once zoomed in, it’s also typically impossible to centre text in the middle: pressing the left or right navigation arrows while in the zoomed in mode pans text far too much cutting off a good 10 characters making reading while zoomed in impossible. Doh! To be fair, while the Sony PRS-600 offers a much more fine tuned zoom slider and a set of navigation controls for the zoom mode, it resets back to regular fit-to-page mode once you decide to browse to the next page. Such UI decision makes me wonder what on earth the zoom mode could be used for beside zooming into diagrams.
Buttons and Overall Impression
I really wanted to like the cute little Kobo, but just as I was convincing myself that I’ll be able to convert everything to well indexed ePubs with detailed hand-made tables of contents, the Display button used for setting display settings suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason. After less than an hour of skipping through Sherlock Holmes and Art of War. Resetting with the pinhole didn’t help.
At this point, $150 really feels like a waste of cash. If you’re in U.S. or have friends there, a Sony PRS-600 is currently going for $169, and a wifi Nook can be had for the same $150. The latter, aside from having all the missing navigational functionality and a speedier CPU that Kobo lacks, is running Android, and will certainly be the reader I’ll be planning a trip downstairs for. Kobo, get your shit together.
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bugs (by Dmitry Kichenko)
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New home
So, the blog now lives here on Tumblr. It’s free, it’s pretty easy and fun to configure, and I can put the few donations I receive towards something programming related rather than hosting on DreamHost.
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Re: Thoughts on Flash
Nowadays, a web application is a bit of a frankensteined creature. But, even though we’ve got a long way to go, the standards are indeed brewing, and will eventually catch up. The way it stands today, we already have some flavours of persistent storage, animation, video, vector graphics, client-server communications, and some interesting frameworks on top of it all to make things a bit more seamless.
The performance and slickness isn’t all there, but it’s becoming painfully obvious the browser is the new OS. We are heading in the direction of something at which operating systems failed — providing a standards-driven platform to bring the same experience to all devices regardless of their software and hardware.
So where exactly does Flash fit into this picture? Proprietary, platform-dependent, buggy, and bloated, its lack of accessibility and direct search engine friendliness just doesn’t jive with where the rest of the web is heading. While a bit of a radical move on Apple’s part, I think keeping Flash off the iPhone OS will be for the greater good of everyone in the long run. Either way I’m sure Google is just as unhappy about Flash on showing up for their platform as Apple is.
What I can’t agree with Steve on, however, is the justification for excluding Flash as a tool for iPhone app creation. It’s not as much about Flash anymore; I couldn’t really care less about its ability to author apps. It’s more about the new, completely unnecessary level of dictatorship on Apple’s part.
Much has been written on the topic. The bottom line is, to me, that it should not matter what the application is written in so long as the user is satisfied with it. The App Store is for users, the developer tools are for developers. If the product meets the user’s expectations, who cares what it was written in?
There is a reason people prefer CPython to C despite the former compiling to C in the end. If all we cared about was code as optimized and cleanly written as possible, we probably wouldn’t touch Python. However, the fact that writing Python is so much more convenient and enjoyable, and that the hardware today is fast enough at running code translated from Python for us to simply not care, we choose ease of use and speed of development over performance because it allows us to deliver our product much faster.
The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms.
So what? Those using Flash will be more than aware what limitations their tool of choice imposes. Want convenience over the latest APIs? Use Flash. Nobody is complaining that they can’t write OpenGL games in JavaScript. I look at it the way I do at Opera Mini on the iPhone — it’ll remind people of just why it’s worth to go for the real deal in the first place.
And who is to say that the standards of quality the Objective-C apps set are somehow higher? Has Steve not been in the darker corners of the App Store, where design guidelines and provided UI controls are thrown out the window and replaced with hideous interfaces and code that crashes apps after going there, then here, then clicking back? How do those bugfests make it into the store? If anything, the App Store approval process has shown just how easy it is for a buggy flashlight clone to make it through, yet have a unique but ‘questionable’ app wait in the queue for weeks just to be rejected for a reason explained in fewer characters than a typical tweet.
I feel like I’m rephrasing things already said before but I can’t help feeling betrayed and oppressed by Apple. If this does not have a major impact and cause them to think again, I’m afraid to wonder what other ideas might pop into Steve’s head.
