gnegg: September 2007

C, C#, Java

Today, I was working on porting a EAN128-parser from Java to C#. The parser itself was initially written in C and porting it from there to Java was already quite easy – sure. It still looks like C, but it works nicely and thankfully, understanding the algorithm once and writing it was enough for me, so I can live with not-so-well looking Java code.

What made me write this entry though is the fact that porting the Java version over to C# involved three steps:

Copy
Paste
Change byte barCode[] to byte[] barCode

It’s incredible how similar those two languages are – at least if what you are working with more or less uses the feature set C provided us with.

Recursive pottery

Yesterday evening, my girlfriend and I had an interesting discussion about pottery techniques. She’s studying archeology, so she has a real interest in pottery and techniques used. I in contrast have my interests in different subjects, but this method of potting we came up with was so funny that I thought I just had to post it.

Let’s say you want to create a vase.

Our method involves the following steps:

Gather a vase that looks exactly like the one you want to build.
Fill the vase with something that gets hard quickly, but crumples easily.
Wait for that material to dry out, then destroy the original vase.
Put clay around the hardened up filler material.
Wait for the clay to dry up and burn the vase.
Remove the filler material.

Obviously this method will never allow you to produce more than one vase as in the process of creating one, you are destroying the other.

We continued our discussion of how such a method of pottery could have interesting side effects. One is that the only way for a potter to generate revenue of his work is by renting out his current vase. And should the vase be returned defective, the whole business of the potter is over – until he receives another initial vase to continue working.

Of course, getting hold of that would be quite interesting a job if every potter only used this method.

And the question remains: Where do you take the initial vase from?

Stupid. I know. But fun in its own way. Sometimes, I take great pleasure in inventing something totally stupid and then laugh at it. And believe me: We really had a good laugh about this.

The new iPods

So we have new iPods. Richard sent me an email asking which model he should buy which made me begin thinking whether to upgrade myself. Especially the new touch screen model seemed compelling to me – at first. Still: I was unable to answer that email with a real recommendation (though honestly, I don’t think it was as much about getting a recommendation than about to letting me know that the models were released and to hear my comments about them) and still I don’t really know what to think. First off: This is a matter of taste, but I hate the new nano design: The screen still is too small to be useful for real video consumption, but it made the device very wide – too wide, I think, to be able to comfortably keep it in my trousers pockets while biking (I may be wrong though). Also, I don’t like the rounded corners very much and the new interface… really… why shrink the menu to half a screen and clutter the rest with some meaningless cover art which only the smallest minority of my files are tagged with. Coverflow feels tucked onto the great old interface and looses a lot of its coolness without the touch screen. They don’t provide any advantage in flash size compared to the older nano models and I think the scroll wheel is way too small compared to the large middle button. All in all, I would never ever upgrade my second generation nano to one of the third generation as they provide no advantage, look (much) worse (IMHO) and seem to have a usability problem (too small a scroll wheel) The iPod classic isn’t interesting for me: Old style hard drives are heavy and fragile and ever since I bought that 4GB nano a long while ago, I noticed that there is no real reason behind having all the music on the device. I’m using my nano way more often than I ever used my old iPod: The nano is lighter and I began listening to podcasts. Still: While I lost HD-based iPods around every year and a half due to faulty hard drives or hard drive connectors, my nano still works as well as it did on the first day. Additionally, the iPod classic shares the strange half-full-screen menu and it’s only available in black or white. Nope. Not interesting. At least for me. The iPod touch is interesting because it has a really interesting user interface. But even there I have my doubts: For one, it’s basically an iPhone without the phone. Will I buy an iPhone when (if) it becomes available in Switzerland? If yes, there’s no need to buy the iPod Touch. If no, there still remains that awful usability problem of touch-screen only devices: You can’t use them without taking them out of your pocket. On my nano, I can play and pause the music (or more often podcast) and I can adjust the volume and I can always see what’s on the screen. On the touch interface, I have to put the screen to standby mode, I can’t do anything without looking at the device and I think it may be a bit bulky all in all. The touch is the perfect bathtub surfing device. It’s the perfect device to surf the web right before or after going to sleep. But it’s not portable. Sure. I can take it with me, but it fails in all the aspects of portability. It’s bulky, it can’t be used without taking it out of your pocket and stopping whatever you are doing, it requires two hands to use (so no changing tracks on the bike any more) and it’s totally useless until you manually turn the display back on and unlock it (which also requires two hands to do). So: Which device should Richard buy? I still don’t know. What I know is that I will not be replacing my second generation Nano as long as it keeps working. The Nano looks awesome, works like a charm and is totally portable. Sure. It can’t play video, but next to none of my videos actually fits the requirement of the video functionality anyways and I don’t see myself recoding already compressed content. That just takes an awful lot of time, greatly degrades the quality and generally is not at all worth the effort.