Month: July 2009

SMS is dead

BeejiveIM is the first multiprotocol IM application for the iPhone that supports the new background notification features of firmware 3.0. Yesterday I went ahead and bought that application, curious to see how well it would work.

And just now my phone vibrated and on the display, there was an IM message a coworker sent me via Google Talk. The user experience was exactly the same as it would have been with an SMS – well – nearly the same – the phone made a different sound.

So the dream I had many moons ago (6 years – boy – how time flies) has finally come true, with one difference: Whereas back then the MB cost CHF 7, now it’s practically free, considering that I’m unable to actually use up my traffic quota and even then, it’s only CHF 0.10 now.

So let’s keep that in mind and also consider that SMS pricing hasn’t changed in the last six years.

So while IM was 52 times cheaper than SMS back then, now the price advantage ranges from somewhere between 3500 times cheaper and infinity times cheaper.

SMS pricing needs to be looked at. This just cannot be.

Of all the hardware that can break…

… it has to be the one that’s most difficult to replace.

Today, my Gefen HDMI over Cat5 adapter died. Well. It didn’t die completely, it just lost its ability to produce a stable image. What is transmitted is very intermittent and in the few seconds the image is available, it’s heavily distorted.

Also, it’s not the obvious issue (faulty cabling) as the problems did not go away after using two very short (1m) cat 5 cables to test.

Now this is really bad for a variety of reasons:

  • Only just last Saturday I bought Star Ocean and Tales of Vesperia for my 360, giving me a total play time of 1.5 hours so far.
  • Yesterday I noticed that Worms: Armageddon was released for Xbox arcade and I have already invited Ebi after the huge success that was our earlier Worms evening on the 360.
  • My setup is totally dependent on the two extenders as I am covering more than 20 meters of distance between receiver and projector. No extender, no Xbox, no Wii, no projector.
  • Last time I waited around six weeks for the extender to arrive

Of all the hardware I’m having at home, the HDMI extender is the worst to break. Not only is it very hard to replace (see above), it’s so deeply integrated into my home cinema setup that just debugging what was going on took a ladder, a screwdriver, a hex-wrench and unwinding an ungodly heap of cables.

All of that in an apartment whose temperature is currently at 30°C (86 °F) and with a hell of a headache.

I’d take anything else going down. Anything but that Gefen extender. My XBox? Sure. Shion? It’d suck, but sure if it has to be, go ahead. My reciever? That would hurt as it was very expensive, but at least it’s easily replaced.

Why did it have to be that Gefen extender? Why??

PostgreSQL 8.4

Like a clockwork, about one year after the release of PostgreSQL 8.3, the team behind the best database on this world did it again and released PostgreSQL 8.4, the latest and greatest in a long series of awesomeness.

Congratulations to everyone involved and might you have the strength to continue to improve your awesome piece of work.

For me, the hightlights of this new release are

  • parallel restore: I just tried this out and restoring a dump that usually took around 40 minutes (in standard sql/text format) now takes 5 minutes.
  • The improvements to psql usability just make it even clearer that psql isn’t just a command line database tool, but that it’s one of the best interfaces to access the data and administer the server. psql hands-down beats whatever database GUI tool I have seen so far.
  • truncate table reset identity is very useful during development
  • no more max_fsm_pages makes maintaining the database even easier and removes one variable to keep track of.

Thanks again for yet another awesome release.