Microsoft FUD: in plain sight

Microsoft is notorious for playing a little dirty in the PR department.  They do it all the time by having technology news and bloggers write about their competitors (mostly Google).  These articles don't outline how the competitors product is inferior, instead they focus on more political issues like social impact, security, privacy, or freedom.  The latest article shines a light on file ownership under Google drive. The adulteration by Microsoft is palpable. You can usually spot this type of behavior from Microsoft since it always follows a formula which causes all of these types of articles to read similarly.

•  Immediately outline conclusions.  This will be as early as the description for the link that brought you to the article.  Not the headline itself, but how it was described from the source that you were linked from.  This type of trick is now becoming less noticeable since descriptions based on headlines are becoming more mainstream since websites like Reddit became popular.  The effect of this step sets the tone and allows readers with limited attention span to stop reading.
•  A positive mention of a Microsoft product.  In most critical articles when the author is about to lambast the subject there is little or no mention of competitor products.  When there is mention it is usually because that competing product defines that market, E.g mentioning Ebay when discussing online auction houses.  Microsoft on the other hand will mention their products regardless.  An example could be an exposition about Java's license agreement.  The article may be trying to throw a FUD hammer because the contents have changed which when interpreted in a certain way may expose Java as a being evil in some way. You can tell if the article was written by Microsoft if there are suddenly miscellaneous mentions of Silverlight.
• Back pedaling. The article will have some sort of backpedal at the end that either completely extinguishes the initial flame or a redaction or article update stating that some fact or source was updated. This will not only contradict the initial fud feeling that brought you to continue reading but will also make you feel like you wasted time.

I welcome anyone else who read some suspicious articles in the past to post links to them in the comments section here so I can refine my search for Microsoft fud speech.

Entropy Key to work with Fedora

If you don't know what this device is, it is a small USB key that is inexpensive TRNG (True Random Number Generator) device. If you decide to get one of these things and you are not computer, programmer, linux savvy you may have a little trouble getting it up and running without some clear guidance, so I have put together some reproducible steps for installing:


1) I didn't bother trying the provided RPM packages since none were packages specific to fedora

2) Lua is already installed on most systems but you will also need lua-socket, an add on for lua that provides sockets support. You can't just install the lua-socket from yum- you have to make small changes to lua-socket and install manually. The changes required will (a) install lua to the correct place for fedora, (b) add configuration for UNIX domain sockets for lua, which are not enabled in the fedora package.

I did a google search to find the changes I needed (google: lua socket unix diff). The result I found was for FreeBSD but it works the same:

[1] on freebsd-8 (CURRENT):
/src/localcode/lua/luasocket-2.0.2
0  # hg diff
diff --git a/config b/config
--- a/config
+++ b/config
@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@
# Compiler and linker settings
# for Linux
CC=gcc
-DEF=-DLUASOCKET_DEBUG
+DEF=-DLUASOCKET_DEBUG -DUNIX_HAS_SUN_LEN
CFLAGS= $(LUAINC) $(DEF) -pedantic -Wall -O2 -fpic
LDFLAGS=-O -shared -fpic
LD=gcc
diff --git a/makefile b/makefile
--- a/makefile
+++ b/makefile
@@ -10,6 +10,8 @@
INSTALL_SOCKET_LIB=$(INSTALL_TOP_LIB)/socket
INSTALL_MIME_SHARE=$(INSTALL_TOP_SHARE)/mime
INSTALL_MIME_LIB=$(INSTALL_TOP_LIB)/mime
+#
+INSTALL_UNIX_LIB=$(INSTALL_SOCKET_LIB)

all clean:
      cd src; $(MAKE) $@
@@ -45,6 +47,8 @@
      #cd src; $(INSTALL_DATA) $(TO_MIME_SHARE) $(INSTALL_MIME_SHARE)
      cd src; mkdir -p $(INSTALL_MIME_LIB)
      cd src; $(INSTALL_EXEC) $(MIME_SO) $(INSTALL_MIME_LIB)/core.$(EXT)
+       cd src; mkdir -p $(INSTALL_UNIX_LIB)
+       cd src; $(INSTALL_EXEC) $(UNIX_SO) $(INSTALL_UNIX_LIB)/$(UNIX_SO)

#------
# End of makefile
diff --git a/src/makefile b/src/makefile
--- a/src/makefile
+++ b/src/makefile
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@
      usocket.o \
      unix.o

-all: $(SOCKET_SO) $(MIME_SO)
+all: $(SOCKET_SO) $(MIME_SO) ${UNIX_SO}

$(SOCKET_SO): $(SOCKET_OBJS)
      $(LD) $(LDFLAGS) -o $@ $(SOCKET_OBJS)

3) Install the patched lua-socket (command: make && make install )

4) Follow the rest of the original instructions for generating a key and running the provided daemon.

To test that your key is working you can run one of the stat tools or just cat /dev/random..

XBox 360: Project Natal

Project Natal aims to be pretty much everything I was working on with cameras and stereoscopic vision in college. The setup is eerily the same too, with dual fixed cameras negotiating the 3D scene. Youtube video here. Since I have walked this path, however short it was for myself, I do have some thoughts about this project and potential limiations:

Camera speed and synch:
Both camera's have to synch frames (ideal) or do some extra processing to negotiate and calibrate themselves for the difference. This is a bit processor intensive to have a perfect synch of the scene and to negotiate the differences if they are not hardware synched.

Camera resolution:
I am hoping that Microsoft realizes how much money thay can make from this type of system and invest some real money to help offset the costs for the consumer on the hardware. High quality (resolution/fps) cameras don't come cheap and are what is needed to have this system accurate.

Camera auto focus/ auto brightness and color calibration:
The operating space for these cameras will likely be in very bright rooms with constantly changing lighting situation- between daylight with constant change in brighness due to clouds, to directional and poorly lit indoor lighting. I have a feeling infrared light projection may be ok for motion and object detection and tracking, but change in lighting situation or ambient artifical light may cause innaccuracies.

Processor intensive, highly parallelizable:
I am guessing this system will not be on xbox 360 considering hardware limitations, and will likely instead be on some platform that can take full advantage of the latest in parallelizable technologies and stream computing- such as nvidia CUDA or OpenCL. I can see this being the ideal application for next generation hardware consisting of hundreds of processor cores chugging away at image processing.

I really really hope this hardware comes out because it is exactly the setup i had been playing with years ago and it would be a dream come true to see it in its final/finished form the way I had designed it.

Stitched tabs? Mozilla ( my mozconcept )

I can't think of a good name for it but the idea is simple: all tabs are stitched together at the seams and allows for viewing more than one web page at a time and to scroll through open pages. Here are the core concepts:

Watch the VIDEO here which explains it much better:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4723419

1. All tabs are stitched together. The open pages are visible from one to the other and parts of adjacent pages may or may not also be visible.



2. Borders between pages are adjustable to reflow the layout of the page.



3. Scaling of each page independently from eachother so the user can work with them completely separately.



4. Bottom horizontal scroll bar is the default scroll for moving between tabs.



5. Scrolling for each is independent from the rest



6. Sidebars can be used to export parts of selected text from one of the browser panes to perform complex actions- like perform a google search in the pane when it is selected or dragged.



7. Dragging from favorites on sidebar creates new tab- dragging action defines width of the page (as it is loading).



8. New tabs created in the center with default width, pushing contents to left and right.



9. Colors flash when the default page changes (the one that has focus in the center) to illuminate which pages are which and which one has focus on the address bar.



10. Tab labels become editable or accept new addresses.



11. Border between pages AND border between sections of horizontal scroll bar can be used to adjust widths of the pages.



12. Width of the tab on the bottom width relative to the page that is being displayed.

Update: I just saw a video about weave- a new feature targeted at mobile synching of tabs. I think my idea would be a good fit for use in a mobile browser and would make weave more powerful. See the video I saw here: http://vimeo.com/2569344

Me using Windows 7 RC1 on my Lenovo T61p

This week when I bought my X25-E I spent an entire day playing around with different configurations of software: XP, vista, and Windows 7 were all at my finger tips. I started by installing XP from the Lenovo recovery disks. I figured to get the driver support and all the IBM drivers I would want to stick with this setup. After running the restore and trimming the fat I went through installing a bunch of crap and then realized the install was messed up. The security manager for Lenovo had the wrong password and I would need to restore again to fix this. I decided to play with the drive briefly and then looked over to my shelf with Windows 7. Why not.

After installing windows 7 (straight forward) i was worried I wouldn't be able to have acceleration for the onboard video. I had trouble in the past obtaining drivers because the nvidia drivers don't always work if they don't come from the manufacturer (I have no idea why they do this). Luckily it just worked out of the box. Windows update found all the drivers for my hardware and I was good to go! Of course, I hadn't realized at the time that I was wrong. I still have no microphone which I have not yet looked into. I realized this when trying to skype a conference call today and had to resort to using the macbook.

So far- I like it. Windows 7 seems to be snappy and fast. The interface is nicer than vista (yet familiar) and the UAC settings are easier to access and adjust. The distinct feeling is that microsoft realized with this releas that they could not go down that road they tried with Vista- which was to make software inately incompatible in an effort to try to force all developers to write software for it. The only things I dislike are moving files on a remote share gives a warning each time with no visible way to disable this. I have also noticed some hickups- where the mouse seems to stick for a moment or the keyboard keys keep pressing by themselves. It seems almost daily that there are updates for the system and I can't actually remember the last time the sticking happend (this morning maybe?). I had updated earlier today, and for all I know It could be fixed by now.

Me and my Intel X25-E

This week I purchased and installed an obscenely expensive 64 gb drive for my laptop ($800). I had read an article from Joel Spolsky about the 160gb X25-M drive that he test drove. He was looking to see if he could cut down his compile times by using a faster drive- which didn't happen. His description of how snappy things ran on the solid state disk drove me to thinking I had to have one. I looked into the specs and found that the X25-E had a considerable performance lead on the X25-M. The E also did not exhibit slowness as the drive filled as the M does which is common with Solid State disks. The E is also more reliable for top speed being sustained over the ownership of the drive and was much more likely to last longer. All that being said I just went for it.

Performance? This thing is great! My main purpose for buying this drive was to quickly be able to index and perform queries on development databases for data mining projects I am working on. I noticed a tremendous speed increase here. Unfortunately, no numbers- but I did notice that when I was running a very large query that took several minutes the CPU was 50% (100% load on a core) and my system was still extremely fast and snappy. Finally I can run my machine into the ground with work without having usability issues with other apps. I was able to open a very large VS9 solution in les than 2 seconds even after high CPU load, as well as all my other apps.

For a long time I have been resisitant to using FireFox since it became as bloated as it is today. It would take a considerable time to start so I opted for running chrome instead. Now that firefox starts under 1 second, I can again use firefox as I did back in teh early days of its existence.

To anyone who may be reading this that is not sure if it is worth it: it is. At least get the X25-M drive which is considerably less expensive. I am not sure if the E really makes all that much of a difference (read Joel's blog post).

First look: Visual Studio 2008

Today marks my second week using Visual Studio 2008. I primarily use VS for C++ programming for work using MFC. I have noticed a few glitches such as some of the slowness that affected VS 2005 pre service pack. I then installed SP1 For 2008 and things were good. The only thing I can really say I enjoy about VS9 over VS8 from my perspective (which is severely limited) is that ctrl+j actually works in this version (initiate intellisense). It actually things for a moment and rebuilds the intellisense database where as with 2005 I would usually exit the program and delete the ncb file to rebuild. Besides this I can't say that I have yet to find a major difference between 2005 for the type of work that I am doing. Everything is in the same spot and I'm glad it is.