Auto enhance, aww !?

This is what Google Plus Auto Enhance did to one of my photo taken in a beautiful day :)

Mobile typing

I think people hate typing on mobile device, I wonder why? I think there is plenty room for innovation in this area. I guess industry also recognizes this problem. That's why we see so many different keyboards and prototypes floating around. Some people are trying to solve the problem from different angle like Google or apple is trying to come up with better voice command based system. I think there are people like me who are not willing to spend their words for device. There must be some other way? The purpose of keyboard is communicating with the device? What else I can do to communicate with my device. Eye tracking? Samsung is taking care of that. It's not working at all, and on the top of that it is very difficult to represent everything just by tracking eyes.

Some other keyboard layout? Maybe? We have already seen couple of layouts. None of them really got any traction. Predictive keyboard? Well that's not working very well. Sure things like swiftkey is very popular but I feel like it is a temporary solution. We need some kind of input mechanism that would make typing even more effortless. Let's think out of the box, instead of making keyboard layout more convenient for people can we eliminate the necessity of keyboard altogether? What ever it is, it has to be fast, and it can be translated into plaintext pretty easily. 

Tablet usecases?

I guess I want little more than bigger screen from my tablet compare to my phone. I am not sure whether my tablet really offer anything else other than bigger screen! What is the use case of a tablet? Just the convenience of having bigger screen? I am curious is there anything that I can do in my tablet but not in phone? In this age of high resolution super phones, pretty much everything is convenient on the phone. Then, why would I carry two different devices with exactly same functionality? Especially when they are exactly identical. I do agree that having larger screen is sometimes convenient for some tasks. But most of the time portability supersedes that convenience. On the top of that, phone has a 'must have' reason that tablet is missing. Then my question is what is the strongest usecase for a tablet?

Google keyboard

Finally Google keyboard is in play store. I have been using swiftkey for some time. My primary complain is it does too much and most of them are annoying. I find Google keyboard more balanced approach. It has correction and it does not do it too much. In that a sense I like it better. On the top of that I make less error on Google keyboard compared to swiftkey.

It looks like Google is disintegrating many killer feature of android. I am expecting Google luncher next. That would be very interesting. All the OEMs are spending so much money to make their own skin and then if people start dropping their skin that would be a total waste of their resource. Android ecosystem is interesting. Sometimes, I feel like it is wild and uncontrolled. And that's the beauty of it.

Google wave

I was exploring tumblr today. Tumblr is interesting. I think Tumblr was designed for mobile and they got superb mobile app for social networking. Then, I spend some time with Facebook home. Facebook home, no doubt an interesting concept but I feel like Facebook overestimated themselves. All of these remind me of google Wave.

I was not a big fan of google Wave. But then, I realized google Wave might have had better future if it would  have been released after mobile revolution. Google Wave was build on based on the idea that everything is a conversation. If you think about that in your desktop that sounds like chat but if you think about that for mobile, that is exactly what we call mobile social networking. In that sense, google Wave was little ahead of its time.

This is an interesting problem. A product no matter how good it is, if it is ahead of time, there is no hope for it. Look at tablet, it was a Microsoft's concept, just little ahead of time. Some people might argue, it is the software that didn't click back in 2000. But I would argue otherwise, the world was not ready. People didn't know what they are going to do with such a device. They didn't know in 2010 either but it was easy to figure out in 2010 but not in 2000. There was not enough content clouds at that time either. PC was used for content creation at that time as oppose to content consumption. So when Microsoft introduced tablet people found it less useful. Over the decade the world had changed a lot. PCs shift their usefulness. They become a content consumption device as oppose to content creation. So, lightweight devices like tablet found their sweet spot in the market.

I think the world is ready for Google Wave now. I am hoping that we would see a reincarnation of wave pretty soon.

Multiplication is a horrible thing

In one of my interview, the interviewer was saying multiplication is a horrible thing to do. I thought those days have passed, processor architectures have came a long way since then. Since, I don't work in that area, I don't know what actually the complexity of multiplication compared to addition. Finally, the solution I gave to the interviewer had couple of addition but no multiplication. But I was thinking is it really true that multiplication is still a horrible thing to do. Well, I am not sure, I am sure the answer to this question would be very different in different language. I pursued this problem is java. Here is my small piece of code

public class TryMultiplication {

  public static void main(String[] args)

  {

    Random random = new Random();

    int tryCount = 100000000;

    int buffer = 0;

    long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

    while(tryCount -- > 0)

      buffer = random.nextInt()+random.nextInt();

         long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

    System.out.println("Total time (ms) : " + (endTime - startTime));

     }

}

Apparently, there is no time difference between addition and multiplication. Well, it was never my intention to say these two takes same amount of time but I am sure in most cases (if not all) the difference is insignificant. Why? because there are other things that takes way more time than arithmetic operation, like load and store. In that case worrying about multiplication, from engineering perspective, is not very pragmatic anymore. Of course, I am aware of the fact that this kind of micro bench marking seldom produces reliable results but there is no observable time difference between addition and multiplication.

Here is a discussion about this issue, http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2010/07/19/is-multiplication-slower-than-addition/

Facebook like

This morning I realized I like something on Facebook called Iran before. That's funny, to my best knowledge I have never clicked like button once I reopen my Facebook account. Yes, I saw a video posted by one of my cousin and I tried to see what is that. But for some reason the video was not played and I gave up.

But then this morning I saw somebody liked that I liked that video, really, seriously? Why would I like a something so political in nature. I read on reddit couple of days ago, there was tons of bogus likes going on in Facebook. But I don't know whether any of them is this kind. Even interesting, all of activities are private, meaning no one would be notified based on my action. Why this like thing was notified to my friends. That's very weird. Unless Facebook thinks, if I wanted to see something means I must like; and I would also like to share my idea with everyone else. Or my account has been compromised?

Phone camera

I think getting habituated with my phone camera. It seems like my phone camera is pretty good. I think it is even better than lower end point and shoot camera. Here is campus view from my Window. I am not a big fan of my office but it has most spectacular view of sunset. My only complain is this Blogger app does not allow me to resize the picture for my blog.

Windows Azure

My advisor decided to teach cloud computing in this semester. So I have prepare all the materials for the cloud computing this semester. She is thinking of one or two assignments for cloud computing. So I am trying windows azure. It is interesting. I have to say the documentations have improved a lot. Almost everything works in first try. So far azure looks pretty straight forward. I am amazed that they offer support eclipse and java, not only that they provide simple instructions for eclipse. I have to say the documentation has came a long way. My early impression is so far good. Most importantly azure provide 90 days free trial for every new account. That's good we can ask for one or two assignments in this semester. I think we will ask for few simple cloud applications.

The boring part of exploring new technology is the waiting time while the software are being installed. I guess this is the time for blogging and that's what I am doing. I think my sp1 for visual studio is stuck :( let's see what can I do.

Blogging vs social networking

I have been blogging for quite sometime. So far I was able to separate my blog from my social networks. The question is why do I need to separate my blog from my social network? I think anything in social networks is crying for other people's attention, after all getting other people's attention is the purpose of social networking. But the way I blog is more like a personal journal. My blog does not meant to be social. It is not crying for attention! It is good by itself. But it seems like Google is really pushing toward unified system and that inherently contradicts my purpose of blogging.

Why? So far my blog serve my purpose. It represents my state of mind at different phases of my life. I can clearly see that. Nobody really cares about my blog unless I publish something and ask other people to see it. That's great. But if my posts start crying for attention throw google+, it would be very frustrating. Some of my posts are really some of my random thoughts. Why do other people care about them? Even worse, I think asking for attention for those kind of posts is just waste of their time. I hope Google would understand that blogging and social networking is not same. Maybe some people use them for same purpose but they are fundamentally different by definition.

I hope Google would let me blogging and would not push me real hard toward google+. In that case I have to find an alternative of blogspot.

Multiple email addresses

Most people of our generation who use Gmail originally migrated from yahoo. At the beginning of 2000s yahoo was the definition of Internet. Some of us still use yahoo. People like me who abandoned yahoo, was due to the fact that it is very difficult to maintain multiple accounts. So we grew the habit of checking one address all the time and check few others occasionally.

I think smartphones have solved that problem. The problem we had is email was pull based, meaning you login into the Web and ask for all your email and you get them. Some people (very few) used to use local client for Web mail. But things have changed a lot in this era with he grace of smartphones. Web mail is no longer pull based, it becomes push based, meaning we no longer go to the Web and ask for the mails. Now we do our things and our phones notify us when new mail received. I don't know other people but that's a big time saver for me who used to check email in every hour. Now I don't check email, emails find me.

That made a huge difference. Now having multiple accounts is much easier than before. You don't have to check all your Web mails every hour; they will find you when necessary. I thing it is now way more convenient to have multiple emails. Those of us migrated from yahoo can actually start checking those old addresses again without adding much workload! Technology is nice!

Apps!

Why do I need an app for Walmart? Same for bestbuy? Sams club? Even PayPal? In all cases apps offer cut down functionality of the Web? You can do very limited things in PayPal app compared to PayPal Web interface. Web was developed to achieve platform independence, Web does its job pretty well. But then now there is growing trend for apps? I don't understand why? There are certain things apps do better, but not all things. The things these apps do is no better than their Web counterpart. All they need to do is design their website for smaller screen size. But instead of doing that they are making apps for different platforms. That sounds very stupid.

Doing something for the sake of doing is not innovation, it is confusion. I think these people are confused, they see the post pc revolution and they think they got to do something. These confused apps are the result of their confusion. They are confused about how they can participate in the post pc revolution. And they think developing apps is the only way. In last decade there was a growing need of Web based application, because Web brought platform independence to the modern computer. Now we are in the same shit again but this time with mobile. What would rescue us this time?

I am sure nobody likes to develop the same app once for iOS and once for android, maybe also for Windows now. Would it not be nice if they can make them once. Well Web was design exactly to so so? But then? The trend seems really backward to me. This trend is really unhealthy for the technology. We need to know what apps are meant for? We don't want to remember post pc revolution as a confused era for technology. I don't think we need an Walmart app, what we need it is an Walmart website for smaller screen size.

Android update!

I updated lipa's S3 yesterday and then first thing I wanted to try is Google Now. I clicked Google Now and it told me that there is a new version available from Google play. I went to Google play and tried to update and I was told I don't have the latest version. What a pity! Didn't I just update?

Well, I follow android development so I know what happened. The latest Google now is for jelly bean 4.2. And S3 just got jelly bean 4.1. I don't mind having 4.1 but the way whole thing came along was very stupid. From lipa's perspective, she just updated to a new version which is already old. Even worse, she cannot get latest software due to her older version. That's the problem.

What if Google now recognized that my version is 4.1 and the newest Google now is not for 4.1, and it never told me about the update? I am sure Lipa would surely be much happier than now. Yes Google kind of marketing against themselves. I am sure people like Lipa would never bother to update unless Google keeps saying that, you know what there is an update and that is not for you.

HTC Sense

Overall, HTC makes good phone. I was curious about why HTC is loosing business. To me, HTC one x looks much better than Samsung s3. But then I have the opportunity to look at Samsung s3 during this weekend. I think Samsung touchwiz is much better than HTC sense. Touchwiz is robust and way more responsive compared to HTC sense.

Now I think I know why HTC is loosing business. Although HTC is making top quality hardware they need to do much better job with software. I wonder why HTC is not releasing phone with stock android. I think stock android is better than HTC sense. I don't see any point to do something that makes a product worse.

My primary complain is about its robustness. Google Chrome crashes every now and then on htc sense. I didn't like stock keyboard. My wi-fi stops working randomly. The menu button is little weird. That's all I think but random wi-fi glitch bothers me lot. My experience is much better with stock android. However htc sense has much better design compared to touchwiz I think. I am eagerly waiting for their new version of htc sense for my HTC one x.

Android 4.2

Android 4.2 lock screen widget is pretty interesting. It has a serious flaw. It allows me add Gmail widget to the lock screen and anybody can read my email without unlocking my tablet. Well that's not a problem if that's what I want. It is even worse, it allows me to add Gmail widget to the lock screen without any authentication at all.

That's pretty interesting. Let's say I do not have my Gmail widget on the lock screen, and now if I lost tablet any body can add Gmail widget to the lock screen and read my emails. He or she does not have to go through any authentication at all. This is very interesting. How come they miss such a big security flaw. I don't mind if they show my email on the lock screen if that's what I want. But allowing anybody to add Gmail widget is a real stupid things to do. I thing some widget should pass authentication before they are added to the lock screen.

Swiftkey

If you are in android and you write a lot using your phone then you must have SwiftKey. SwiftKey is perfect for fast typing, all you have to do is trust SwiftKey. Sure plenty of your keystrokes would be wrong but at the end you will get right word. I know this is very problematic if you try to write other language words with English alphabet. But for English it is simply great.

The factory keyboard with my HTC one x simply sucks. And hence I had to go to third party keyboard. I am happy I choose SwiftKey. I have not bought the paid version yet, but I surely would. I think my phone without SwiftKey is really incomplete.

One interesting problem I had with SwiftKey was trust. Like I said lots of keystrokes would be wrong and if you stuck in correcting them then you are doomed and no point of using SwiftKey. Even if you point one or two mistakes in your keystrokes you need to move on and then you will realize the beauty of SwiftKey.

I am trying to adopt mobile blogging with my new phone and SwiftKey. I heard that SwiftKey has the ability of learning, and meaning even if you I write other language with it can learn and adopt to my writing style, but I didn't try that yet.

Diversity!

This time I have witness the battle between between Android and iOS; I have heard a lot about the battle between Windows and Mac during 80's. I didn't even witness the reminiscence of the battle. My introduction to the computer was actually way after the battle, in fact way after the battle when all the mess were cleaned up. My first introduction to the computer was windows 3.1. After that when I first saw Windows 95, it was huge blow! Windows 95 was a super cool an super easy. I have grown up listening the story that the tiny piece of thing next my computer is actually invented by some other company and then Windows copied it. I don't know the truth, but I know for one thing for sure, if there was no windows, there would be no computer at my home and there would be no Chronicle of Mundane Life today.  

I don't know what Mac did at that time, but Windows did it so right that it reached every corner of this world. As I grew older I learned there is another kind of computer with linux, they are even cooler but they are hard to work with. They are for what call experts. I have played smart for quite some time in early days :P Then I learned there is another kind of computer even cooler and different from what I have seen so far. It was the revival of Mac. When I was first introduced to Mac, I was thinking it is quite similar to Linux. But they are not intended for so called experts! They are for regular people. I had the idea about how difficult it is to change the hardware in Linux system in early days. Wow! that problem does not exist for Mac at all! Superb! why because they don't support very many hardwares, they are designed for fixed set of things! Ooops! That's interesting! The whole idea of Mac is software can be hardware agnostic! Ouch! That's okay, there are still people in this world who believes Autocracy is the right government; we also see genetically coded animals roaming in this world.

But then in late 2000's the battle between smartphone OS had began. Well lot of people in early days predicted that it is gonna be another 80's war, and surely it is. But many people went far enough to declare the winner. Now in post Jobs era we see they were right, but this time it took less than five years. Interesting! I was thinking exactly what made Android so popular leaving iOS far behind? It is really hard to tell, then I was watching Malcolm Gladwell's TED lecture the other day and it struck into my head, may be there is no right thing for everyone. Why? that is big question; I guess partly because human brain develops beyond the womb and very little part of it actually comes with genetic coded! And that's why there is such a huge diversity among people in the same species. Other than human being two different samples of same species from two different parts of the world would almost behave same. But human is the only exception.

That makes me thinking if Apple makes product for anything else other than human they might actually see great success, because the design of the other animals follows the same philosophy as Apple does. They simply don't understand the beauty of diversity. I don't get it why? There is no wonder America is the greatest country in the world, it the most country in the world as. Every American brought a small piece of their own culture and ideas and together they are more robust than anything else. Diversity does not make something weak, it makes the thing robust. I feel pity when Apple claims something robust; I don't think they know what robust mean.

Acer Aspire

I got my second Acer Aspire Laptop last week. It is a Acer Aspire TimelineX. It is a true budget laptop around 400$. I used my last Acer Aspire for about four years. Well, I guess laptops are not meant to be used more than that. I used two hp laptops before and each of them survived about a year. When my second hp laptop broke I broke as well and I choose budget laptop from Acer which I used about four years. It is indeed still running but having hard time catching up softwares. My hp laptops were dead and in both cases mother board was gone. I think I am happy with Acer; well, they are not the best brand in the market but they serve my purpose very well.

In fact I am so happy with Acer that I decided to advertise for them for free :) In case you are curious how much I used my laptops? I used it everyday and I rarely tuned it off. I used my laptop for my experimental purpose and each of my experiments runs for week and use 100% CPU. I have a case where my CPU was 100% used for 10 days in a row. Of course the credit goes to Intel but Acer put it well. The hard drive still runs good and I never any trouble. The only maintenance I did was I opened it up several times and cleaned dusts. One last thing to mention, the left hinge was broken for quite some time but it did not make difference for regular use. I think Acer is worth trying.

Tech news!

Last couple of days I have been following tech updates meticulously. I have not done that before but I am kind of amazed by learning how journalists write about technologies and tech companies. I think the entire journalism is based on hoax. People have been publishing rumors shamelessly. Insufficient research behind every article is almost impossible to miss. Many article shamelessly copies other article as well. I am not asking you to buy my words, just pick a tech word (let say "Kindle Fire") and google it. The first few search results are saying the same things and you can find the similarity in wordings as well. 

Now interestingly the things they are talking about are most likely rumor! Ooops! I don't understand how come a rumor become a news! Are we living in twenty first century? Finally, analysis! I have no idea what they were thinking when they were writing those articles. Well, no analysis is full proof but those analysis are far from perfect they are just garbage. Somehow they kind of habituated with the idea that it is okay to write hoax and garbage about technology. 

Back in 07 Google published an hoax about Toilet Internet Service Provider and one reputed Bangladeshi news paper published it in their technology column. Back then I was kind of amazed how come they published something without giving a second thought. I was thinking maybe, we are living in a developing country and where all latest technologies are not readily available; and so it is conceivable that they kind of believe whatever they heard. But when I found the same thing here in most advanced technologically developed county and I kind of get the idea that technology is beyond the reach of journalism. Please leave it alone. 

Tablets: An Elusive Revolution

When iPad was first introduced in 2010, I was little bit skeptical, I was asking do I need one? Well many people were asking the same question. I was used to familiar with the idea of tablet since early 2000 when Microsoft first introduced the idea. I was not too excited about the product and like other people I was not very convinced. Things have changed so much now, millions of tablets are sold in every month. Some tablet enthusiast even believe that tablet is the next way to go. Tablet will eventually replace mobile phone, pc and what not. You name it they will replace it with tablet. Apparently tablet is in the driving sit of post-pc revolution. Surprisingly my position has not changed since then. I still don't know why I need a tablet.

Truthfully, I am not in a position to spend any money for any fancy gadget. Definitely 'need' is a big word for my spending. Unlike many people 'need' is not the new word for 'desire' for me. So, I have to carefully justify the need before decide to purchase. Sure, for people like me the word tablet has a very little use (if any). Apart from all that I feel like tablet is probably not the right way to go. I know big people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs used to believe tablet is the future of the industry; somehow the whole tablet thing never been able to convince me.

Smartphone was a big step forward from whatever we used to have. Smartphone redefined the use of the cell phone that we used to have. What could be most use of tablets: book reading, browsing, media consumption. Well specifically, tablet is a media consumption device! Aha. so that is the use of tablet! I see the use of tablet as a media consumption device. But my imagination stops right there. I cannot take it any further! Even though tablets are becoming ubiquitous. Some guy is India use his tablet to change the education system, aircraft industry is planning of use iPad as a real-time flight simulator, fire fighters are using it for live layouts. Even I have no trouble imagining tablets as a widespread ad-hoc mobile network that have the potential to replace wired network of today and torrent over that really possesses the possibility of replacing the internet of today. But remember all these can equally be done with a smartphone and they both share a serious problem: input!

The input is simple not convenience. Touch is an interesting way of input but it is not convenient. Technically touch is a mechanical way communication. Being a mechanical way of communication it has high degree of error, hence we are never gonna achieve a touch sensitive device with arbitrary precision. If your device is limited by input, theoretically is limited by output as well. Well that's theory but practically there is no limitation; the biggest problem is smartphones are more convenient (let alone its ancestor pc).

The second problem is no matter how powerful your tablet is there would always be a same powerful smartphone and high powered pc. So the only advantage it offers is its little bigger screen. If a smart phone can come up with bigger screen the requirement for tablet is diminished. When I say bigger screen I mean to say bigger projection of the screen. My point is: a device with only advantage of having bigger screen with whatever display cannot sustain the evolution where more convenient devices compete with it. (I am assuming tablet is not gonna replace pc anytime soon, if you are not convinced why you don't know pc at all) 

The only advantage tablets have over smartphones is in content consumption which is primarily because of bigger screen size. I have no problem imagining a device that solves the problem. Well devices with multiple convenient screen can easily solve the problem. I am sure there would be more innovative way of solving this problem. Well smartphone would be a narrow name for it then; it would be less phone and more of something new then, but not surely not tablets as we know them today.

When a new sustainable technology emerged it would enable countless new technologies to bolster its echo system. Tablets have no such things; everything it has is borrowed from either smartphone or pc. It does not give us anything new. Therefore my bet is tablet would not rule too long. Sure it is a successful business product of today; it is a killer product but it not a technology of future.