maebmij’s blog

My local IGA had Nudies for $0.99 today, so I bought two. They’re normally over $3 from most places, so I don’t buy them, but it made me think about loss-leaders and the possibility of deciding I like them so much I will buy them every day. OK, so let’s do some calculations to see how much money habits like that might cost:

• Nudie at $3
• A Nudie every weekday (we’ll imagine I buy them at lunch at work or something)
• $15 a week
• $780 a year ($1,092 if you have one every day inc. weekends)

Coffees are around the same price, so replace, if that’s your thing.

So imagine your salary is $50,000pa. Very roughly, then, you’re spending 2% of your salary on your daily drink. Is it worth it? I suppose it depends on how much you enjoy it.

Let’s approach it from another angle. For about the same price as your daily Nudie ($780 – $1,000 per year), you could buy the following things instead:

• A cappucino every day
• A movie every week
• A broadband ISP subscription
• A new-release DVD every couple of weeks
• Enough petrol to drive 30km per day (perhaps a half-hour-each-way commute?)
• Subscriptions to New Scientist, Wired, Science Magazine and the Sydney Morning Herald
• A subscription to Foxtel Digital (the second most expensive package)
• A lease on an Apple iBook
• A 5-dvds-at-a-time subscription to Bigpond Movies (an Australian clone of Netflix)

Bruce Sterling has a blog entry showing some climate-change-like things happening around him. His book Heavy Weather, which I read a few years ago, made me think pretty carefully about climate change and its effects. One of the themes is that a few decades into the future, when climate change is obvious to everyone, the older generation (that’s us) will be blamed. Our kids will be incredulous that we could ever have driven petrol-powered cars around every day for something as mundane as going shopping or going to work.

My mother found this one in the supermarket the other day – zoom in to see the ‘contains caffeine’ at the top of the carton.

Now all we need is my long-time-most-requested product, the caffeinated vanilla milkshake, and all will be as it should be in the commercial beverage arena.

Take this simple quiz from Virginia Tech to see where you should be sitting for the most effective study technique! I ought to be studying in a cafe, or maybe the kitchen, apparently.

So I got a little bored today, or maybe I was avoiding polishing up my CV, but I decided to do my own take on Uncle Mark and his Almanac. So here’s my guide to the best products to buy in a variety of ‘tech gadget’ categories: James’s Guide to Tech Consumerism.

A lot of the old UNIX cavemen seem to have a really negative opinion of the X Window System. It seems like the reverse of the usual pattern: Those who were around to see X in its early stages seem to think it’s abject junk, but most of the younger people who inherited it as a fully formed, free Xfree86 seem to think it’s ok.

It does seem to have had a troubled start, at any rate – designed by committee, with a number of really important things just left out due to lack of expertise among the original group.

When Apple set about building themselves a new operating system, they took a UNIX-alike for the core OS, but entirely threw away X11 except as a legacy/compatibility add-on for people with existing unix software.

A project, Fresco, exists to attempt to replace X11 from the ground up.

So – I’m no X genius, just a user – what seems to be wrong with X at the moment?

Pipeline issues

Going through the X abstraction interface to draw buttons, images etc is ok, but in general it sucks for video, and most apps bypass X to draw directly into video memory in some way. This is ok, but it would be better if there was a seamless X-provided way of integrating this that degraded gracefully when the hardware access isn’t available.

Double buffering

Take a complicated app, like firefox, and move another window around in front of it quickly. Notice the ‘ghost trails’ of the app that get left behind as the program struggles to update its window as the picture is revealed? This is apparently solvable at the application level with double buffering of the window contents, but why make the application programmer care? why doesn’t the window system do this by default? This is a large part of why X11 ‘feels slow’ to the average user.

Widget set abstraction

When you see gui buttons, sliders, etc in X, they’re drawn using primitives – essentially coloured boxes, lines, ellipses and fonts. So how about that snazzy, drop-shadow, 3d-looking button? Well, that’s pretty much a bitmap that just gets dumped across into X every time we see it on screen. If it ‘animates’ when clicked, then the other frame gets dumped across too when you click it. Not cool for good performance (especially across a network). So some people want to move the widget set (buttons/menus/dials/etc) away from the app and into X itself, so the app just tells X what kind of button it wants, and X draws it locally. Pros: better performance, more consistency across apps. Cons: greater limitations – limited ability to use whatever newfangled widget set you feel like when writing an app. But I think this has to happen, basically.

Pixel agnosticism

Right now, you can see the pixels on a screen pretty easily. So it’s appropriate to have things drawn on the screen pixel-by-pixel sometimes: the font I’m seeing right now is a good example. It couldn’t be this small and still clear if it wasn’t pixel-based. But in general we’re slowly moving away from pixels. Vector art is actually getting used (Flash being the most popular example) and the bitmaps we do look at are often scaled-to-fit on our screens (such as the automatic shrinking of large images in both Internet Explorer and Firefox). 3D graphics are necessarily pixel-independent as well. With many modern video codecs (the various mpeg4s for example) the pixel concept is weakened by lossy compression that works on areas of the image rather than specific pixels, leading to images that are actually clearer when viewed at a larger size than their nominal ‘native’ size.

You see something related when you use Apple’s gui: Exposé and the genie effect both dynamically change the size of the application on the screen, yet the app is unaware and keeps updating just the same (actually there is a slight bug: mouse-click mapping isn’t updated, so if you freeze the genie effect halfway (by killing the finder during a shrink) you can still use the app, but button clicks don’t go to the new warped locations of the buttons).

I can’t think of any reason why this sort of thing can’t be essentially hacked into X11 directly; the challenge is exposing it to the developer as well as the user – we need some sensible way of dealing with pixel-independent objects in X through the API. I haven’t really thought this one through though.

I’ve been listening to the Katamari Damacy soundtrack a lot recently – it’s some great music. The various genres represented remind me of two or three items I already have floating around in my collection:

• Melodies from Mars by Aphex Twin – an unreleased album supposedly commissioned by a computer game company as a soundtrack, and then never used. The instrumentation on Katamari Damacy is so similar in places that I imagine the composers must have been fans of this album. In particular: songs Sasasan Katamari and The Wonderful Star’s Walk is Wonderful.
• Wendy Carlos’s Clockwork Orange score – a couple of the tracks (Fugue #7777 and Katamari March Damacy) use something like Wendy’s ‘voice synth’ from her 9th Symphony, Fourth Movement.
• Gatas Parlament – crazy Norwegian anarcho-communist hip-hop. There’s no real connection here, I think I’m just a sucker for fun hip-hop in languages not normally associated with hip-hop, and the Katamari Damacy track “The Moon and the Prince” has that, and is a good song besides .

• I’ve been thinking about jobs recently. It’s probably about time.
• I played with MythTV – it works really well with my cheap BT878 card. I couldn’t use the scheduled recording features, though, as there seems to be some lack-of-working with the (screen-scraping?) tv guide script, ‘tv_grab_au’, on channels except sbs and one other (abc?).
• I’m having a go at making automounting work right on my Debian machine. I’ve been in OSX-land recently and have become rather used to the fact that USB drives, cds etc are mounted automatically. It saves a lot of time.
• I bought a camera: the Canon IXUS 40, aka Powershot SD300. I’m pleased with it. You can see some photos I’ve taken with it on flickr.com (unfortunately not at full res, but there you go)