Tag: Technology

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Product Reviews – is there any value?

Product reviews have been commonplace in magazines, newspapers, on TV, etc. With the increased popularity of the Internet, everyone seems to write reviews on varying topics from products to movies. I’ve even written a review. With all these reviews out there, is there any value to them? That’s, of course, a matter of opinion. Each reviewer has a bias, knows certain facts, has likes and dislikes, and maybe even an axe or two to grind. When I buy things, I typically read a lot of reviews that are all across the board; someone may not like a company because an employee was mean to them, or they could have had a bad experience with a piece of software (one that may only have happened on their machine), or on the other side, the reviewer may have met the author of a piece of software personally and felt a connection.

Years ago (about 10), one of my products was put head to head against a competing product. Both products were decent and the reviewer indicated the strengths and weaknesses of both. In the end, the reviewer said that they were evenly matched; however, the reviewer said this because a feature that my product had, the other product lacked, but the company that made the competing product promised it in a future update. This update never materialized and the reviewer, in my opinion, did a disservice to his readers by reviewing a promise and not what a customer could actually purchase and use. I’m still a bit bitter about this and makes me think even more about reviews I read. Reviews give me an idea of what other people think, but that really doesn’t help me. I need to form my own opinions of a product.

Movie reviews are extremely common and I sometimes glance at them before seeing a movie. My wife and I like the same types of movies, usually action/mystery or comedy (she has a wider range of movie likes than me that includes romance), so we see action movies more than any other type of movie (we don’t watch movies all that often). Before we went to see Firewall, I had looked at the reviews. It got pretty mediocre reviews at best. We both enjoyed the movie. It might not have all the things that Ebert and Roeper think make a great movie, but to us, it was worth the time and money to see the movie (TIP: Costco sells movie tickets for AMC Theatres; 2 for $15 which saves up to $2.50 per ticket).

In another case, I’ve seen reviews of products where the reviewer gave it bad marks because it didn’t do exactly what he wanted it to do; the product never said it would do it, but that didn’t matter.

Product reviews, from software to video cameras, to books to movies won’t be going away anytime soon, but I’d hope that people form their own opinions and don’t just make a buy/watch decision based on what someone else believes.

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Apple’s Transition to Intel Revisited

I wrote awhile back on how moving an application from PowerPC to Intel isn’t as easy as Steve Jobs has indicated. This topic has come up again and I’m a bit offended by what one author has said in a recent article where the author basically says that developers that have been using Xcode and have programmed in Cocoa have a relatively easy transition moving code. This may be true for simple applications, but doesn’t reflect the reality of many applications out there. In one of the programs I’ve been working on for the last few years, we developed it using Xcode and used Cocoa throughout (OK, one slight component still has to be in Codewarrior as it needs to be CFM). One engineer spent several months making things work on Intel; the main reason is that the application talks to an external device over USB. Any application that talks to an external device is far more complicated than outsiders think. In addition, we have taken, what I consider an extraordinary step, in supporting third party plugins that weren’t designed for Intel. Apple says that users should run applications that require third party plugins in Rosetta by forcing it in the Finder. I find that this is unacceptable to have to run a universal application under Rosetta just so that plugins can run as I want the speed of the universal application. So, additional work was required to get this to work seamlessly (I’m still amazed at how well this works) which most applications don’t have to handle. (In this particular case, it is unlikely that most of the third party plugins we support will be made universal any time soon, so waiting for them to become universal is unrealistic.)

I got my first universal application running in about 5 minutes as the application has no external dependencies (no third party plugins or devices). A lot of applications fall into this category, but end users can’t just say that developers don’t care or aren’t doing enough to move applications to Intel as users don’t know the circumstances around application development. Even if a developer has followed Apple’s lead to switch to Xcode and Cocoa, it doesn’t mean they can put a universal application together in a few hours. As I’ll be ordering a MacBook Pro in a few weeks, I’d love to see all my applications running as universal applications, but the reality is that the smaller applications and many shareware titles will be coming much sooner than the big titles such as Microsoft Word.

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New Video Camera

Last week I went to use my Canon ZR85 video camera to record our dog doing something wacky. When I turned it on, instead of an image on the screen, I saw lines. After futzing around with it, I came to the conclusion that the CCD was busted as playback worked fine. We’re going on vacation soon and I know that my wife will want video of it, so I started research into a new camera. I don’t use the video camera all that much, so I didn’t want anything real fancy and didn’t want the bottom of the barrel. I went to Circuit City to look around, looked online, and settled on a Panasonic PV-GS36 that I bought at Costco for $279 (there was a coupon this week). For the price, I don’t think I could beat it. It has similar specs to the Canon I’m replacing, but I must say that the user interface (via a joystick) is far superior to anything else I’ve seen. It seems to have everything I want and we’ll see how well it does. I hate that we’re a disposable society, but getting my Canon repaired would probably be a minimum of $100 to look at it and then the cost of parts. Then I’d only get a 30 or 90 day warranty on the repairs.

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Completed a video game!

image_114x196.jpgI’m not very good at video games, but sometimes I enjoy playing them. Through some generosity of a friend of my wife, I have a big collection of PlayStation Portable (PSP) games. One of the most recent ones I got was SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALS Fireteam Bravo. While I’m not very good, I managed to get through the entire campaign mode of the game in about 1.5 weeks which is quite impressive for my lack of skills. I play to complete the game so I don’t also get the best scores or complete the missions with an A rating, but I managed to get through it. There is still more to play including online and something called Instant Action, but I made it through the 12 missions. Unlike the PS2 version of this game, it only saved at the end of a mission, so if you didn’t make it through, you had to start over. While the PS2 version also saves at the end, as long as you don’t quit the game, you’re taken back to a “temporary” save point. For me, this makes the game enjoyable as I can complete missions without having to make it through in one try.

I haven’t played much online, but might have to give it a try. It might be embarrassing to play against teenagers and get the crap beat out of me.

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Nice work Sprint (again)

I received notification that my bill was ready for my Sprint PCS account, so I went to take a look to make sure it was accurate. I logged in, clicked invoices and got nothing. Tried 2 browsers and it turns out that the invoice page points to www.sprint.comnull. Yes, that’s right it points me to an invalid domain. Should I be surprised that no one at Sprint saw this yet and made the simple fix? It just makes me laugh when major companies have screwed up websites; they must have scores of people working on them, but apparently no one checking them close enough. If the goal is to reduce phone calls and drive people to your website, your website better work.

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Mini Review of Garmin Forerunner 305

Forerunner 305I’ve had my Garmin Forerunner 305 for 2 weeks now and have been quite pleased with it. A few people have asked me for a review of the unit, so I’ll do the best I can.When I first opened the box, I put it on the docking station plugged it into my DC inverter in my car so that it could charge on the way home from REI as I wanted to use it that day and it was supposed to charge for a few hours. After I got home, I plugged it in and it was ready to go in no time. I turned it on, took it outside and it acquired a signal pretty quickly. I browsed the instructions while waiting for it to charge, but didn’t thoroughly go through them.There was no configuration required and I started my first run by strapping on the heart rate monitor (I read a tip that said to put water on the monitor before putting it on), putting the monitor on my watch and I was off. There really was no configuration needed to get it going. It seemed to keep a signal and gives me the data I need to train (current pace and heart rate are about it).I’ve read some complaints about the unit from others in that it doesn’t keep a signal, the heart rate monitor doesn’t work, etc. My unit has performed flawlessly and keeps the signal all the time; I don’t run in wooded areas and there is pretty much a clear view of the sky. Also, the heart rate monitor works fine; another complaint I’ve read has to do with the heart rate monitor not registering when the GPS unit is placed on bicycle handlebars or on a crossbar on a boat. Since I run with it and it was designed for running, it works well. My only problem with the monitor was that I didn’t wet it down one day so it didn’t start registering until I had worked up a good sweat. Continue reading “Mini Review of Garmin Forerunner 305”

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They hooked me!

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been using MotionBased with my new GPS unit uploading each activity (dog walk, running, and in-line skating) to the website. The free version of the website only lets you see the last 10 or so activities and has a few other limitations. These include no saved reports and no totals. Well, it only took 5 days of me using the site and uploading data to convince me that I needed to subscribe so that I could separate my activities and total my activities. So far, it seems worth it and I think that I’m really going to enjoy using the website even more as I continue my training. Excellent work, MotionBased on giving me a free taste and then reeling me in!

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I’m not an IT person

My dad called me today telling me that his IP phone wasn’t working (it’s hooked to my server). Well, he hadn’t restarted the phone in awhile and I had upgraded the firmware on it so that the next time it rebooted it would pull it down. What I hadn’t realized is that the phone’s firmware switched from using active FTP to using passive FTP. My server was setup to allow active FTP (not much to setup), but didn’t handle passive FTP. So after the phone got the firmware (using active FTP), it choked getting its config file via passive FTP. After a bunch of work, I figured this out and fixed my firewall to allow this. That was only part of the problem; the second problem is that I was using a non-standard SIP port (6060) for some reason that I can’t really remember. Either the phone or my dad’s router didn’t like that, so I had to reconfigure the server (Asterisk) to use port 5060 and reconfigure the phone configuration to use port 5060. I think that this got the phone working again, but it took something like 2 hours and got me very annoyed at my dad when it clearly wasn’t his fault.

I’m definitely not cut out for doing IT stuff. Luckily I don’t have to do this all the time or I’d be pulling my hair out.

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Virtual Trainer is out to get me

One of the features of my Garmin Forerunner is a virtual training partner that gives you something to try to keep up with during training. I tried it out yesterday and set it to a 9 minute mile which is about what I’ve been averaging. When I was ahead of the pace, the lower half of the display was black text on a “white” background, but when I was behind, it was a black background with white text. It shows how far ahead or behind you are relative to the training partner. The problem with the training partner is that he never has to stop for stoplights, is never out of breath, and just keeps running. When I was behind, I could just hear him say (not literally) “you wimp, speed up”. There are parts of my run that I can easily beat the partner and other parts where it is hard (going uphill). Luckily, I managed to beat my virtual training partner by a few hundred feet on my 5 mile run. While it is a nice concept, I can’t say that I like that kind of competition even if it really is all in my head.

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Another stupid hack attempt

I was checking the statistics on my server this evening and saw a constant CPU and bandwidth spike from 6 am to 10 am. After some research, I discovered some bozo trying to break in via SSH. Hello, if you can’t guess the username/password in the first 10 minutes, why not give up? Someone has obviously attempted to secure the system. So, I found a script called SSHBlack and then easy instructions that will blacklist an IP address after a few failed SSH attempts. I guess I’ll know soon if it all works. Geez, don’t people have better things to do with their time?