Category Software

On Feeds and Fads

In 2004 ‘web feeds’ were becoming extremely popular in the tech community. People were keen to label ‘web pages’ as old, obsolete, clumsy and resource ‘heavy’. It was the time of ‘Web 2.0’, the time when web ‘surfers’ were gradually getting rid of Internet Explorer 6, when Ajax was starting to make its appearance on […]

What's wrong with this?

Check out this table. A bunch of modern, high-quality, high-performing codecs. AAC+, AAC LC, enhanced AAC+, MP3. All decodable by Android, on all devices. Sadly, Android devices can only encode on AMR-NB at the sad sampling rate of 8KHz. At the miserable bitrate of 4.75 to 12.2kbps. At qualities unheard of since the early days of the telegraph (ok, I'm kidding --- AMR-NB is the voice codec most GSM and UMTS phonecalls are carried over). Now, you may be asking: Couldn't the manufacturer add encoding support for more audio codecs? Sure, and some do. Others, like HTC for example, don't. Even on high-end devices like the Desire. Devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs clocked at 1GHz. With hardware support for stereo AAC encoding. No, really, what on earth is wrong with these people. At the same time, HTC went into the hassle of adding encoding support for h.264 and 720p (using MPEG4). And it makes me wonder: that they added h.264 encoding support means they are at least clued up with respect to paying royalties, adding the codec to the system and making use of it. That they introduced 720p using MPEG4 on the other hand makes no sense: how useful is 720p video recording --- recently introduced with HTC's Froyo build for the Desire --- or the capability to record audio as a whole come to think of it, when the recorded audio on this phone sounds like a wax record from the 1880s, not least because of the totally backwards codec they use throughout, while one of the most powerful mobile device CPUs in the market today just sits there idling. Idiots.

Bing and OpenStreetMap

Bing, Microsoft’s portal/search/mapping service has announced that they will start providing OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, as an optional layer, in Bing Maps. OSM data will be downloaded from Microsoft’s fast Azure CDN, as opposed to OSM’s ‘slow’ servers. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Microsoft using OpenStreetMap data. That’s why it’s Open. But then again, I am […]

Rails3 Critique Tidbit: html_safe, raw() and h.

One of the most annoying thing with Rails has always been how it provides for convenience at the expense of uncertain (and sometimes shady) abstraction implementations. It's a great framework for prototyping, yet there are reasons why quite a few people are skeptical about it. Nevertheless, in the truest tradition of Ruby, Rails provides a pretty clean way to do web application development. Rails 3, the latest incarnation of the framework builds upon a solid foundation, offering great improvements in many areas. But not everywhere. Take for example the html_safe string escaping that supersedes 'h'. In Rails 3, all input strings are automatically escaped, unless the developer passes the string through raw() before the string. That's fine, as it's bound to make sloppy developers safer by forcing them to go out of their way to leave the string unescaped. One of the issues with this, however, is how the old way of escaping, 'h', is still around in some cases: say when you want to render a link using link_to and you use raw to provide formatting to your link (via span) and include some part of user provided input (as found in the example provided in the xss and scripting screencast at 02:20), then you have to resort --- once again --- to using 'h'. This is confusing and inconsistent; if all strings are automatically escaped, you'd expect input variables to be automatically escaped too, even if included in strings using raw().

Δύο μήνες με το Android

Το οτι το Android αποτελεί βασικό στόχο στην ανάπτυξη τόσο του AthensBook όσο και του GEO|ADS είναι κάτι που δεν έχουμε κρύψει, εδώ και αρκετούς μήνες. Ετσι, στις αρχές του περασμενου Απρίλη, επενδύσαμε σε ένα HTC Desire, μια συσκευή που βρίσκεται κοντά στην κορυφή της αγοράς γα τη συγκεκριμένη πλατφόρμα και παρέχει πλήθος δυνατοτήτων που […]

Bye bye C4

I came to know of C4 after finding online videos from some of the talks there in 2007. Living in an — almost bankrupt financially, intellectually and creatively — land, the C4 videos brought a glitter of hope; like Google Video lectures, Microsoft’s MURL (now ResearchChannel), C4 presented a community, a world so rare in […]

Android, the HTC Desire and Localisation.

Having recently stepped up our efforts to provide an Android version of AthensBook before the end Summer 2010, I’ve acquired an HTC Desire, the flagship Android phone from HTC, featuring the latest Sense UI, impressive hardware specs and a gorgeous display. Sadly, while Android is a much more ‘open’ and an extremely fascinating platform (for […]

Guitar Rig 4

Two years after Guitar Rig 3 was released in autumn 2007, the fourth iteration of the software modelling application for guitarists was released by Native Instruments. This time around a combination of an ever increasing workload, little free time and the fact that Guitar Rig 3 was ‘good enough’ for my needs meant it took […]

Microsoft Courier.

If its anything like the demo video Microsoft’s Courier is the closest device I’ve seen to Apple’s — now classic — demonstration entitled the Knowledge Navigator. See the resemblance? From the few images and videos around, the device seems beautiful, but that’s not the point; as the Mac and then the iPhone have demonstrated, it’s […]

Nexus One. A Message to the World from Mountain View.

It must have been sometime near mid-December when I first actually saw and used — albeit briefly — a Nexus One. A Googler, the owner, graciously let me use it for a bit after receiving it as part of the Google corporate gift that the device got — more a publicity stunt rather than an […]