rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for Miscellaneous
September 9, 2009 at 5:48 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
I received my Beatles Box sets by FedEx today. I haven’t had a chance to listen to them yet – and I only really care how they sound – but I did open them and want to share a few impressions on how they are packaged.
First some background. There are two Beatles box sets (i.e., The Beatles Stereo Box Set
and The Beatles Mono Box Set). One contains the stereo mixes, and the other the mono. Several people have asked me why I would want the mono recordings. The mono mixes are interesting because they were the top priority back when these recordings were originally released. Great care was taken to get these mono mixes right. The stereo mixes took a backseat. They got less attention, and the Beatles / George Martin weren’t always directly involved. So does this only matter to audiophiles? I don’t think so. In many cases, the stereo mixes involve different source tracks – e.g., the vocal or guitar are just different.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, the mono set is way nicer than the stereo one. Remember though, these are non-audio opinions – I’ll post those later.
Stereo Set
I first opened the stereo set and was struck by a few things:
- The whole box is inside of a paper sleeve that looks just like the box. My first thought was “am I supposed to put it back in that sleeve or throw the sleeve in the recycling?” I’d rather there were no sleeve.
- Inside the box, the discs are stacked in two piles. You can’t get any but the top one out without pulling out the whole stack. Kind of lame.
- Each disc is in its own shrink-wrap. Why?
- The covers have a white stripe and the Apple / The Beatles logo on them.
- No extra book, though there is a documentary disc.
- No Sgt. Pepper cutout sheet (though included as a page in the booklet).
All in all, I’m thinking they should have done better.
Mono Set
- The sleeve is sturdy cardboard and slides off of the inner box.
- Once the sleeve is off, all of the discs’ spines are available to pull out the one you want.
- Each disc is in its own resealable wrapper.
- The covers are replicas of the original releases. No superfluous Apple logos on pre-Apple records.
- A nice book that talks about the mono recordings and goes into details on the “Mono Masters” disc that is included.
- The Sgt. Pepper cutout sheet.
Simple, yes, but much nicer than the Stereo.
Tags: audio, Beatles, music, TheBeatles
May 19, 2009 at 10:45 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I didn’t really make it to the IIW yesterday, but I did make it to the dinner. I hope to make it there by lunch today.
Instead of going to the IIW yesterday, I got pulled into a meeting to help work through some client issues. The actual problems were completely tangential to my role on the project, but given my background I was happy to help.
That morning meeting became contentious. After the fifth time of hearing the same inadequate solution with a dose of attitude . . . well . . . I don’t cotton to that.
Kind of a mess, really. I wouldn’t have done it at all except that I was helping out a friend.
And now, off to the IIW 2009A, day 2.
Tags: IIW, IIW2009A, Software-Development
May 10, 2009 at 10:09 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
I’ve been running Windows 7 RC since Thursday. My impressions are mostly quite favorable. It is all I wanted Windows Vista R2 to be. Actually it is all I wanted Windows Vista RTM to be, but I’m happy to have finally gotten there.
I’ll post more on this later . . . as time permits.
April 29, 2009 at 9:12 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Ironically, this message is intended for those who won’t find it in their feed reader.
I had hoped the transition to rwandering.net would be mostly automatic, but it seems that many feed readers ignore the “permanent” in the 301 redirect. That is, they are happy to redirect but ignore the fact that the feed URL changed. So when the old feed stops redirecting, b’bye.
The feed for this blog is http://feeds.rwandering.net/rwanderingMain.
I am making this statement for completeness.
April 16, 2009 at 5:08 pm · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
This is a public service announcement to release engineers and developers out there.
Your installers — and core components for that matter — shouldn’t be performing checks that preclude new versions of Windows.
This is particularly relevant with a new version of Windows coming soon. In fact, I’m writing this because recently someone told me that his team’s software wouldn’t install on Windows 7. The release engineer fixed it by increasing the high version limit.
That is the wrong approach.
The right approach is to eliminate any upper bound on a version limit. The premise is that developers shouldn’t assume that their software won’t work on future versions of Windows.
Windows Logo requirements have required this for some time, and in fact there is a certification test called the HighVersionLie that tests for just this case. The test sets the Windows version to an artificially high number to see if the tested software still installs and runs.
BTW: One reader from Microsoft told me a similar story at last year’s PDC – this posting was prompted by a different conversation altogether.
Tags: HighVersionLie, Windows, Windows7
April 13, 2009 at 9:14 am · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
I use speech recognition a great deal – and I recently switched to Windows Speech Recognition on Vista. And I’ve been using Chrome exclusively for Google Apps, because I think it offers superior performance for JavaScript apps.
Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t support WSR. According to Rob Chambers this would be easy for Google to do, and I suspect it is just an oversight on their part (both in terms of making their software more accessible as well as following Windows best practices).
Google: when are you going to put the effort into this? The Chrome 2.0 Beta doesn’t do it either.
Rob Chambers: how easy is this really? You also said that Firefox does support WSR – maybe it does, but not in Google Docs.
So now, I’m using IE8. Google Docs with WSR works great there.
Tags: Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, IE8, Microsoft, WSR
April 9, 2009 at 8:15 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I am migrating this blog from https://et.cairene.net to https://et.cairene.net.
This should be transparent, but if I lose you in the process, you’ll know why.
Tags: blog
April 1, 2009 at 1:57 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
I am a heavy user of speech recognition technology. I find that I can write faster than typing (and I have a reputation for being a fast typist).
I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for several years now. Every new edition has gotten a little bit better. And I’ve found it quite useful except that the last two versions have tended to get corrupted databases. And now, I will very commonly get some error that causes it to lock up. I have found that it tends to fail if I switch around between different applications.
Of course, I am an avid multitasker, so these errors has become really irritating, and essentially stopped me from using voice recognition. I just can’t commit to staying in a single application for very long.
Today, I started using the speech recognition built into Vista. While I am struggling a little bit with differences in the verbal commands,I am already sold. Why?
- It feels much faster.
- I can switch between applications with no problems.
- The recognition engine is doing a terrific job with very little training.
I know that while I continue to use this I may come up with some problems, but so far I’m blown away.
Plus, Vista doesn’t try to sell me things through its auto-update feature.
Tags: Dragon, Speech, Vista, WSR
March 26, 2009 at 10:44 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I’ve been seeing lots of problems with Live Messenger connectivity lately. I see this message a lot:
I don’t ever want Live Messenger to interrupt my work with that dialog.
If connectivity fails, use a notification balloon, or better yet, do nothing. The red X on the tray icon already signifies trouble. Let me drill down to find out more info. This is a bad design decision.
If I dismiss the dialog, it will happen again. And if I don’t dismiss it? Well,
I left my machine from 9pm till 11am today and found my taskbar full:
Apparently Live Messenger thinks it is so important that I can’t connect that it needs to keep telling me. Or at least telling the task bar. This is a bug.
Live Messenger Team: Please fix this. I’m sure several of your myriad guidelines for Windows developers eschews any and all of this behavior.
Tags: Bug, Live, LiveMessenger, Microsoft, Windows
February 25, 2009 at 5:16 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Here are my initial impressions on my new Vado HD:
Pro:
- Quality of picture and sound are pretty good (haven’t tested it much).
- Fast startup.
- It mounts as a drive.
- Movies can be viewed and the drive managed without running the Vado Central software.
- The software / codec are installed on the drive making it easy to plug it into any computer and use it without going through a painful installation step.
Con:
- The battery door is pretty flimsy. One of the benefits of this device is supposed to be its replaceable battery, but I wouldn’t trust this door to last for a long with frequent battery changes.
- The battery door doesn’t actually close fully with the battery inside. This problem is solved by putting on the included skin.
- Like the Flip, this has an extendable full-sized USB adapter. While I understand the benefits of this approach, I would much rather they used a mini USB port instead. This would allow for either a smaller device – or my preference – room for a stereo microphone input and output.
- Documentation is bad. Normally I don’t care about that, but there is no information about the different quality settings. This can be easily found online, but it should be in the manual.
Bonus Con:
- I bought the Creative branded waterproof pouch assuming it would be sized for the Vado. While it will work, it could be much smaller. The Vado swims in it. With the skin on the Vado it keeps stationary inside of the pouch.
So far I’m happy with it.
Tags: Flip, Review, Vado
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