semi/signal

I love this icon. It was on the plastic wrapping from a new keyboard I recently bought.

I was cleaning and found this piece of paper. I have a habit of doing stuff like this, especially when I’m on the phone; this is how I take “notes.”

There has to be some hidden meaning in there, right?

I was with the Windows 7 RC yesterday and noticed something really cool. I was watching a video on Hulu (using the web client) and as the mouse hovered over the Internet Explorer icon in the taskbar, I noticed the thumbnail view of the page was a live rendering, showing the video playing in real-time. It’s perhaps not terribly useful but it is pretty cool and a testament to what can be achieved on modern hardware.

Thinking along the lines of powerful hardware and immediate feedback and representation, I was, unfortunately, struck with this disappointing bit,

The folder refresh option in the context menu. It’s somewhat sad that this still exists and updated data from the file system isn’t polled, updated, and displayed automatically by the OS. (There may very well be valid reasons for not doing this [e.g. cost due to hard disk seek + latency] but it’s disappointing none the less.)

I also bring this up because it was something that came to mind in the design of Fragment Sync. If you used an early version of FS, you might have noticed a refresh link in the Setup window; you would click it and it would updated the list of devices to show/update which ones were active or inactive. I reached the conclusion early on that this was horribly annoying and it would cost next to nothing to automatically detect and display such information, and at this juncture I conjured up a rule that there should be no “refresh” buttons, links, or whatever else in Fragment Sync, and all state changes should be detected and addressed automatically, without user intervention.

Last month the motherboard in my main desktop died. I replaced it with this board (GA-MA78G-DS3HP) from Gigabyte (I had some reservations, as the previous board was from Gigabyte as well, but the price and feature-set won me over). The installation went smoothly and I was surprised that Windows booted up (probably b/c of similarities due to both boards coming from the same manufacturer; fyi, I later discovered there is a way to install a new motherboard w/o a windows reinstall). I was pretty happy until I started hearing seemingly random stuttering in the audio. It was very short, but noticeable, especially in games.

I spend hours trying to figure this out. I was thinking it was the onboard sound, but it was Realtek audio, which I’ve never had issues with, and this new board has one of their best chipsets. I finally stumbled across some forum posts mentioning DPC latency and the DPC Latency Checker. I had no clue what DPC latency was, but it’s summed up nicely on DPC Latency Checker page,

If any kernel-mode device driver in your Windows system is implemented improperly and causes excessive latencies of Deferred Procedure Calls (DPCs) then probably drop-outs will occur when you use real-time audio or video streaming applications.

This is a wonderful utility, and, sure enough, after a few tests I noticed very long red bars, indicating I indeed had a DPC latency issue. Now, there are issues with older Gigabyte boards and DPC latency issues, discussed in this Anandtech thread, but the board I purchased was newer that those afflicted. What was also curious was how the issue was occurring. I was not getting steady red bars, but spikes, and after many hours of pulling my hair out, I finally realized that that the spikes were coming from the keyboard and they were fairly random in occurrence (although more prevalent within Direct3d or OpenGL games and apps).

Trying to think of solutions and trying to avoid a BIOS update, I tried a repair install of Windows; perhaps something went wrong b/c I was using a new motherboard w/o a clean installation. The repair install had no effect. I thought about doing a fresh install, but the amount of time for reinstallation of programs and drivers put me off the idea – this machine is my main development rig and I need it at 100% as much as possible.

It then occurred to me that maybe this was related to input in general, so why only the keyboard effected? I have a mouse and gamepad that didn’t cause any DPC latency spikes. I realized it was a PS/2 keyboard and all other input devices were on USB ports. Luckily I had a USB keyboard on my Mac that I could test with and, like magic, the latency spikes disappeared.

My long term solution? I don’t know. I’ll probably just get another USB keyboard. There’s a BIOS update available which I’ll probably try at a later date – BIOS updates scare me. It’s possible a fresh install of Windows may solve this as well, but I’m doubtful. I was surprised that the board got great reviews on Newegg and no one there or anywhere else on the web seems to have encountered similar issues with this board.

On the subway in NYC, you come across… um… eccentric personalities from time to time. On the F train last night, I was sitting a few feet away from a man who was muttering something to himself, he was loud but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. A few minutes later he yelled out across the train car, asking if the next stop was Union Turnpike (it wasn’t). A woman responded that she didn’t know, and he proceeded to explain to her that he was happy, very happy; in 2006 his doctor has diagnosed him with terminal cancer and told him he had 2 months to live. However, his cancer was now gone; he had cured himself by regularly drinking a mixture of green marijuana and ginger.

So there you go, cure for cancer = green marijuana + ginger

Below is an email response to my aunt sometime in July, when Cuil was launched,

Yea, I read about cuil this morning. I played around with it a bit and they’re getting quite a bit of press due to the founders past employment w/ Google and their claim that they’ve indexed more pages than google. However, it’s a pretty poor launch: shoddy search results, mismatch between sites and images, useless results “summaries” and terrible performance…

I never bothered with Cuil again until I read this a few days ago,

Cuil isn’t performing well any way you look at it, and I can only imagine how nervous the startup’s management team and investors must be by now. Based on the numbers and graphs we gather from Google Trends, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast, you could even say search engine traffic is nearing rock bottom.

I decided to give Cuil another try to see if anything had changed since my first analysis. Unfortunately, I still encountered the same frustrations; here’s the first result in a search for “fallout 2”,

I think that’s Evander Holyfield in the associated image and, as far as I remember, he was not in Fallout 2.

Attempting to compete with good-to-better search results than google would have put Cuil in a steep uphill climb for success, but such poor results and mis-associations point to flaws in the technical architecture of the service itself. Not to mention simple usability flaws; results in a multi-column layout is a dumb idea – it’s completely alien from the way people actually read (well, read English, at least) – I’m supposed to read top to bottom, scrolling down… then scroll back up to continue?!

What’s amazing in all of this is that Cuil’s founders are apparently experts at search and managed to raise $33 million in funding! … and what’s even more amazing is that they were ranked as one of the most successful U.S. startups by Business Week. Business Week’s explanation for this apparent oddity is as follows,

Cuil raised $33.25 million in that period, and whatever you think of the company or their product, the amount raised indicates that investors judged them worthy of significant backing, as some TechCrunch commenters noted. Obviously, that’s different from them getting traction or becoming profitable. But they made the list under the criteria we used, which we made clear from the start.

I guess you have to buy into the idea that funding = success.

Great graphic from washingtonpost.com,

there may have been another universe!

LQC [Loop Quantum Cosmology] has been tantalising physicists since 2003 with the idea that our universe could conceivably have emerged from the collapse of a previous universe. Now the theory is poised to make predictions we can actually test. If they are verified, the big bang will give way to a big bounce and we will finally know the quantum structure of space-time. Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.

No. 2 and my favorite from the 7 Historical Figures Who Were Absurdly Hard To Kill:

Magellan agreed to kill a man named Lapu-Lapu, an enemy of two different Philippine kings that he was friendly with… Magellan and his crew landed on Lapu’s home island of Mactan. However, Lapu apparently knew they were coming, because he had an army waiting.

Magellan was hit with a poison dart almost immediately, but he trucked onward into the mass of native warriors, possibly shouting the Portuguese equivalent of “MOTHERFUCKERS!” as he did so.

He was stabbed in the face with a bamboo spear, to which he responded by burying his lance in the attacker. Magellan tried to draw his sword to keep fighting, but his arm was slashed and soon his leg as well, and he fell to the ground more or less mortally wounded.

The natives then surrounded him and began stabbing and clubbing him as he lay defenseless. He kept looking up to see if his crew had made it safely back to their boats and, upon seeing that they finally had, Magellan allowed himself to die.

Remembering why I stuck with blogger for so long,