Double vision

 General  No Responses »
Dec 152005
 

I have a Sony G420 monitor that I purchased not too long after moving the the D.C. area. This is possibly the finest 19″ CRT ever made. I had problems with an NEC FP950 being too bright; the G420 is truly easy on the eyes. I guess I’ve been using it for more than 4 years now; and it still delivers a razor-sharp picture.

A coworker recently upgraded to a LCD flat panel and was looking to unload a Sony G410. I took it off his hands, figuring that it would be pretty similar to the G420 and thus make a good second monitor. My NVIDIA Quadro FX 540 can support dual CRTs, so I’d just have to plug it in.

And it does a pretty good job. The two monitors just barely fit side-by-side in front of me on my Anthro corner cart. Except for somewhat different sets of controls and ports, the housings are identical. So getting the images at the same height is pretty easy. The picture quality on the G410 is good; but it isn’t quite up to the G420. The colors on the G410 are significantly different and have taken quite a bit of twiddling to get reasonaby close to the G410′s “default” 9300 K setting.

All things considered, I’m pretty happy with the set up. Having the second monitor really is nice. But it also means that there’s absolutely no way I’m upgrading to LCD until nice roomy 1920×1200 displays are reasonably affordable.

 Posted by at 9:10 pm

Is this thing on?

 General  No Responses »
Dec 152005
 

So, it’s been more than a month since I set up WordPress and made my first few token entries.

Between work, the various obligations of the holiday season, and a raft of patches for OpenVRML, I’ve not had time for much. But there’s really a much lamer reason: I didn’t want to bother posting much more until I’d gotten Andy Wingo’s Advogato plug-in set up. Well, after much procrastination and fumbling about attaining the most rudimentary understanding of XMLRPC, I seem to have it working.

Last week I got e-mail from an old friend from high school who I’d lost touch with. Apparently he came across my comments on the NetBeans 5.0 beta. Of all the things. I probably wouldn’t even have written that if I hadn’t set up WordPress and been looking for an excuse to use it. It was really good reconnecting with him.

 Posted by at 4:50 am

Testes, testes…

 General  No Responses »
Dec 152005
 

One, two…three?

 Posted by at 4:37 am

Reassessing the feasibility of creating a decent phone book

 Mobile Phone, Software Development  2 Responses »
Oct 172005
 

As I started playing with Motorola’s SDK, I realized there was little to no mention of a phonebook API. Some more poking around revealed that it was not present in the JARs associated with the emulator.

Ahem.

Turns out that the materials required to make use of this API are only available under NDA from Motorola. And for some random yahoo like me, that process is started by filling out a questionnaire on the Motorola developer site. And as of this writing, submitting that form yields a server error.

Lovely.

 Posted by at 3:19 am

Revisiting NetBeans

 Mobile Phone, Software Development  1 Response »
Oct 152005
 

I’ve never cared for NetBeans. Historically it’s been slow, ugly, and the UI has been chock full of (what I found to be) unintuitive contrivances. With recent releases the speed has improved dramatically. The appearance has also improved; though there are still significant problems: notably a lack of antialiased fonts.

So why revisit it? Well, from what I’ve seen so far, the mobile application development support is very slick. And this 5.0 beta I’m playing with addresses some of the more glaring UI issues. The mobile application development support just might be enough for me to forgive NetBeans’ remaining flaws. After all, I use emacs normally; obviously I can live without antialiased fonts.

 Posted by at 6:38 am

Assessing the feasibility of creating a decent phone book

 Mobile Phone, Software Development  1 Response »
Oct 152005
 

Okay… If I do this, I don’t want to create some application that lives in a totally different world from the standard phone book; even though it sucks, the standard phone book is too integrated with the overall function of the phone. It has to be leveraged for an enhanced phone/address book app to be any use to me.

The Bad News: MIDP 2.0 doesn’t appear to provide an API for accessing the phone book.

The Good News: Motorola provides an extension API that does.

This could actually happen.

 Posted by at 6:14 am

New RAZR V3

 General, Software Development  3 Responses »
Oct 132005
 

My Motorola V551 got washed about a week and a half ago. And dried. It’s dead.

After weighing my options, I purchased an unlocked black RAZR V3.

Damn, it’s sexy.

I’m partial to carrying my phone in the front pocket of my pants; so I appreciate how thin this thing is. Much more comfortable to carry around than the V551. I also get somewhat better reception; and the sound is definitely clearer.

The software is basically the same as the V551. Which means that like the V551, the V3′s phonebook sucks balls. Let’s see…

  • You can group together entries that are stored in the phone; but not the ones that are stored on the SIM card. So if you try to back things up to the SIM card, you’ll have a lot of entries to scroll through with the same name.
  • There are categories; but entries can only be in one category and you can either view all categories or one category.
  • There’s no differentiation between first and last names.

And furthermore, why do I have to get a PDA just to store physical addresses? Why can’t phones provide an addressbook?

Which gets me thinking, how hard can it be to create a decent phone/address book for a phone? Maybe I should find out.

 Posted by at 8:03 pm

So this is WordPress

 General  No Responses »
Oct 132005
 

This is the second time I’ve installed WordPress on endoframe.com. The first time I fiddled a bit with the themes and then abandoned it. I’ll probably fiddle with the themes again later. Not now.

So will I actually use this thing this time? I’ve used advogato.org intermittently in the past; but stuff that isn’t (free) software-related seems out of place there and I would like to write about other things some of the time. I’d also kind of like to have the content more under my control.

 Posted by at 7:27 pm

Hello world!

 General  No Responses »
Oct 132005
 

Welcome to WordPress. This is the first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

 Posted by at 5:38 pm
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