Dialup Slowdown

This is the dialup handshake, slowed down 700x.

I used to have a 2400 baud (call it ~2Kb/m) and I'm now getting 5MB/s, which is more than a 700x speedup.

My .perltidyrc

Especially when working with others, it is important to be able to format your code. Perl Best Practices convinced me to start using PerlTidy, and this is my current .perltidyrc.

# my .perltidyrc config file
#   http://perldoc.perl.org/perlstyle.html

  --backup-and-modify-in-place
  #--cuddled-else
  --continuation-indentation=4
  --indent-columns=4
  --maximum-line-length=78
  #--line-up-parentheses
  --opening-brace-always-on-right
  --noopening-sub-brace-on-new-line #  -nsbl        # opening sub braces on right
  --indent-closing-brace  # thought this was -ibc
  --indent-block-comments #  -icb         # indent comment blocs
  --vertical-tightness=0
  --vertical-tightness-closing=0
  --closing-token-indentation=3
  --stack-opening-tokens
  #--stack-closing-tokens
  --space-terminal-semicolon
  --space-for-semicolon

  --brace-tightness=0
  --paren-tightness=0
  --block-brace-tightness=0
  --square-bracket-tightness=0
  --no-outdent-long-quotes

I Keep Telling People!

This guy on Reddit points out that, in 1996, a simple statement of many of our regular lives would be taken as science fiction.

Mary pulled out her pocket computer and scanned the datastream. It established contact with satellites screaming overhead, triangulated her position, and indicated there was an available car just a few blocks away; she swiped her finger across the glass screen to reserve it. A few minutes later, she spotted the little green hatchback and tapped her bag against the door to unlock it. "Bummer," she said as she glanced at her realtime traffic monitor. "Accident on the Bay Bridge. I'll have to take the San Mateo. Computer, directions to Oakland airport. Fastest route." Meanwhile, she pulled up Kevin's flight on the viewscreen. The plane icon was blipping over the Sierra Nevadas and arrival would be in half an hour. She wrote him a quick message: "Running late. Be there soon. See if you can get a pic of the mountains for our virtual photospace."

This is not a new thought. I worked in a used bookstore during my first sojourn in academia, around the summer of 1991, five years before the point in question. At that time, I was big into cyberpunk science fiction. Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. I was putting things away, cleaning up the place, when I saw a book centered upon a computer hacker. It wasn't in the science fiction section. It wasn't even in the true crime section like Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. It was in mystery. That was the point where science fiction stopped being about futurism for me.

Lovin' Me Some Gingerbread

So, last night, I forgot to plug in my phone, which is an HTC Evo, an Android phone. I've had it since November, and if I forgot the overnight charging, I'd have a dead phone.

I had something like 77% charge this morning.

I love the Power Management under Gingerbread.

Remixing for Cache

I have a web thing. I did the server end stuff in Perl and right now adding some UI usefulness stuff with Javascript. I'm doing this using Chrome as my #1 browser, under Windows 7 64-bit, and I'm finding a problem.

Specifically, I make changes in the .js file and can't get Chrome to load the changes. I know that I can get that with CTRL SHIFT DEL , but with Firefox, if you hit CTRL SHIFT R on Firefox (and I think IE, but I've never been a big IE user so I'm not sure), and I somewhat recall that behavior as something Chrome did but no longer does.

Anyway, GRRR.

Anger Subsides

I don't know if it was Sprint getting it's act together.

I don't know if it was Google getting it's act together.

I don't know if anyone from either saw my blog post and felt my anger.

I don't know if moving from Froyo to Gingerbread made all the difference.

But I have now fully connected my Sprint phone running Android to Google Voice. And I am happy.

Want To See Something Cool? or Why I Wish I Was A Hardware Hacker, Pt 2

Follow this link.

Glasses-mounted display. Which is connected to a 1GHz Beagle Board, powered by batteries to make it mobile. Man, that's cool. 

I thought about linking the image, but I'm not seeing "Creative Commons" anywhere on there. 

Following the links to the guy's current blog, I saw that it's relatively simple to solder on an RCA cable, which makes the composite link to the myvu glasses. I'm thinking you could get readable console mode with that, which is good. Wouldn't want to try a windowed interface.