tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111454142011-12-28T17:35:12.616-08:00Information and opinion about anything and everything.Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.comBlogger331100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-87237216060819273402011-12-28T17:35:00.000-08:002011-12-28T17:35:12.621-08:00

Here are my early impressions of the Motorola Atrix2 I bought my wife for Christmas. 1. Price - Free (with upgrade/new account) Thanks Radio Shack! 2. Fast - everything is fast with virtually no lag ever 3. Pretty - the screen looks fantastic 4. Big - the large screen is nice for web surfing, but it is definitely not as pocketable as I would like. 5. Crapware - it comes with it - but you can

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-76244495429746695772011-08-24T19:05:00.000-07:002011-08-24T19:05:33.465-07:00

I also got some video from a relative that was shot in portrait mode on an iphone so when trying to view it on a computer it was sideways. To rotate it I used Avidemux on Linux. Here are the steps I used to convert it: Open the file Choose MPEG-4 AVC (x264) for the video codec Click Filters Find rotate in the list and double click it Choose whatever rotation you need (for me it was 90

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-85202589689985680882011-03-19T12:36:00.000-07:002011-03-19T12:36:16.164-07:00

HTC & AT&T finally updated the HTC Aria to Froyo (Android 2.2). After about 2 weeks of using it my impressions are mixed. They added some eye candy (fading in and out) which unfortunately slowed down the sense UI. I have since turned off the animations so they don't slow anything down. Otherwise however, the phone does seem a little snappier. The update also seems to have fixed the headphone

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-11544031915082800702011-03-04T19:49:00.000-08:002011-03-04T19:49:12.882-08:00

Just like many Android developers, I had a working Ant build that included obfuscation using Proguard. When I upgraded to the latest SDK and tools (to include Android 2.3 and higher) my Ant build no longer worked. Instead I got this error: add-proguard-release.xml:37: Expecting class path separator ':' before '{' in argument number 1 After adding a few echo Ant tasks before the offending error,

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-71072390710008287252011-02-27T09:04:00.003-08:002011-02-27T09:04:38.964-08:00

This time a friend sent me a video that was recorded sideways on an iPhone. I first tried the same mencoder command I tried for an AVI file and that didn't work. Then I googled it and found lots of people using AVIDemux. This worked great. The thing to keep in mind is that you can't just copy the stream. You have to set up a rotate filter and then convert to video format so that it gets

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-8420125918681602112011-01-21T19:04:00.000-08:002011-01-21T19:04:03.809-08:00

I shopped around for a smartphone for quite a while. Since I wanted to do mobile app development without having for fork over a lot of money for a Mac I decided I would skip the iPhone and go for an Android phone. I have had my HTC Aria for about 6 months now. I purposely did not get a Nexus One or a faster Android phone because I wanted to develop games and run them on a slower device to make

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-35149490218708444202009-09-08T19:04:00.000-07:002009-09-08T19:08:31.499-07:00

My wife shot some video of our kids with our point and shoot. It came out great - except it was sideways. A quick google on the net turned up a few possible solutions. I first tried Windows Movie Maker, no laughing, please. It converted, but messed up the aspect ratio so it looked really squished. Then I tried mencoder on Linux which worked like a champ. Here's the command line I used:

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-11456958928188267062009-04-21T20:29:00.001-07:002009-04-21T20:40:00.769-07:00

I got a kill-a-watt from Newegg.com to measure how much energy my computers use when I leave them on all of the time. So far I have measured 2 computers. Both are Athlon XP single cores (3200 and 3400) with integrated video (crappy Via Unichrome and GeForce 6100). So far both use around 60-65 watts when idle and up to 100-120W when I make them work really hard. It's not as bad as I thought it

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-20292994767584919022008-10-06T20:29:00.000-07:002008-10-06T20:32:03.199-07:00

Coming home after a long day at work to shouts of "Hi Daddy!" and "Daddy's Home!"...along with lots of smiles and hugs.

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-16262348600508144412007-09-07T19:12:00.000-07:002007-09-07T19:23:08.374-07:00

I used to tell everyone that todays computers are plenty fast for web browsing and email and word processing. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. With all of the web applications going AJAX and JavaScript crazy, the web browser can wreak havoc on your computer's performance. Tonight while listening to some music with iTunes, I was scrolling an image up and down and every time it scrolled,

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-69428371794984757462007-08-14T19:25:00.000-07:002007-08-14T19:29:13.957-07:00

Here's a story about a Chicago Alderman's plan to tax bottled water in Chicago in order to help make up for budget gap in the city's water funds that is partially caused by a decrease in demand for city water. I have a better idea. Bottle the water and sell it cheaper than the name brands. He does understand how much more expensive bottled water is than any city water, doesn't he? Even after

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-9389950816703544122007-04-22T12:44:00.000-07:002007-04-22T12:53:56.623-07:00

I have been teaching myself Groovy lately and I am a recovering sudoku-aholic... the other day I came across this very cool link:http://groovy.codehaus.org/Solving+SudokuIt's brute force, but hey, what do you expect for from three lines of code?

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-48492980902881899042007-04-18T19:00:00.000-07:002007-04-18T19:19:48.996-07:00

I used to really enjoy watching Lou Dobbs on Moneyline on CNN. Now that he is more focused on news and politics, I am not impressed.Several paragraphs into his weekly opinion piece regarding the massacre at Virginia Tech, he starts spouting statistics about deaths on college campuses and how "We must reject death and violence as a rite of passage on college campuses."Say What?First of all if you

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-51182179662270600042007-03-22T18:55:00.000-07:002007-03-22T19:07:39.125-07:00

Is it just me or are the search engine spammers figuring out how to game PageRank and whatever other algorithms the search engines have come up with?I did a search last night on 'pseudafed while breastfeeding' because my wife is sick and breastfeeding. On Yahoo, the top 10 results all had the name of a drug that starts with Z in the title and all of the urls ended in messages/somenumber.html. I

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-45784232801692547472007-03-09T18:51:00.000-08:002007-03-09T18:57:42.295-08:00

Here's a blog post you developer geeks out there should appreciate:http://www.destraynor.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/102-Programming-Theorems.html

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-23136421746312700722007-03-09T18:35:00.000-08:002007-03-09T18:41:59.623-08:00

I recently called an insurance company to get a quote for car insurance. I was a little taken aback by how much the insurance company already knew about me. After telling them my SSN, they know that I was married and knew my wife. They also knew exactly what types of cars we owned and for how long.Apparently all of the major insurance companies all now share this information via a company

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-56998705883856945262007-02-21T22:47:00.000-08:002007-02-21T22:52:40.712-08:00

Here's an interesting article by Jason Whitlock about gang-bangers taking over Las Vegas over past NBA All-Star weekend.The questions are:Is he blowing it way out of proportion?If he is not making inflammatory statements, then why is there not more coverage from the big media - a conflict of interests perhaps?

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1161053189936550022006-10-16T19:34:00.000-07:002006-10-16T19:46:29.946-07:00

Okay...so AJAX doesn't totally suck. Everyone's doing it so it can't be wrong right? It still drives me crazy that developers have to test with several different browsers because they are not completely compatible. I wonder if this will always be an issue.There is one area in which AJAX makes a huge positive impact on web development. I'm talking of course about the dreaded back button. By

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1155866157780217812006-08-17T18:51:00.000-07:002006-08-17T18:55:57.790-07:00

Mmmm. Yummy. I love little Debbie snacks! However I may have to boycott them now that they have insulted my intelligence. I was at the grocery store the other day and noticed that several Little Debbie snacks came in "family size" packages which were basically double the normal size packages. Who can argue with double the Little Debbie snacks? The only problem is the price for the family

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1148093107957485712006-05-19T19:06:00.000-07:002006-05-19T19:48:07.810-07:00

I definitely have to side with Gilad Bracha on this one...http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/05/19/Continuations-and-GUIsGilad argues that we need something richer than the current web GUI and that AJAX is a step along the way to better web apps. This point is difficult to argue, but Tim Bray tries. Tim Bray argues that the contraints on web UIs are a good thing. He implies that when

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1139420447051395112006-02-08T09:37:00.000-08:002006-02-08T09:40:47.063-08:00

Whan I first saw this article on CNN.com: Bush urges end to cartoon violence... I thought maybe President Bush was still having nightmares because he watched a few too many Tom & Jerry cartoons when he was a kid.

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1133151684244544952005-11-27T20:17:00.000-08:002005-11-27T20:21:24.246-08:00

I was all ready to actually make a purchase at buy.com. I did not have an account so they asked me to create one. On the web page where I was to choose a username and password, they also displayed 'Terms of Service' which were too long to bother reading, but I'm a sucker so I started reading it.A few paragraphs in, it states that as part of the terms of use, I was expected to read the terms of

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1133151450102782772005-11-27T20:14:00.000-08:002005-11-27T20:17:30.113-08:00

Go to www.target.com and under electronics, choose MP3 players. Then choose flash based players. The first item in the results list is blank with only a message 'No information available'.If there is no information available, why are they displaying it at all?They need to hire some new developers for their web site...

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1133149561636431872005-11-27T19:41:00.000-08:002005-11-27T19:46:01.650-08:00

I often browse popular electronics web sites and look at MP3 players to see what's new and hip.I have a major beef with every site that I have seen that sells MP3 players. For MP3 players that come in multiple colors, each color shows up in the search results for each color. So if a model comes in 10 different colors, it takes up an entire page in the search results.Hello?? This is ridiculous.

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1129166980902147912005-10-12T18:23:00.000-07:002005-10-12T18:29:40.906-07:00

Will there be anything that an iPod won't be able to do?Apple announced (not suprisingly) a video iPod today.It's got a very high cool/geek factor, but will anybody really use it to watch videos other than maybe people who commute via mass transit?Video iPod owners will be able to buy episodes of some popular shows (Desperate Houswives and Lost for example) the day after they are broadcast for

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1125860284640685972005-09-04T11:55:00.000-07:002005-09-04T11:58:04.646-07:00

Wow - I thought gas prices were high earlier this spring. Now as a result of Hurricane Katrina's wrath, gas prices have jumped to their highest levels ever. As a result, it cost me $59 to fill up my small SUV. As a result of this charge, my Citibank Visa flagged an alert and they called me to verify all of my transactions for the last few days. I guess Visa needs to factor in these types of

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1119812563138313222005-06-26T11:58:00.000-07:002005-06-26T12:02:56.816-07:00

There have been rumors floating around about Google working on a payment service. At first smoe thought it might be a competitor to Paypal, but that rumor has been dispelled.I think there is a good chance that this would be a micropayment system that has been envisioned for many years. Google (and perhaps Yahoo) are the only internet companies that have the clout (and the trust of the public

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1114652115755366922005-04-27T18:30:00.000-07:002005-04-27T18:35:15.756-07:00

The high gas prices are hurting many business, especially those that are delivery related such as flowers and pizza. It's the high pizza prices that worry me. If pizza prices rise significantly, we could have a lot of starving college students on our hands. Maybe I should start a charity, pizzaforcollegestudents.org to help those college students being hit hardest by the high cost pizza.

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1112302060263425702005-03-31T12:41:00.000-08:002005-04-11T19:45:51.170-07:00

Link analysis is dead. Okay - well maybe it is not dead, but it's effectiveness is definitely on the decline. A significant percentage of the blogs that I have browsed on blogger.com are obviously there to influence search engines because they are the same text and links repeated over and over again. These pages were obviously not intended to ever be viewed by a human.Can the big three search

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1111065479087864812005-03-17T05:11:00.000-08:002005-03-23T18:33:46.356-08:00

The latest buzz in web application development is AJAX, which stand for asynchronous JavaScript and XML (or something like that). AJAX can help make web applications much more interactive and much more use friendly by not forcing web pages to reload for every user interaction. Unfortunately, AJAX sucks...here's why...AJAX is still the same old browser technology we have had around for a number

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1109942305469629092005-03-04T05:02:00.000-08:002005-03-04T05:27:29.420-08:00

There has been a lot of commentary regarding the AutoLink feature of the latest Google toolbar. Some love it and some hate it. Here is some thoughtful commentary from Tim Bray's Ongoing.I can understand both sides of the argument. Perhaps there is a happy medium. Let me propose 2 solutions...1. The Google toolbar, instead of modifying the actual links in the page could provide links to

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1109650153088818562005-02-28T20:04:00.000-08:002005-03-01T04:04:44.056-08:00

I just don't get it. Maybe I'm getting old - I don't know. What is the deal with ring tones?In the last few years they have become a multiple-hundred million dollar business. Are people buying these things regularly? I have a feeling most people are simply buying a few ring tones because of the novelty of having them on their phone and the growth will slow down a lot real soon.The fact that

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11145414.post-1109648330387821372005-02-28T19:31:00.000-08:002005-03-01T06:30:45.283-08:00

I recently purchased a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 and a MediaMVP. They are a lot of fun to toy around with. I use the PVR-250 to record television shows weekly so that I don't miss them - just like Tivo except not quite as user friendly. I highly recommend both the WinTV PVR-250 and the MediaMVP.Lots of techies use the WinTV-PVR boards as part of their own home brew DVR/PVRs. I thought about going

Charliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02740866492549467767noreply@blogger.com0