Two Slashes

Just be glad this isn’t my pre-planned iPhone rant…that’s for another day.

As a geek of many interests, I find it useful to keep track of all matter of electronic devices, at least to some extent. Being a student, especially one inclined to seeing things for more than what they are, I take quite a bit of interest in TI’s graphing calculators. I’ve developed a little for them, and I’ve been using them for several years now.

For the most part, I’ve been happy, or at least satisfied with what TI’s put out. They get the job done, they’re expandable, I can develop for them (quickly, I might add), and they aren’t really much of a nuisance.

However, when I heard about TI’s new Nspire series of calculators recently, I had to question some of TI’s decisions about what went into the calculator.  I know the device isn’t new…but it’s new enough to me that it still warranted further investigation.  So here goes:

• First and foremost, why start with two models of the unit? I understand that you want to be accepted as a calculator of choice for tests like the ACT (actually, it’s not so much of a want as a requirement, because who’s going to purchase a banned calculator), but there’s nowhere near the need to confuse consumers…it’s like Microsoft and their fun with seven versions of Vista.  What’s next?  Nspire More?  Nspire Much More?
• Why would you allow one version the privilege of having a “replaceable” keypad (shown below), but not the other? If the one non-CAS model can instantly go into “84 mode”, I think it would be trivial to support this keypad on the CAS version…just disable the advanced features the CAS provides because they wouldn’t be accessible on the 84. With plenty of storage for an operating system, it seems obnoxious to me that this wouldn’t even be a consideration.
• While we’re on the subject of keypads, what idiot decided that rather than use TI’s norm of the Alpha-button, they should steer away from it and instead make minuscule keys for the alphabet, some logic operators, and some of the more important buttons…and make a weird almost-diamond-shaped key for all the other functions (again, shown here). Not only does that not make any usability sense, but it’s laid out in a really awkward configuration. I have small fingers, so I wouldn’t have much of a problem typing on that personally, if it made any form of sense. I can get a pretty decent WPM on an 83+…and that’s WITH having to press Alpha for every keypress (no Alpha-lock). And to put the icing on top, it looks like the whole thing was designed for Fisher-Price. Let’s not even get started about what’s supposedly the “84 Keypad”.
• The non-CAS version of the calculator also includes a “testing” light. What is a “testing” light, you ask? Simple…when certain parts of the calculator are disabled by an instructor for use during a test, there’s a little light that blinks to let the teacher know the functions still ARE disabled. Now, I get distracted easily, as do thousands of other students, so a little blinking light is the last thing I need drawing my focus away from my test and back onto my calculator. (Now, admittedly, I haven’t actually played with one of these things, and I can’t say for certain that it’s even that much of a bother…but just because the calculator you’re using isn’t blinking where you can see it doesn’t mean another student’s isn’t going to bother you.) And there’s another problem: who’s to say some knowledgeable student doesn’t just wire up a timer and switch to pulse an LED? After all, I’ve seen people add in backlights, 3.5mm headphone jacks (for game audio), fans, and all sorts of miscellany to a TI-83. If people are that willing to carve up a lesser calculator to “improve it”, imagine the possibilities for this thing.  Can I just ask whether teachers actually requested there be a blinking nuisance for tests?
• There’s no real application support. Wait a second, let me repeat that. THERE’S NO REAL APPLICATION SUPPORT. Now, I’m getting a little ahead of myself…but the only way either model supports applications or programs is through its emulated TI-84 mode, with the 84 keypad installed. Now, explain to me why TI would be so kind as to NOT include this? When I was in high school, my teachers didn’t really frown on the program support the 83′s and 84′s have. Some of them wouldn’t be too happy if you took advantage of them and typed up notes into the calculator, but others would actually embrace the idea to the point of ensuring the students had their (*poorly-written*) programs. In chemistry for example, one teacher was well-known for writing programs for the students to use in class, on homework, and on tests. Now tell me, if a forsaken teacher is embracing the functionality you add to a product, doesn’t it mean that means more than just games or cheating on a test?
• What’s with the design? I swear, one of the designers must have either come from GM, or been working on his car a lot in the time leading up to the implementation of this design, because the thing looks like a kiddie-ized version of the Tech 2.  Where do I connect to the OBD port in my car?
• Let alone design…let’s talk about specs. Talk about waste when you realize that there’s 32 MB of Flash ROM and 32 MB of RAM…explain to me what part of that is necessary when you can’t even develop apps to put on it? Oh…hold on just a second, I think I’m getting an idea…it’s called it’s necessary because the dingbats did away with the backup battery, instead prompting the device to reload its own OS every time you wear the suckers down.  And by the way…why are they wasting 16-shade grayscale LCDs on this?  Why not swap them into another offspring of the 83 that can actually make use of them?
• Finally, what’s with the name?  People know you as the company that labels their calculators with numbers in such a way that you can tell which ones are better just by if x is greater than y.  So why dump that in favor of something that attempts to sound cool and lame and makes me want to gouge my ears out every time I hear it?  Frankly, I’m surprised that for all TI’s attempts at not sounding clichéd, they didn’t just keep the ‘I’ and call it the ‘iNspired’.  At least then we’d have the confidence that the jolly folks developing calculators took English alongside math.

Alright, maybe I’m just nitpicking because I have nothing better to do.  But despite TI’s pushing this as the “revolutionary way for educators to teach their students”, perhaps the only thing it’s revolutionizing is how disappointed I am.

For every useful piece of technology, we’re left with some crock of crap that somehow manages to become a reigning champion and hang around for a while with no improvement. No, as much as I’d love to, I’m not actually talking about Microsoft Office today. This little blurb is about something much more common than that.

It’s on the very hard drive you’re probably using now, and chances are it’s probably alerted you to some problem at one point or another. Now, if that problem ever really existed, nobody knows, but you probably took the warning’s advice and replaced the drive pretty quick. Still not catching on? I’m talking about S.M.A.R.T. – the “drive health monitoring system” that’s been standard in every drive manufactured in the past several years.

Standardization is good. It’s why we can swap things around and still expect them to work without a lot of jerry-rigging or modification. It’s also the cause of plenty of things ranging from why Windows is the dominant operating system of this point in time to why the power connector on most internal devices is interchangable.

Still – why S.M.A.R.T.? Well, that’s a simple answer. The very “technology” designed to monitor the health of your hard drive and alert you when it might be dying has a very poor track record with me, and it’s about to get worse. Every S.M.A.R.T.-enabled drive I’ve used that has died has done so without so much as a single S.M.A.R.T. alert. That’s right, nothing but the dreaded “click of death” to tell you your data’s on its way to the curb with your useless hunk of metal. And in my case, that’s not exactly something to be celebrating or claiming that the drives in question failed suddenly or were abused – not at numbers like mine. These are drives that have essentially been babied from the get-go. And interestingly enough…the ones I get warnings on? False alarms. Yup, they keep churning away, while the drives that don’t give so much as a warning die off every once in a while.

Now, it’s been a while since I’ve had a drive fail…maybe a few months. (Though the fact that I’m now away from 90% of my equipment and unable to mess with it helps that longetivity score just a bit.) But I brought a desktop and my laptop with me to school.

My usage habits might raise some doubt in why I’m posting this, but it’s interesting all the same. My laptop, for instance, usually rides around with me in an unprotected backpack alongside my schoolbooks, sometimes being squeezed, pressed, crushed, dropped, smacked, banged, hit…in short, it takes quite a beating just being carried with me. I know I could protect it more, but it’s a cheap machine, it’s long outlived the lifespan I had expected for it, and in general it just goes to show that treatment isn’t always the primary reason for failure. Not to mention that I’ve pulled the thing apart several times, flung it around onto beds, tables, desks, chairs, and any other matter of instant-computing surface…and it works. For three years now it’s gone through treatment like that, and here it is, still churning away and letting me write up my post. In fact, the only new hardware the thing has seen is a stick of RAM. That’s it.

My “school” desktop, on the other hand, is a different story. For the most part, the machine’s been coddled like one would coddle a newborn. At least, since I got some of the parts. (I got them from a friend; long story, but they still work and they saved me a bit of cash.) The hard drive in there’s been mine since day one though. And even after suffering a nasty PSU incident about a year into its life (it’s now about 4-5 years old), it’s served me well. After that aforementioned incident, the drive developed a small clicking problem. And despite the clicking, I continued to use it. I mean, what’s the point of status monitoring if it tells you the drive is in better condition post-trauma than it is beforehand? Anyway, it managed to make it into my school machine (at which point the clicking had subsided). It’s been between a month and a month and a half since that…and the clicking’s back, but it’s no *click* this time. It’s almost more of a screech. In the signs of hard drive health, it’s not a good sign when the thing is screeching.

Anyway, even I can tell by now that the thing is about to kick the bucket…yet where’s the “monitoring” that was supposed to have alerted me to the problem even before it occured? I wouldn’t expect it to warn me about my PSU blowing up, but it certainly should be able to predict the drive’s death based on the fact that it spends more time attempting to perform disk activity than actually doing it.

Now, the concept of drives monitoring their health is novel, and bloody useful, especially in a corporate world, and if it weren’t for the problem of flash-based internal media coming to the consumer world in the next few years, I’d be wondering more why there haven’t been any recent announcements concerning a technology that may very well be on its way to redundancy. But based upon its standardization and wide acceptance, and (lack of) monitoring prowess, I’m left to wonder why nobody ever bothered to try and improve it considering it fails in every way, shape, and form imaginable.

So, this brings me back to my original point. Why include something that doesn’t work, and charge the consumer to implement it? Certainly there can be a middleground where the technology either is not implemented or actually functions well enough that the data on the drive can be backed up well before any audible clicking can be heard? It’s not smart, and it’s not fair to extort consumers for random “features” on that bulleted list that don’t work remotely near as advertised.  I realize that drive death prediction is really hard to do…but seriously…can it actually predict something?

As much as I’ve ranted and raved about how much the current generation of “social networking” (aka “whore-yourself-out-and-see-who-knows-(or-doesn’t)-know-the-most-people” networking, I’ve also realized that they’ve become a part of Internet culture that may very well be just as much a necessity as an instant messenger screen name, or even more importantly your e-mail address.

A pair of students conducting video interviews stopped me today to ask my opinion on Facebook’s recent decision to open up profiles to search engines. (Which if you couldn’t tell already was the inspiration for me delving a little deeper into the issue here and now.)

In a way, I see social networking as not only a necessity, but a beneficial one. Picture your favorite social networking site as a gigantic phone book, only filled with the information people have volunteered. Picture the friends list on that site as a personal address book; those listings out of the “white pages” of the site that you know personally, and have a lot of contact with, but the difference between this address book and a standard paper or personally-kept one is that instead of you updating your information, your friends do it all for you.

Like I said, the interviewers were asking opinions about Facebook opening up profiles to search engines. Having recently acquired an account myself (yes, I know what you’re thinking), I’ve been able to poke around with the site and see exactly what information people have a habit of posting or not posting.

I see the decision as double-sided, really; on one hand, it makes it even easier for the people you want to find you to, well, find you. Perhaps a long-lost elementary school friend will finally catch up with you and get back in touch.

On the other hand, this same information is available and potentially being presented to potential employers, your mother, and anyone else who punches your name into a search engine. And with the ever-increasing rate at which the “background check” for a job includes a Google search to see how much and how well-standing a presence on the Internet you have, it becomes essential that you not only be creative and show your personality, but maintain your dignity and uphold the idea that you actually have a maturity level beyond that of a giggly fifteen-year-old girl.

For most people who have common sense, the content of their profiles is benign, but I would like to point out that I have seen plenty of profiles that could use a bit of a sanity check to more appropriately represent their owners, and in some cases to protect their identities. Let’s be mature and smart about what we do, people.

For example, setting your cell phone number and home address to be visible to the world are probably not the most intelligent things one could do. So to help you stay safe, I’ve compiled a short list of recommendations to help you avoid being the biggest target for miles.

• NEVER, EVER list your street address, and depending on the size of your city, it might be wise to even avoid listing your that. Bigger is better, obviously, since there’s more of a “needle-in-the-haystack” problem with each additional person in your town, but you never want to be able to have anyone come right up to your door without you having given the location to them. I really don’t think I can emphasize enough the importance of this one single bullet.
• AVOID using your phone number(s), especially mobile phone numbers, in a profile. These are very easy to harass (prank phone call anyone) and can often be problematic, not to mention in some cases cell phones can be traced. Instead, use e-mail addresses, and perhaps a seldom-used instant messenger account, both of which you can ditch or filter for unwanted attempts at communication, with no further effort required beyond the “Block” button.
• NEVER post anything that might get you (or anyone you know) charged with a crime, be it something that could get you in trouble with a police department, or even simply your school. And I’m talking anything. And with the movement to online mediums such as social networking sites, it makes it even easier for universities to keep an eye on students and their activities. (Remember how I just pointed out the address book image about how people’s information comes to you? Same thing…all they have to do is wait.)  So, as an example, don’t go around posting pictures of yourself or your best friend holding a beer…someone will find it and you’ll be caught.
• DON’T post anything that you might later regret, even to the slightest extent. Remember, this is the Internet, and news travels faster than the light shining out of my laser pointer. The moment you let someone know, you’ve pretty much let the world know, and that can mean a world of pain when it comes to your romantic or professional lives. And now that Google can come in and read portions (if not all) of your profile, it can be archived for future public consumption, even after you’ve removed it from your profile.
• DON’T add everyone who asks to your profile; there’s a reason they ask you to confirm the friendship – it’s to confirm that you actually know and trust the person requesting to be your friend.  By “whoring yourself out” you introduce hundreds, if not thousands, of people you don’t know to a free-for-all access to all the information you have posted.  So think before that random hottie sends you a message asking to be your friend; chances are it’s not even a female but an obese guy with three layers of skin on his stomach and flies buzzing about his head.

I’m not saying that social networking should be bland and boring; it’s at the heart a form of self-expression, albeit one demonstrated to the world. The problem is that most people just don’t know when to quit – and end up committing the virtual equivalent of streaking around.

Well, I’m both happy and displeased to announce that there is a small problem with the installation writeup I created to help install iLife ’08 on OS X-based systems that didn’t meet the requirements. I’ve recieved several e-mails about the problem, but if you experience it yourself, let me know.

A user by the name of derbochennag has traced through some of his logs and discovered what may very well be the culprit: Quartz. From what I can tell based upon my discussions with him, and a bit of creative theorizing, the problem lies in the Quartz packages not being suitable for use with earlier versions of OS X. (Speculation: Perhaps this is the limiting factor in why Apple doesn’t officially support installations on prior versions of the operating system.)

The symptoms of the “Quartz bug” include some of your applications no longer working, and a Spotlight icon that flashes in the corner of the screen, but remains useless the entire time.

For now, I would like to perform some experimentation in attempting to avoid installation of those packages; perhaps the iLife suite will work fine.

I also realize that it’s been a very long time since I’ve posted content of any kind; school’s been getting into the way of me doing much of anything productive but unrelated to education lately. But we’ll see what I can do in the near future.

Update (9/18):  I have modified the posted shell script to SKIP the Quartz installation (it’s commented out in the script, so you can take a look at it if you want to experiment or try installing it against recommendations), until more testing can be done.  In the meantime, running a repair installation of OS X over your screwed up installation should fix everything up.