Random Numbers

I never took a statistics class, but this just occurred to me:

If R is a random number between 0 and 1, then the average value of R taken to the power of N is the inverse of N+1;

EVO 4G: First Impressions

Having been an iPhone user for 2+ years, many of my comments will occasionally refer to that new iPhone thinger that all the cool kids are sporting. Kids, like the guys over at Engadget who seem to keep a decent perspective with the insane pace of the phone industry. In order to help my own perspective, I have read their articles, specifically: a review of the EVO 4G, and a comparison between the EVO 4G and the iPhone 4, which confoundedly ends with "follow your heart." Maybe I should be more emotionally attached to my electronics...

With all that said, here are my first impressions of the EVO 4G:

• Beautiful screen, and considering I'll be staring at this, like, all the time, it's a good thing.
• A bit heavier and obviously bigger than my iPhone 3G, but not in a bad way.
• Won't that protruding camera lens get scratched up?
• The power button is a bit difficult to press because of the way the phone's edge profile is shaped with respect to the button. 
• The UI is slightly more sluggish than I was hoping, but I'd still label it "very fast."
• After a quick login to Google, everything was automagically synced: contacts, gmail, calendars (even the shared ones). Could not ask for more.

My Hungover iPhone

It's actually not me that's hungover. It's my phone. Here's my theory: Apple released iOS v3 and it was so splendiferously good that my phone secretly went on a drinking binge. By the time iOS 4 came out, the phone had had enough with the bottle and simply fell into a nasty hangover.

Search speeds, browsing speeds, even navigating the freaking settings was slow. The phone that had once been so snappy was now a sluggish beast that could barely manage playing an mp3 whilst placing a "Q" tile on the board in Words with Friends.

And I'm not even going to bitch about AT&T's network "service."

My point here is to provide a little back-story to why I want to move away from my current phone. AT&T is less than admirable (text costs), their connections are spotty and drain my battery quickly in Chicago, Apple has bloated my iPhone 3G and provides me no way to make it lean and mean again, and I have a slight desire to do more phone-tweaking (read: root).

And a switch to Sprint's EVO 4G = cheaper monthly cost (we'll see about that) + a phone with more features + allegedly a faster network. Oh, and they offered a 30-day return policy. I was sold, and so the testing begins.

Reward: EVO 4G

I wrapped up taking (again) the SE II exam here in Illinois on Saturday. Naturally, one must reward oneself for such a thing, so I went and did what any respectable geek should do in such a situation: buy an EVO 4G. You know, that one phone that is the first to make sliced bread, the wheel, and will babysit your kids:



I searched high and low for a decent EVO 4G review for Chicago, and barely one was found. So, granted it's late to the show, I plan to leave a few remarks, comments, and maybe even a video over the next 28 days as I "test drive" the phone (before I need to return it, if so decided).

The EVO Test Drive continues...

Thoughts, In-Out

in: afternoon coffee
out: morning coffee

in: capitalizing sentences
Out: "definitely", "literally"

In: "presume"
Out: "assume"

In: Dominion
Out: MtG

In: Revit
Out: AutoCAD

In: mortgage rates under 5%
Out: rates over 5%

Y'another iPhone (or a Bit on Hi-Res Displays)

Thank you, Apple, for still making impressive improvements on your devices and software. Meanwhile, back here in reality, we'll all continue suffering through AT&T's contemptible service.

With that out of my system, I wanted to blab a bit about Apple's "retina display." Besides being a brow-raising brand, it does embody what's so awesome behind the display. At 326 pixels per inch, it opens the doors for unique human/computer interaction. Magazines, brochures, and just about anything that's printed and viewed from one's hands uses a printing resolution of around 300 dots per inch. One can deduct that Apple's new display thus offers a viewing experience on par with the printed world.

What's so cool about this? Digital ink, as they call it. I know Steve thinks any sort of interface between a human and computer that uses a "stylus" equals failure. (He may want to reconnect with Apple's huge following of creative professionals.) To this day I would never have suggested that digital pens would make a good input device, solely because of our displays' resolutions. Digital ink fails from the start if a person can differentiate the pixels. But with a display at Apple's RD's 326 ppi, we can draw digital lines and curves, and paint with brushes and colors at arm's length without the distraction of zooming, pixels, or resolution. A wall is being torn down between creative professionals and being productive.

Of course, the iPhone is still just a 3.5" screen, so that in itself is a barrier. But it won't be long before Apple will offer these displays at workable sizes.

I come from a heavy architectural background, which stemmed into my current occupation as a structural engineer. We work daily with line drawings. Back in the printed world, line drawings need to be kept vector to be printed well. Rasterized, such drawings need to hit 600 or higher dpi to keep the human eye happy with what it sees printed. However, we continually need to convey information to the rest of a design team: the architects, the structural engineers, the mechanical engineers, the contractors, the owners, the developers, and the multitude of sub-consultants for a project. This industry has been slow to acclimate to a digital world when it comes to coordination and sharing information. One of the barriers here has been the process of marking up drawings. For several reasons, it's still usually best to print a drawing, mark it up with good ol' real-life pens and pencils, scan the thing back in, then email it away. With a display at 326 ppi matching at least a letter-sized page (8.5" x 11"), the process of sharing information on drawings could be drastically more efficient, clearer, and faster. Give me a display hitting 11"x17", and we're getting gold.

So, Apple: When can we see your spiffy Retina Display at something larger than pocket-sized?

styles, publishing

I've been doing more and more InDesign layouts at work for our architect clients. We often assemble these for the same architects, who do send us "templates." Unfortunately, these templates have formatting styles spottily applied and often existing with overrides, so on the last project, I spent a decent chunk of time to define my own cleaned up, reliable styles.

I won't claim to be an InDesign expert, so I ran into a new task today: grabbing the styles from the last document. It being an Adobe product, I believed it might be a simple copy-paste job similar to Photoshop layer styles, but it's a bit different in InDesign. You essentially have to "import" the styles from the other doc. From either of styles palette menus, clicking on "Load Character/Paragraph Styles..." lets you do this. It's quite straight forward from there on out.

Now this got me thinking about WYSIWYG editors and how the latest version of Word has made Styles a much more obvious tool to users. Unfortunately, I'd bet that the majority of people still have no idea how to use them properly. I would suggest that part of the problem is that the separation between content and styling doesn't fit the mold of a wysiwyg editor, and is better understood through a typesetting software such as LaTeX. But writing in that looks like scary code...

These are just random thoughts of the moment. I've heard rumor that I might be sharing my InDesign knowledge within my office, a scary thought; teaching InDesign to engineers... I wonder if an approach focusing on the separation of styles and content might be of interest to such an audience.

javascript back

Another little note to myself in the future: despite what w3schools says, history.back() is not the same as history.go(-1). Now, I don't know what the standards say, but the behavior of these two is different in the following way (at least in IE at the moment).

history.back() seems to return the previous page, but adds it as a 'new' page to the history. This means, that if every page on a site has a link for history.back(), the user will simply bounce between two pages, never actually going back through the history.

history.go(-1) seems to behave just like the back button of the browser: it moves the pointer of the current page back one in the history.

giving aid to Haiti

Food for thought:





And there's more to this data. And the full image.