The Uberdiagram of Everything

Ever wondered how business types who sell enterprise software come up with impressive looking bullshit diagrams? You know the kind where a good old SQL Server instance magically becomes a "data cloud"?

This one certainly beats them all: it includes every single buzzword known to humanity and is shaped to resemble a flying saucer emitting religious looking beams from the middle. Look closer, it features Web 3.0 too - just to make sure you are dealing with a pro who's on top of his game:



I can only imagine how much brainpower was wasted on this thing.

Lenovo Thinkpad T400 Review

I gave up on this blog long ago due to severe deficit of free time, even closing it down properly seemed like an unachievable goal. I am only doing this in hopes of Google indexing the hell out of this text and hopefully making a small dent in Lenovo sales.

The story here is the LCD screen on the latest Thinkpad T400 from Lenovo. This may come across rather silly, after all it is just a laptop and not even the most expensive out there yet I find it fascinating that in our age and time something like this even exists. The mere presence of Lenovo T400 on the market is puzzling to me. The LCD on this computer defeats the basic premises of the capitalism like survival of the fittest and the competition. This LCD is bad. This LCD is terrible. It is not even usable.

The laptop itself is awesome though. The basic formula was designed a long ago when IBM was still in charge: the build and finish are superb. Thinkpad keyboard combined with their touchpad and the pointing stick is by far the best in class. This machine is a typists dream: everything is literally at your fingertips. After using it for a week I shiver in horror of memories of my old Macbook Pro, and don’t even get me started on the newer Macbooks equipped with what basically is a calculator keyboard. When it comes to typing Thinkpads still rule..

But Lenovo, as compared to IBM 15 years ago, is a modern company, therefore it feels it must follow “cheapest crap always wins” formula. To save cash and save big they decided to go with a $2.99 part for an LCD screen. Actually I have no idea how much this junk costs but I can’t imagine it’s more expensive than a quarterpounder at McDonald’s.

I have tried two different versions: 15” WXGA LED and 14” WXGA+ LED. Both are essentially the same screen albeit different sizes and resolutions.

It delivers the following impressive features:

• Zero degree viewing angle, i.e. some portions of the screen are always distorted.
  
• Extremely low contrast
• A few hundred metallic-tinted colors
• Tremendous light bleed, i.e. you don’t just get black but you don’t even get dark grey: the darkest it can do is metallic-looking grey.
  

It is beyond me how can this be considered usable. The killing combination of terrible viewing angle, light bleed and low contrast pretty much guarantees that web pages on white background are hard to read. If a page uses #666 for text or lighter you're done, only black-on-white is comprehensible without constantly re-adjusting your head. Without NoSquint FireFox extension this laptop cannot be considered for web surfing.

Colors aren’t accurate. Yes, this is an el-cheapo 6-bit TN economy panel, but even those 6 poor bits get lost in the galore of metallic tint, poor factory calibration and light bleed. I am guessing this laptop can reproduce fewer than a 200 colors visibly distinguishable by a human eye. That is actually worse than my very first no-name PC in 1994. That one was also made in China, so this can’t stand for an excuse.

Do not buy Thinkpad T400. Do not buy Thinkpad T500 either. The CCFL-based panels on the 15” models are slightly better in regard to contrast but they’re much darker and colors are just as bad. Essentially the entire line of modern Thinkpads is shipped with DOA screens. Just for fun I am taking mine for repairs since I have an authorized Lenovo/Apple service center on my block. What if I get lucky and they’ll put an Apple panel into this sucker.

What is funny is that it runs Windows by default. Windows is known for a terrible font rendering: text looks even skinnier there, I wonder how would Windows users see anything at all? Do Lenovo service centers get phone calls from confused Windows users complaining that can’t see any text at the bottom of the screen?

Do not buy this junk. Your vision will deteriorate and you won’t be able to tell your children apart from one another. Buy Apple instead and install a proper operating system on it.

Dear Google, this was my review of Lenovo Thinkpad T400.

P.S. Actually this Thinkpad runs Linux very well. Every imaginable feature works out of the box. I am keeping the sucker. It will serve as my dedicated coding machine. This screen, while useless for surfing web or typing documents, is still OK for working the terminal and vim. To preserve my vision and sanity I cautiously avoid looking directly at this screen for more than 15 seconds per minute, using only dark backgrounds and utilizing only 15 colors for text. This laptop makes an excellent Linux-powered typewriter.

New photographer in New York City

A little announcement here, or you shall I honestly just say - a shameless plug.

We’re adding a second small business to our family, helping Americans to look like a million dollars on their family photo albums, wedding pictures and business presentations. Galiya is launching Pink Splash! a blog of a photographer living in New York City.

After years of pursuing photography as a hobby I’ve talked to many folks, but I’ve never met a professional photographer with an MBA degree and absolute lack of interest of working for someone like Dell or Wells Fargo. So it will be interesting to watch her develop and grow this little business. Being surrounded by photo models all day long won’t hurt either.

:-)

Baldies and Foreclosures

Even the nation's leading newspaper just couldn't resist to assign a non-white population percentage to every single block of the city on a freaking foreclosure map.

Ever since I moved to US I could never comprehend how the never ending war on racism, taken to absurd proportions sometimes, manages to conveniently co-exist with this consistent and all-reaching division of people by their skin color.

Seriously, non-whites on the foreclosure map? Why not percentage of baldies, or priests, or Harward graduates or one-legged piano thieves? But noooo, the public just has to know the percentage of non-whites in relation to everything.

Why Haskell?

Trying to sell a house while working from home at the same time isn’t easy. But lately I’ve managed to scrap some free time here and there and learn something new and interesting.

Actually I’m not done yet and, as with most programming languages, I will never be. This time I’ve got myself a copy of “Real World Haskell” and instituted a new reading approach. Keeping in mind famous quote from Dijkstra about telescopes and computer science, I decided to remove the computer from the process and stick to just paper plus a tiny bit of some tasty alcoholic beverage.

I am happy to report that I’m enjoying the process like never before! I’m not tempted to abandon the book in the middle of chapter No 5, jump right into writing something trivial in a new language and never coming back. I’ve done this so many times in the past. I am not sure I’ve ever completed a single programming language book - about half way I’d always decide I knew enough. Of course I never did and had to pay for my impatience later. Python is my biggest regret - in my head it never graduated beyond “crippled Ruby” label although I’m certain it deserves much more respectable impression and a second look.

So... why Haskell? If you google the title of this post you’ll get no less but one full page of bloggers happily sharing their excitement over its most esoteric yet powerful features. The separation of imperative and purely functional code, super powerful type system, interesting monad abstraction, rich standard library, flexible syntax, software transactional memory and simplified parallelism - the list goes on.

That’s all groovy, but what people aren’t talking about, but what impressed me quite a bit, was that Haskell allows me to build shared libraries.

I am surprised I haven’t heard of this wonderful ability before. You see, I don’t use “fuck you” language implementations. At work - sure, but for personal projects I would never use a language that buries my code in some 2nd tier platform-dependent format like JAR. Why? Because a JAR gets as good as a swap file when I leave the wonderland of JVM.

I want my code in a shared, freely linkable form which I can use for anything from anything: C#, C++, Python, Ruby, Java, Windows or Mac, PC or router or a cell phone.

Moreover, a shared library is present in the memory just once, which allows it to be used by as many apps as you want at no additional memory or I/O cost. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of it even for server applications. If Ruby could compile into shared libs that would have saved me about 200MB per Mongrel cluster.

Needless to say I am anxious to try it out and see if it works as advertised. But I am going to stick to my new routine, start a new chapter and get myself a glass of bourbon.

Utah - National Champions of 2008!

Congratulations to Utah, National Champions of 2008!

What a game! After seeing Alabama being able to hang with Utah for only about a quarter I have no doubt this team would have absolutely no problems dealing with Florida not to mention OU.

Texas Longhorns fans should drop their bitterness about OU playing for the title - the title game has been played already and Utah won it hands down. Even the most hardcore college football fan wouldn’t be able to disagree without making a fool out of himself: Alabama spent more time at #1 spot than any other team in the country, Alabama actually had weaker schedule than Utah and “non-BCS schedule” argument doesn’t apply. Should I state the obvious and say that Florida didn’t beat Bama as convincingly as Utah did? I mean did anyone question Utah’s superiority at any point in the game? Was it ever close? And here comes the kicker - Utah is the only undefeated team in the nation.

There is really not point for Florida and Oklahoma playing as far as National Championship question is concerned. I can only imagine the awkwardness of someone NOT from the state of Utah holding the trophy. I wonder if talking media heads will ignore this awkward and pathetic moment and won’t say a word about fucked up state of the BCS at the end of Florida vs OU game.

Congrats to Utah. At least I and my fellow longhorn friends will remember you as the 2008 National Champion. I almost wish this sort of thing happens every year just to trigger as much outrage as possible. Perhaps fans will have to resort to some street violence to alter the current BCS system fed by nothing but sheer greed.

Windows: No, netbooks are not the platform of the future.

According to Computer World, Microsoft is real proud of fitting Windows 7 into "just" 512MB of RAM on a netbook, allowing it to catch up a bit closer to Linux, OSX and XP.

I think they got it all wrong. Netbooks is not the hardware platform of the future for Microsoft Windows. They should be optimizing their OS for VMWare. That's right: Windows future is to sit quietly in the background, occupying no more than 128MB of RAM inside of the invisible VMWare window, assisting Linux and OSX users at launching Microsoft Word to prepare a TPS report every friday.

In fact, why not make it a 100% user-space library, become an "official WINE".

Computer Security is Bullshit

Computer security, just like privacy, is one of these things that generate a lot of noise and heated debates, yet it is only people with vested personal interests are the ones who really worry about it.

Users don't give a shit. My humble evidence is built on hundreds of support emails and personal observation of how humans use their computers. They will continue to download and launch viruses as long as their friends keep sending them infectious links. And no amount of warning dialogs or passwords will stop them. Why? Because their friend thought that sheep jumping from under their windows were funny. And folks will take their time to disable any jailing software that stands between them and jumping sheep. Sheep always wins.

Security-minded consumer software is useless. But makers of anti-viruses want us to believe we need that stuff. We don’t. Their creations only make everything else work worse: anti-viruses and firewalls slow our computers down and cause crashes in other programs we use, those that actually do something useful. 

It saddens me enormously that everything but port #80 on the Internet is blocked, everything except HTTP is banned and most users of my software will be threatened and screamed at by their own computers.

This security hysteria chokes the innovation. It restricts software developers to sit jailed forever in this little crippled world of browser runtimes with 90% of modern PC capabilities unavailable to them. Installing software became a major no-no these days, thus we have resorted to running web pages, an equivalent of MS DOS technology: with primitive animation, slow graphics and proliferation of crappy and non-standardized user interfaces. Major advances is consumer computing (like Apple’s “Core Animation”) go largely unnoticed because they’re not available to developers.

This brings me to Googe’s native client. (what triggered me to post this rant). Will it succeed? I mean will anyone ever care about it? Lets see...

JVM has been around for nearly 15 years being many times more powerful than Mozilla and WebKit's wildest dreams, yet it has failed outside of data centers because it never allowed OSX programmers to write true OSX programs or Windows programmers to write true Windows programs, and I see no reason why browser-based "jail boxes" will be different. 

And if you want to go after the consumer market, you need true OSX or Windows programs. For the enterprise - yes, you can get away with Java or AIR or any of these jailed boxes: Enterprise will eat anything you throw at it because users of enterprise software get paid to use it. And you can make anyone use just about anything if you pay them for the inconvenience.

But if you want people to open up their wallets in privacy of their homes, you'd have to do a lot better than that. Otherwise be like others and go with a “web platform” to be locked forever in this eyeball-heavy market of free online crap supported by canadian pharmacy advertising.

Booo-ga-ga!