L.A.B. Unleashed

Interesting article on slashdot today, asking: what is the best gaming console of all time?  The jist of the comments lead to the obvious conclusion, that this is a very subjective question, and depending on which gaming console you were first introduced to, you may have different opinions.  My first console was the Nintendo Entertainment System, the 8 bit one before the Nintendo 64, and I absolutely loved that thing.  Favorite game?  Definitely the Legend of Zelda!  Just recently, I successfully stalked and hunted down the latest Nintendo console … the Wii.  It became all about the chase, and less about actually wanting the Wii, but now that we have it, I am enjoying tennis, golf, and making various Miis.  I think the BEST part about the Wii, is that you can download all the old Nintendo games, including the original Legend of Zelda!  Brilliant idea … charge $5 a pop, and make it easy to download all the nostalgic games directly to the Wii console!  It has been at least 20 years since I took Link on a quest, but it is funny remembering all the little tricks of where to bomb or burn a bush to find the hidden secrets in the game.  It’s also funny, now that I am a programmer and am seeing things from a different perspective.  For instance, there was always this one screen with little monster guys shooting arrows, that would slow down to an annoying chug, and you could tell the system was getting overloaded.  That same screen is still there, with the same problem, and now I wonder how this screen was coded to load, and what sort of memory constraints it is hitting.

I’m looking forward to trying out the latest Zelda game designed for the Wii as well … but for now I am content gathering all the pieces of the triforce!

I am a huge fan of the new NBC TV Show – Chuck.  Its a fun show, with a lot of comedy and drama.  The opening song is the best …. reminiscent of the opening to a James Bond movie, bold colors and spy characters, are splashed across the screen … all set to the instrumental version of Cake’s Short Skirt/Long Jacket.  I couldn’t find a good ringtone based off of this song, but I already had the full version, so I made my own.  Here’s what I did:

1. Download Blackberry Desktop Software, including Roxio Media Manager.  The install is a mess … I had to uninstall it after the first busted run, and then do it again.  It launches a bunch of other windows including 2 Install Shield instances, and a winzip self extractor … so don’t be surprised.  Be patient and just let the whole thing run straight through, even if it looks like it is frozen.
2. Plug in your Blackbery Pearl, and run the new software you just installed for Roxio Media Manager.  By the way, if you thought the install was flawed, wait until you run this software!  It crashed on me more than once!!
3. Using the media manager, navigate to your song, right click it, and Edit with Quick Sound Editor.
4. Using the Quick Sound Editor you can take any piece of the song you want.  I only wanted the very beginning instrumental, so I chose that and saved it.
5. The part of the song I wanted is only 12 seconds long, but a ringtone goes on longer than that.  So I downloaded FAST (File Append and Split Tool).  Then I used that to append my spliced mp3 to itself, creating a repetitive ringtone.
6. Back in the Media Manager, I dragged my newly created mp3 ringtone, down to my Pearl’s Ringtone folder.  Make sure you put it in the Ringtone folder, and not the Music folder.
7. To change the ringone on the Pearl go to Profiles->Advanced->select profile->Phone->Tune … Tune is where you can change the ringtone, and your new ringtone added from the Media Manager should show up at the top of the list!

Easy, right??  Email me or post a comment if you want more details!

It took a full 24 hours, but I can say that I have finally recovered from Lotusphere 2008!  It was an exciting, but exhausting week!  Our session on Dynamic Group Policies was very well attended at 8:30 on Thursday morning, this was still about 10 minutes prior to show time, and you can see there is a pretty full house already:

About 60 seconds before we were ready to start, I advanced 1 slide on my 1/2 of presentation, and the display was completely off!  I and the audience could only see the top left portion of the screen, and everything else was cut off …. PANIC!!!  The in-house tech guys couldn’t fix it, and while Laurie gave the first 1/2 of the presentation I tried everything I could think of to fix it, but to no avail!  Ironic because just the night before we were being made fun of for going to our "tech check" to make sure we were all ready to present in the room the next morning.  The "tech check" went fine, everything looked good.  It just goes to show you, it doesn’t really matter if you are a "good doobie" or not … anything can happen!  I quickly pulled myself together, and remembered that the last portion of my presentation was a live demo, and much of what I was going to show on the slides, was part of the demo as well.  So I explained to the audience, that we’d chug through the "buggered" slides, and spend more time on the demo portion.  It actually worked out really well.  The demo went on without a hitch, and people really enjoyed it.  I even got the compliment that it was the best demo they had seen at Lotusphere this year!  We got some great questions at the end of the session as well … lots of good stuff to bring back and think about as we continue with the 8.5 release.

I updated my two other posts from the week with a few images as well … enjoy!

The lab has been quiet so far late yesterday and early today.  I expect that to change later this afternoon and tomorrow.  Art Thomas and Chip Carter gave a great presentation yesterday on Domino Administration, ID202.  There is a repeat of this talk on Wednesday at 4:15pm, for anyone that missed it. 

People really enjoyed it 1) because it gave a really nice high level view of many Domino Administration features and 2) there was some excellent dramatic effects, about 1/2 through that really jolted the audience.  I can’t give away anymore.  Policies, ID Management, Inbox Management, Database redirects, where just a few of the topics covered, and there were many points that were rewarded with applause! 

Tonight is the Policy Management Bof, and judging from the applause at ID202, surrounding Dynamic Policy Management, this is an exciting topic for customers.  I am looking forward to interacting and getting more feedback on this at the Bof, and then again at our session on Thursday morning.

Waiting for the second Opening General Session to really get started.  Last night was the big welcome reception outside on the beach at the Swan.  Food was great … mini burgers, mini briskets, mini fried dough … I literally ATE UP the mini food theme!  Drinks were readily available as well, but man was it COLD!  FREEZING in fact!!  I thought I had escaped the arctic New England air … apparently not!  We all quickly switched from cold beers, sangria and mojito shooters, to hot chocolate and hot tea to keep our hands warm! 

The OGS is just getting started now.  A band has been rocking it out for about 10 minutes, Sting’s Message in a Bottle was cool.  But now the Orlando Symphony Orchestra has emerged on stage.  It is a GIGANTIC room … holds thousands … maybe 10 thousand … not sure.  The orchestra is fantastic.  They remind me of the Trans Siberian Orchestra with their heavy metal Christmas Eve album.  They are definitely keeping the energy high in the room, and with dramatic imagery playing on the 15 large drop down screens all over the room, it is a great and dramatic start to Lotusphere 2008!  Cheers, hollers, and a standing ovation, as the orchestra finishes their big opening.  Speakers are emerging on stage … going to pay attention now …. more to come later.

Here is the Notes vs. Domino portion of the OGS … which one has made the most improvements???  It turned out to be a tie (go figure), and there will be a re-match next year:

In just a few hours, I will be on my way to Lotusphere 2008 in Orlando, Florida!  Just in time to escape the unforgiving arctic blast New England is about to see.  The weather should make the Patriot’s game interesting today.  Luckily, I am flying Jet Blue, so I’ll have my own front row seat to all the action.  Too bad those mini tv’s are not HD! 

In the next few days, I’ll try to find some time for blogging from Lotusphere.  If you are heading down there yourself, you can catch me in the Meet the Developers Lab in Asia 1.  I’ll also be doing a BoF (Birds of a feather) on Tuesday evening discussing Best Practices for Policy Based Management.  Then on Thursday morning I’ll be co-presenting a session on Policy Based Management, where I will be showing off some new policy features for the next release of Domino.  It’s going to be a packed week!

Why does the Mac get all the cool names for their software?  If I want to edit some text …. would I rather bring up Notepad, Codewright, Microsoft Visual Studio ……. OR Text Wrangler …. YEE-HA!!  How about administering a SQL database?  MySQL Front on the PC …. OR …. Navicat on the Mac!  Grrrrrrr!  One last example … how about I want to FTP some files.  I can go to my PC and bring up SmartFTP or Winscp.  Sure they are descriptive … by the name you know exactly what the software is expected to do,.  But you could get really crazy and choose to rock Cyber Duck on the Mac instead!!   Can’t you just envision the next "Hello, I’m a Mac" and "I’m a PC" commercial:

Mac: "Hey PC, why do you look so sad"

PC: "ah … well … everyone is talking about all the cool software on the Mac, with all their fun, fancy names.  Navicat …. grr (PC makes a puma type gesture, pouncing at Mac, and growls)."

Mac: "Oh, I’m sorry PC, I’m sure even though your software has boring, uncreative, names, people still find it useful"

Commercial ends in a blue screen of death …… AND ….. SCENE.  Its just too easy!

Anyone who knows me well, understands my obsession with mini things.  Mini waters, or the "aquapod" are a summer must have!  Also, mini Cokes, mini Heinekins, mini Coronas … or Coronitas, are key!!!  I also love to make mini burgers, but always have trouble finding matching mini buns.  I think it would be a very lucrative idea to produce and entire brand of mini food and beverage products. 

In any case, it has been 1 week now, since I set up my new toy … a Mac Mini.  I have never been that comfortable using a Mac, I think I’ve said before I am a heavily trained PC girl.  It has been an adjustment, but I am definitely enjoying it overall.  One major difference, besides it being 20% the size of my old desktop, is the noise factor … it is so quiet!  My old PC would rev up like a big ol’ engine, until I thought it might explode!  The fan would be a blazing, and the hard drive would chirp away.  It never ended well … usually a blue screen and a cold boot.  The Mac has been solid.  One thing I have noticed is that the Mac seems to be much more mouse based, than my PC.  I always use a ton of keyboard short cuts to navigate windows, but on the Mac, it feels like I am expected to use the mouse more.  This has been an imposition so far.  For instance, on windows I am constantly using Shift-End, to highlight to the end of a line.  I can’t find the same keyboard shortcut on the Mac.  On the Mac, "end" means end of file … so that has been a point of confusion/frustration for me … especially as a coder.  I’m sure there is an equivalent, magic, keystroke on the Mac, I just need to look it up.

I’ve got a pretty cool setup software-wise.  Complementing my mini, is a new 24 inch wide-screen monitor … who wouldn’t want to code on that puppy?!  Since my programming work-wise is windows based, my IT guy set up VMWare Fusion for me, running windows XP.  It is amazing!  Basically, I can run any windows program right on the Mac desktop, using the "Unity" view with VMWare.  I had to finagle the VPN a bit … I don’t think the IBM help desk was too happy with me, but I got it working.  Other software on the Mac, that I can not live without:

• Graphic Arts : Acorn … I tried GIMP, but is was a slow pita, running in X11.  Too bad, because I did love it on my PC.
• FTP: Cyperduck
• My SQL Db Access: Navicat
• Instant Messaging: Adium … which handles both google talk and AIM!
• Text editor: Text Wrangler … Now I feel like a rouge, cow girl, coder when I am programming … Yee-Ha!
• Browser: Firefox – of course!!!

If anyone has other suggestions on programs I should check out, please let me know! 

I came across this paper, entitled Faster Integer Multiplication, which describes a faster, or the currently fastest, method to compute the multiplication of large integers.  The prior fastest method reined from 1971 to 2007, so this breakthrough was one of the big ones for 2007.  Much of the computation in the paper is way over my head, but the general theories behind this problem are intriguing and easy to understand.  Finding new and better ways to compute large numbers is not only a fun theoretical topic to think about (for some), but it is also crucial to very real world scenarios … in computer security for instance. 

Here is a very simple mathematic convolution that depicts a different way of carrying out integer multiplication:

Multiplying the numbers 123 and 456, we set it up in the normal way, but do not perform any carrying operations:

Now take the sequence of numbers 4 13 28 27 18, and perform the carrying operation, by keeping the right most 8, and adding the 1 to the next column of 27, and continue on so that you end up with 56088.  This final number is the product of the original two numbers …. 123 x 456 … go ahead and check it with calc!

Last week I blogged about a cool new site I found, snooth.com, and how I was really impressed with some slick UI transitions they had implemented.  I came across code that implements something similar ….  what I was calling a "blink" on their web site.  A very technical term.   Basically, you click on an object, the page goes to a grey 80% opacity, and then comes back to normal when it is done executing the link that you clicked on. This blink can be produced with a bit of javascript, css, and some jpg/png files.

Check out this article for the scoop on blinking.