It’s always inspiring to read about great people and their great stories. In Steve Wozniak’s case, it’s interesting to see how HP has stayed a stubborn and old-fashioned company since the 70s. HP could have been Apple (and there’d never be an Apple), but it screwed up…. Not that they’ll ever admit that they regret passing on Woz’s designs for the original Apple I and Apple II, but it’s pretty clear that some company cultures stink and will always stay that way…
Author: shun
China’s RedBerry
Excerpt from an article:
On the eve of its long-delayed China launch, BlackBerry is facing a sudden challenge from a cheaper Chinese rival called, unapologetically, RedBerry.
The new service, aimed squarely at BlackBerry, was launched this month by China Unicom Ltd., the state-controlled telecommunications giant that ranks as China’s second-biggest mobile operator.
The new RedBerry service could pose a major challenge to Research in Motion Ltd., which is planning to launch BlackBerry in China by the end of next month. Its China launch has been delayed by two years of negotiations and regulatory obstacles, and RedBerry has now been introduced ahead of it.
Wow… Sweet! Chinese businessmen’s got to be one of the most “innovative” and “honest” people in the world… Innovative in stealing and coming up with original names for products they stole and honest in having no shame in doing it. I look forward to having such a great country and people to lead the world into the next century. I get excited just thinking about it! Woohoo!
Killing Bugs with Nature
C|Net has an interesting article on companies using organic methods to repel or eliminate undesired bugs for argricultural purposes. Great idea!
Organic biopesticides comprise only a small fraction of the overall $30 billion pesticide market, but they are growing rapidly–22 percent a year thanks to technological, regulatory and market forces. By 2010, biopesticides could account for more than $1 billion in revenues, according to some estimates. Other companies in the field include Valent Biosciences, Suterra, Certis and Nutra Park.
The business has come a long way from previous years when biopesticide scientists were viewed as modern-day snake oil salesmen. A number of start-ups formed in the 1990s were based on sound science from university labs but cratered in the dot-com meltdown.
AgraQuest, which has $10 million in annual sales today, was one of many companies that, back then, canceled plans to go public. But now new investors such as Texas Pacific Group Ventures are aiming to rapidly grow the company’s revenue by expanding relationships with farmers and retail outlets like Wal-Mart.
To maximize agricultural production, pesticides are not going away. But instead of using harmful chemicals, leveraging nature against nature is probably the best and sustainable way to go! I mean, how much longer will it take for those commerical chemicals to reach a level where all food chains are contaminated with them that we won’t be able to eat anything without dying from one disease or another caused by the chemicals?
Fresh Orange Juice
Grace was feeling sick on Sunday. I got a box of oranges at Safeway and one of those manual juicers from Longs. I came home and started juicing. It was a fun experience at first until my wriests started to get really sored.
It turns out that a box of oranges at $5 produces about 2.5 liters of fresh juice (with lots of pulp though, but we like it that way; also, give or take a few ounces because I added two grapefruits for flavor). I used to think those 2.5-liter “not from concentrate” cartons of juice were expensive at $3. But the economy of scale really demonstrated itself in this simple juicing experiment.
But I guess I really can’t buy the notion of “freshness” straight from my own kitchen… Maybe this whole excercise would be more worthwhile if the oranges were organic or something when Bryan is old enough to drink orange juice…
When Good Things Are Not Priced for Good People
Shopping for baby products can be an frustrating experience sometimes. The market is flooded with inferior (and sometimes just plain dangerous) products with extremely poor designs. Just about the only thing good about these products is their price — they are all dirt cheaply made in the great manufacturing capital of the world, China.
Because of that reason, I am always on the look out for great designs priced for everybody. Not having visited Daddytypes for a few months, I hopped over to the site and found an article mentioning the Orbit Baby Infant System. It’s a company founded by a couple of Stanford grads with ideas to make transporting babies safer. Great ideas with a good cause, I thought. The design is delicious and the concepts look wonderful… Wonderful until I saw the price, that is. At about $900 a pop, this “safe and good looking” product is effectively priced out of reach for most working class parents.
That’s what I don’t understand about innovative products like Bugaboo or the Orbit Baby. Do the rules of economics not apply to those systems? Can they not find an equilibrium where they can manufacturer something innovative and affordable all at the same time? I mean, it’s not like there are no substitutes out there! Why can’t there be an Apple in the baby products market? Why can’t there be a Target supermarket for babies?
Now that I Know how much the Orbit System costs, I feel like a snob just by drooling at the pictures. Is it true that maybe the manufacturing cost is just so high on such a well-made and designed system that the product can be justifies at that price point? Or is it simply a “Stanford” thing that it’s OK to be snobs because this is the Bay Area where most people make lots of money from the high-tech industry anyway and can afford to spend that kind of money? Maybe the profit-making scheme is blinding their noble objective to make the safest baby transpotation system? Or maybe they think being safe should always come at a price (only the rice should be able to survive a crash in their system)? I just don’t get it.
Maybe more classes in economics will help me see the world more clearly.
Blah… Just another rant from a financially strained parent…
The Rules of Economics
I am taking my first (ever) class in economics in this quarter at UCSC Extensions. And for the first time, the world makes perfect sense to me through the eyes of economics and math. And this is the only time where math has ever made any sense to me outside of the realms of daily application.
The best way to describe my experience is Jonathan Goldstein’s description of Eve’s experience with her first “nibble” of the Fruit of Wisdom… “It’s like trying on a pair of new glasses for the first time…” An experience that is both dizzying and exonerating.
Sweet. Maybe I will take the next class in macroeconomics!
Safari Still Unbearable
After ditching Firefox for Safari less than 48 hours ago, I am back using Firefox again. Safari’s memory leak was simply unbearable. After doing some surfing on how to boost both Safari and Firefox’s performance as well as reduce potential for memory leaks, I came across this nifty command line to check leaks:
For Safari, in the command prompt, run
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Process 16320: 296847 nodes malloced for 47252 KB
Process 16320: 56 leaks for 6176 total leaked bytes.
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(lines and lines or error codes)For Firefox, run
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Process 16320: 309998 nodes malloced for 47750 KB
Process 16320: 111 leaks for 3440 total leaked bytes.
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(lines and lines of error codes)
When
1 | leaks Safari |
was executed, the error codes ran for pages and pages in the command prompt. It was so long that the command prompt’s buffer ran out of memory (and only after I piped the errors to a text file did I find out that the error code generated a 20MB plain text file!!). And that was after I launched Safari fresh with 10 tabs. In comparison, Firefox’s error code was only a few mouse scrolls away. On top of that, after only having used Safari for less than 12 hours yesterday, I watched it gobbling up almost 200MB of RAM where as in Firefox, I can go on for days with keep the memory occupancy at less than 135MB. Again, this was all with about 10 tabs opened simultanously at all times.
After I decided to quit Safari (again), I closed the windows one by one after transfering all the pages to Firefox. And it gave me this error:
The following world leaks were detected (the check is done when all browser windows are closed):
2 WebView objects, 1 WebFrame object, 1 WebDataSource object, 1 WebFrameView object, 1 WebHTMLRepresentation object, 1 WebBridge object, 2 JavaScript interpreters.
Please write a bug report about this, along with reproducible steps if possible.
Supposedly Finder and almost everything else leaks memory as well… But I am surprised the OS holds up so well after having gone weeks (sometimes months) without a reboot… I wonder how XP and/or other OSes and their Desktops/X hold up against leaks. But I have never heard of Linux having to restart from crashes or bad memory leaks. And OSX has been pretty stable for the past 3.5 years in various versions I have been using. So Windows must just suck more then?
Argh… memory leaks are annoying…
The Best Story on Adam and Eve
I was in my microeconomics class ALL day last Saturday. But during break, I caught an interesting reanimation of Adam and Eve narrated by Jonathan Goldstein at the end of “This American Life“. The Real Audio file can be downloaded here. The segment starts at about 42:30.
This is probably THE Biblical story told over and over again and is probably one of the most recognizable icons of Christianity. But the way Goldstein narrated the tale was so fresh, dark and humorous that I couldn’t help but to track it down and listen to it again. As always, “This American Life” produces one of the most interesting and original radio shows on NPR.
The World of Advertisement
I went to the ATM today to deposit some checks. As soon as I approached the teller machine, I was like, “WTF! What is that huge 7-11 sticker doing on the floor?” It turns out that 7-11 has a marketing deal going with Citibank. Not only is the tiny area in front of the teller plastered with a 7-11 smoothie, the touch screen of the machine is also polluted with 7-11 ads and catch phrase. Just before I thought this experience couldn’t be worse, my printed receipt from the ATM was also littered with stuff from 7-11…
Introducing the ATMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
7-ELEVEN now has Citibank ATMs.
Go to Citibank.com to find the location nearest you.
O~kay… I guess that’s good to know.
Now I can’t even get my own my money in a peace and quiet manner. As if Citibank isn’t doing me enough favor by squeezing every possible dollar out of my bank account, they want to also make money by selling me ads….
It feels like ads are all over the place now. They are between half-time breaks of professional sports games (“This half time break brought to you by Budwiser” ), half-time scores announcements (“This half time score brought to you by “AT&T” ), shopping carts…. everywhere. And now they are even on the ATM machines and printed receipts. What next? Toll booths and gasoline receipts (well, they ARE all over the back of Safeway’s receipts)? Or, ahem, blogs?
This kind of stuff makes me appreciate Apple and Macs even more. Allow me explain why.
When I had to buy a Dell years ago (stupid 3D modeling), I had to sign up an account with them. It’s been almost 5 years, I am STILL getting emails from Dell about their special deals despite of my opting out (can I sign up somewhere to sue them?). When I got the computer, there were endorsed trial services and softwares all over the computer! AOL, Earthlink, this or that financial services, this or that trial software… The computer was literally littered with stuff I didn’t want and didn’t ask for. So the first thing I did was reformat the hard drive and install only stuff I wanted. But when I had to support 10-15 Dell computers, it was a nightmare.
Fast forward to the day I got my PowerBook from Apple. I powered up the computer; I made an account; it asked if I had an ISP, if not, whether I wanted to sign one up with Earthlink. DONE. No more ads, trial software, advertising garbage. Nothing.
It’s been almost four years since I got the PowerBook, I have yet to receive a single piece of junk mail from Apple. I will take a company that does not compromise the integrity of its customers’ information v.s. another that treats it as another dollar sign any day, even if it means I have to pay a slight premium over the former’s products and services (all this is beside the point that Apple simply makes superior products).
Bryan the Imitator
We knew that Bryan knew how to imitate some simple stuff a few weeks ago. But to see him being able to imitate more complicated stuff was just a blast!
Today Bryan was smacking the desk with his palm as usual. So I played a game with him using that: I first gently patted the desk twice and then on the back of his hand, also on the desk with the palm facing down, twice. And then I took his hand to pat the table twice and THEN on MY hand twice. I repeated this cycle two times. Then on the third time, I stopped at taking his hand to pat on mine. But Bryan made the connection of what that pattern was supposed to be and patted the back of my hand twice!
WOW! That’s pretty damn cool!
At first I thought that was a coincidence. So I asked Grace to come by to witness it and showed Bryan what to do again. And he did it again, twice, without me showing him what to do the second time. Grace and I were both ecstatic! Too awesome…
Babies are fun…
Another observation we made of Bryan is that he’s getting pretty damn good at balancing himself in our arms. Just a couple of weeks ago, if we held him in our arms facing us without support on his back, he’d have flapped backwards like a broken bamboo. Today I observed that he’s now fully capable of balancing and counter-balancing to adjust the degree of angle to which I hold him with his head, legs and torso. It’s a very unique opportunity to be able to observe those developments so closely as Bryan grows.
Bryan has also just learned how to turn over… But it’s only a one-way street so far — he can turn from facing up to facing down, but not always the other way around. This can only mean one thing — crawling is not too far behind… Time to childproof the damn apartment…
Switching Back to Safari
I finally have had it with Firefox and its crawling speed on page loads, long page scrolls and other user interface issues. So I made the switch back to Safari again. Having used a crowded UI like Firefox’s, using Safari again is like taking a vacation from all the “interface noise”. Safari’s interface is clean and snappy. I do miss a couple of Firefox’s features though, namely “search as you type” and “AdBlocker”. Safari has a very cruel “search as you type” feature (even that, I think was from a plugin I installed).
Speaking of Safari, Carl sent me a site that compares Camino to Firefox and their differences. It’s an interesting read. Maybe I will give Camino a shot again when I am tired of Safari in a few months… But what I am really looking forward to is Apple’s next new OS and all the possibilities it holds (Safari 3.0, Mail 3.0 and other cool stuff).
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Chee-hoi and I were emailing back and forth on how he thinks Apple/Mac OSX are just pieces of crap. I was surprised that at this day and age, there are still people out to trash talk Apple even when the most critical of Apple/Mac geeks are making the switch to Mac OSX. Sure, us Mac users do seem a bit cocky at times, but it’s just so hard to grasp how some people can be so stubborn about trying new things when Windows is just so behind on almost every feature it has to offer! Worst yet, most people who trash talk Apple/Mac OSX haven’t even used a Mac for any meaningful period of time!
I think I am qualified to trash talk Windows and non-Apple hardware in general because I had been a hardcore user of “the other side” for so long (I have owned PCs before! Shame on me). I was even a systems administrator for them for years (to a point where I knew more than Dell’s tech support… well, not that they know anything anyway)!
But I took the flame bait myself. I only have myself to blame…
Impeach Bush and Cheney Now
At least Nixon had some integrity when he was caught with the Water Gate incident. Now that Bush and Cheney are caught with their pants down, what will they do (again)?
US President George W Bush authorised the leak of secret intelligence to a newspaper to help defend the Iraq war, a former White House aide has said.
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… in the past the president has said he does not approve of such leaks and would sack anyone involved.
How many lies does an administration have to tell for its members to be impeached?