B166ER - Made in Cyberspace

HTC S630 Cavalier with WCDMA Disabled

Shohat — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:06:42 +0000

A few weeks ago I have received a brand new smartphone - the HTC S630 Cavalier. Despite actually having very little use for its Internet and 3G capabilities, I figured that this kind of hardware will have top-class camera, battery and speaker. The fact that it comes with WiFi and PC syncing capabitlities also meant that it will be handy on the road, especially with the 2 Gigabyte MicroSD storage card.

To make long story short: the Speaker is next to useless. The JOGGR touch interface is absolutely horrible - I had to disable it after a week, because it makes the phone nearly unusable. There is not a person in the world that would actually use the JOGGR scrolling bar on the right side of the S630.

But the device had two even bigger downsides : Reception and Battery life. The HTC S630’s battery hits 10%-30% after barely 18 hours, while barely being used. A good friend told me that switching from WCDMA to GSM would prolong battery life and improve reception. Of course then I would have to give up on all the features I don’t use anyway, so I gladly agreed.
And it worked. By disabling WCDMA, I got exactly what I needed - a great SMS machine with a good camera and a lot storage, decent battery life and great reception.

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Putting My Time and Money Where My Mouth Is

Shohat — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 17:55:11 +0000

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of arguing with a young and gifted individual with a self-inflicted CEO position, a title that was claimed upon the launch of his small Web2.0 company. Being a low tech industry person with decent experience in operating commercial projects online, I stated that the Internet’s only real economy are merchants(sometimes of digital content) and services providers, and everything else is nothing but an advertising platform for these sites. So technically, no matter what kind of online company or project you lead, its complexity simply cannot compare to the challenges of managing the design and production of real product, even as simple as lets say, bottles.
I certainly went too far with that statement, but it was made in the heat of the argument and to emphasize a certain point. Surely enough, the response I got was “Why don’t you do it?“.

None of my acquaintances or even friends are aware of the full scale of my online projects, due to the simple reason that I never use my real name or claim any credit for running the communities, blogs, video services, directories, and ClickBank projects I own and operate on a daily basis. Anonymity has great advantages online, especially when you are in it for the money and the challenge, and not just ePenis. But running a full-scale company requires networking, and a certain amount of exposure in order to fit into your own industry, and in the Web2.0 “industry” exposure sure means a lot.

So, in order to prove a certain point, here “I am, doing it“.
You can visit Ixeest to see the company’s logo and the supported services. We are actually in early closed beta at this point, and when Ixeest enters any sort of open or invitation based beta stage, both Ixeest’s website and this Blog will be updated.

In the mean time, feel free to contact me via (shohat AT ixeest.com), and find more about me via my LinkedIn Profile.

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Starcraft 2

Shohat — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:49:19 +0000

I’ve been following Blizzard from the very beginning, and now it’s time to contribute something of my own to the community. I am helping with the TerranoZergus Project, and you can see the first parts of it here, right on the Starcraft 2 Blog. The Starcraft 2 forums are to be launched soon also, with a few more related sites.

Good luck to everyone in the TerranoZergus Project.

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Nobody Cares About Software Engineering On a PC

Shohat — Thu, 17 May 2007 08:29:31 +0000

I have recently purchased an amazing piece of hardware: Logitech’s MX1000 Laser mouse. Quite frankly, it’s the best mouse I’ve ever owned - for plenty reasons; it’s somewhat heavy and comfortable, is rechargeable, has perfectly engineered sliding pads, and most notably - it measures its own movement using a laser. I happen to program real-time thermal and chemical controllers for a living, and I can really appreciate this fine piece of hardware . It’s controller chip program was probably very well written , hundreds of engineering hours put into it’s hardware and software design, and it was optimized for minimum power consumption by some of the brightest electrical engineers in the field. These are merely my assumptions, based on the mouse’s performance, but who knows, maybe there is a team of 100,000,000 monkeys that just happened to put it all together.

Just like the one that wrote the drivers for this amazing piece of hardware. It really seems that nobody takes time to optimize software these days, everything is built upon some API of API of a wrapper of some Library of an API . This is the only explanation I can find for having a 10 Megabyte resident mouse driver.
Now maybe it looks normal for kids that never saw software that had to FIT INTO A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF MEMORY or not be able to run at all. And regarding hard-disk space requirements…. Great games like Transport Tycoon fit into 11 Megabytes. If any so-called software engineer would re-write this game nowadays, it would take 550MB on the CD and 250MB memory for the world to run in .
I am not writing now about the “Good ol’ days” when men were engineers and women were secretaries. I am talking about less than 10 years ago, when software had to be efficient and compact , or at least avoid being overbloated beyond any proportion. Ten Megabytes for a mouse driver is ridiculous. If hardware engineers would be given the same treatment and level of compromise for their hardware design, my mouse would probably come with a 10 kilogram battery, a massive heatsink and would work on only surfaces within a certain reflective range.Oh, And would probably blind me permanently in case I’d flip it over to see the Laser thingy.

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A finger to the MPAA.

Shohat — Tue, 01 May 2007 21:01:43 +0000

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

MPAA is trying to get this number “censored” and sending takedown notices to anyone hosting it, ranging from simple Blogs to Digg news items. Here’s a hint- numbers can’t be censored, or trademarked - this is actually one of the reasons the Pentium trademark was born(instead of a 586), because numbers are hard to “defend” as intelletctual property of any kind, and certainly as an encryption key, which is a natural use for a number - a mathematical operation.

Quoting an awesome Slashdot comment …

”

This is merely a very famous (from now on, hint, hint) number theory curiosity:

09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0

is the hexadecimal representation (with leading zero to round off to 32 hex digits) of

13256278887989457651018865901401704640 decimal

which amazingly enough, is equal to the huge prime number

13256278887989457651018865901401704613 + 3^3 (i.e. + 27)

Astonishingly, the next prime after that is only 31 away, so our famous number can also be represented as

13256278887989457651018865901401704671 - 31

It is also very interesting because it is also equal to the product of the following prime numbers:

2^6 * 5 * 19 * 12043 * 216493 * 836256503069278983442067

Truthfully, when was the last time you saw any remotely similar number? Never, right? We better record this for mathematical posterity!!!

“

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Gmail Account Suspension Ended

Shohat — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:15:30 +0000

Gmail account appears fully operational now, and the suspension appeared to be active for only around 20 hours. During account suspension time I wasn’t able to download attachements, but was able to read email and view attachment previews.

The reason for the suspension appears to be a massive burst of emails with attachements from other gmail users - Even though I cannot confirm that this is the only true reason, it is the only anomality I’ve noticed when I was notified of the “Lockdown in Sector 6″.

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Gmail Account Suspended

Shohat — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 21:25:16 +0000

After getting a nice barrage of funny emails from a friend of mine, I was notified by almighty Google that my Gmail account is suspended, for up to 24 hours.

To Google’s defense I must say that I was sent around 50MB in random movie and PPS files, with very little content or description, except the Fwd: Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd: Ha-Haaaa and Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fannay titles.
This is the exact text of the notification:

Lockdown in sector 6!
Lockdown in sector 6!

Our system indicates unusual usage of your account. In order to protect Gmail users from potentially harmful use of Gmail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.

This is likely due to the use of a third party software tool with Gmail. If you are using any third party software that interacts with your Gmail account, please disable it or adjust it so that its use complies with the Gmail Terms of Use. If you feel that you have been using your Gmail account according to the Terms of Use or otherwise normally, please contact us.

————————————————————————————————

Click Here for the Banned from Gmail Screenshot.
I was able to get back to reading my emails, but no longer able to download any attachments, at least not immediately after the notification of account suspension. Hopefully the account will be get back to normal withing 24 hours as described .

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