Category: Random Thoughts

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First Upgrade For My Computer After Nearly 4 Years

After nearly 4 years since I bought my desktop computer and after complaining about constant thrashing I finally decided it’s time to give it a little upgrade. It now sports 8GB of memory instead of just 2, and the improvement is noticeable.

The big culprits for the thrashing turned out to be Eclipse and Unity. We have pretty large projects by now, and having the main ones open together requires no less than 2GB of virtual memory and nearly 1GB of actual memory. That’s a lot, and it doesn’t include at least one running Android emulator! Unity added quite a bit to that (I don’t remember the number) but switching to Gnome helped.

I’m still happy with this Core Duo, now very old, computer. It does its job well and I expect it to last a year or two more.

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Google+ Following Violates Privacy (In Its Current State)

I’ve been using Google+ for a couple of days and have been very happy with it. It’s really a great social network, but I’ll refrain from rehashing the same things everyone has been saying. You can Google it yourself.

One of the things Google+ has been slated to be is a Twitter replacement, in which you can follow others without them following you by adding them to a circle.

However, if you previously shared something with all your circles (or intend to do so in the future) now the people you’re following can see these things too, something you may have not intended to happen. After all, they’re not your friends. Not even acquaintances.

For me this is a flaw in the current circles implementation. At the least I would like to be able to share things with all my circles except for some of them (e.g. “my circles minus the Follow circle”.) However, this does not fix things for historical posts, which I already shared with all my circles as you can’t change the sharing settings of a post after it’s been posted. With the current implementation I’m left with the only option of specifying each and every circle I intend to share with for every post, and if in the future I’ll have new circles – they won’t be able to see these posts.

Another way to fix this is to allow defining “following circles”, so that stuff you share with your circles (or even your extended circles), still won’t be shared with them.

Maybe I’m wrong. Let me know if I jumped the gun here.

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Trying Google’s Voice Search

Here’s what I got trying to say “Amit Schreiber” into Google’s Voice Search using my netbook and Google Chrome:

  1. sperm tribe
  2. sure I burn
  3. ami schreiber what the f***
  4. chile
  5. I’m yours driver
  6. tommy shaw rugs
  7. how many shriver
  8. short
  9. send me to a boot
  10. striper

Oh, well… I guess it goes through a relevance engine and I’m just not that famous enough. Yet! :)

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Forgotten Experiences

Yesterday I called a friend of mine who is visiting from the US and is staying at her parents’ place. My mind struggled for 2 seconds before I remembered how to say “may I speak with…” It’s been years since I’ve uttered this request.

And today my father called to tell me about an interesting article he saw and thought I would like to read. I immediately said “email me the link” and he replied “I’m reading it on the hard copy.” Again… took me a few seconds to realize what he was referring to.

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Goodbye Unity, Welcome Back Gnome (Classic)

I gave Unity a good chance, but it was simply torture. Maybe it’s the over 3 years old hardware I’m running Ubuntu on, or maybe it’s the servers I’m running on my machine for the project I’m working on, but the hard drive kept thrashing to a point where it was unbearable. Sometimes just clicking a top menu or switching to a different window would take over a minute while the hard drive was grinding as if it was being benchmarked.

So I decided to go back to Gnome classic. The computer is way more responsive now and works considerably faster. My guess is that either Unity’s memory requirements are so high that I ran out (of 2 GB) and the memory had to be constantly swapped or it’s my relatively old 3D accelerated nVidia video card or Unity is doing too much disk access. Whatever it is, Unity does not work well on my machine.

I’m not so happy about reverting back to Gnome because I don’t like to be the kind of person who doesn’t accept change. But for the sake of productivity – I have to forget about Unity for now.

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Ubuntu 11.04 Launcher Doesn’t Auto Hide

If you installed Ubuntu 11.04 and after a while the launcher stops auto hiding as it should, it may be because you did some dragging and dropping in an application. For example, if you use Konsole (like I do) and you drag one of Konsole’s tabs to reorganize their order, the launcher will suddenly pop up and will not hide itself automatically.

The easiest workaround I found is: right click the tab in Konsole and choose “Detach tab”, then drag the tab in the newly detached window back to where you intended to put the tab in the original window. When you’re done – the launcher will hide itself.

Excluding (some really annoying) bugs, is anyone else having difficulties with the new Unity interface? Or am I just too old for these kind of conceptual changes?

EDIT: This is a known and confirmed bug in Unity. I dutifully added my two cents.

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When Text-To-Speech-To-Text Is Perfected

What’s going to happen when text-to-speech-to-text is perfected? Phones can already read text messages well enough and soon you’ll be able to input text messages to your phone just by talking to it.

Then, instead of texting, you’ll be:

  1. Talking to your phone (entering a message.)
  2. Waiting for a reply, entered by your friend by talking to his/her phone.
  3. Having the reply read to you by a text-to-speech engine.

Essentially, you’ll be having a push-to-talk (PTT) conversation with the robotic voice of your phone. All to avoid a simple call.

Just a thought.