Rest in peace grandfather.
David Russell Sr., Parker Hill, Springfield, Vermont, April, 1913 – December, 2011
Rest in peace grandfather
David Russell Sr., Parker Hill, Springfield, Vermont, April, 1913 – December, 2011
David Russell Sr., Parker Hill, Springfield, Vermont, April, 1913 – December, 2011
GPS Dog Tracking System
Cool product. Particularly for Siberian Husky and Malamute owners 
Product requires:
- $8/month subscription
- $100 hardware investment
- Verizon wireless coverage
- Clear view of the sky for GPS tracking
- Smartphone or portable computer
Lightning
Merriam-Webster Top-10 Favorite Word Quotations
#4: Wit
“Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
– Dorothy Parker, interview in Paris Review, 1956
#5: The Smallest Ideas
“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.”
– Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Frederick Trevor Hill’s Lincoln the Lawyer, 1906
#7: Clear Language
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
– George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946
#10: Lightning
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
– Mark Twain, 1888
DevHawk Blog on WinRT
Interesting article and great links from Harry Pierson’s blog: The Windows Runtime
For Sale by Owner: 2008 Mazdaspeed3 GT Trim Hatchback w/Upgrades
3GS denied iOS 5 upgrade drains battery in envy?
There’s buzz about iPhone 4GS/iOS 5 battery life issues and talk about iOS 5 performance on older 3GS device hardware that has some 3GS owners like me holding off on the OS upgrade. iTunes offers me the upgrade but I’ve so far declined to apply the patch.
What’s puzzling me is that right around the time iOS 5 became available my 3GS started to experience major battery life issues. But I have not applied the iOS 5 upgrade patch. Is this just happenstance that I observe a sudden change in batter consumption shortly after declining to upgrade my 3GS to iOS 5?
The coincidence makes me wonder if other 3GS owners who have not upgraded to iOS 5 but who have recently backed up and synchronized their device with iTunes are now suddenly having battery life issues?
Should iPhone 3GS owners upgrade to iOS 5?
Update: After digging around on the Apple support site my theory is that an iOS background task is spinning on the phone consuming the battery. To test this theory I’ve killed all background applications on the phone and disabled core iOS location and network sync of e-mail, calendars and contacts. The hypothesis is that battery life should now return to normal. If true, then I’ll start re-enabling features to try to narrow it down. If false, then a $20 3GS replacement battery kit will be the next experiment.
Remembering SoundMAX MIDI on NT 4.0 :)
Here’s a link to a YouTube video containing a 30-minute audio recording of Analog Devices, Inc. SoundMAX MIDI software synthesizer running on Windows NT 4.0. I think this is really cool because I wrote this synthesizer for Analog Devices, Inc. while consulting for them in the late 1990′s.
[MIDI Comparison Project] SoundMAX ADI Integrated Audio (make sure to listen to the 480p stream).
The Musical Instrument Data Interface (MIDI) spec is used a standard protocol used to interface electronic musical instruments for the purposes of live performance and recording. In the early 1990′s MIDI was hugely popular among game authors who leveraged the massive compression afforded by MIDI-encoded scores to provide background soundtracks (games were still being distributed on floppy disks at that time).
By the late 1990′s there were still many application titles that leveraged MIDI synthesis to provide background music in educational titles and games primarily. MIDI synthesis hardware was expensive however and host CPU’s were increasingly capable of taking on the relatively compute-intensive task of MIDI rendering.
Intel’s AC’97 PC motherboard audio spec omitted hardware accelerated MIDI synthesis for cost reasons. Analog Devices wishing to differentiate their SoundMAX product contracted me to provide a host-CPU synthesis solution for Win98 and NT 4.0.
The synthesizer code leveraged the SoundCanvas sample set licensed from Roland, Corp. and featured active host-CPU load monitoring and dynamic render fidelity adjustment to minimize impact on foreground application performance and ensure smooth and unbroken playback even during periods of peak CPU utilization.
Such a fun project
The inside story of how Microsoft killed its Courier tablet
Really interesting article on CNET today:
Jobs and Gates
I found the off-record comments from Jobs and Gates amusing:
TechCrunch: Steve Jobs: “I Admire Mark Zuckerberg For Not Selling Out”
Jobs’ relationship with Bill Gates goes back the furthest and is the most complicated. But the two pioneers of the PC era met one last time near the end of Jobs’ life and talked for several hours. Gates told Jobs that he proved his model—of controlling computer products from end to end—works. And Jobs said that Microsoft’s model of licensing out the OS to other manufacturers worked as well.
Only later did Gates relate to Isaacson: “What I didn’t tell Steve is that it only works when you have a Steve Jobs.” When Isaacson asked Jobs if he really thought the Microsoft model works, Jobs replied: “Yeah, it works, but only if you don’t mind making crappy products.”
Drive Photos
^– Dave’s RX8 and my Evo X at Randal, WA pit stop before launching into the Mt. St. Helen’s Volcanic Monument.
^– Heading East on WA 14 towards White Salmon on the banks of the Hood River.
^– Jake found an amazing campground on a bluff overlooking the Hood River (Mt. Hood to the South).
^– Early Sunday AM in camp. I woke up early and took a walk around.
^– Andy’s Honday S2000 and Jake’s Nissan 350Z Nismo (amazing car and quite an even match for a stock Evo in the twisties).
^– Hood River and Mt. Hood as viewed from camp. Amazing.
^– Another view from camp on Sunday morning.
^– The ‘camp master’ is a ‘character’. Don’t think he gets very many people to talk to
^– $20 campsite. Definitely going back here.
^– The land around the camp reminded us all of the hills around Palo Alto. Only better because it doesn’t cost $50K/square inch.
