splutterance

My First Smartphone: The Nexus One

2010-01-09T18:08:00.000+01:00

I bought a Nexus One, my first smartphone, and I'm quite happy with it so far. The key selling points for me were:

Independent from carrier yet works with all prepaid sim cards that I already have
Low price compared to other smartphones ($529 and no tax)
Free overnight shipping (very important since I was supposed to fly back to the NL two days after ordering it: 1 day to buy, 1 to receive, and 1 to fly)
Usable in the US and elsewhere (multiple GSM and 3G/UMTS bands)
Decent reviews

What follows are some random comments about my preferences and experience so far.

The real reason I bought it is to be a mobile computer. I haven't used my phone to do much calling in a long time. My voice calls primarily involve some sort of VoIP. I use the stupidphone that I bought in 2008 as a clock and occasional SMS device, though I prefer Google Voice or VoipBuster for the latter.

Looking at the design of the Nexus One, it's clear that it's primary purpose is a computer, specifically one for browsing the web or using web applications. Four buttons—"back," "context menu," "home," and "search"—make this evident. And the scroll wheel works surprisingly well as a cursor for editing text fields (something that is rather difficult to do with thick fingers).

I love the bundled apps. After playing with Dad's iPhone, I'm enthralled with the Android Gmail and Calendar apps that work much more like the web-based versions. I can easily access all my labels and calendars and perform various other actions that are Gmail- or Google Calender-specific. Since these apps already serve a significant part of my online life, it's important to me that I can use other versions in the same ways.

I like Google Voice and would prefer to use it for my calls and texting. Even though it's not available outside the US, I can still use it for texting with a data connection.

I am happier with the view of Google than with Apple towards applications and what I can do with my phone. This has been a major reason for not getting an iPhone.

I look forward to seeing what I can do with this mobile computer. I don't think I will get service with voice minutes, but I might get one with an unlimited data connection. Even if I don't get 3G, I can still use my Nexus One wherever there is wireless, which includes many places I go on a daily basis. I also still need to figure out what apps are available and what I want.

What do I want to do?

2009-11-10T22:05:00.000+01:00

This post is meant to be a (hopefully) living article with statements about things I want to do. That is, I expect to add to this as I think of things. I also might check off items that I do.

Something that I want to do can be anything, but in order to make it onto this page, it will probably be somewhat significant. It could be an aspiration or goal, though I won't limit myself to that. In general, this post should help me remember things and also let me see how my desires change over time.

Postdoc. I would like to continue working in academia, but I want to get experience with research in a related but different area. I want to work with different people. Basically, I want more and broader experience. [2009-11-10]
Live in another country. I'm currently fulfilling one of my dreams: living in a place outside the US for at least a year. I would still like to experience life in yet another country for at least a year. At some point, I may decide I want to live somewhere permanently, but I'm not quite there. [2009-11-10]
Get married. Yes, it's basic, but why not list it? In case I forget... [2009-11-10]
Have kids. Probably two, but I will see how it goes. [2009-11-10]
Teach. I would like to plan and organize my own courses. I would like to have students doing research with me. [2009-11-10]
Travel to Russia. I learned the language for so long: wouldn't it be nice to see the place where they speak it? [2009-11-10]
Travel to India. Such a crazy place with crazy people so different from other crazy places and other crazy people. I'd like to see different parts—north, south, east, west—not just one area. [2009-11-10]
Visit friends in South America. Go see Juan in Colombia, Americo in Bolivia, and Marcos in Uruguay. [2009-11-10]

The NRC needs a new editor

2009-09-18T17:54:00.001+02:00

Carefully read the first sentence of this article summary:

The Dutch government is going to store the fingerprints citizens as of next week are required to submit when applying for a new passport in a single database.

The NRC International says it needs a new editor. Yes, they most certainly do!

Madiba's Chicken Curry

2009-08-04T22:21:00.003+02:00

This is a dish I made today. It came from a cookbook that Darshana gave me last year. The authors of the cookbook are the South African Jeremy Mansfield, radio host and TV presenter, and his wife Jacqui. He fixed this dish for Nelson Mandela (whose nickname is Madiba). It was the first time I'd made anything like it. (Lately, I've taken to doing stir fries because they're so easy.) This was not difficult, but it did take a while: 45 minutes to stew the chicken. In the end, it turned out quite well.

Picture Pages

2009-05-05T23:03:00.000+02:00

Does anybody else remember Picture Pages? Am I one of the few who has fond memories of the song, the musical marker, and Bill Cosby?

Picture Pages, Picture Pages
Time to get your Picture Pages
Time to get your crayons and your pencils

Picture Pages, Picture Pages
Open up your Picture Pages
Time to watch Bill Cosby do a Picture Page with you

Picture Pages, Picture Pages
Lots of fun with Picture Pages
Lots of fun with crayons and with pencils

You can play with Picture Pages
Fill your day with Picture Pages
'Till Bill Cosby does another Picture Page with you

Feel free to sing along. It's a catchy tune.

Slumdog Millionaire is a rich film and worthy of Oscar

2009-02-24T00:49:00.001+01:00

I'm glad to see that Slumdog Millionaire won so many Academy Awards last night. It was an awesome film.

From direction to story to editing to music, this was most definitely not Bollywood fare. British director Danny Boyle told the Times of India:

I’m truly happy that every Indian I meet is beaming, and it is the ultimate compliment for me that people in India see Slumdog Millionaire as an Indian film. However, in reality it is a British film. It is a very gritty in the beginning and very realistic because our film culture is based on that kind of realism which in Hollywood and Bollywood isn’t quite there.

From my (notably limited) experience with Indian films, I can't help but agree that Slumdog lacks the songs, dancing, and melodrama typical of Bollywood. But it's good to see that Indians are excited about the success of this film, because it is still an amazing portrayal of an amazing country. It's completely filmed in India (Agra and Mumbai) and filled with significant amounts of subtitled Hindi. (Side note: I loved the styling of the English subtitles.) Slumdog also has an almost entirely Indian cast. The lead actor, Dev Patel, is a British Indian. And the score comes from the extremely popular composer A. R. Rahman.

Speaking of music, I thought this was some of Rahman's best work. Unlike his usual repertoire, we are treated to more Western-style songs: there are a lot of hip hop beats and English (rather than Hindi, Tamil, or mixed) lyrics. But I thoroughly enjoyed the tunes whenever they came to the forefront.

The story was at times dramatic and coincidental, but present and past were interleaved well to provide full character development and a climactic build-up. I was wrapped inside the story of Jamal Malik, a child of the slums who grew into a young man with definitive character and persistence despite all the horrible things he saw and survived.

If you haven't gotten the point yet, you should see Slumdog Millionaire. And congratulations to all those involved who won awards!

In other news, I want to see Smile Pinki, winner of the best documentary short. It's another film about Indians, particularly about a girl born with a cleft lip who gets it fixed up.

Last but not least: Happy Shivratri!

Pasteboard commands for the Mac

2009-02-16T11:45:00.000+01:00

Perhaps I'm a little behind on this, but I just discovered two useful command-line applications for the Mac:

The summary is that these allow you to send standard input to the "pasteboard" (a.k.a. the clipboard where copies using Cmd-C are stored) and received text from the pasteboard. For example, you can copy the text of a file to the pasteboard and paste it (Cmd-V) into a graphical editor.

$ cat file.txt | pbcopy

In my opinion, anything that makes it easier to transfer information between command-line programs and GUI programs can only be a good thing.

PGP in Gmail?

2009-02-13T00:43:00.028+01:00

Note: See the update below!

Do you have any idea what to make out of this? No, they're not fake.

And after clicking...

I only saw this in one conversation that I had open in a "New Window" (actually a tab). Every message had it at the bottom. I tried to reproduce it with other conversations, both new window and not. I even looked at messages that have a PGP signature and tried to see if it mattered whether a person was in my contacts or not. Alas, it was all to no avail.

Update 1: A few hours later and a lot more investigation have resulted in the discovery that Google is testing PGP verification in Gmail.

Here's what one finds when one greps the source (... Luke):

$ grep -i PGP a.html function zOb(a){var b=a[dd](/(-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----(.|\r?\n)*?-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----)/);return b?b[0]:null}function AOb(a,b,c){if(!a.ff())return 1;var e=zOb(a.Ug());if(e==null)return 2;try{if(c==null||!c.Fp())return 4;var f=b();if(!f)return 3;return c.Omd(e,f)?5:6}catch(g){return 1}}function BOb(a,b){sp[j](this,a);this.XN=b}function COb(a){pZ[j](this,a)}var XNb='<applet code="',YNb='" width="0" height="0"><param name="archive" value="',ZNb='"/></applet>';OZ[k].Omd=function $8Qa(a,b){return this.YBa.verifySignature(a,b)};OZ[k].Fp=function $9Qa(){return this.YBa!=null&&this.YBa.verifySignature!=null};OZ[k].Lgc=function $$Qa(){var a=this.wbc();document[ye][H](a);return a[Fe]};var DOb="PGPApplet",EOb="exp/799/pgpapplet_0.jar";OZ[k].wbc=function $aRa(){var a=document[Qi](M);d(a,WNb({code:"com/google/caribou/pgp/PGPApplet.class",name:DOb,archive:EOb}));return a};Dq[k].sua=null;var FOb="pgpEngine";Dq[k].JBc=function $bRa(){if(this.sua==null)this.D.sua=new OZ;Sn(FOb,this.sua)};Dq[k].orc=function $cRa(){this.JBc();return this.D.sua};var bOb="snHRaf",jOb="kCeyR",kOb="Click to verify PGP signature in this message.",lOb="Verify signature",RZ="vPzQab",mOb="Info",nOb="No valid PGP signature found.",oOb="Warning!",pOb="Invalid key entered.",qOb="Applet not loaded. Is Java enabled?",rOb="wrClmc",sOb="Success!",tOb="Your message was verified successfully!",uOb="Verify again",vOb="The signature was incorrect! This message may not be authentic!",wOb="Internal error occurred.",xOb="nKAWHb",yOb="dlMhw";o(BOb,sp);var GOb={C1b:tqa};P=BOb[k];P.ub=function $dRa(){this.IOb(0)};P.Lx=function $eRa(a,b){if(!ee(b,xOb))return false;var c=this.ycc(),e=this;fca(c[w](),function(){e.rTc(this)});return true};P.ycc=function $fRa(){var a=new ed(Xj);a.V(fj,uU);a.V(JG,this.XN.Hc().Yc);return a};P.IOb=function $gRa(a){d(this.b(),aOb({id:this.Jj(GOb),w1:a}))};var HOb="Enter sender's PGP public key:";P.rTc=function $hRa(a){function b(){return hT(HOb)}var c=this.XN.w().orc();this.IOb(AOb(a,b,c))};_B_prog(97)}catch(e){_B_err(e)} <form method="get" action="?tf=1&ui=2&ik=20658725fc&view=cv&th=11f6233736b8d787&msgs=11f622c66e59b189&rt=h&search=sent" style="overflow: hidden; position: absolute; visibility: hidden; left: -10px; top: -10px; height: 10px; width: 10px;" accept-charset="utf-8"></form><div><applet code="a_data/PGPApplet.html" name="PGPApplet" height="0" width="0"><param name="archive" value="exp/799/pgpapplet_0.jar"></applet></div>

Unfortunately, a_data/PGPApplet.html doesn't give much information. It's appears pretty much the same as the loading page.

Update 2: I'm grateful to Ionut Alex Chitu for the discussion about this. He has posted an article about Gmail's PGP testing on his blog.

The New Me: Personality according to Jung and Enneagram

2008-11-09T20:00:00.003+01:00

To inaugurate a new blog, I am declaring a new personality. Thanks to Seth, I have taken a personality test that gives Jung results (somehow similar to the Myers-Briggs type indicator) and Enneagram results.

First, the Jung results:

Introverted (I) 57.14% Extroverted (E) 42.86%

Sensing (S) 58.33% Intuitive (N) 41.67%

Thinking (T) 62.07% Feeling (F) 37.93%

Perceiving (P) 55.56% Judging (J) 44.44%

ISTP - "Engineer." Values freedom of action and following interests and impulses. Independent, concise in speech, master of tools. 5.4% of total population.

Here is more information from the ISTP article on Wikipedia:

ISTPs excel at analyzing situations to reach the heart of a problem so that they can swiftly implement a functional repair, making them ideally suited to the field of engineering. Naturally quiet people, they are interested in understanding how systems operate, focusing on efficient operation and structure. They are open to new information and approaches. But contrary to their seemingly detached natures, ISTPs are often capable of humorously insightful observations about the world around them, and can be closet daredevils who gravitate toward fast-moving or risky hobbies (such as bungee jumping, hang gliding, racing, motorcycling, and parachuting), recreational sports (such as downhill skiing, paintball, ice hockey, and scuba diving), and careers (such as aviation and firefighting).

The text is pretty accurate, I'd say. I think when I took the Myers-Briggs test back in high school, my Thinking and Feeling were much closer. I suppose continuous exposure to school and engineering work has turned me into a emotionless, thinking machine.

Next, the Enneagram results:

Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||||| 46%

Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||| 46%

Type 3 Image Awareness |||||||||| 40%

Type 4 Sensitivity |||||||||| 36%

Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||||| 56%

Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||||||| 60%

Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||||| 50%

Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||| 30%

Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||||||| 66%

Type Score Type behavior motivation

9 20 I must be peaceful and easy to get along with to be happy.

6 18 I must be secure and safe to be happy.

5 17 I must be knowledgable and independent to be happy.

7 15 I must be high and entertained to be happy.

The summary of the types follows:

Type One is principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic.
Type Two is demonstrative, generous, people-pleasing, and possessive.
Type Three is adaptive, excelling, driven, and image-conscious.
Type Four is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.
Type Five is perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated.
Type Six is engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.
Type Seven is spontaneous, versatile, distractible, and scattered.
Type Eight is self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational.
Type Nine is receptive, reassuring, agreeable, and complacent.

Another way to name the basic personality types is the Riso-Hudson method:

For more on the meaning of the diagram, read how the Enneagram system works.

Here's more detail on Nines from the Enneagram of Personality article on Wikipedia:

The Nine's attention goes to connecting with others, maintaining harmony, peace, and comfort, and avoiding conflict. They typically enjoy a feeling of ease, harmony, and peace.

Coping strategy: Some Nines describe their childhood as one in which they felt overlooked or ignored and felt they had to go along with the wishes of others. Other Nines describe having had a pleasant childhood with almost no family conflict. In response to these environments, they learned to identify with others' positions, forget their own point of view, and go along to get along. As a result, while Nines can see many different points of view, they can have a hard time locating their own opinions, desires, or agendas.

Major traits: Nines merge with others energetically, taking on the feel and positions of others, thus losing touch with their own internal experience and priorities. As one of the three anger types, Nines can be very out of contact with their own anger, which can leak out in the form of passive-aggression, stubbornness, and passive resistance. Typically they are more focused on others than on themselves.

Strengths: Nines can be skilled mediators and loyal, steadfast partners and friends. They can also be warm, understanding and caring.

Challenges: Nines can have difficulty feeling and expressing anger, dealing with conflict, knowing what they want, and differentiating their experience from others in their lives.

Ego fixation: indolence

Holy idea: love

Passion/Vice: laziness (sloth)

Virtue: patience

Interestingly enough, there is a lot of truth in describing me as a Nine.

Unlike many of the silly personality tests out there (e.g. Which breed of dog would you be?), I think this one is potentially useful. What are your results on this test?

Introverted (I) 57.14%	Extroverted (E) 42.86%
Sensing (S) 58.33%	Intuitive (N) 41.67%
Thinking (T) 62.07%	Feeling (F) 37.93%
Perceiving (P) 55.56%	Judging (J) 44.44%

Type 1	Perfectionism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	46%
Type 2	Helpfulness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	46%
Type 3	Image Awareness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	40%
Type 4	Sensitivity	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	36%
Type 5	Detachment	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	56%
Type 6	Anxiety	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	60%
Type 7	Adventurousness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	50%
Type 8	Aggressiveness	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Type 9	Calmness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	66%

Type	Score	Type behavior motivation
9	20	I must be peaceful and easy to get along with to be happy.
6	18	I must be secure and safe to be happy.
5	17	I must be knowledgable and independent to be happy.
7	15	I must be high and entertained to be happy.