Lueders Haus Blog

Graphing calculators were required at my high school for many of the advanced math classes. My HP-48 calculator one of the first devices I learned to write programs for. Most kids in my school had one of the TI-80s but a few of the nerds shelled out for the HP. Those with access to a BBS or the Internet would spread the games to their fellow classmates. I would say most good computer programmers have spent sometime plugging programs into their calculators. It is too bad TI is going after these kids. These kids are their biggest fans.

Interesting piece in today’s business section on Japan’s inward cellphone industry. The Japanese have some of the most advanced cellphones but rarely make it overseas.

Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins

Last week I switched to reading both the New York Times and the New Yorker on the Kindle. Reading on the Kindle is pretty enjoyable. The screen does a great job with text and a decent job with photos. Browsing articles is a little slow but the interface is pretty easy to navigate. Wireless delivery is what really makes this device successful. I can shop for any book on either my Kindle or my web browser and it will automatically appear on my Kindle. No need to hook the Kindle up to your PC or logon to a WiFi hotspot.

There is one downside, it is pretty hard to share a Kindle. Sherry and I can no longer fight share the paper in the morning. Of course this is an upside as well, since Sherry pretty much destroys any periodical she is reading.

Last week we welcomed a new member into our family, a TiVo. It has been recording our favorite shows ever since. Now I can watch “The Daily Show” after I get home from work instead of staying up late. (Yes, now that I’m a few weeks away from the big 3-oh, eleven is too late.) Tonight it is going to record “The Biggest Loser” while we might watch last night’s “No Reservations”. It found the “Charlie Rose” show for me since I can never remember when it is on. The “TiVo suggests” feature is a bit weird, it has decided to record more “South Park” and “Scrubs” then I will ever watch.

After our great experience with Skype back a few months ago to call hotels in Spain, we tried to login again to make some cheap calls to Canada. Just our luck, all of Skype was down! Its back up now but who is to blame?

The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

This is generally what software developers do when faced with bugs in their own code. Point the finger at someone else.

The reviews of the iPhone have been pretty positive so far (until they mention AT&T or the price). But the Times business columnist Joe Nocera can’t believe it that, like the iPod, you can not replace the battery. Assured obsolescence its called.

BusinessWeek published an article with the provocative title of: “The Myth of High-Tech Outsourcing“.

Unemployment for engineers, computer programmers, software developers, and other IT professionals is at the lowest rate in years. Less than 3% of computer systems designers are out of work and less than 2% of engineers are sitting at home searching the classifieds, according to the AeA study. U.S. unemployment across the board is about 5.1%.

The Sunday Business section has a great piece on H-1B visas. Most of the requests this year for those visas has come from technology outsourcing companies like Infosys and Wipro rather then Microsoft.

“Microsoft may well be using the program to bring in the best and the brightest,” Mr. Hira said. “But it’s definitely not representative of how the H-1B program is being used today.”

My new SoundBridge came in the mail today.  Pretty easy setup after I figured out what ports to enable in the firewall.

Coolest part was buried in the manual. There is a not so secret command line interface if you telnet to port 4444. Checkout the developer site.

Big news in Wikipedia-land today. One of the main editors has out’ed himself as a fraud.

To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside Louisville.

The New Yorker had to issue an Editor’s Note for a story they ran last year. Wikipedia has become a major source of information on the Internet. The site regularly comes up in the first handful of results on Google searches. We already know that the facts on the pages are liable to all kinds of twisting. But now we can’t even trust those tasked with editing?