Oct 7
Many of us technical types assume the technical knowledge and ability should be the determining factor for wealth and success.
In reality, social skills are the key to wealth and success. Ergo, it’s better to have socials skills than engineering skills.
Do we really have nothing to fear from Chinese and Indian immigrants? The problem is that these workers have problems communication with us (much like we have problems communication with them). While they have great engineering abilities, engineering ability in and of itself is not that valuable to society.
We can train engineers. We can’t teach social skills. Social ability seems to be an innate trait. The Myers-Briggs type indicator shows how we are born with introverted or extroverted tendencies which will have a large impact on our social skills.
Weber’s law: It’s better to be outgoing than smart.
Oct 7
Windows 7 Media Player recognizes and plays mkv (a container format) out of the box.
1080p playback was fine. Max’ed the CPU when it should be using the video card. Most modern video cards come with h264 decoding built in.
I may need to find the right combo of codecs to make it work.
Playback was fine as long as I used Media Player Classic Home Cinema. It’s just using the CPU not the video card.
Playback was terrible in Windows Media Player. Not so bad in VLC.
I’ll be curious to see how the Asus O!Play works.
Oct 6
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001107.htmlIntegrated graphics card should be fine for home theatre tasks. Didn't realize that. In fact a 1.1 Ghz processor should be fine.
That's why these cheap little boxes from WD and Asus can decode this stuff so well.
Interesting.
Sep 23
I admit I didn't like the gmail inbox at first. However, I've grown to love it. So much in fact that I've changed Outlook to act like Gmail.
Sep 19
Game Development Update.
I have a tentative game premise in mind.
The choice of prototype languages came down to C# and Python. C# is without a doubt the most advanced mainstream language. However, there is something about Python that I really like.
I like Python syntax (significant whitespace) and simplicity. Also the plethora of libraries is encouraging.
I want to learn more about Python and see how far I can take it.
Tools:
Sep 10
I'm still loving my new
ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-PU1X-BK.
One issue is that the charger will randomly not work.
Yes that's right, the charger will just not work for some reason. Amazon and Asus are out of the chargers. I've seen enough complaint posts to infer that this is a major issue.
I've decided to live with it for now. I may have to pick up another charger. I'm looking for a nice DC charger. The laptop is just made for the car. With it's 10+ hour batter life, I'm not too concerned about running out of juice.
Sep 10
If iTunes is their flagship app then Apple is dead to me.
It is the most bloated convoluted application I have ever used (and I use Visual Studio every day).
My wife wanted more songs on her iPod. That duty fell to me. I installed iTunes on my laptop and she bought some new songs.
Then I got the mistaken idea that I should just be able to put those on her iPod. Oh foolish me. I'll save you the long story.
In the end I had to restore her iPod, reboot a couple of times and then the sync just worked. Wow Apple products are so easy to use.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/09/somebody-has-to-say-it-its-time-for-itunes-lite/
Sep 9
Leo is hard to describe. It's like an outlining programming editor.
I looked into using it for a Python dev environment but burnt out on trying to get it to work on Windows. Seems there was some change to the interface recently and some features might not work.
Has anyone used Leo successfully on Windows for Python development? What's the trick?
Aug 28
I need to take a better one to show how small it really is.
Don't mind my messy desk in the background.
Aug 28
I just got a new ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-PU1X-BK.
So far I'm happy with it. I don't like Windows XP (it's fine for now but Windows 7 has spoiled me).
I'm going to use it as a backup laptop when I'm upstairs and as an ultraportable for traveling and around town. Also as a music player and video player for my 2 year old.
