Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Australia Tech Post Mortem: What Worked and What Didn’t

Posted on October 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

Like a lot of geeks, I spend a lot more time planning which bits of techno-kit to bring with me on a trip than worrying whether I’ve actually remembered to pack clothes or not. I gave it a good shot with my family’s two-week trip to Australia, but had a few misfires along the way. Here’s a brief rundown on what gadgets proved worth their travel weight down under, and which weren’t up to the task:

Winner: Asus EeePC 900HA Netbook

A crazy-cheap computer that’s light, has great battery life, a built-in camera for Skyping to the folks back home, and weighs next to nothing. If it weren’t for the slightly undersized keyboard and problematic positioning of the up-arrow key (net to the right Shift key), it’d be the perfect on-the-go computer. If you got an email from me during the past two weeks, it was likely sent from this sand-covered little netbook. I was also able to video-chat with my folks back in the states from one of the two hotel rooms that featured workable internet.

Winner: Canon XTi

41RMGH3XG3L._SL160_

It’s been superseded the XSi (and higher-end models), but the shots from this 10.1 megapixel camera are light years ahead of the vacation snaps I took years ago–not to mention the pathetic camera phone shots we all sometimes have to make do with. It survived surf and sand with aplomb, and it’s the definitely my best tool to capture the beauty of a perfect beach or view.

Loser: the iPhone (AT&T plans/Vodafone internet in particular)

This was a shocker to me, since my iPhone has become such a daily part of my life. I even congratulated  myself on having the foresight to call ahead and set up a a global data roaming plan so that I’d get hit with a data charge of only $60 or so for the two weeks in Australia, vs. the several-hundred-dollar horror stories I’ve heard of from unwary travelers who dared to access the internet abroad without an international plan.

The truth is, I may as well have left it at home for all the good it did me. I burned through 1/3 of my allotted 50 MB of internet traffic within a day of arrival just trying to use it for basic hotel lookups and GPS navigation. Data speeds were almost useless even in the big cities (hosted by Vodafone locally), and GPS navigation was impossible due to slow response times and winding streets without turn-by-turn routing. Within a day, we’d made the decision to go back to the car rental place and pick up a ¨real¨ GPS (more on that in a moment).

Also, even with AT&T‘s pricey ¨Global Traveler¨ plan, we faced fees of well over a dollar a minute for calls, and more to pick up voice mails. And that was a discount from the regular roaming rates of over $3/minute(!). In the end, we wound up picking up a “burner” pre-paid phone in a mall for about $80 to give us the minimal mount of phone service we needed on the trip.

The truth is, without the internet and an affordable calling plan, the iPhone is hugely crippled. It was really a huge disappointment, although I did have one wonderful moment of joy with it at the end. I realized that you can actually type in non-map queries into Google Maps like “Comic Store, Brisbane, Australia” and have it instantly plot your location in the city next to every available comic store nearby–even with street view pictures of the shops. That was cool!

Winner: Tom Tom One GPS (Australian)

Thinking to save $59, I bowed out of simply buying the Australian maps for my own Tom Tom GPS, thinking I could just use the Google Maps on my iPhone. This was a disaster, and we quickly wound up heading around to the car hire place to pick up a rental Tom Tom for the duration of the trip.

Once it was up on our dash, it turned the trip instantly from a harried series of missed turns and frayed nerves into a relatively calm drive–albeit on what my American reflexes told me was the wrong side of the road. It also did a terrific job of pointing out gas, tourist attractions, and the numerous speed cameras that cover the Australian landscape.

If you’re planning to drive in Australia, do yourself a favor and bring this along–it would have been a far worse vacation without it.

Leave a comment

Posted in Geek Stuff, Travel

ComicBase 14.0.3 and the Awesomely Large Database Bug Fix

Posted on September 9, 2009 | 4 comments

I just posted two beta (translation: we‘re pretty sure they work perfectly, but we don‘t want to get cocky until some other folks beat on them) builds of ComicBase 14.0.3 and ComicBase Express 14.0.3. If you‘ve got ComicBase 14 already, you can download the updaters here:

Of the three issues these builds address, the one I never saw coming was an “Overflow” error which we traced to an ancient routine in ComicBase which counts the number of titles in your database (prior to things like showing progress bars and statistics). What was the overflow in question? As it turns out, a few folks have actually managed to add more than 32,767 titles in their databases (A title is a comic series (e.g. Action Comics–not to be confused with the 437,000+ individual issues currently in ComicBase).

As it turns out, 32,767 is one of those magic numbers in computer science–2 to the 15th power (if you start counting at zero) — and the limit to a data type known as the “signed integer”. Go beyond that, and you get an overflow error.

Once I located it, it took but a moment to fix the problem (the new limit is 2 ^63rd power: a bit more than a 9 quintillion). But I had to stop for a moment and just marvel at how far this little comic project has come in the 16 years since we started with the then-huge database of 20,000 issues from 297 titles. (And back then, I figured it was just a “mopping up” operation to add in everything those 297 titles didn’t cover, thus my dimensioning of the title count as a simple integer). Man, I couldn’t have been more wrong about the scope that ComicBase would one day become.

So anyway, please try out 14.0.3 and send us notes to let us know how they work out for you. And let’s all pray that I never have occasion to revisit that particular limit again!

4 Comments

Posted in ComicBase, Geek Stuff

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Posted on August 18, 2009 | Leave a comment

As a sci-fi buff, I always loved the idea of traveling in the fourth dimension. Four dimensions I get. But my eleven year old son Neil is a budding string theorist, and one day tried to school me in how there are ten (and exactly ten) dimensions. My response was to smile indulgently at the precocious lad–then vacate the room quickly before he could realize I had only the foggiest idea of what he was referring with all those extra dimensions. (Why ten? Why not six or 23 or infinity?)

But now, if you can hang through the fifth dimension part of this well-presented, but admittedly mind-blowing video, it’ll all be made clear…

Leave a comment

Posted in Geek Stuff

Late to the Party: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Posted on August 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

During Comic-Con, I was introduced to Joss Whedon’s latest project, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. I’d vaguely heard about this one last year right about the time I was neck deep in work trying to get ComicBase Atlas out the door, so I never actually checked it out. Apparently, it was a project thrown together during the writer’s strike between fan-fave director Joss Whedon and his brothers, and starring Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother), Nathan Fillion (Firefly), and Felicia Day (The Guild).

Amazingly, the whole thing was originally released on the internet for free and quickly became a fan phenomenon. Now, however, it’s out on DVD, and Shiaw-Ling managed to snag me an autographed copy so we all sat around in our hotel room at the convention watching it…and it’s great! Whedon funded the entire project himself, and even though it’s available for free from various outlets, I have no problem recommending the $9.48 DVD (both for the extras and just so Joss can get some of his money back!)

One of my favorite scenes is here: Self-aggrandizing super-hero “Captain Hammer” (Fillion) has just recognized Dr. Horrible (Harris) out of costume and informed him that he’s about to make off with the girl Horrible has a hopeless crush on just to spite him:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILObfEzX92k&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]


Leave a comment

Posted in Geek Stuff

To All Software Vendors: Keep It Real on Upgrade Prices

Posted on August 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

OK, upgrades are on my mind a lot right now, and I don’t want to tell anyone how to run their business—it’s hard enough running my own. But to all you software vendors out there, can we please keep it real when it comes to upgrade pricing?

I’m catching up on phone messages and emails after our big cameo on the silver screen, and among my many messages were two from the vendors of some development tools we use in-house. These are fairly expensive products, and the messages were pleas to buy their latest and greatest. Although I’m happy with the products in question, I won’t be jumping on either upgrade deal anytime soon.

The reason? The programs in question cost several hundred dollars apiece, and the upgrades in question were incredibly minor (e.g. “now with better support for Word 2007 XML export!” or “more responsive menus!“ [I’m not even kidding on these]). But, because I’m a valued customer—the companies in question are offering me an upgrade discount of…about 15-25% less than buying the whole product over again.

To wit: the first product costs $799 to buy in the first place, but upgrades can be had for the special upgrade price of just $599 (but only if I act now–otherwise the upgrade price goes up to $699!) In comparison, upgrades to ComicBase typically run about 1/3 of the original price ($99.95 for the upgrade to the $299 Archive Edition, or $49.95 for the $129.95 Professional Edition).

Normally, I’d just shake my head in disbelief, but this time, in a fit of misplaced inter-company generosity, I made the mistake of actually telling the salesman of the special $599 upgrade why I wasn’t taking him up on his kind offer:

“Hey look, let’s say I get $800 worth of value out of buying your product from a starting point of nothing, which is pretty much the minimum I’d need in order for it to make sense to buy a $799 product in the first place. That’s not chump change for me, and the product really has to deliver in order to meet that. But when you price the upgrade at $599, you’re saying the difference in value between the two-year-old version I’ve already got and the new one is by itself worth 75% as much as a whole new program.”

“I mean, are you really telling me that the ‘Improved Word 2007 XML support’ is such a great feature that I’m going to get 3/4 of the value from it alone as I did going from nothing at all to the current version?”

I didn’t think so either.

What the salesman apparently didn’t recognize was that when you ask me to buy a $699 upgrade to a $799 product, it was less a question of upgrading, than trying to sell incredibly similar software to someone who already owns a copy. Upgrades are generally easy to sell: you’ve already found the customer, and done at least one thing which makes them happy. New purchases are much harder. And that’s effectively what they were asking me to buy.

Honestly, though, I sympathize with anyone running a business, and we all have to choose our best shot at a strategy for success. Ours is to keep upgrade prices as low and attractive as we can make them, and be as aggressive as possible with the data and feature set so that our customers really look forward to each year’s upgrade.

Every year, it’s really a game of, “What can we do to make this version so awesome that anyone whose subscription just ran out will be dying to grab the next one?” We don’t want to merely justify the upgrade price, we want to pack in an excess of value so that as many people as possible will feel that grabbing the current upgrade is one of the smartest buys they’ll make this year. (And I for one completely believe this–especially in the case of ComicBase 14! I know that we won’t get everyone to upgrade every year with this strategy, but our customer retention rates have been known to make a lot of other companies green with envy. And that’s the way I want to keep it.

But that’s just one man’s opinion. I wish these other folks the best of luck with their strategy (and I really do enjoy their products). But please, stop calling to ask why I didn’t grab the new version this year, and get your engineers to do something more than “improved menu speed” to justify an almost-the-same-as-new “upgrade” price.

Leave a comment

Posted in ComicBase, Geek Stuff

Tagged

Kindle Hacking: Changing the Screen Saver Pictures on the Kindle 2 and DX

Posted on July 11, 2009 | 12 comments

Article_HeaderThis may or may not have anything to do with the soon-to-be-announced ComicBase 14, but for my fellow Kindle fans out there,  I wanted to share some tips I’ve learned in the last month or two to help you make the most of your Kindle 2 or Kindle DX (I’m afraid I don’t have access to an original Kindle, so I can’t vouch for hacks which are meant for that platform).

First up: I love the screen savers on the Kindle, but I wanted  like to swap up the pictures for ones of my own choosing. But the pictures in question live on a hidden partition which isn’t user-accessible. Here’s how you do it:

1. Get your Pictures Ready

For the Kindle 2

Get your favorite images, and save them in 600 (width) x 800 (height) format, in .jpg (or .gif or  .png) file format. Make sure you leave a bit of a margin in your image as the viewable area of the image will be slightly smaller than the physical dimensions would indicate. Color is fine, but keep in mind that you’ll be viewing them in 16 shades of gray on the Kindle. Also, smaller images load faster than large ones, so try to keep the image sizes under 300K or so.

The Kindle will cycle through your images in order of their file names, so if you have a particular order in mind, you might want to save the files with a number in front of their name, e.g. “01_My First Image.jpg”)

For the Kindle DX

The same advice applies as with the Kindle 2, except that you will want to save your images at 824 (width) x 1200 (height)

2. Plug In Your Kindle via USB.

It will appear as a removable drive under My Computer

3. Set Your Computer to Show Hidden System Files

Go to Start > Settings > Control Panels > Folder Options and click the View tab. Scroll down and uncheck the “Hide protected operating system files” box, then click OK. This will let you see the hidden “System” folder on your Kindle.

4. Copy the appropriate “hack” to the top level of your Kindle

The following hacks come from MobileRead Forums user ClarkNova. I’ve tested them myself and can verify they work great on my Kindles, but they’re not official releases from Amazon, so caveat hacker (use at your own risk). They both basically work by showing the invisible partition on your Kindle which holds the built-in screen savers, allowing you to modify that folder. They’re also reversible using a second hack (at the end of this article).

For the Kindle 2

http://www.comicbase.com/Kindle/Kindle_2_Screen_Saver_Hack.zip

Download and unzip the above folder. Copy the enclosed file,  “Update_kindle2_user_screen_savers.bin” to the top level of your Kindle.

For the Kindle DX

http://www.comicbase.com/Kindle/DX_Screen_Saver_Hack.zip

Download and unzip the above folder. Copy the enclosed file,  “update_DX_screensaverhack-install.bin” to the top level of your Kindle.

5. Update your Kindle

Unplug your Kindle from your USB connection and restart it by pressing its Home button, Menu button, choosing Settings, pressing Menu again, then clicking Update Your Kindle. When the it’s done, it will restart.

6. Copy Your New Pictures to the Kindle

Plug in your Kindle Again via USB and you’ll see a new folder in your Kindle’s System folder called “screen_saver”. Inside are all the original Kindle screen saver pictures which you can add to or replace with your own pictures that you prepared in Step 1. Because we’re good like that, we’ve thoughtfully provided you Eight Fantabulous Glen Orbik Original Paintings from ComicBase, in Kindle 2 and Kindle DX format which you can download as well.

7. Restart your Kindle

Unplug your Kindle from your USB connection and restart it by pressing its Home button, Menu button, choosing Settings, pressing Menu again, then clicking Restart. Your new screen saver images will now appear in rotation. 
 

 

Undoing the Hack

If you ever want to go back to the original screen savers, just plug in your Kindle, and copy the the “Update_kindle2_restore_default_screen_savers.bin” file (for the Kindle 2) or the “update_DX_screensaverhack-uninstall.bin” (for the Kindle DX) to the top level of your Kindle. Update your Kindle by doing the Home, Menu > Settings, Menu > Update Your Kindle routine, and it’ll undo the hack and restart your Kindle.

12 Comments

Posted in ComicBase, Geek Stuff

Upgrading to a New iPhone, Transferring your old Data and Number

Posted on June 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

When Apple announced the new 3G S iPhone, I jumped at the chance to upgrade my still-shiny 3G to something even shinier. Unfortunately, since I had bought my 3G last year at this time, I didn’t qualify for the “upgrade” price until December. My much-less-gadget-crazed wife Carolyn, however, had an aging Samsung phone which did qualify for an upgrade.  So, after chatting it over, we hit upon the idea of upgrading her phone instead, then somehow switching the numbers so that I’d get the new 3G S, she’d get my old 3G iPhone.

Jumping to the end, it all worked out fine. Here’s what was involved to make the switch happen:

Step 1:  Back up your old phone

Just sync it to iTunes and make sure it completely backs up. It’s a really good idea to check your iTunes preferences for the phone to make sure your apps are getting backed up as well (for some reason, I had that option unchecked on mine, which caused me to have to reinstall a few things later).

Step 2: Activate the new phone

Basically, when the new phone came in, you need to hook it up to a computer, let it be recognized by iTunes, at which time, it’ll get its Sim card recognized by the AT&T network. Do this before anything else.

Step 3:  Swap the Sim Cards

Grab a paperclip and poke it through the tiny hole at the top of the iPhone next to the headphone jack. The Sim carrier will pop out. Do the same thing on the other phone, swap the Sim cards, then plug them back in. Within a minute or so, each phone will be recognized on the AT&T network as the other.

Step 4:  Sync the new phone to iTunes and let it restore your old data

Plug it in, and you’ll be greeted by an advertisement for Apple’s Mobile Me service. once you click past that, you’ll be asked if you want to treat the phone as a new phone, or restore its contents from your old phone (which you backed up in Step 1). Do the latter. After several minutes of restoring, you’ll be good to go!

Leave a comment

Posted in Geek Stuff

Internet Explorer 8 Ships, Fixes Dropdown List Problem

Posted on May 5, 2009 | 1 comment

Microsoft finally made Internet Explorer 8 a “recommended download” with the latest set of patches on Microsoft Update. At first glance, there’s not a ton new with IE 8, but it does fix one incredibly annoying problem with all previous versions, including IE 7: Dropdowns containing many items no longer take a huge amount of time to be built, freezing the page (and computer!) during the process. Firefox and other browsers haven’t had this problem, but it’s nice to see IE finally getting this one fixed.

Why is this one important? My big point of pain was the “List of Titles” under the seller inventories on Atomic Avenue. After complaints from users, we tracked down what appeared for all the world to be a hard crash in IE 6 and 7 to the user’s going to my personal titles on Atomic Avenue, where my list of over 10,000 titles in stock resulted in a drop-down list which could take several minutes to fill on a fast computer.

Cutting down the number of titles resulted in an exponential decline in the time required, leading me to guess it was a case of the programmer equivalent of the blonde joke about painting lines on the highway–basically, the programmer was adding onto the end of the list in a way which involved constantly going back to the start, counting to the end, then tacking on the item there, rather than setting an index point at the end and tacking new data on from there directly.

On modern machines, the lazy, brute force way of adding to lists by counting from the beginning is normally not a problem, but when thousands of items are involved, you can quickly set up conditions so that the computer must walk up a number of items in the list equivalent to  [the number of items in the list] raised to second or third  power—each and every time they want to add a new item. Repeat that ten thousand times, and you can see how little programming inefficiencies, repeated with very large numbers, can become killers.

Once we discovered the original problem in Internet Explorer, we’d been forced to cap IE clients to seeing the first 2000 titles worth of content from a given seller when viewing individual inventories. This only affected a couple of sellers on the system, and was largely a temporary measure until we could address the matter in a more satisfactory way.

Unfortunately, one of those sellers with wide-ranging titles for sale was me! (By nature, we tend to grab one copy of everything in order to throw it in ComicBase).  Happily with IE 8 now available, we’re safely able to remove that limit (and warn users of older versions that they could do better if they upgrade to the latest version, or use another browser like Firefox which never had that particular problem). We’ll track browse usage in the months ahead and see whether we still need to engineer a workaround for older IE user.

(I’m hoping not, frankly, since any fix would not only be reasonably complicated, but would also involve a fair amount of overhead to load up the list, realize that there’s too many to be safely be shown by old versions of IE, then display smaller batches in a safer way. Having Microsoft simply fix IE seems much preferable, although if nobody ever updates their browser, we may have to rig up the workaround anyway, I guess…). In any case, kudos (and thanks!) to whichever person on the IE 8 team fixed this one!

1 Comment

Posted in Atomic Avenue, Geek Stuff, Programming

Saboteurs Take Out San Jose Internet

Posted on April 10, 2009 | 1 comment

If you’re wondering why the ComicBase.com and AtomicAvenue.com sites were down yesterday, it wasn’t the normal server crashes, equipment moves, or other normal stuff. No, saboteurs actually cut the cables, disabling phone, cable, and internet service to a big chunk of San Jose, Morgan Hill, and Santa Clara.

The cuts were actually done in four different locations, and AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the culprits.  The FBI is also on the case.

Weird, weird times we live in…

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/09/MNP816VTE6.DTL

1 Comment

Posted in Atomic Avenue, ComicBase, Geek Stuff

Apple could largely stop iPod theft…should it?

Posted on March 22, 2009 | Leave a comment

As I heard tonight about another kid dying because he was mugged for his iPod, I thought again about the three GPSs I’ve had stolen from my own car, and how the companies that make both products could have probably prevented the crimes from ever taking place.

Simply put, both Apple and Tom Tom have a registration database of customers and device serial numbers. If they were to require activation of the units in question (and let’s imagine the database and devices were secured enough to not be easily broken or renumbered), it would be possible to refuse activation of known stolen devices, and to disable previously activated devices that were reported stolen. For instance, an iPod could be made to check in with a remote server to verify its activation before it was synched with a new music library, or a GPS could interact with a satellite signal to confirm activation status, much the same way as traffic reports are done now. In a world like this, stolen iPods and GPS units would become largely worthless, and there’d be no sense in stealing them. For much the same reason, car thieves largely don’t bother stealing radios with XM/Sirius transmitters: those radios can simply be shut off after the fact, so they’re worthless on the resale market.

So why doesn’t Apple implement such a scheme? I can think of any number of reasons, ranging from user inconvenience, not wanting to take on the enforcement role, or the fact that the costs of such a system would all fall on them, while the present system actually benefits Apple in the sick sense that they actually make money when a stolen iPod is replaced. Ditto for Tom Tom and Garmin. Generally, you don’t convince someone to take on a task when they’d take on all the cost and suffer financially as a result.

And yet, if companies in these situations did work to prevent the use of stolen property in this way, it’d present a huge societal good…which is the fancy-pants way of saying I wouldn’t have had to replace a couple of car windows and some kid would still be alive if there was no point stealing his iPod.

Leave a comment

Posted in Geek Stuff, Life

Tagged