I’ve been a  long time proponent of digital reading. I started out with a (slightly darker) gray on (a slightly Plighter) gray display of an old  Palm III. I read the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series (which I incidentally didn’t like very much) on that device straining my eyes to see the badly drawn fonts. When the old PDA broke, I moved on to a Palm Tungsten T3 and have been reading books on it since using the wonderful Plucker software. I read about a hundred books over the last 4 years, almost all of which were in digital format on and I enjoyed every minute of it. Most of the time when I’m reading I forget I’m holding a digital device in my hands and not a real book, except that I find it’s much more convenient to hold the PDA. The first thing I noticed about digital reading is that I could hold the device and turn pages using just one hand. I was taking the train to work at the time, which was so crammed I had to stand most of the way. I found that I could stand on the train squeezed between odd smelling passengers, hold on to a pole with one hand and hold the PDA in the other comfortably reading and turning pages with my thumb. Paper backs on the other hand, I can’t even figure out how to hold properly with both hands. If you open a paperback all the way, you ruin the book with an ugly crease on the back of the cover. If you don’t, you have to awkwardly hold it half open sticking your thumb in the middle and struggle to read the inner part of the pages. Perhaps I’m overly modern in my approach, but I fail to see the sentiment in holding, owning and reading paperbacks printed on the cheapest recycled grayish paper with the cheapest possible ink in a font that’s either too small or too large, but is never the right size. In modern terms, I’d say the user interface of the common paperback leaves much to be desired. Note, I’m not talking about a rare edition of a classic whose pages were manually arranged with love and caring. I’m talking about those pulp fiction books we all read and forget about a day later which are printed at a factory somewhere in China and shipped in containers for us to read. There’s no sentimental value in most of those books either in form or content and we don’t read most of them more than once.

I believe the psychological aspects of holding a book, smelling it (ew!) and turning its pages will last at most a single generation once a proper technology is available. One of the things I like best about reading from a PDA is the immediate access to more information about what I’m reading. Even when I read something as simple as a Vince Flynn thriller I sometimes use a dictionary or turn to Wikipedia for some more info on a term, a place or a person. This is one thing Amazon got right with their Kindle – it’s always online and you have full access to Wikipedia, a dictionary and other internet resources. The experience of reading a book is so much richer when you can instantly find out more about what you are reading. This is even more important for scientific or professional books. The ability to directly jump to a cited source and read the original material the author based her claims on is quite amazing as I imagine you know from reading stuff on the web. The feeling is only enhanced by the ability to do that while in bed or sprawled on a sofa.

A final point that came to me while writing this is that the digitization of books can help books evolve into a different non-linear media. The result might be similar to the hypertext we see on the web, but perhaps more akin to the Dungeons and Dragons books that were common in the early nineties. In those books you could choose the storyline by jumping to some page in the book according to the author’s instructions. Perhaps the Interactive Fiction style of games will return with a vengeance and allow us to be more active participants in the books we read.

I don’t believe paper books will disappear and be completely replaced by digital books. After all, the TV hasn’t completely replaced the radio and CDs and MP3 players haven’t replaced vinyl records. However, when new technology emerges, the old ones usually mutate and find the niche they serve best. After all, people watch TV at home but still prefer the radio when they are driving. They listen to old jazz records on vinyl, but take their MP3 player when they jog (which might be a bit inconvenient carrying a record player). In a similar manner, paper books and digital books will coexist each finding its niche. Meanwhile, I’ll be ordering myself a brand new Sony PRS-700 and hoping that somebody ports a dictionary program and a Wikipedia browser to it so I’ll be able to enjoy a truly enhanced digital reading experience.

To check the firmware version, go to http://192.168.2.1 (that’s the IP of the router in its default configuration) and click Status Info at the top of the page that appears. The firmware version is written under Runtime Code Version.

The 1.57 version apparently has a bug, which did not exist in previous versions and has been fixed in newer ones. The latest official firmware release is 1.51, and can be found at the Edimax site. I’ve also found a 1.58 version on an Israeli’s dealer’s site here.

Direct link to 1.51 (edimax.com): BR6204Wg_1.51.zip (unzip it before upgrading)
Direct link to 1.58 (pikok.co.il): EdiEngBR6204Wg_1.58.bin

I’ve tested both 1.51 and 1.58, and they both fix the problem.

Upgrading the firmware is actually quite easy.

Go to http://192.168.2.1, select System Tools at the top, then Firmware Upgrade on the left and follow the instructions on the screen.

Hope this helps somebody someday.

Sarah Siegel writes:

“Channa, I don’t want to forget to ask you for a word today. How do you say, ‘Bull’ in Kannada?”
“Gooli, Ma’am.”

And the urban dictionary says:

Goolies

Noun:
1. Private parts
2. Family Jewels

“I kicked him in the goolies”

Balls of bull. Nice!

I too use a couple of 19″ monitors and although they are plain old 4×3, I still often have the feeling that I’m underutilizing my screen space. This issue has been on my mind for the longest time. There’s some code on my HD called TidyDesktop that I wrote about 4 years ago. The idea was to turn the desktop into something akin to modern IDE’s, with floating windows, dock points and most importantly splitters – those narrow bars you drag to change the relative size of windows. I was doing it in C at the time, playing around with windows hooks and message loops and it was going very slowly. I did get to a point where a single window could be dragged to the edge of the screen and it would dock there, but didn’t have the time to see it through.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and it suddenly dawned on me that I was going about this the wrong way. Instead of trying to bring the splitters to the desktop, I could try to put the windows within a large container window, a general purpose IDE if you’d like.

Turns out you can change the parent of an application’s window and attach it to another window. Not only that, but when you maximize the inner window, it stays within the borders of the container window.

Based on this idea I’ve build a wxPython application that can host other applications’ windows and it looks like this:

As you can see in the screenshot, I’ve arranged Firefox, Notepad and a command prompt in a nice way that allows me to use all of them at once. You can also use this technique when you watch online movies and want to jot down some notes or when you’re playing the guitar and need both the chords and the lyrics alongside on the screen.

This should really boost productivity, but don’t take my word for it,
try it out and let me know how it goes.

I want one.

(via AskDaveTaylor)

This post is part of a series of posts based on the fine lecture given by Dr. Roni Horowitz of www.internet-marketing.co.il at the Israeli CEO forum on May 31, 2007 in Herzlia, Israel.

Let me start this installment with a quote:

Our company is the leader in its field. We provide up-to-par turn-key solutions to enterprise-grade resource allocation problems thus improving both your ROI and TOC and allowing your company to be prepared for the challenges of tomorrow. Join us in our quest!

Care to guess which company is this or at least what business it is in?

You can’t actually, because I lied to you. This isn’t a real company’s marketing pitch I quoted, though it sure sounds like one, doesn’t it? I’ve just written it up in 5 minutes with the help of a couple of bullshit generators to illustrate a point.

Mistake 3 – Writing for the CEO

We’ve all seen, read and heard those statements from all manner of self-proclaimed experts, consultants and incompetent CEOs. It’s even worse if you’re living in a non-English speaking country like here in Israel. People seem to crap all over their message with English words within a Hebrew text to make them sound smarter. We all know it doesn’t.

We still do it sometimes, and usually have an excuse along the lines of “But that’s what the CEO wanted”. You aren’t creating a web site for the CEO. You aren’t doing it for the CMO either. You aren’t even doing it for you. You’re doing it for your vistors who might become paying cutomers. Your marketing messages is probably something the CEO’s ego should be left out of.

Many people in the software world have at least heard of Joel Spolsky of JoelOnSoftware. His recent material is a bit weak, but the archives are a great source of insights on software development, architecture and business. He’s also published most of his articles in a book which my business partner dubbed Joel on Toilet. Yeah, disgusting, I know.

I’ve always been quite interested in the configuration management world and Eric Sink is a guru in the field. He’s also one hell of a hacker and an accomplished business man which makes his blog a gem.

The Daily WTF (which stands for Worse Than Failure although the usual meaning usually works just as well) is a constant source of amusing stories of programmers and other technical people f***ing up in huge ways. Very entertaining read, especially when you find yourself thinking, oh shit, that happened to me too.

If you think that you want to go on your own and start a company, but just looking for the right motivation to do that, you should read Paul Graham’s essays. He claims that any decent hacker can and should start a startup, and he’s even willing to put some money where his keyboard is via Y Combinator, a company that he founded that funds startups in the earliest possible stages.

Raymond Chen probably knows more about Windows internals than any other man alive (except maybe for Mark Russinovich of SysInternals). His blog is full of insights about programming for Windows and historical explanation for things like Why are console windows limited to Lucida Console and raster fonts?.

For my Hebrew speaking readers I would also like to include two blogs in the Hebrew language I read on a daily basis:

Cognitive Dissonance has some deep articles on how philosophy and math relate to everyday life.

The Glob is a quite amusing take on the everyday events in Israeli politics and media.

That’s it for now. I haven’t written anything for quite a while being busy with several projects that run in parallel. I’ll tell you more about the more interesting parts of what I’m doing in future posts.

If you do have an installed Visual Studio 2005 however, and want to find out the serial number you’ve used to install it because you don’t have a clue where you put that shiny sticker, you can. It is, like most things in Windows, in the registry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Registration\PIDKEY

In order to convert the value in that key to an actual serial number you have to put a dash ( – ) after evert 5 characters of the code.

Enjoy and don’t do anything illegal with this information.

[Update] Almost four years have gone by since I posted this and it is still a magnet for guys looking for Visual Studio 2005 serial keys. Comments are now disabled and removed.

I didn’t know in how much trouble those guys were already in.

I’ve just read a post at arstechnica about an agreement between the American and Russian governments that Russia will close down the Allofmp3.com site. I guess you can’t hide forever behind the iron curtain of problematic laws.

It’s back to downloading music from eMule now.