This fatwallet thread on Sennheiser headphones has some excellent information on headphones. It also points to the MAD Winamp plugin project as a way to get significantly better MP3 decoding quality. I just tried it, and it does provide amazingly better quality. It’s very easy to setup. If you use winamp, go grab this right now and give it a try.

I asked a few post ago why Java is still slow despite the papers claiming technically it should be as fast or faster than C. Here is a page that claims to explain why, and why it will remain so. I can’t say I’m smart enough in these topics to know who is right, but I know what I see – Java is still slow.

Update: And here is James Gosling commenting on the same thread, basically saying Java is now as fast as C, faster than GCC. Hmm. Would love to believe that. Perhaps I just need to add “-server” to my optimizations and suddenly I’ll get a 5x performance improvement. Hmm.

I’m looking to buy a new TV. My research has mainly involved browsing the TV section at the local Costco, and of course scouring the Web for reviews.

[Update] I ended up buying the Sharp 65DR650 from Costco. It’s a monster – really a nice big screen. I’ve been largely happy with it. Not as bright as an LCD or plasma, but a beautiful HD picture. My dad bought an Akai and had the lamp blow out after 1 1/2 years, so it looks like lamps burning out after warranty are par for the course. Overall, I’m happy with the Sharp, no problems so far.

A couple of friends have the Samsung 56″ DLP. They all like it, although more than half have had to have someone come out and repair it. My own browsing of the aisles led me to believe that LCDs are the best looking displays, followed by plasmas, followed by DLPs. Costco has some nice plasmas that are comparable in price to the DLPs, but I’ve been scared off by the rumor that plasmas quickly lose their luster and picture quality.

Anyway, Costco has a $500 off deal going on for the Sharp 65″ DLP 65DR650, ending up at $2500 including shipping. That seems pretty good to me, given what I’ve heard of large TVs’ reliability issues and Costco’s excellent return policy. I looked for reviews everywhere with no luck. Here’s what I’ve been able to find:

http://www.hometheatermag.com/rearprojectiontvs/1005sharp/

http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/2/143579.html

The professional review makes it seem pretty good, so I think I’m going to go for it. I can always return it if it doesn’t work out. Before I do, any words of advice? Anyone out there have this thing?

UPDATE: Fatwallet thread on this deal. According to one poster,

Consumer Reports rated the 56″ Sharp as excellent HD picture quality, very good DVD picture quality, fair s-video picture, and fair non-hd picture.

From someone who bought the TV:

TV looks good, I am pleased, more so than I expected. The monster screen is really astounding to look at. I’d rate the picture quality about similar to the reviews noted earlier (out of 10)

SD TV – Fair 6
DVD – Very Good 7-8
HD TV – Very Good 7-8

I have yet to run a game system through it, so I can’t comment on that. Not quite as good picture quality as my Sony Grand Wega LCD-RP, but the screen size and price make me happier I have it instead of my Sony which recently broke after 2 months (thanks to the Costco return policy, another reason this is a good deal in my eyes!)

Another TV stand which appears to work for this TV (see measurements) can be found on the costco website here, let me know what you all think? While it sits on the ground just fine, it really should be about 2 feet above ground for ideal viewing so consider that a stand would be recommended when buying this TV.

The contrast ratio IS low compared to other DLP sets (as mentioned earlier). I only looked briefly and saw one DLP set with 2000:1 and another with 10000:1, I’m no expert so do your homework and determine if its important enough for you. Hope this helps!

Thread from AVS Forum. One guy who has it says:

I have a 65dr650 and think it is great. I have had it for about a month now. My only complaint is the codes for the remote, to switch inputs it has 1 button for every 2 inputs. Or 1 button to scroll thru all inputs. Doesn’t work well when programming a universal remote. Other than that TV is very good for a good price.

Forget 5 times, you should be getting paid 300 times that other guy. From the Wall Street Journal, via Kedrosky:

One top-notch engineer is worth “300 times or more than the average,” explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering. He says he would rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist. Many Google services, such as Gmail and Google News, were started by a single person, he says.

I keep running across pieces like this DeveloperWorks article called Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends revisited, discussing the performance benefits of Java – that it is in fact faster than C or C++.

The article makes some convincing arguments. In fact most of the arguments I hear are convincing. However, performance of real-world java apps still leaves a lot to be desired, and certainly is leagues behind C/C++ apps.

I’ll give you an example. I’ve personally been involved in two projects that essentially involve creating a Web proxy that does various fancy things. One version in Java, the other in C. The Java version tops out at maybe 200 simultaneous requests per second, while the C version is somewhere above 1000/sec. The Java version is actually a second generation, optimized rewrite of an earlier Java version that brought about significant performance improvements. Still, it lags far behind the C version.

You can try this yourself. Grab Axis and gSOAP. Write a simple service in each. Now throw load at them. Lots of load. You’ll see the same thing: gSOAP will be many times faster than Axis and handle much more simultaneous load.

Perhaps Java is very fast but people tend to write slow, inefficient programs with it? I have a theory that the fact that it’s easier to write code in Java than C leads people to write more code than they would in C to do the same function, which ends up causing bloat and slowness.

I don’t have a religious axe to grind here – I’d be very happy if Java was in fact very fast. However, pretty much everything I see in practice points to Java being much slower than C/C++. What’s your experience?

Perhaps this is meant to be in jest, but it’s an awful way to argue evolution versus intelligent design. The basic argument appears to be that “No Intelligent Designer — God or otherwise — would design a [human] that is this ridiculous.” The article points out various supposed flaws with the design of humans.

Two counter-points. First, intelligent design does not argue that the creations have to be perfect. It simply argues that designs of sufficient sophistication must have been produced by an intelligent designer. If you’ve worked in software you know very well that plenty of very intelligent designers have created plenty of extremely flawed systems. Second, the supposed flaws listed are not real flaws. The scrotum, for example, seems an example of excellent design. Instead of building a complicated design to cool just one part of the body, simply distance that part from the rest of the body.

There’s plenty of evidence for evolution and against intelligent design. Let’s not give the IDers something to shoot down by making flawed arguments.

Interesting speculation about Google’s use for the dark fiber it’s buying:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html.

Cringely got it wrong. I have hard evidence that Google is actually working with an alien species (their interest in NASA is simply to mask their secret communications). The “shipping containers” Cringely mentions do not actually contain computers; in fact, they’re filled with ALIEN BRAIN MATTER. The dark fiber forms the elongated alien appendages and the central nervous system. GoogleBase, of course, will be the main alien base, as in “all your bases are belong to us”. Google is finally revealing what I’ve known for years: AI is not Artificial Intelligence – it’s Alien Intelligence… They’re amongst us… they’re everywhere… I … garble garble garble…

I was reading Philip Greenspun’s blog and ran across this gem:

Managers of software development projects tend to be so incompetent and lacking in information that they can’t recognize and reward the strong contributors (this results in the best programmers getting paid only 20-30 percent more than the mediocre ones (compared to a 500 percent ratio in most areas of law, for example)).

500 percent? I didn’t realize there was already a blueprint for such significant difference in compensation. Law is comparable to software engineering in many ways, so perhaps we can bring the compensation methodology over too.

Actually, law typically has a much larger “sales” oriented aspect – people who make partner bring in business. So perhaps it’s not so comparable.

I have 76 feeds I read regularly (as in daily or so). Of those, I invariable hit Kedrosky’s first. It’s not alphabetically at the top, so it’s actually indicative of what I like reading.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I gravitate to Kedrosky first. For one thing, I’ve met him, so I can put a face to the words. But I’ve met plenty of the other bloggers I read too.

I think he’s got the right ingredients:

1. His posts are the right size. Not too short (like Scripting News, which I enjoy reading, but there are just so many little posts!), and not so long you have to dedicate 10 minutes to reading them. A quick read, a nugget of info, and you move on with the rest of your ADD life.
2. His posts are not too dense. It’s great to read a wonderful essay or two, but it’s a committment. Not just of time, but also of attention. It’s the difference between a full context switch and a small interrupt. One topic, one point, digest, move on.
3. He posts regularly. You can pretty much guarantee he’ll have something for you to read every day.
4. His topics are varied. A lot of the rest of what I read tends to be narrowly focused (eg. on XML or AJAX). Paul’s topics are all over the place within the technology space. Probably because he’s a VC so he gets to see and interact with a lot of different areas and topics, whereas the rest of us are pretty much into a few topics related to our main line of work. I also get the sense Paul can research whatever he feels interested in in the name of furthering his understanding of an area to invest in, whereas the rest of us can only put time into researching things directly related to our main line of work.
5. He posts actual content, as opposed to me-too’s and links. A lot of the postings out there simply point to other posts of interest. Nothing wrong with that, except when you see the same post pointed to in 5 different blogs you read. With Paul he usually has actual content, and even if he’s linking he usually has a comment to go along with it.

I look at my own blog, and I’m missing most of these ingredients. Perhaps Paul has a more interesting job than me. More likely, he’s a more interesting person than me.

Actually, my job is pretty interesting, but most of the juicy stuff I can’t blog about. Perhaps another difference between having a regular job and a VC job.

What do you like reading? Or, more precisely, what do you read frequently? Have you picked out any patterns or characteristics in blogs you read most frequently?

If you look up cheap bastard in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of me.

That is, my methodology for buying computer equipment is to aim for the “sweet spot”, which to me means the cheapest technology that’ll do what I need. The thinking being that today’s top of the line is 6 months later’s “sweet spot”, and I’m willing to live with 6 month old technology.

Which brings me to the laptop I’m writing this on. A couple of months ago I wanted to buy a personal laptop, having been unable to convince my wife to part with hers. I scoured the net for deals, almost going for a Dell. But then I ran across this deal on a decent laptop for $450 after rebate.

It was too good to resist; 6 pound laptop for $450, with the next contender in the same weight class coming in at well over $600. I bought it.

It’s really quite a nice laptop. An Acer 3002LCI, with 15″ XGA display, 40G hard drive, built in 802.11g. Light. Large and wide, resembling the powerbook. I got lucky and got one of the “upgraded” ones, which means a better processor (AMD 3000+) and DVD writer instead of reader. All of that for $450 is nice.

The downsides: only 256M memory, and atrocious battery life (as in 30mins).

The laptop itself feels solid – more solid than most of the Dells I’m used to, not as solid as the Compaq I have from work. The keyboard is good, display is good, everything is pretty much good. I haven’t done any benchmarks, but it feels very fast, faster then my work Compaq which is a pentium 1.6 mobile, I think.

Now, if I were to add in the cost of the extra memory I really should buy to make this thing sing and the cost of a decent battery, it’ll add up to over $600, but let’s ignore that for now.

Anyway, the main point of this post is, Acer looks like it produces a pretty solid product. I’d never touched it before I bought this thing, but so far I’m pretty happy. If you see a deal don’t be put off by the non-brand-name. I recommend the Acer Aspire 3002 as a nice light laptop so long as short battery life is not an issue for you.

Riding the train back to San Diego. It’s packed due to the holidays. It’s amazing how lacking people are in train etiquette, probably because most of them don’t ride regularly – we are in Southern California after all. The guy in the seat next to me is yapping away into his phone. The one across from him has his phone on speakerphone, and is babbling away while drinking on a 40 ounce magnum malt liquor. The lady behind him has been on the phone for the last 20 minutes. The kid sitting in front of me is playing a PSP with the sound turned up.

And I, being the genius that I am, forgot my headphones in my other bag.

I hear they’re looking at allowing cell phone usage on airplanes. I am so looking forward to that.

I uploaded the slides from the talk here. Much thanks to everyone for the great feedback, it was a pleasure presenting. Hope to do it again at XTech 2006 in Amsterdam.

People tend to complain more than complement, so let me take a second to say…

Staying at the Sheraton in downtown Atlanta. The service has been fantastic – a young man named Naqwaan at the check-in desk did just a fantastic job of turning what had been an unpleasent trip (lost luggage, etc) into a great stay. If you’re heading to Atlanta, give the Sheraton a shot – the hotel is nice and the people have all been great.

The last post on the new Yahoo Maps Beta drew some good comments, primarily objecting to the use of Flash as the base technology.

My reaction: Wow, tough crowd! The main point of the post was: pertty. Isn’t the pirate interface visually beautiful? I think (hope?) that as long as the app works out of the box with good performance, the average user who isn’t a hackneyed techie like us will care most about usability and visual appeal as opposed to the underlying technology. If the technical choices enable usability and aesthetic appeal and don’t hinder hackability, I think we’re in good shape.

I have two kids under the age of 4 who like to play computer. Turns out most of the Web hosted kids’ games are flash based. They really work quite well and have opened my eyes to the capabilities that exist in almost all of our browsers – apparently flash is available in over 96% of the browsers worldwide. You can do a lot with this thing.

On the other hand, I have to agree with Daniel’s sentiment that “Flash is so… nineties”. Somehow despite its capabilities it doesn’t get any respect, at least not from the core technology alpha dogs. It feels old school, not something you’d consider seriously if you’re one of the cool kids. Why is this?

Last time I directly touched Flash was back in the flash 5 days in a disastrous attempt at a disastrous project. The issue was not necessarily flash, but my rather obvious lack of ability and taste in visual design. However, a few things did surface – Flash is not aimed at the programmer. Its core audience is the visual designer, who can and does do amazing things with it. As a programmer, I was supremely frustrated at the lack of real server side support and a very hokey programming language.

I understand both of these have been addressed to some degree in subsequent versions. However, the barrier is still too high for the average geek. For one thing the authoring environment costs money. For another, it’s primarily visual as opposed to programming based.

I was excited about SVG as it has neither of these issues. But it turns out issues still exist – no technology is going to cure lack of taste and aesthetic design ability when you’re dealing with lines and shapes instead of pre-built components. Also, it’s difficult and unnatural to design a very graphical interface by writing lines of instructions and text. You want a graphical authoring environment. But wait, I didn’t like that either…

AJAX is no cure – it’s possible but unnecessarily painful to create nice interfaces. XUL hasn’t made a dent. So where do we go from here? Is Microsoft going to solve our problem with XAML?

I laughed out loud at this one. Check out the Register:

A battling 93-year-old Lithuanian woman has thwarted an attempted burglary by grasping one of the miscreants by the testicles so hard that the sobbing blagger required hospital treatment, Ananova reports.

Best part:

Popova attributes her grip of steel to years of milking goats.

Via Robert.

Now this is just beautiful.

Justin Everett-Church has created a way to change the look and feel of Yahoo! Maps, creating a pirate map and a radar map as examples.

I wasn’t crazy about the use of flash for the new Yahoo! Maps, but I had no idea you could do this sort of thing. I’m very impressed.

Another data point on the importance of APIs. You set the APIs loose, people will figure out neat things to do with it.

Via McManus.

I’ve been intending to get into Ruby on Rails while actually getting into Python. Shahin forwarded a link to TurboGears, which is a RonR for Python of sorts.

Anybody tried this thing? Any words of advice? It looks pretty neat.

I was reading the Economist and saw that Shanghai University ranked the world’s top universities according to their academic or research performance:

Ranking indicators include the alumni and staff winning major international awards, highly cited researchers in major research fields, articles published in selected top journals, articles indexed by major citation indexes, and performance per capita, “ the authors said. “We chose to rank research universities in the world by their academic or research performance based on internationally comparable dates that everyone could check. No subjective measures were taken.�

UCSD came in at number 13. Yes, ahead of UCLA, which you all knew already, but didn’t want to admit.

The Economist article is available by subscription only, but here’s UCSD’s release on it.

I don’t know why I get such a big kick out of these things, but here’s my Abolish XML Namespaces article translated to Russian. I had one translated to Turkish sometime back. That’s pretty neat.

I ran across yet another couple of people looking to implement a SOAP echo server, this time for load testing. Here’s how to do it very simply:

What is SOAP? It’s an HTTP POST containing XML, and an HTTP response containing XML. You can make an echo server by – here it is – simply serving a static XML file. That’s it. Just put an XML file on your http server and you’re done.

One complication – many HTTP servers, including apache, get unhappy if you POST to a static page. So make it a php page. Or any other scripting language you like. All you want is the ability to accept POST and spit out XML.

Here’s how not to do it: don’t use Apache Axis. No sense in that. Remember, SOAP is just XML over HTTP. So just do XML over HTTP.

Update: Mark likes it, Savas doesn’t. I should mention I fully realize that SOAP is transport independent and not tied to HTTP, and that I’m looking forward to all the implementations of SOAP over messenger pigeon. For SOAP over HTTP, the above will work for you.