It’s All Just A Ride

I just received my Sorapot from Joey Roth last night. The Sorapot is such an incredibly novel little thing. The aesthetic design is beautiful. It is minimalistic, but still has a kind of flair to it. I love the semi-sphere structure. First thoughts on it? It is incredibly solid. The main cast aluminum pieces that make up the frame seem like they could take a fall without more than a cosmetic scratch or two. The fact that the glass canister is removable also makes cleanup a lot easier than your standard teapot. Just wash the canister in some warm soapy water if need be, then put it back in and fill it up with a little hot water, then swish it around and drain.

The functionality of the pot itself makes getting tea into and out of it a tad cumbersome (just a little awkward what with the folding frame), but it’s sturdiness gives you enough confidence that at the very least you aren’t going to break something with a careless mistake. I found that it was less awkward if you lay the Sorapot on it’s side as opposed to it’s end while loading the tea in. When you do it this way loading actually goes pretty quickly, and isn’t as awkward. This technique would not, however, work if there was too much liquid in the canister since it would leak out when you go to loosen the retaining nut. You’d have to pour the excess out and then open it up, taking a bit of care not to leave a big bunch of tea leaves at the front.

Also, you can’t exactly pour the Sorapot like you can a normal top-loading teapot. Because the Sorapot has no opening to let in air like is usually present in the lid of a regular pot, you have to pour slowly at first, to leave a little gap in the spout for air to get in while the tea is rushing out. It starts to gurgle when you pour too (think of it like what happens when you try to drain a soda bottle by simply turning it all the way upside down). Not a huge deal, and I’m not sure how you could deal with that without ruining the aesthetic. The breather hole would have to be in the glass canister itself somewhere, which has complicated consequences design-wise. The only thing I could think to do would be to have a notch in the canister at the top lid that would let air in. There could also be a tab in the aluminum where the two meet so you know they are aligned correctly (i.e. so you don’t accidentally put the notch on the bottom and get hot water all over when you go to fill it with water), with the notch in the glass being a bit deeper than the aluminum tab to create a small hole, sort of like a “u” inside a “U” if you get my meaning.

One nice detail I found was that Joey was thoughtful enough to put a little groove in the inside of the spout to make it pour without a lot of drippage, as sometimes happens with less well-made pots. It’s little things like that that make a big difference sometimes. This and the nice box that it came in, wrapped in a rope (hemp?) ribbon, with a nice little bag of pretty tasty tea and a friendly note definitely make it apparent that Joey is not skimping on the details.

My friend Kevin had this idea to create a new “New Years” beginning in Spring. For those of you who live in the temperate zones of the world, where S.A.D. is a way of living, this makes more sense than Jan. 1 as the official New Year. Spring is about renewal. The dead of Winter is about depression. ‘Nuff said. So, with that, I’m adopting this practice, and these are my Neo-New Year’s resolutions…

1. Re-learn most of the Mandarin Chinese i lost this past year
2. Re-learn a bit of the Japanese I lost oh so long ago
3. Be less cranky
4. Learn Ruby and Rails programming to some useful degree
5. Learn at least some Tibetan beyond the three or four phrases I know now
6. Pay down credit card to a reasonable degree
7. Learn how to use that Anime Studio program I bought a year ago
8. Read more
9. Play around with iStopMotion some more
10. Vote for Barack Obama in November. Hoo-yeah!

I’m mildly embarrassed that half of these involve computers, but I learned to accept and embrace my nerdiness long ago.

We recently acquired two iPod Touches…Touchs?…iTouches?…anyhow, we got two of them to test out and brainstorm ideas on how they could fit into coursework. With the announcement that there will soon be an iPhone/iTouch SDK this little gizmo is looking pretty promising. Though, there are still some things that could make it much better.

My big gripe, as of now, is that the QuickTime plugin that runs in the mobile Safari browser does not support RTSP streaming. This is unfortunate since our media server streams all the videos in RTSP from a Darwin Streaming Server, which can’t stream via HTTP because of port conflicts with Apache. **Grumble**. One has to wonder why this functionality was left out of the plugin. Browsing the web is fine on the device, and the multi-touch interface is easy to get used to. I can already see the widescreen display being much easier on the eyes when trying to watch films too.

What I am excited for most, however, is to see some of the 3rd party apps that will start popping up once the SDK is released. One of my personal “must see”s is iFlash on the iTouch. iFlash is a great app, especially for language learning, and the iTouch interface feels like it would fit like a glove with iFlash.

The iTouch has also spawned a whole host of “if I knew how to program better” ideas in my mind as well. For one, a web-based home media library to catalog video files on a media server that you can access on the road. No need to load up your iPod with huge files if you can stream them over Wi-Fi when convenient. You can already do this in a very manual sort of way if you set up a webserver in your house and manually edit the pages and files, but it would be great to have a Wordpress-like system by which you could store and access the videos.

That also gets me wondering…why can’t one access a shared iTunes library via the iTouch? Perhaps the practicality of that isn’t as much as is I think. I could see situations where it would come in handy though.

Throughout the later half of my life I’ve been flirting with programming technologies of one sort or another. HTML, JAVA, CSS, PHP, Applescript, and various proprietary scripting languages. Never, though, have I really felt that I could do anything really useful with any of these languages. I just didn’t have the head for programming, and it took too much coding before I could even get anything like a base that I could work from; a working model to tweak and configure. I’ve built some ok websites, and know enough Applescript to get stuff done that I need to, but beyond that I’ve always been very intimidated by programming.

Then I decided to take a look at Ruby on Rails. I had heard good things about Ruby, and I picked up Learn to Program by Chris Pine, which is an introduction to programming in Ruby. Compared to my CS 160 flirtation with JAVA during my freshman year (the class that ultimately led me to spurn CS in favor of Anthropology) Ruby was much more elegant, and required less headache to do simple tasks. Having decided that Ruby was actually approachable, I looked into Rails.

Rails is (as I understand it at this early point) an extension of Ruby that focuses on developing dynamic database-driven web apps. The kicker is that it does a LOT of the setup work for you, provided you can live with adhering to some simple naming and structure conventions. Within 15 minutes you can have a simple web app up and running. It does this by making a few basic assumptions about what you want to accomplish. You have a database, with tables, and in these tables you want to create, edit, and delete elements. Create the database, making sure you name it right, and add a table with some fields, then tell Rails to build the scaffold around that ( a one line terminal command). Presto! You have the basic structure from which to build off of.

I’m only at the point where I’ve been following in some online tutorials, but the ease with which one can create something that is actually functional is a big kicker for me. I don’t want to have to code for days on end in several programming languages just to be able to get to what I would consider a starting point.

I used to be mildly amused by Facebook. It was fun after they allowed groups and started making it more interactive (as opposed to the now defunct Collegefacebook.com). Then they added the apps, which made it slightly more amusing, or so I thought at first. I’ve added a few, but most of them seem really slow. Scrabulous is fun, but barfs out at least a couple times a day. I also get more Zombie, Slayer, Ninja, Pirate, etc requests than I can handle.

But the thing that irks me the most about Facebook, the thing that makes me want to reach out and strangle the developers, is this:

Why must my status updates take the form of “John is…” ?

What if I don’t simply want to declare my immediate status? What if I’d like to give a more general impression of my status, or even *GASP* declare my PAST status? After all, as soon as it is posted it no longer represents my true immediate state of being, but rather my recently passed state. Facebook forces me to be a liar.

One way around this is to use the Twitter app, and have it update your status as well, thus the status takes the form of, “John is twittering ‘Take that facebook!’”. But that is limiting in another way, because then it would seem unnatural to say something like, “John in twittering, ‘John has consumed too much cereal and beer today’”.

Would it really be too much for Facebook to simply leave out the “is” in the status? Would that be too much to ask?

*EDIT* How timely, they just changed the status updates so that you can substitute “is” for anything you want! I take back everything I ever said bad about you Facebook.

*EDIT AGAIN* It seems they removed it as quickly as it had been changed. How…depressing. At least I tasted freedom for a few seconds.

There is an interview with Nancy Jo Johnson over at BlogCritics in which she discusses some very interesting points about where Tibetans are today, what they want, and what that means to her.

She is mostly very even-handed regarding what she sees. She concedes that Tibetans are economically engaged, and generally seem to be enjoying the fruits of their relationship in the fold of China. She tempers this view, however, with what is really a classic case of what Donald Lopez described in “Prisoners of Shangri-La”. Johnson laments what she sees as an abandonment of traditional Tibetanness (read: Buddhism).

Her overly romantic view can most clearly be seen in this comment:

People don’t smile. And when you consider the traditional Tibetan culture, in which people did nothing but smile for thousands of years…

I have the utmost respect for all she’s done for the Tibetans she has helped, but simply put, she is a classic romantic. Speaking in more theoretical terms, this romanticism often has, as it’s base, a subconscious ethnocentrism. Westerners who lament the losses of traditional culture (however sad this may be) fail to realize that people are not museum peices, and culture is not a static phenomenon. It is paternalistic to look at modern Lhasans with materialistic desires and pity them for abandoning their traditional heritage. It robs them of their agency, and assumes that they are simply “confused” in her words.

While it is regrettable that China is not doing more to nurture traditional Tibetan identity it shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. The GIE in India’s campaigns to establish an independent Tibet (not to be confused with the DL’s more tempered requests for autonomy within China) are essentially a nationalist movement, with the preservation of a distinct Tibetan identity (they have often discouraged Tibetans from marrying non-Tibetans) as its core goal, at least publicly. When ethnic nationalism is seen as the problem, then it is somewhat logical (though unfortunate) that China would not rush to nurture that feeling of ethnic separateness.

In a way we should look favorably on the fact that China is taking steps to keep Tibetans engaged in the greater system of things. It should hardly be a surprise that when given the chance to be engaged many Tibetans, most of whose families lived in subsistence-level serfdom for generations, would take those opportunities.

Lately I feel a lot like this:

I’ve been developing a very solid opinion that this kind of thing is becoming the norm nowadays for technology. Companies release hardware that has great potential to do truly great and useful things, and then they completely drop the ball on the implementation of it. Another case in point:

The Elgato Turbo.264 H.264 Video Conversion Stick

Anyone who does video conversion knows that the process is long, boring, and wastes time that one could be doing getting more important things done. Video conversion is very hardware intensive, and anything that could make that process faster and less boring is very much appreciated.

Elgato had it right in concept: a USB add-on that would take the load off your processor for converting to H.264 video. Problem is they funneled its use through their severely limited software, which only allows a couple different conversion presets, does not support anamorphic or widescreen ratios, etc and so forth. Not only did they make a complete bottleneck of the interface software, but they couldn’t be bothered to release an API for independent developers to write more useful software, or make existing software integrate with it.

Boo-urns.

While I love iPods, and wouldn’t really use any other player that is on the market right now, I grow less and less enthusiastic about the newest, bestest iPods coming out. I deal with iPods so much it sometimes makes me want to puke. I have at least 20 sitting on my living room floor right now waiting for student audio to be loaded onto them. I love the interface and the look, but honestly I can see so much more potential in these little boxes then Apple is currently putting out. The biggest problem is that even if someone saw potential, and had the means to create a program for the iPod, or even a new OS, they face big hurdles, mainly because everything that goes onto the iPod has to go through iTunes.

Why is this the big problem?

Because what this means is that everything, excluding songs that you yourself rip, is laden with the Apple DRM. This includes games and other programs that go onto the iPod. Now, to me this is simply ridiculous. If Apple has to kowtow to the music industry and cripple their music with DRM, fine, and if they want to do the same for programs bought through iTunes, I guess that makes a bit of sense too, but to completely lock out any third party programs that do not go through iTunes…that sucks. As such, anyone who wanted to make games or programs for the ipod would need to set up a licensing agreement with Apple, something I’m sure is beyond the scope of small developers, and almost certainly beyond the scope of open-source, freebie-producing one-off developers.

This is a shame, because if Apple didn’t cripple the iPod directly out of the factory then the iPod could be just as useful a tool as an Apple computer. If independent developers were not locked out of programming for the iPod then we could have just as robust a community of free software developers as we have for the Mac OS X operating system.

Until the day that Apple relinquishes the iPod from its development lock any version Apple puts out will be simply less-than it could be.

The ultimate option would be to simply replace the OS with an open-source one, but the current options, like Rockbox, and iPodLinux, are much too inadequate. Rockbox is drab and slow, with an interface that is still in B&W (which makes putting it on a 5G iPod Video a rediculous proposition) and iPodLinux is even slower, buggier, and seems like it was made simply for kids to do useless things like put DOOM on it. Also, good luck getting either to easily install on an ipod that is less than 2 years old unless you are relatively good with Linux.

Edit:

Altering Log has a good post about the possible reasons why there is no iPod SDK, however, there are a couple points which don’t bear out, such as freeware producers taking market share away from Apple. As of right now there are only 18 games available on the iTunes store. In the 2 years that games have been available for the iPod there have only been 18 games. Not only does that suggest a lack of enthusiasm on the part of Apple to make games, (heck, even with outside companies like EA getting in on the action there is still a measly selection) but it also suggests that the revenue from games is not exactly a huge selling point for Apple. Also, as someone mentioned in the forums, more options for games, or actual apps that could do low-level PDA stuff, would actually sell more iPods, and selling more iPods would net Apple much more dough than selling a few games for $5 here and there I’m sure.

Preparation for and execution of the beginning of the semester here has rendered my blogging non-existant. There has been no shortage of work to rend my sanity in twain. Despite this, this semester seems to have a good amount of potential. The faculty seem to have taken to the new opportunities that have presented themselves from our Mac conversion. The lab itself is slowly becoming more solid technologically, and things are coming together in general. I even finagled a brand new Mac Pro (Quad Core, 8 gig ram, ridiculous amounts of hard disk space) into the new purchases, and am aghast at the sheer power. I can’t wait for things to die down so I can really put it through its paces.

My personal projects, however, are languishing. I didn’t get anywhere near the amount of reading done I had hoped. I still haven’t been able to start learning Tibetan. My banjo lessons were going good until this past month when all the work came to a head. I can’t seem to shake all the little details that swim through my head about work projects. I know this is bad, and that I should leave work stuff at work, but I am a project-oriented individual, and to leave things half-finished just bugs the crap out of me.

I really wanted to do a video documentary project this summer. The plan was to do some filming and interviews with ONA (Otaku no Anime), the anime fan group here. Unfortunately, due to my awful planning it fell right smack-dab on the weekend of the IALLT conference. Bummer. Now I need to find something new to investigate.