Google link soup: Back to WEB 0.1

Only recently I took a look at the Google reader / My Stuff page which is part of the iGoogle portal. And boy, is this a mess... (Screen-shot on the right->)
Fifteen Underlined links, one that is an image (the 'Google Reader' image and one in small print light blue at the bottom left.)
Seven buttons in two different heights, all different widths, one with an icon, one greyed and one button that is actually a dropdown box and a search box. Eight clickable menu items of which two have an icon in front of the text, two have it after the text, three have no icon and one is printed bold.And still they did not have enough ways to leave this page so there is a 'More' menu of which the last entry is the option 'Even More..'
Google apps on the web is a horrible UI nightmare. I really don't understand how they ever expect to take over the desktop from a browser centric OS if they continue on this path. Let's face it: it is already extremely hard to create serious office applications that run in the browser and meet even the minimum level of usability. I even dare to say it is impossible using the current state of the browser technology. I currently use a browser app myself on a daily basis and even though it's very well thought out, does everything we need and has a slick user interface, it makes me itch every time I use it. Every day I try at least ten times to move, copy or delete a file by clicking my right mouse button. Which brings up the browser context menu...
And when I move through the explorer-like files list it annoys me that every step through the tree just takes anything between two and ten seconds. So why did we spend the last decade in doubling computer performance every year to get faster interaction if we are now giving this all away because everything must run in the browser ?

Name your Number : Great Joy !

Recently I stumbled on site named WikiDump that loosely archives interesting but deleted items from Wikipedia. There I found an an entry on the 'Zuckerman number' that intrigued me.

A Zuckerman number is an integer that is divisible by the product of its digits in a given number base. All integers between 1 and the base number are Zuckerman numbers. No integer with a zero as one or more of its digits in base b can be a Zuckerman number in that base. In base 10, the first few Zuckerman numbers with more than one digit are 11, 12, 15, 24, 36, 111, 112, 115, 128, 132, 135, 144, 175, 212, 216, 224, 312, 315, 384.

And here is the Wikipedia entry that discusses the deletion.
What I considered strange about this is that the definition of this 'special numbers' seems quite valid. Although the usefulness of this (other than making it a programming exercise) seems arbitrary, I see no reason why mr. Zuckerman does not deserve his small area of fame for discovering it. So I decided to dig deeper...
The definition can also be found on PlanetMath, which claims to reference 'J. J. Tattersall, Elementary number theory in nine chapters, p. 86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005)'
Now this book is by no means a fake or in any way humorous collection of real mathematics. I briefly went over it and checked some facts and biographies, and it all seems pretty legit. The tricky part is that on 'Google Books' the referenced page 86 is not present. Mr Zuckerman himself though is present on several other pages, proving that he is in fact a significant mathematician. In fact he was co-author of 'An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers' (By Niven, Zuckerman and Montgomery) which is a book that is often referred to in math studies.
But when we search for the other author, Ivan Niven, we find that there is actually something called a 'Nivenmorphic' number. And the definition for this is ' an integer that is divisible by the sum of its digits when written in that base'. Which by now sounds familiar. To add a little confusion though, the official name for this seems to be a 'Harshad number'. And Harshad means 'great joy' in Sanskrit. So who said mathematics was no fun...?

Went over the world.

Some time ago I bought a AC/DC power adapter for my notebook. It's an amazing little device that takes anything from 12 Volt DC to or 110-240 VAC as input and supplies anything from 12 to 24 VDC to a laptop. It came complete with a 12 V car plug, a mains lead and a set of adapter plugs for only 20 Euro. It was made in the People's Republic of China, where the percentage of people that speak English is probably negligible. But the packing-designers assume that there should be some English on the box to give it something like a professional look.
So here it is:

'In My Mind Do Not Forget You Even'
'Went Over The World'

(note that the last sentence is technically correct...)

It looks like they brought in some random phrases. Just like European companies sometimes copied Chinese symbols from the window of the nearest Chinese restaurant to give their products an oriental look. But where do you find texts like this? Or is this an image of a typical 'European Pub' in Peking...

Multi-Multi Tasking

Multi tasking is not my thing. Apart maybe from listening to music while ironing, any other combination just does not work for me. When I'm doing 'serious' work (like writing software, design electronics, create a report, just anything that requires a significant level of concentration) it takes a while to get started. And any interruption, no matter how short, will cause my mind to reset and start all over. It's even worse when there are two or more tasks at hand that have equal priority. Anything (e-mail, phone, colleague bringing coffee..) can trigger me to shift my attention from one to the other and if this happens often enough none of the tasks get finished at all. And I'm not sure having many arms ( like this Indian god) would help. It's in the mind.
Well, a lengthy intro to the real reason for this post. Someone pointed me to this video on YouTube. How nice it would be if you could replace Guitar Hero with Visual Studio and the Rubiks cube with some kitchen gear so you could prepare fresh pizza while you are coding...

Criss Cross Platforming Speedup

I've written a lot so far about my fascination for cross platform development. Unfortunately my time is limited so I do not spend as much time on it as I would like. And every time I find a little time to pick it up I find to my surprise that others are proceeding down the multi platform road at a much larger pace. Like the Mono team, lead by the the brilliant Miguel de Icaza . Check out StackOverflow podcast #61 to find out he's also a amusing speaker (which is a well known rarity among good programmers...)

Here he also announces the introduction of Mono tools for Visual Studio. This will allow simultaneous development on Linux an Windows. And since Mono is also working towards iPhone application development it is getting really interesting. I believe that we are now slowly working towards the real future of software development. It will not be long before it is relatively easy to create applications that run on Windows, Windows Mobile, Mac, Linux and the iPhone. Something I would not have thought possible two years ago.

Hardware vendors should NOT make software

Hardware and software manufacturing are two different professions. Really. Believe me. Trust me. And if your good at one of these stay away from the other (unless you are Apple.)

The best example is a piece of software that is made by one of the largest and most successful manufacturer of everyday hardware: The 'Nokia PC Suite'.
It is definitely the worst piece of software I have used in years. First it's the only Windows program I've ever seen that somehow tries to render it's own fonts. Look at the image on the right, showing the barely readable menu. And believe me: this image is not compressed or manipulated...
Nice detail is that the Settings menu first item is 'Settings..' which almost sounds like there is way to change Settings like font or fontsize. Well, it's not. You can select where you want your popup when your phone is ringing or if you want to send 'Diagnostic information'. Exactly the two things I could care less. I want to switch off automatic updates ! Thes updates come on regular basis and you get this annoying balloontip warning every time you switch your PC on, so in the end you just have to agree.
Upgrading however has a totally different meaning to Nokia then for example Microsoft. A Nokia 'Upgrade' means downloading a complete 35 MB installation file which leads you through the complete installation every time like it was the first time. It decompresses itself to a giant 290 Megabytes and you cannot leave it in the background since you have to agree to the license, answer the standard installation questions and click to finish. Finally it even wants you to RESTART your computer ! The only funny thing about this is that this is the only window in the suite that uses a clearly readable font.
So the question that really bothers me is 'Why ?' Why can't a company like Nokia, known for it's high level of engineering produce a decent piece of software to support over a billion phones ?
I suppose they just have it developed by trainees that dropped out of the hardware engineering course...

I'm not alone in .NET Cross Platform land

So I'm not the only one to work on cross platform .NET applocations (how come I'm not really surprised..?) The Banshee Project is a cross-platform multi media player based on .NET and Mono. Though my only experience with the Banshee player is not positive ( It could not play MP3 without hickups on my EEEPC ) it is a great project to show the power of cross platform development. And I'm sure one of these 95 developeres working on it will eventually solve the EEEPC problem.

Banshee creator Aaron Bockover talks about it in a recent Hanselminutes Podcast. Both the show and the shownotes mention that it will run on Windows, but I actually could not find it on the Banshee homepage. On his Blog he mentions working on it, (despite of his aversion to Windows programming) but the status of it is not really obvious.