George Sudarkoff

iSwitched, therefore iLive

So, I switched. From the world where every suit you buy almost fits as is and doesn't cost too much, but you have to buy a new one every month because it wears out and its pockets are full of crap and you don't know where it came from, to a world where you can get a suit for free but it doesn't quite fit, it's ugly and you have to sew your own sleeves to it, and finally to a world where you just buy the suit and you wear it, and it feels good - my journey was long and painful, but now it's over and I love where I am ended.

I have a dream

My sweetest dream for the last few years (of a technological kind, at least) was to have a full-blown home automation system. I want to be able to check my email, read news, program a DVR, AC or coffeemaker, and to control a security system, lights, music, etc. from any room in the house. And I want things happening automagically without me wasting my precious time. I want technology to deliver on its decades-old promises already!

Although this all sounds quite feasible there is one big "but" if you consider implementing it with the current state of things. To administer the system of this complexity will be a full-time job. And to become a servant of my own home automation system would be the biggest joke of all times!

Palm OS is dead

I was cleaning up the address book on my PDA the other day when I suddenly realized that Palm OS is going to die pretty soon! Yes, I think its days are counted and here's why.

Programming for the Palm OS platform has a very distinct "embedded" smell to it. Memory management is a mess, supporting different screen resolutions is a major pain in the butt, and instead of a real file system developers have to deal with this stupid notion that everything is a database. There might have been reasons for it a few years ago but not anymore. And Palm fails to recognize this fact and deal with it appropriately.

By no means am I an expert in Palm OS internals; I had only a brief encounter with it as a developer, but when I look at my Sony Clie UX50, I don't understand why oh why all these limitations. I remember my first computer - it had a 66 MHz processor, 4 MB of memory, 210 MB of disk space and yet it ran a multi-task operating system and all bells and whistles that came with it. Why on Earth does my PDA lag behind? It has a CPU twice as fast, a separate co-processor for dealing with multimedia (which it does pretty well, thanks to Sony), twenty-five times more RAM, a few times roomier "disk", etc...

If the course of things sticks to Moore's law for at least one year longer, Palm OS is going to be so out of touch with reality that it won't make any sense developing for it whatsoever. Heck, maybe that's why Sony is retrieving itself from this market?

Urban Beauty

My lovely wife waiting for a train at a BART station.