Macbook Air: should I, shouldn’t I debate…

Macbook Air

For years I’ve been arguing about the advantages of small format computers.

I even bought one of the first EeePC netbooks from Asus with it’s 7″ display (that is to small, by the way).

On the other way I never felt very interested in an iPad, although I recognise it is a beautiful piece of engineering.

I always felt that an eBook reader like the Kindle would be more suited (a Kindle fits for example the inside pocket of a coat easily while the iPad doesn’t) for a “on the road” device, while for computers an Eee or the Macbook Air would be perfect for computing.

Now, this brings me to my dilemma:

Looking at the alternatives, there are excellent machines out there that could take the Air out of the Macbook in any comparison that you could imagine.

I love the Lenovo Thinkpads and they are cheaper, more powerful and equally robust, but they can’t be found anywhere in Portugal.

On the other hand Apple has in Portugal the distribution channels that make it easy to go to a store and pick up one Macbook Air (something that few years ago was a mirage).

Also the reviews of the Macbook Air by people that really use it (not paid reviewers) rave about its qualities.

Quoting Maria João on the computer:

As for me, a demanding user of computers (home and work), I’ll say: The MBA 11’ is the best Mac I have owned so far. I love it.

Obviously she is delighted with the machine, and if you read through the review you’ll see that she points the bad points about it also.

Was the MBA enough for my demands (limited RAM, HD, ports, screen size)? No, if it was to be my only machine, I concluded. But yes, if it was to become the iMac’s sidekick.

The things that worry me the most is the glossy screen and probably the price of the high end 11″ macbook air vs. its performance.

I don’t worry much about the 13″ version as I wouldn’t ever buy it.

Then I have another problem: computers overload. I have a MBP from 2008, a Toshiba from 2008, a EeePC from 2008, an iMac from 2010…

Do I really need another computer?

Can I justify the price?

Hm, decisions, decisions…

Publicidade no Kindle será o futuro dos livros electrónicos?

A amazon anunciou que vai começar a vender um eBook reader kindle mais barato no qual vão colocar publicidade para compensar o custo reduzido.

No entanto ao ver o valor do “desconto” verifica-se que é de apenas 25 dólares, e portanto serve apenas para enganar um pouco a carteira na hora da compra, ficando o custo extra para mais tarde na forma de publicidade.

Se ao menos o sistema deixasse de mostrar publicidade assim que o utilizador visse os $25 de anúncios?…

A verdade é que este kindle serve apenas para a Amazon testar novas formas de vender livros no canal livro electrónico.

Se o público aceitar a publicidade, que diz a Amazon será apenas no screen saver do kindle e no menu principal, então será fácil perceber que num upgrade de firmware futuro será dada (ou não) a opção a todos os utilizadores para verem publicidade.

Isto é uma medida que visa aumentar as receitas da Amazon e não baixar o custo final ao utilizador, por mais que a Amazon tente vender a ideia contrária.

O futuro dos livros electrónicos não passa, a meu ver, por publicidade, mas antes por novos formatos, mais próximos do papel e que não obriguem a conversões de PDFs ou HTML para eBooks.

Passa também por novas tecnologias no campo da E-Ink e muito possivelmente na introdução de cor e taxas de refrescamento mais elevadas (há até quem esteja entusiasmado em lá meter vídeo, imagine-se!).

O Kindle continua no entanto a ser um brilhante leitor de livros electrónicos.

Tive a oportunidade de comparar um Kindle directamente com o meu BeBook de há 3 anos e a tecnologia e-ink está muito melhor, o contraste e a legibilidade são fantásticas.

Para além disso o preço do kindle é agora suficientemente apelativo (mesmo a versão com Whispernet) para considerar a substituição do Bebook.

No entanto nunca me passaria pela cabeça substituir por uma versão com anúncios.

Blog pageviews autocorrelation – When to post?

sixhat.net Pageview Autocorrelation

How can a Slashdot, or digg, front page affect your blog pageviews over time? I’m not talking about those huge amounts of traffic that pounce servers when you are being hit at 500 requests per second, but… what happens after? Is that reflected also in the days following the event? And what about non-famous blog posts? Do they affect pageviews in the days following publication? Is there a correlation?

Today I took the pageviews data of this blog for the past year. It is a timeseries so I calculated its autocorrelation. Autocorrelation measures the cross-relation between a signal and itself, showing hidden time patterns. Autocorrelation lays between -1.0 and 1.0, -1.0 meaning full anti-correlation, 1.0 full correlation, and 0.0 no type of correlation at all.

You can see in the above figure that the daily pageviews of sixhat.net are positively correlated during the first days after a blog article is published. After 2 days, that blog article doesn’t really influence the pageviews anymore. Another observation is that you have this weekly pattern observed in the correlation given by the 7th bar.

So, how can this help your blog posting strategy?

The first conclusion from this graph is that you shouldn’t really let time pass since last posting. Blogging is a regular thing and after 1 or 2 days you lost all the influence your last post had on you pageviews. After one week without posting all your pageviews are due to organic search and are not influenced by your latest and greatest rambling about Autocorrelation.

The second point to make is that this only applies to this blog in particular. You should analyse your own blog. Download the data from your Google Analytics account and use Matlab or R (free) to compute the autocorrelation. In matlab use the function autocorr(), in R use the function acf().

Besides pageviews you might want to test for other variables: click through rate, returning users, bouncing rate, etc… You might get insightful information about the performance of your blog that might help you decide your publishing strategy.

R versus Matlab in…

R versus Matlab in <put your domain here> has been a long discussion. I end up using both, but I find that I use Matlab for more simple things and R for things where I want the highest quality in figure output or where the extra mile of not having a fine polished IDE is compensated in the end by the results.

I agree that the argument of R having a stranger IDE is annoying, but developing one might require some extra time… but as in Open source I think that you must iterate, and often, and R as become very good, stable and powerful. Many are flocking to R even without ever starting with Matlab. That’s good.

via R versus Matlab in Mathematical Psychology.

Nokia are you the new Palm?…

Palm was once a company that had great PDAs… They ran something called Garnet OS and they ruled. Then they started selling Palm devices (PDAs and Phones) with Windows Software. Then… they failed for some years and they didn’t innovate until they decided to make a new OS based on linux. But as they were so late… they basically had to scrape the company and be sold to HP (another company that once had a PDA/Phone division and was trying to recover some market share). A couple years forward and now HP announced the new Palms (Ups…) No Palm to be seen anywhere. Palm RIP. The devices (that use an evolution of that linux based OS) are now branded HP.

Now, Nokia.

Nokia was once a company that had great phones… and now some guys from microsoft run the company, and the company is announcing windows mobile phones… hm… [you can fill the rest]…

Java Hangs Converting 2.2250738585072012e-308

class runhang {
public static void main(String[] args) {
  System.out.println("Test:");
  double d = Double.parseDouble("2.2250738585072012e-308");
  System.out.println("Value: " + d);
 }
}

via Java Hangs When Converting 2.2250738585072012e-308 – Exploring Binary.

Don’t try this on production machines… :)

Reading through gestures – OpenKinect+Processing+Text2Speech

I’ve been playing with a Microsoft Kinect for some time. I want to use it in ways to provide useful interaction with traditionally difficult environments for the mouse. Public exhibitions or presentations are examples of those situations where the kinect might do a good job. The above is a simple interaction test with kinect that tests the integration of different things: The kinect and the open source drivers (obviously), the Processing language and the java wrappers, the Text2Speech capabilities of Mac OS X, and the Real time reading of news (in this case from the NYT). This is just a first demo. I’d like to see in the future some integration with other technologies like openCV for face recognition, openNI skeleton tracking, and multitouch using TISCH, but lets take one step at a time.

Google is becoming irrelevant? Is Facebook ready to takeover?

Spam is a pain. In emails and in search. Google with the monopoly of search made itself part of a SEO game where on the engine side only google mattered. From this we’ve seen specialists of Spam gaming google’s algorithm. This created a negative feedback and now first page results are becoming irrelevant. That’s why Google has been trying desperately to stop this negative feedback by changing the “algorithm” in the past weeks.

On the other hand we have facebook using moms and grannies social life (some  argue that it is is the lack of, but let’s forget that for now) to improve results through social graph theory, and would love to make Google irrelevant.While Google thought Local would be the future, Facebook found that local only has value connected with Social and is beating Google at its game.

Is this true or important? (Who cares anyway?)

In the statistics of Sixhat Pirate Parts I’m seeing an increase on the number of grannies (sorry, visitors) Facebook sends over (and I had deleted my account on Facebook definitively) while Google visitors are slightly declining. Worried? No… the nature of these negative feedbacks will end up destroying who ever comes after… We just need to “surf” the dynamics of it…