Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Using flash? Your site and skills are sold to Adobe.

Well, not exactly sold, but 'at the mercy of'.

You should always keep in mind the disadvantages of relying or learning too much flash; yeah, learning is not bad, but you should be careful what you're learning.

Remember that Flash, shockwave are Adobe product, it's Adobe's property, but your work (your work on Flash), your skills, or you heavily flash ridden website rely on these products. It depends on Adobe how your flash work displays, and also depends on Adobe on what devices you flash work is displayed. Any security vulnerability in Adobe's product may be exploitable via your flash work, and unknowingly you (and Adobe) will be to blame.

And these are not hypothetical examples, but these have been already proven. For starters, Adobe is no longer supported on mobile devices and on Linux, it's been discontinued and your flash (or future flash work based on future versions of flash) work wont work on these devices, even though you want to.

To businessmen with a company's website (who very commonly use flash), all this means that your company is already more dependent on yet, more companies, which no business owner likes; your customers may have a bad experience for your eye-candy flash animation and might not even consider your products simply cause your website didn't open on their device, or they were having technical issues related to flash. To most businesses, a customer wants to see your products, get product information and find information on your products easily, what will they do with eye candy? Even Facebook and Google doesn't have that, why do you need it? People want your website to open fast and provide them the information they need as fast as it opened, they don't want to get hogged by slow animation and loading times which makes your website impossible to view with slow internet connections!

These are the reasons for why not Flash/Shockwave or any propitiatory plugin. With these technologies, you're never your own master, Adobe is your master and Adobe is all about money, not about you.

So go for HTML5 and webgl, they're all about you, all about standards and benefits to the public without any political or business motivation.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Low and high frequency sound collection.

 Download from -

http://minus.com/mlUGvWe6m

Contains one minute clips of frequencies from 15hz to 25Khz.

Although the sounds are right, your player might be wrong. Some players produce the wrong frequency. For me Kmplayer worked.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

"Can't establish a reliable data connection to the server" -- android + google account.

This's a fairly common problem which people are facing with Android.

Apart from more common solutions like resetting the phone and logging in via youtube, first you should check if you set the date and time correct or not.

Monday, May 7, 2012

Debian 2 year's release cycle is good for the Desktop.

Debian always got this criticism of long release cycles. 2 years in development of GNU software is revolutionary, but still Debian continues to churn out new stable distros at a snail's pace.

But actually, in my experience this kind of cycle is good for casual users who require only a few set of software to survive instead of complications like the latest DE, software or Window manager.

In KDE and Libreoffice at least, it happens that after each upgrade, there's a regression. And you know those regressions will be ignored long to cause major annoyance (you know the KDE devs will be implementing 'features' instead in their 6 months release cycle), and ultimately these buggy updates with regressions will be pushed to unstable and testing... and nothing can stop it from being pushed.

So, after each update of the distro, there's an element of surprise.

But the sable branch on the other hand will remain with the old version, the few tolerable bugs that existed will continue to exist and people will find workaround for them, and many times the fixes will be backported and updates will be provided, then for the newer software we have the backports, the only problem with them is that it's difficult for the average joe to install form backports. Maybe Ubuntu software centre should be modified show graphical packages form backports also.

Also drivers and kernel can be backported, solving most of the hardware compatibility issues.

People who ask for comparatively newer packages (5%) can usually handle the small inconvenience with testing, but not the average non-IT guy.

So ultimately: Debian's stable's release cycles matches the average user's requirement of a stable and secure desktop.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Philips 192EL2 review.

I don't own many Philips products around; this must have been the first few, and I'm not having a good impression on Philips's QA.

The first monitor I bought did not work... it just displayed a blank screen, nothing else.

So I got it replaced.

For the good part, the brightness is fabulous, and colors are good but the firmware is equally bad.

It's so bad that you have to reset the monitor at times in order to get it's sharpness back.

At times the auto adjustment doesn't work well and you can see some parts of the screen as blurred (yes, the monitor is at it's native resolution). Solution is to reset the settings to factory default.

I would've liked it if there were presets for settings, but following the bad firmware and resets, I wont work hard storing them.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Samsung Galaxy Y review

This's one of the cheapest Android phones around and is good value for money.

At this price range you really can't complaint about missing features, but still for the review, the phone is not very slow (very fast than you Windows computer) but you can complain, yes, sometimes you do get a few seconds delay when opening the desktop after a long browsing session, or opening calls/contacts if you have a lot of entries in them.

IMO the battery life is ok if you set the brightness to low, but if it's at max, you may have to lug the charger around. Notice you have to set it to high brightness outdoors.

Low resolution display and camera come with the price.

Verdict: It's a good phone for business application with Android expanding the possibilities, but bad as an entertainment phone (cause of low resolution display, slow processor and less ram).