Dan East

I recently evaluated the HTC Touch Vogue (US Cellular branded CDMA phone) for a few weeks. I tried my best to get this phone to a state so I could use it as my primary phone, and I just about succeeded. However, in the end, the hardware simply had too many handicaps conspiring against it.

As with all devices, there are two distinct components that combine to produce the overall functionality and user experience of the device: hardware and software. As far as the software goes, I tried pretty much everything available. I experimented with Google’s Android, but eventually ended up with the most cutting edge version of Windows Mobile available – 6.5 running HTC’s TouchFlo shell in place of the default Windows home screen. Of course Windows 6.5 isn’t officially available for this device (nor is Android for that matter), but obviously it can be done. I found a good commercial 3rd party SIP (onscreen keyboard) that worked really well, and if it weren’t for that the device would have been a complete non-starter. Typing with a stylus is a ridiculous notion in this day and age.

So as I’ve already mentioned, the hardware was the ultimate reason for doing away with the device. In some ways it was simply inadequate, while in others it was poorly designed. Here are the specific hardware deficiencies I encountered.

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Unfortunately I’m becoming something of an expert on repairing or reviving electronic devices that have been submerged in liquids.  Here’s a short list of what me, my wife, my 4 kids and our cats have been able to soak:

• Kyocera Phenom – Ranch Dressing
• Nintendo DS – Sprite
• Motorola Razr – Cat pee
• iPod Touch – Washing machine
• Motorola Razr – Dr. Pepper
• Samsung Cell Phone – Washing machine
• FRS radio – Toilet
• Blackberry Curve -Toilet

And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.  And yes, all those devices lived to tell the tale.

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Minor update: I now use swig for my C++ / Lua binding, and I like it much better.

I’ve been using the Lua programming language for several years now as an embedded scripting language in a game engine.  In order to bind C++ classes into the Lua environment I use a 3rd-party library called tolua.

Recently I kept running into a bug with a new class interfaced via tolua that would manifest differently between Release and Debug builds.  The symptom was apparent corruption of other unrelated objects within Lua.  The specific situation was accessing a member of a class that was also a class.  Here’s an example to make things clearer:

class B {
int n;
};
class A {
B b;
};
//create an object a of type A
A a;


Then in lua when accessing the nested class the bug would be triggered:

a.b.n=5

tolua passes instances of C++ classes into lua using simple user data, which is basically just a pointer.  To reduce memory overhead there is no metadata passed into lua – just the pointer.  So whenever an C++ object is accessed in lua, tolua has to look the pointer up in a table or list in order to determine what the object’s type is.  This is a design flaw, because memory pointers are not necessarily unique to a specific class.  Specifically, the first member variable in a C++ class has the same pointer as its parent class.  In the above example, &a and &a.b will have the exact same memory address, even though they are two different objects of different types! So the limitation is that, for two classes interfaced via tolua, one cannot be the very first member variable of the other.

The workaround is straightforward – either rearrange the order of member variables in your class so the interfaced nested class is no longer first, or place a dummy variable in front of it.  If you do not have the flexibility to modify the class you are exporting then you may be in trouble – this would require fixing the design flaw in tolua itself.

I’m posting this in the hopes that it will keep someone else from wasting their time.

It appears the CAPTCHA used to keep spam comments out of my blog was broken, which prevented any commenting at all.  Oops.  Well, that explains the total dearth of comments for the last several months.

Well, a matter of minutes ago, while sitting here reading the news at my desk on my computer, I heard a loud “POP” sound, like a firecracker going off.  It was pretty loud – enough to make me jump.  A foot away from my arm was a Duracell 9V battery, and apparently one of the cells in it exploded.  It warped the top where the connectors are, and popped the bottom loose.  I felt it immediately and it was room temperature.  It was not connected to anything or touching anything – it was simply laying on its side on my desk.  Then less than two minutes later another cell exploded.  I’ve got my Blackberry sitting here video recording the battery in case a third cell explodes.  So far its up to 11 minutes and no third POP.

This is really disconcerting.  I could understand if the terminals were shorted, and the battery got really hot causing it to rupture.  But this thing was just sitting there, disconnected, not touching anything.  It’s been on my desk like that for weeks – I don’t even know if it has been used or not.  The fact that two different cells exploded within minutes of each other is very odd.  I wonder if the barometric pressure is falling, causing pressure inside the battery to stress the sealed cell and pop it open.  Right now the pressure is 29.88.  I just consulted a history chart.  The pressure was 30.18 24 hours ago, and it has been dropping steadily.  However that can’t be the cause, because the barometric pressure was even lower than that 5 days ago on December the 1st.

This  reminds me that a couple months ago I found another 9V battery on my desk (I don’t remember the brand) that also had also spontaneously exploded at some point, without being connected to anything.

Well, my Blackberry has been recording for 30 minutes now and no third explosion.  So maybe the fireworks are over for tonight.

My son and daughter both got new DS Lites for Christmas. We purchased Nerf Armor for them both, knowing that they would be heavily used and dropped often. Well, around two months ago, my son dropped his DS, while it was open, onto solid concrete. One quick glance at it was all it took to get that sinking feeling in my stomach – the top LCD panel was toast. A crack ran diagonally from one corner to the other, and only a sliver of screen at the bottom actually rendered pixels. The Nerf Armor didn’t save it, but the fact that the screen was open when it was dropped was probably the main reason it was damaged.

So I began searching for replacement LCD panels. Having done quite a bit of electronic repairs in the past, I decided I would try swapping out the panels myself. I found some at various online retailers for $40-$50, but most were out of stock, and all were priced too high. By the time I would pay shipping and buy the special screwdriver required to open a NDS Lite, I would have had $70 in parts just to attempt a repair on a $129 product. So my son made due with only the bottom screen for a few weeks (hopefully that served as a good lesson in being extra careful with expensive electronic devices). I eventually started looking for LCD panels again, and found one for sale on eBay for $4.98. Yes, you read right. $4.98 USD, with $10 shipping from Hong Kong. I read through the user’s feedback, and it was good, however I learned the shipping would take around two weeks, and that buyers received no communication from the seller at all. So a couple clicks of the mouse, and less than 10 days later the new LCD panel arrived (didn’t receive one single email from the seller as expected).

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For those of you looking for the actual R7000 repair, I get to that at the very bottom of this blog. No, the power cord was not the repair.

I am the proud owner of a KLH R7000 tuner / receiver. It is a 600 watt receiver with Dolby Digital / DTS / Dolby Pro Logic II surround sound decoding, and a plethora of video and audio inputs and outputs. It has composite, super and even component video inputs and outputs, to allow easy switching of various video sources without having to resort to an A/B switch.

The reason I’m a proud owner of this receiver isn’t because I am in possession of this low-end, budget piece of hardware. It’s because it didn’t cost me a cent. Well, actually, it cost me $1.95, but I’ll get to that later. This receiver gets good reviews – when it works. It sold for as low as $99 at Best Buy (based on my googling), and has very good audio qualities for the price. The problem is they seem to die pretty quickly – usually in a matter of several months. So how did I happen across one of these receivers? Well, one day I was hauling off the trash (around here we have refuse centers where we take our trash and recyclables) and happened to notice a pristine-looking tuner / receiver in one of the trash bins. The power cord had been cut off, but besides that, it looked brand new. I snagged it up and took it home, where it sat for a good month before I finally decided to check the thing out.

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I’ve been using Google News (news.google.com) for a couple years now as my primary site to keep up with the news. Basically what Google News does is crawl hundreds of news sites and group their articles by topic. So for example, if there was a large earthquake, Google News would “feature” a news story from one of the news sites by using the headline and introductory sentences from the selected article. Underneath that it would list the headlines from two additional articles from other news sites covering the same event, followed by just the names of four other sites covering the story. At the bottom of the entry is a link that will list every article that falls under that category, which is a collection of hundreds to thousands of articles.

Now as much as I like Google News, which enables me to quickly jump to numerous articles about a single topic, allowing me to absorb more information and viewpoints, it is not without its faults. So here they are – nine problems I encounter with Google News on a regular basis.

1. Biased stories. With fairly regular frequency, stories with extreme bias are featured. These are articles spinning the story in an outright false way. This is one of my biggest issues with Google News – it sometimes provides exposure to an “article” that doesn’t adhere to journalistic standards in even the loosest sense. Often these are blog entries and not actual news articles.  Here’s the main headlining Entertainment story from April 20, 2008, taken from the site “hecklerspray”: Sandra Bullock Almost Killed To Death By Drugged-Up Driver, “Nineties heartthrob Sandra Bullock has narrowly escaped death after her car was hit by a drug-crazed female driver. “  Now, besides the terrible grammar in the headline, the article bends the truth.  No-one one was injured in this accident, so how was it she was almost “Killed to Death”?  Also check out the “drug-crazed” female driver.  Nothing like a little colorful adjectives to spice things up.  The funny thing is the driver was intoxicated on alcohol, not drugs, and that article even mentions the fact further on down.  Yet anyone reading just the headlines on Google News would have a completely wrong impression of what happened.  How in the world did a site like “hecklerspray” get on Google’s list of sites to retrieve news from?
2. Broken links. At least weekly I click on a Google News link only to find that the webpage is no longer available at the news site.
3. Dated articles. This is a very substantial problem with Google News, and is best illustrated with an example. Say a prominent murder has occurred, and later in the day they catch the murderer. Google News will still display news stories from a few hours earlier with as much preference as newer stories. Even though the initial articles are only a matter of hours older, they are light years behind since they were written before additional news broke. This problem is exacerbated when a dated article is the headline for the topic, and the headline contains incorrect or grossly out of date information.
4. Spoilers. Do you watch reality shows like American Idol or Survivor? If you do, and happen to miss an episode where someone is voted off, then you’d better stay away from Google News. Twice in as many weeks the American Idol vote off results were spoiled for me by Google News headlines. Today’s main headline under Entertainment was American Idol: It’s over for Amanda. Well, that pretty much let that cat out of the bag.
5. Off-topic text. On occasion Google will grab text from a news site that is not part of the actual article text – often this is text from an error message or other information on the page unrelated to the specific article. I’ve seen text under a headline read “The page you are looking for cannot be found”. Just today the headlining article for all of Google News was from The Washington Post and was entitled An Antiwar Blockade Amid the Apathy Armada. The descriptive text under the headline, which is supposed to give a summary of what the cryptic headline is about, read “Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site.” So for some reason Google grabbed part of the Post’s policies for posting comments as the summary for the article.
6. Loosely related articles. Often, Google will group together many articles that aren’t related to the headline. Here are some examples from a couple days ago:
   • Two completely unrelated news stories were happening at once regarding Heathrow airport in Britain. One was that the airport opened a new terminal. The other was that a man ran out onto a runway carrying a couple bags – a huge breach of security. So this was the headline from the featured article, “Man charged over Heathrow security alert”. The two stories under that covered completely different news events; “Heathrow Opens New Terminal” and “Queen opens Heathrow Terminal 5″.
   • There was a headline about a specific video game release “Microsoft Bullish Ahead of GTA IV Release”. Under that topic were two completely unrelated articles discussing how the Nintendo DS is the number one selling game console.
7. Foreign news sources. When there is a story about a shooting in Missouri, I don’t want to read about it third-hand from a news site like the BBC in Britain or Al Jazeera in the Middle East. Conversely, if there is a story breaking in France, I don’t want to visit the local CBS affiliate TV news station in Boise Idaho, just to see their copy / paste of the Associated Press’ article. So I usually have to do a little extra digging to find a news source geographically close to the news story. The local news organizations will always have the most detail regarding news happening in their backyard. It would be nice if Google News would consider this fact when ranking stories.
8. Registration Required. Some news sites only allow registered users to view their stories. Some are subscription-only services that you must pay for. I don’t want to have to register to view an article, and I can’t think of any news content remotely interesting enough for me to justify paying to read it. So I would rather Google News not include results that are not publicly available, yet it does not provide such an option.
9. Pictures. Just as Google News uses headlines and summaries from news sites, it likewise utilizes their images. This is one of the most buggy parts of Google News, which is understandable, as the software algorithm would not be able to draw any meaning from the picture image itself. Thus it is commonplace to see pictures next to topics that are totally irrelevant. In fact, the images are often so unrelated to the news story that they are comedic.

Experts-Exchange is a website where people pose questions they require a solution to. Questions are usually of a technical nature, and have to do with topics like software development, website design, and other similar areas. In turn, “experts” will proffer up answers which the asker may accept or ignore. If a solution is accepted, the asker is charged points, and conversely, the person providing the answer is awarded points. Moderators may force acceptance of a solution if they deem it sufficiently answered the question.

I have never formally used Experts-Exchange, in that I have submitted neither questions nor answers. However, in my searching during a typical workday I will usually encounter Google search results referencing Experts-Exchange. I normally avoid these results for a number of reasons. Questions do not always have good answers; often people post haphazard answers just to earn potential points. In fact, questions may not have any answers at all. But most importantly, Experts-Exchange will not show you the text of the answers. So even though someone already paid points (often via real cash) to have the question answered, they expect every other person to also pay (not points but hard cash) for a Premium Account to see those “solutions”. This is rather unfair, considering that the “experts” that provided solutions do not even get reimbursed points for providing solutions to all these additional people, although the site itself receives actual monetary compensation for them.

So although I normally skip over results from Experts-Exchange, there are occasions when I am searching for something so obscure that I must look at all the results to find what I’m seeking. In that case I use a simple little trick to see what solutions were posted to Experts-Exchange – I use Google’s cache. You see, when Google’s web crawler bot visits Experts-Exchange, their website will display the full text of all answers to Google. That way all the text in those answers will be indexed by Google, which vastly increases the chances of seeing an Experts-Exchange page in the Google results. Google, in turn, saves a copy of each webpage it visits, which is called caching.

So if you are searching Google and come across results at Experts-Exchange that you want to view, simply click on the link that says “Cached” at the bottom of the search result, and you will see the full text of the page, answers included.

There is a very specific type of chest pain I’ve encountered a couple dozen times throughout my life. This pain is related to breathing, and is a very intense, stabbing pain that hurts the most when taking a deep breath. The reason I’m posting about this is that I’ve found a “cure” that works for me, that completely stops this type of chest pain. Now let me throw in a disclaimer that I am not a doctor, and that any chest pain should be taken very seriously because it could be an indication of severe medical problems (myocardial infarction – aka Heart Attack – being a particularly serious one).

Onset and Symptoms

The onset is very sudden, like flipping a switch. Sometimes when it starts I can feel a little popping or crackling sensation where the pain is at. The thing that really sets this apart is the breathing. If I take shallow breaths it doesn’t hurt at all. As I inhale there is a certain point where the pain starts – a sharp pain that feels like someone sticking a knife in my chest. It is a very intense, stabbing pain that is so strong that I literally cannot make myself breath any deeper. As long as I keep my inhalations shallower than that threshold it doesn’t hurt at all. I’ve also noticed that this tends to happen when I’m twisting my body around in an odd position while taking a breath. Like twisting around in the car to reach something behind the seat.
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