Below are the 9 most recent journal entries recorded in Martin H's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005
7:24 pm	PSP The Gadget. I got a PSP after much dilly-dally and general ba humbuggery. The wireless internet connectivity only took 3 hours to get to work. Partly my fault, in a way, for having configuring my wireless router myself a year ago and not using one of the dynamic DNS features. Also The Gadget doesn't work with WEP encryption, although it claims to. Might be the router's fault ... how could you ever know? Anyway what I REALLY wanted to complain about is the web browser. The browser isn't bad really, quite good in fact, in a handheld device no keyboard kind of way. What stinks is the virtual keyboard. PSP has four buttons on the left, four on the right (Triangle Circle Cross Square) and L and R on the shoulders. So, how do you implement a virtual keyboard or alphanumeric entry? (The Gadget looks a bit like this only more professional and blacker): As you may be aware, telephones have 10 numbers. One half-sensible system is to map say three or four letters to each number, as has been done since early times: Yes I am hotlinking to istockphoto. So? As you may be aware, cell/mobile phones also have 10 numbers, so one arguably half-sensible system is to map 'DEF' to '2', say, and count the presses, one press on '2' means 'D', two means E three means F. You can get used to anything, and this is one of the things you can get used to. People who have not yet got used to this system, will naturally be thinking alphanumeric entry on mobile phones is a bit like communicating with someone in the dungeon cell next to you, by tapping on the wall. Which it is - only much more expensive. I shan't consider the people who have got used to this modern morse code monstrosity as their brains have been turned to putty by using this entry system and also by holding a high powered radio antenna next to their skull. There is a slightly subtle feature of the mobile phone alphanumeric entry system. It is VERY IMPORTANT to notice if the user doesn't press anything for a second(ish) - that means they've finished entering that letter, and if they press '2' again, they want a new 'D', they don't want the old 'D' to turn into an 'E'. This saves having an enter button and when you only have 10ish buttons that is quite valuable. Also it (normally) saves the user having to make an extra press (on that enter button you don't have). In my opinion, overall the mobile phone system is pretty bad, but not so awful that a better system can ever hope to be widely adopted in mobile phones. Now, joy of joys we come to PSP alphanumeric entry. What the designers have decided to do, is to have a virtual mobile phone keypad on-screen (10ish buttons), and simulate the mobile phone grid-of-buttons interface. There, on the screen is a grid of buttons, which you can navigate between. So if you want a 'D' you use the four direction buttons (on the left of the screen) to MOVE YOUR CURSOR over to the fifth big virtual button in the grid, which is marked 'DEF', and then you press Cross (I think it is Cross) (one of the buttons on the right of the screen), one two or three times, to press the virtual button one two or three times and enter D E or F, according to your pleasure. A sketch from memory of the screen of the PSP: [exit ] [cancel] [delete] [ www.goo| ] [ ABC ] [ DEF ] [ GHI ] [ JKL ] {[ MNO ]} [ PQRS ] [ TUV ] [ WXYZ ] [ .?!: ] This means entering the next letter requires 1 2 3 or 4 direction presses followed by 1 2 3 or 4 Cross presses. For an average of 4 button presses probably. Compared to an average of 2 on a mobile phone. Of course, entering numbers takes more presses, because '1' appears after 'ABC'. Anyway this hurts your brain. Perhaps because it is a third-rate simulation of second-rate way of entering text, but also because one spatial arrangement of buttons is being used to navigate around another, different spatial arrangement of another set of (virtual) buttons. But wait. There is more. The crowning triumph is the fact that they didn't realize it is REALLY IMPORTANT to be able to move on from adjusting your current letter by waiting. So it isn't even true to the original mobile phone interface. If you have just entered a 'D' and want another 'D', you have to select some other letter temporarily, an 'A' for example, then delete it, then move back to your virtual 'DEF' button and press it once. But wait. There is more more. The constellation of jewels in that crown of triumph on the head of that king that is PSP alphanumeric text entry, is the fact that, when setting up wireless connectivity (in the sexily-entitled Infrastructure mode) you have to enter: a8cb 7a8c 1063 5211 d48e 1434 41 - 26 characters of hexadecimal, your WEP key 123.145.167.189 - 12 digits of DNS server 1 IP addr 123.145.167.198 - 12 digits of DNS server 2 IP addr 213.145.167.189 - 12 digits of router IP addr Naturally if you enter one of these slightly wrong, for example you enter 25 characters of hexadecimal, it deletes everything you entered, tells you you should have entered 26 characters, and gives you the opportunity to ENTER IT ALL AGAIN. The end result is that entering 60 digits into the stupid network settings took about as long as typing this entire, and surprisingly long article (OK rant). But on the plus side, by having wasted your time telling you about all this, I feel I have got some of my life back, somehow. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 15th, 2005
8:24 pm	Scientists will create mutant mice to examine genetics and disease ... and do the dishes. The Independent (Comment on this)
7:51 pm	Peter Jennings' death is reason to quit smoking says the Houston Chronicle Strange. I thought he had stopped already. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 20th, 2005
9:19 pm	I watched To Have and Have Not. It was excellent, but uncomfortable, because it is plainly and brazenly derivative of Casablanca. Bogart plays a resistance fighter, in turn playing a neutral cynic looking out only for himself. Set against a World War II backdrop in a marginal french colony where ... You know what? Listing the similarities is going to take a while. So instead I'll ask a question. What do you get if you take the recipe for Casablanca, replace a distant Ingrid Bergman with an incandescent and smoky Lauren Bacall, erase Claude Rains and his eternal lines, make the pianist white, instead of a plane, a boat, lose the dark humour, buoy them up with something lighter, how about a comic drunk, ditch the nihilism of an unrequited and impossible reignited romance and the complications of a love triangle, make it a simple sunny love story man meets girl, this time she can be the pickpocket, and fix the miserable ending, sheesh, let's fill in any gaps using a book by Hemingway, bring in William Falkner to script, he'll add a few great lines, let Lauren walk a truly incredible walk, Howard Hawks to direct, then what do we have? A pretty damn good film is what you have. But when you take something ideal, and change a few things, every change is for the worse. For those who are tired of watching Casablanca, To Have and Have Not is similar yet different. It is also an education in the danger of taking perfection and tweaking it. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 14th, 2005
10:46 pm	AVOID CHOCOLATE WITH BEER That was a public safety announcement for the benefit of those who enjoy chocolate, and those who enjoy beer. It is one of a series of announcements on the subject of "Things which while nice on their own, really do not go well together", and is brought to you in partnership with Walls, makers of anchovy ice-cream, Coca-Cola, makers of OJ Cola, and Tetley and their instant coftea range Hotwet. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 4th, 2005
9:12 pm	I switched from Opera (6 and 7) to Firefox (1.0.4) at home and at work. I use PCs sadly. The main properties of Opera were: Opera was always fast. Opera has tabbed browsing. I like lots of tabs. Opera isn't written by Microsoft. I prefer not to support organizations that produce poor products (by using those products). Opera doesn't support ActiveX, have buggy Javascript, so less security risk at present. Opera isn't part of the monoculture, it isn't that popular at all, therefore a low security risk in the future. Opera failed to render many pages properly. Increasingly: Opera 7 is getting old. Opera wanted new money to upgrade. Thinking about my lists, Firefox has nearly all the pros, and none of the possible cons. It is getting dangerously popular, so there is more security risk. But I think I'll eat it. The only real cost of switching was reading through all the Mozilla add-ons, to pick out the few gems that I knew would be there. 3 hours, including trying some out. I picked SessionSaver, Tabbrowser Preferences, Unread Tabs, Adblock, HashColouredTabs. I noticed an add-on "Moji 0.7.8 - An integrated Japanese dictionary, including kanji dictionary". But I guess Firefox isn't very tempting at all to Mac users? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 20th, 2005
7:52 pm	Irony, Sarcasm and Style Chard made a remark about Japanese irony which made me remember a thought of mine about the irony, and sarcasm and similar things not carrying between languages. http://www.livejournal.com/users/chard/29079.html?view=104855#t104855 Although not speaking a word of Japanese, I've made an effort in the past to comprehend Japanese humour when I've come across it in interpersonal situations. Some Japanese I have met with have had a reputation as being jokers. Generally the translator looks into the corners of the room and politely neglects to translate jokes. So I ask direct questions in a polite manner: "What exactly did he say literally?" and then "Is it possible to explain to a foreigner why that is funny?" My observations are: Firstly, Japanese seem very shy about translating. I think they are embarrased someone made a joke that an outsider cannot understand. Given a certain point of view, I suppose it could be considered rude. The English view, or perhaps my view, is that understanding a joke is the responsibility of the listener, and no real concern of the joker. Secondly, the jokes are not funny when translated. This is no real surprise. Thirdly, what is surprising to me, is although a Japanese remark might be dictionary definition irony, or understatement, or sillyness, or sarcasm /double edged, they are still not witty or funny to me. (Well, maybe very modestly smile inducing). All these things are things which exist in English and which I am accustomed to finding extremely entertaining. Which means there must be at least two styles of sarcasm -- sarcasm which is funny to Japanese and sarcasm which is funny to the English. I am obliged to infer that the number of sarcastic remarks which are amusing in English is very much smaller than the number of remarks which match the dictionary definition of sarcasm. And therefore there is enormous complexity and art in the subject that is not captured or even hinted at in the definition. I shouldn't have been surprised at this, but I was. I guess I figured that pretty much anything that was "the opposite of what was meant" would be amusing. I guess the large hardworking part of my brain that understands style and makes is-it-funny-yes-no decisions just never really got noticed by the contemplative introspective and concious part of my brain. In contrast to all this, slapstick, embarrassment and situation comedy, as seen by me on TV, in adverts and in anime all seem to translate from Japanese to English absolutely perfectly. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005
10:17 pm	The Seventh Seal The Seventh Seal is a film I've been meaning to watch properly for years, but I kept postponing, possibly because I expected it to be a very unrewarding and depressing work. The Black Death features heavily, and, in the mediæval tradition everybody dies. In fact the film is an intelligent contemplation of opposites, black or white, faith or rationalism, eternal life or nothingness. The correspondence between the extremes of the monochrome stock, the Knight and the Squire and the pieces on the chess board is remarkable. It seems unlikely there is a finer metaphor in film. The uplifting resolution does not involve metaphysics, but the characters of the young family. Bergman considers the colourless spectrum that runs between Christianity and Nihilism. He finds it at no point beautiful, and discovers for himself in the course of the film the real reprieve from the angst of life and death. The escape is not a stay of execution, short or infinite, real or imagined, and is not faith in this or that abstraction. It is, he concludes, a simple delight in a simple life. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 8th, 2005
10:36 pm	Paper versus PDA, only one can survive Paper Wins I'm writing this for the benefit of my future self. The picture is a reminder of the point of the piece. I'm not a luddite, I'm a technophile. But from now on I'm going to try to love paper more, and kiss personal digital assistants goodbye. Douglas Adam's called it "twig technology" and "one of the monkey's most prized achievements". But I can't help feeling dead-tree based information storage is a bit recherche. So I asked reyet to snap a picture of my trail of modest destruction and the end result of my flirtation with pocket computing. To remind me of the bad points which nostalgia might efface: In the space of 7 years of loyal Psion usage, I have destroyed 3 devices costing around 500 local currency units each. Changing batteries is slightly annoying In the later stages of the relationship, after the love of newness had melted, the value of the device did not justify keeping the batteries charged I should add that the historical record suggests two personality traits. First, I have a natural disrespect for and cavalier disposition towards fancy electronics. Second, I show no sign of learning any lessons. These facts should be recorded and illuminate future purchasing decisions. The record will show I broke all three by dropping them onto hard surfaces, occasionally but repeatedly, and until they were dead, and in flagrant contravention of the operating instructions. I continue to have the same suspicion I had in 1998: that keeping information on a grown-up computer and regularly printing it out in incredibly small print would prove much more practical. So I will act on the instinct and break with the Psions. P.S. If anyone wants three broken Psions, I don't, they're yours. It is likely possible to assemble one functional unit from the undamaged portions, Frankenstein style. (6 Comments |Comment on this)