We don’t really watch American Idol in our home. It’s too housewif-y for my taste, does not represent me at all and the (usually R&B) songs they pick are boring. However, we do watch the qualification round, simply because they are funny. The qualification round has nothing to do with the normal episodes because you get to see all the retarded wannabes that think that they can sing and go in front of the camera to make fool of themselves and their families.

Look, I love karaoke clubs. You go there to laugh, and when you go up to the stage, you know that you can’t sing, but you do it for the fun of it. But in American Idol’s qualifications, you get thousands (and I mean thousands) of stupid kids that actually truly believe that they can sing. I mean, some of the young people who showed up in Seattle looked like retards and they should have never be allowed to go there. Do I sound cruel to you? Do I sound like a snob little prick? Well, if that’s how you call an honest person, then that’s what I am.

“Know thyself” is something that all people should learn instead of what usually American kids are taught: “believe that you can do it and you will”. Self-confidence is a good thing, but not when it’s not realistic. “I am the next American Idol” some of these people said with confidence that can break steel. WHAT? Some looked, danced and sounded like they were the product of a birth defect.

I know my own limitations. I don’t try to sing on national television when I know that I sound like a donkey with a hiccup. In fact, each time I open my mouth to sing at home my husband leaves the room, do I need a louder feedback than this? And I know that I can’t win any beauty or even Lego contest either.

And then they say that Simon is rude and a jerk. Simon is the only person with his screws still screwed on. You see, Simon has a higher level of comparison than the rest. For example, “normal” for Simon is when a person can actually sing. While for Paula and Randy “normal” is when a person can barely sing. I feel the same when I review products. For me, “normal” is when the reviewed app or OS actually works as expected and as advertised. Anything worse than this (e.g. a few bugs or crashes), makes me get hay fever. And it shows on my articles. Being ‘brutally honest’ ™ is the right thing to do.

And BTW, that white-haired alien that appeared tonight needs to learn to wear a fucking bra. She looked like an alien cow everytime she was walking with her breasts marching in front of her: 1-2, 1-2, march… I have large breasts too, but when I am in front of people I don’t let them “free in the air”.

Like all Greeks, I refer to all mandarin oranges, clementines and tangerines as “mandarins”. But each time we go shopping with my JBQ, this is a problem and it has started to anger me.

Eugenia: Sweetie, get some mandarins.
JBQ: They don’t have mandarins, they only have clementines!

or

Eugenia: Sweetie, want a mandarin?
JBQ: Oh, this is not a mandarin, it’s a tangerine.

We don’t classify them differently in Greek, and there is a good reason for that: they all look exactly the same. And be assured that we produce all these varieties near my home in Greece in large quantities (we export to Russia too), so we are not talking about clueless harvesters here. We are talking about practical people instead. If there is not a really good reason to call a fruit a different name, we simply don’t. Why complicate matters? I let all the botanists to call each variety the way they want to, but in common language I see no reason to distinct between these fruits. There is a reason to distinct between the blood, sweet or bitter oranges, because it has a major impact in the taste and looks, but in the mandarin’s case this is not really an issue.

Most people love VLC because it supports a lot of media formats. Indeed, it has saved me from frustration a few times too, being able to playback videos that no other app could.

But VLC has major problems in every other aspect. I mean, its Win/Lin preference window is one big mess. The rest of the interface is not great either. But what REALLY bothers me is its streaming ability (doesn’t really work most of the time) and its stream-rip & transcoding ability (it NEVER works).

Remember the guy I sold the LG Chocolate to a few days ago? He emailed me this morning asking me “how did you put these ipod ads videos in the phone? I would like to put some anime fan videos too, but they don’t work“. Apparently, the videos he was trying to upload to the phone were too high resolution for the phone to handle, but most importantly, they were encoded in the uncommon AVC1 MP4 format that QuickTime or even the 3GP-Encoder utility would not recognize. VLC was the only app that recognized and played back the sample file! Trying to use VLC to transcode the video to ANY other format though, it would result in either scrambled video or no video but just audio (I tried at least 5 video format/encapsulation options). Absolutely nothing worked.

I wonder, do these guys actually TEST their bloody apps before they offer them for public consumption? I don’t think so! Or, they simply “user-tested-it” instead of having a real PROCESS to QA their code. You see, if you just “user test” an app, only the most obvious bugs will be found, because users only tend to test their most required feature, in this case “playback”. But just about anything else, goes to hell. This kind of non-QA testing is common in the open source world, which is why after you actually try to seriously use most apps found on distros (or on gnomefiles.org), you will stumble from one bug to another, and from one crash to another.

Anyways, at the end, the SUPER application managed the transcoding to MPEG4-BASIC just fine. And then, I had to use Quicktime PRO in order to re-transcode it to the 176×144 resolution that the phone requires (SUPER would not go below 320×240 in their MP4 option).

From the mouth of Ian Murdock, the creator of Debian. I wish more developers in the OSS community understood the importance of keeping the users (and the IT dept) happy. And Apple should as well (OSX is not more than 60-70% compatible between major releases).

The best example of Ajax going bad is Yahoo!’s new TV Listing site. All you have to do is a simple search on the internet “tv listings yahoo ajax” and you will see most users being pissed off about this change.

The thing is, the new site is unusable. I have a powerful 3 GHz P4 and when the page renders or does a request to the server it consumes about 55% of the CPU (or when you scroll the time slider), and there is a lot of lag and waiting when you are scrolling down. This is one good looking site, that simply does NOT work. It performs BETTER when you are NOT logged in, and if you are using IE (but still, far from ideal). But if you ARE logged in and you do have a “favorites tv channels” list AND you are using Firefox, the thing is simply unusable. Everyone on the net are shouting about this. If the information is not INSTANT, then this is a useless upgrade. And this is a shame, because the previous HTML-based version of Y!’s TV Listings was the only one with the right cable/show information (other TV listing sites never get it right for my cable area). It was uglier, but it was also functional, practical and to the point.

Ajax is not bad, especially when only used when it’s truly needed. Google has the right idea with Gmail for example. It works well. But then again, Google has hired the smartest guys in the Valley, while Yahoo! it seems has hired all the left overs.

It makes me feel like RMS felt in 1984 when he didn’t have the source code of that printer driver that pushed him to create GNU. I feel the same about the data. If I had access to the data I would create my own site to do TV Listings the way I feel it’s best.

Whad’ya know? Someone bought my LG Chocolate phone for $170 today. He seemed happy.

I also went through the tricky procedure of upgrading my Linux-based ROKR E2’s firmware to a newer one (from 32p to 45p). Upgrade went well. Then, I edited its firmware with a hex editor and enabled… 850 Mhz on the phone (there is hardware support for it but Motorola had it disabled by default). If only this phone had Greek support and a free SDK, it would have been pretty nice.

For my next review I am juggling undecided between the Nokia E50 or E70, Nokia 6288 or Motorola A1200.

Oh, boy, do I get weird dreams or what! I was back at my high school (I wish)! But instead of doing normal school stuff, we were under a Google-sponsored programme where we would learn more about programming and then the best 2 of each class would get a job at Google.

The thing was, Steve Jobs was our teacher for 1 hour per week. He was teaching us history of computers and all-around tech knowledge. I wasn’t gonna let go of this. I wanted to impress him and get the best scores he could possible give. I would be the know-it-all girl, but I would also try to play on his pet peeves. For example, Steve was showing us his Nokia N93 smartphone and he would switch the screen on landscape and portrait and ask us what is wrong with what we are seeing. Of course, I would reply that the UI is not resolution-independent and that the widgets don’t align right etc etc. It was easy to impress Steve.

After that, I somehow got re-united with some old Greek friends of mine. I told them that Steve Jobs is one of our teachers. And they replied “who? who’s that?”. Yup, that was enough to squash my excitement and even wake me up. Thanks for ruining it guys.

UPDATE: A few online friends responded to my dream above via IM and they all replied the same: “yeah, weird“. Now that I think about it though, it’s actually not a weird dream at all. It is exactly as it should have been.

You see, I always wanted to study programming after finishing high-school, but my mother insisted I should become a nurse. I paid dearly for following her decision in many ways. In fact, because I became a nurse and then ran away from it in a very questionable way, I pretty much broke my family apart. My father will never recover from the “shame” I brought to the family (like a true Klingon…).

Then, the “impress Steve Jobs” dream bit is simply my uphill battle to validate myself, succeed and prove wrong my family and friends who had me written off. IMO, I did pretty well studying, later working in tech firms in UK, but the journalistic stuff brought me quite some recognition. I have met important people through my work (Jobs, Torvalds etc), my name is recognized in many Silicon Valley companies (not always in a positive way of course — remember, I am infamous, not famous) etc. But only after I started writing for a popular Greek magazine my mother would accept the fact that I did worthwhile things in my new life and that I have something to show for it. Not to boast, but hey, I am proud for the things I worked for in the last 6 years.

Still, most of my “friends” don’t have a clue about all that. For them, I am still someone who “got married to a French man and who she now lives in America”. Hence, the last bit in my dream about my friends not having a clue who Steve Jobs is.

It’s good to see that this time around my subconscious used a symbolic dream that does make sense instead of messing around with me as it has done so in the past.

iLounge talked to Steve Jobs about the applications isuse on iPhone. Steve said that only pre-approved, pre-tested apps by Apple will be allowed to enter iTunes and get sold. Basically, the way this usually works is that serious companies will have to get into signing a contract with Apple to get their SDK, then Apple will actually have to qualify by testing the app for a fee (e.g. if the UI is what an iPhone user expects, if it crashes etc) and then it will make its way to the iTunes Store.

In theory, this is a good thing. The user will only get to choose between the best and most stable software instead of random crap that every Joe programmer writes in an afternoon. On the other hand though, this pretty much takes away the freeware/enthusiast market. Forget having a freeware port of VLC or Adium. As long as there is enough market for a specific app, commercial companies will create it and sell it (they can’t get away giving it out for free as themselves will have to pay Apple). And Apple, possibly not only will get money for the SDK and the testing time they will offer, but also a percentage of the iTunes Store sales. And of course, no piracy will be possible, like the current iPod games, these will be DRM’ed apps.

Excellent plan. If you are an Apple stockholder that is. Personally, I prefer open systems and instead being myself responsible of what crap I install. But that’s me.

Update: The Slashdot crowd comments on this. Apple is doing the same mistake Motorola is doing. I mean, heck, even my brother, a hard-working electrician, doesn’t wanna get any phone that doesn’t run third party apps to extend the original capabilities of the device. Apple could have changed the “phone business” (which is need of a change) and instead only changed the “phone”. This, along other problems that this first model has (from price to non-replaceable battery) will prove thorny for Apple to catch on. I am not sure that they will be able to get that 1% of market share that Jobs wants to get, not like this at least.

I really can not say enough about TenGO. This is an amazing piece of software, a really out-of-the-box experience that lets touchscreen users to type up to 75wpm. You can check their Flash demo here.

Now, what really got my attention this evening though was the last section of this page: in order to implement TenGO you apparently need 10 virtual keys as a minimum. And guess what! Humans have 10 fingers (well, most of them)! Their next challenge would be to implement it with a special glove or sensors attached to fingers. This mean that you would sit on your chair and just tap your fingers to one another to type text instead of having to reach for a keyboard and type characters one by one (although this method doesn’t have to go away as not all text is real words, e.g. URLs).

You know me guys. I am difficult, and therefore more likely to criticize a product rather than kiss its ass. But TenGO deserves it; and it’s a mystery to me why no company that deals with touchscreen OSes has bought them yet (and this ranges from MS to SonyEricsson, Motorola, Palm and now Apple).

- I went to visit my doctor today. He said that I was “funny as hell”. Meant a lot to me.

- I’ve added a small mobile portal page for those who would like to have a homepage to their cellphones/PDAs with all the right mobile links (click the MobilePlay link to get a lot more mobile links). The URL is http://mobits.com/wap.html

- This story reminded me of a scorpion bite that made a cousin of mine to fall ill for 3 days. And I was to blame. You see, there was this nice flower in a very steep part of my village around 1982-3. And I wanted it. Because I was not good at climbing, I told my cousin “I bet you can’t climb up there and get that flower” (he was a good climber). He said “I can”, and I replied “no, you can’t”. Well, that was enough for him to climb up. He got to the flower, and there was the scorpion that bit him. I felt awful afterwards but thankfully he survived the bite (some don’t, especially as young at age as he was).

- My JBQ got offended by Steve Jobs’ insulting keynote talk about “baby wap browsers”. Well, the point of the matter is, the iPhone runs on a very high speed ARM processor and it requires more RAM than any smartphone (trusty sources say). Now, try to run Safari (or just WebKit) on a 50 Mhz cellphone, with a 128×160 screen and most importantly, with 1 MB of RAM. While Openwave’s UP.Browser and Teleca’s Obigo can and Opera Mini steals its way through, Safari would shit on itself instantly. So Steve, let’s keep it real, shall we?

- My brother called me today using a special card number where he gets 100 free minutes of calls, everywhere in the world. Apparently the card was part of a newspaper release (in Greece, newspapers are giving away stuff when you buy them, DVDs, CDs, books etc). During our chat it seemed obvious to me that quality was lower and there was some lag. Obviously, the system was running on a VoIP server rather than via normal telecommunications.

- My little bro also told me that he gave the phone I had sent him a few months ago to his brother-in-law. I am happy to learn that the Linux-based E680i found a new home and that it’s actually going to be used (my brother hated it because there are no apps for it as Motorola doesn’t release the SDK).

- The adult film industry chose HD-DVD. This might be the death of the Blu-Ray business. No matter how well the PS3 sells (or not).

- I am selling the LG Chocolate at Craigslist. I don’t believe that anyone will buy it.