The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Saturday, December 07, 2002
.:10:54:36 PM:.
Please bear with me as I try and get some things sorted out. Apparently when I add the code to check out a counter all my IDs for the DIV tags disappear completely ruining the use of the stylesheets. Very weird.
.:1:39:36 AM:.
Thirteen years ago yesterday Canada experienced its worst massacre in history. Fourteen fellow engineering students were shot and killed, thirteen others were wounded. The fourteen students were female engineering students who were shot because the man wielding gun thought they didn't belong.
We'd all like to think that because we're in Canada, a great and open country that everything is hunky dory-Canadian Style. That we've grown up from events that happened in the past such as the Railroad that hundreds of Chinese immigrants lost their lives in building in the late 1800s or the Japanese concentration camps set up in during World War 2, or the September terrorist attacks, or pick any street shooting, car bombing that happens in Israel. Truly you'd think that after such horrible events people would start to change. That they would stop and say "hey, maybe I've been totally wrong about this person because I thought he was this or that" or maybe they would take the effort ot try and understand the other side.
Growing up as a CBC, I wasn't really aware that there were different people. I was blessed. Thank God for that. I grew up not knowing that there were people who couldn't tolerate others. Intolerance was a completely foreign concept for me. Thinking about the massacre made me think more about what is really happening today. In a recent article and study it showed that race is still a factor in the salaries of workers. This probably isn't a huge shock for some of you (you know who you are) but to me, the difference was surprising. I'm not sure why, I'm constantly told that there are people out there in the world; people who aren't like you. Its sometimes hard for me to believe; I know the world isn't all good but how evil can it be?
For a while, I realized that even CBCs had their own classification of where you are and I felt "it". The preconception of what you are based on what little they knew about you. There are the pure CBCs which basically with the exception of their ethnicity are pretty much "westernized". There are the Chinese CBCs who are pretty much like their "mainland" counterparts except they were born here. Where do I stand? Being the engineering geek, I stand off the line, in the imaginary plane... in other words. I'd like to think I'm different and yet I can "group" myself as a CBC. Is it feasible for people to understand and know who I am based on a simple acronym I tell them? Is it possible that people I meet in the future will look past different ethnicities and take people for who they are? or are we there yet?
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
.:1:43:56 AM:.
How can people continue to use tables? Its got to be one of those things that should become quickly apparent to the content writer that tables are not the way to go. You have to go through a couple of lines of code just to figure out where you are. With stylesheets, you can easily just type in the content you want and the stylesheet handles the design. No need to search through which td tag you need to change. Just look for the right paragraph nice and simple.
So in my perusal I found a "Daniel Tse's" website Its sort of scary because we both attended the same University and we're both in the engineering program. He's a computer engineer, I'm an Electrical Engineer-there's a difference in case you're wondering :). I was slightly shocked when I came across another Daniel Tse. I know that Tse is pretty common, and I guess Daniel is also pretty common (I know of at least five other Daniels) so I guess it shouldn't be that surprising that in a world of 6.3 billion people there would be at least another person with the same name. Its not like I have to have a unique name either-actually its kind of neat. I guess that's why Danprime was kind of a neat nickname, it was so different. Anyways in case you're wondering, there's a Doctor Daniel Tse in Hong Kong, there's a David Tse who plays "Head Labourer" in Tombraider, there's a Daniel Tse who plays the "Warden's Lieutenant" in Spy Game and another Daniel Tse who (at the time) is 80 something years old. Oh yeah, did I mention there's a guy who looks just like I do? only his name isn't Dan and I believe he really would like it people stopped calling him Dan. :)
On the MP3 Player front-not much has progressed. No one has yet answered any of my questions about accessing the USB port on the PDA. I'm slightly surprised that this doesn't come up more often but then again, interdevice communication isn't that hot of a topic. I'm still having problems with my avr programmer. It doesn't seem to recognize the avr chip. I'm not sure if the avr is broken or if the programmer doesn't work. There's only one way to eliminate one of the options: get another or buy another chip... sigh. Its not that I don't want to pay for it, but I wish I had some better sign other than "Device Detection Failed. Is Device on?". I've even rebuilt the programmer on to a breadboard. Once this step is finished I can try and program the avr with the YAMP project set to play only from the USB connection and then its only a matter of time before I get the PDA's side up and running.
I found another company that made an mp3 player for Palm OS 4.1 PDAs. Specifically the M series from Palm. PocketPyro designed a sleeve like unit that fits onto and under the PDA. It contains 64 MB of flash memory and plays WMA, AAC, and MP3 files. They also use the USB interface to transfer files at 3MB/sec. Definitely fast enough. The price? A whopping $299.00 US!!! That's insane by my count since at most my unit will cost me around $60 Canadian... maybe $55 if I do it right. This doesn't include memory, but at least it'll be expandable to however large your memory card can be. Add an average $130 for around 128MB and that's still cheaper. I know I'm on the right track.
I've also been thinking about putting on a counter, but don't want to tie up the downloading of the page. Nor do I want to use any counters using cookies. I would like to know how many people are reading or finding this interesting. Guess I'll keep on thinking for a bit.
Monday, December 02, 2002
.:1:18:37 AM:.
So my friend called me up a week ago. It sort of went like this:
"hey", regular short guy conversation ensued.
"What are you doing on the 1st?" he asks.
"I've got a musical at Beulah to go to but that's at night."
"Did you want to go to the Oiler's autograph day with me?"
"sure," I replied.
Just like that. I've never been to an autograph day, or gotten anyone's autograph. What do you do with an autograph? Its not like the old yearbooks where you can look back and say oh yeah I remember Akhbar, he was a real comedian, or there's so-and-so they were always cool. This is the mark of some person, some guy you've never really met. He's supposed to increase the value of whatever you possess just by putting some scribble on it. Why is that? Sentimental value I suppose could drive it up, yet that sentimental value has a dollar figure attached to it and that's sort of disturbing. To me its sort of like this; I really, really, love my goldfish whom I've cared for and fed, and did all this stuff but I'm willing to part with it for say... three hundred. Or then there's the situation where you're purposely raising a goldfish to sell for three hundred dollars to some other dude-and well that's you know "do what you want to do but I ain't doing it". Why do people line up and wait for some dude to use some pen to mark on some thing that some body (you) brought?
So right after church we picked up some food and drove over to West Edmonton Mall. We were thinking that since it might be busy it might be a good idea to go a bit early... There were already a HUNDRED plus people ahead of us in line!! I was thinking what in the world is happening? People were standing in line with all sorts of paraphenilia from jerseys to posters. My friend had a little model of Tommy Salo (the goalie we were going to go get autographs from) and so did many others in the same line.
So we waited...
And waited...
And waited... until 2 and a half hours had elapsed. We finally saw Tommy Salo. What was so great about it? Was there some giant resounding gong to indicate I was moving on to the next level? I can't really tell you-because I didn't hear anything. I got my brother's hockey puck signed by him and got Jussi Markanen to sign a cap. Take a photo here and we're done. Just like that. Three hours later we emerged with five autographs and a very ecstatic friend.
I can't seem to connect with the fascination or thrill of standing in line to specifically wait for someone to sign something. Perhaps the person signing might get a boost to his or her self-esteem for having so many people adore them and well I'm glad I played a part in helping someone feel better but I'm trying to think: How long will it be until I forget I met them in the mall? I'll probably remember the waiting in line with my friend, the jokes about the "lightning" speed our line passed by the stores, and I'll remember running around trying to get snapshots of players for my friends. I'll probably even remember that I ate some taco bell food with my friend. Will I remember who I went to go see? probably not. The autographs will fade, other players will come in, other teams, other sports but I'll definitely remember going with my friend and hanging out and that is why I waited in line.
Sunday, December 01, 2002
.:1:34:46 AM:.
Well it was bound to happen. I just found out on slashdot that a company by the name of Aerodrome Software has made a program for the Palm pilot that decodes Ogg Vorbis music files. If you remember from earlier posts, Ogg Vorbis is a type of compression for music files-sort of like what mp3 and .wmv is. The only difference is that mp3 and .wmv, and a few other mainstream formats are all proprietary. That means you (now) have to pay to be able to use their libraries and compression. Every time you buy an mp3 decoder/encoder chip you pay a licence fee to this German company. Now I don't have anything against that. mp3s have been around for some time and all the more power to people being able to use it. Its sort of like the .doc for documents-generally people assume that its a microsoft word file. Its proprietary, meaning all the rights to who can use it, to how it can be used belong to that company and rightly it should. If you believe in it, and your customers believe in it-why shouldn't you control it?
Enter Ogg Vorbis, a free and independent-open source compression method. Not only do you not have to pay any licence fees to use it, but you also can use it in any way you want, and according to sound tests, its a better compression. Ogg Vorbis is relatively new, but it hasn't proliferated like mp3s. Why don't people chose a better and freer format? Because change is hard to go through, mp3 was "there" first and it was free. Right now, people don't realize they have to pay and probably won't because they're not the ones building the decoders and encoders. Those costs are absorbed by the company cause everyone else is doing it. This is similar to the whole Linux, or Windows OS alternative situation. Better systems exist outside of the Windows platform but why do people still use the same systems? Change is hard and can only be done one at a time.
Fortunately all of this stuff about Aerodrome's player doesn't concern me because like I've said, what I wanted to do has already been done by a company and although mine is similar in function its different because I'm building my own based on what I think and know I need not what I've seen (big difference). The other major difference is that for now I'm not playing Ogg Vorbis files. Aerodrome's player needs to use the Palm OS 5 platform. That means processor speeds that are way faster than the Palm OS 4 platforms. If they ever come out with a Ogg Vorbis decoder chip, I'll definitely check it out, but for now I'll still use mp3s because this is the best choice given the specifications of my hardware.
