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Commodore Founder Dead at 83

A legendary man in the home and small business computer field died this past Sunday, Jack Tramiel. Founder of Commodore. He made history with the PET, VIC-20 and Commodore 64.

My first computer was a VIC-20. Later I got a C-64, and eventually a C-128. After that point the writing was on the wall for the general computing field, IBM-PC style computers were mainstream from that point forward, so I had to leave the Commodore world behind.

I certainly hope the world makes as big a deal about the loss of Jack Tramiel, as they recently have for Steve Jobs. Personally I was far more influenced by Jack and his company than that arrogant and annoying Apple guy. And I believe far more people were influenced early on by Commodore than Apple. Commodore basically disappeared, and Apple eventually found it’s niche markets and obviously did very well. But for people my age, there is no comparison on which of these 2 men influenced more people in the 70’s and 80’s than Jack Tramiel. Even though he wasn’t a show-off and had a need to be as personally famous as his creations, his products influenced the most people during Commodore’s rein in small computing. Commodore’s philosophy was to make computing affordable, unlike some of the competitors of the time. Uncountable people started their computing lives with his products, and learned about computing and programming with his company’s equipment. Not to mention their start in gaming.

A great man in history, Jack Tramiel.

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Commodore computer founder Jack Tramiel dies at 83

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SciTech/20120410/commodore-founder-jack-tramiel-dies-120410/#ixzz1rfEHawJA

The Adventures of Tin Tin (2011)

I have fond memories of Tin Tin comics and cartoons from when I was little. I certainly will not have fond memories of this horrible movie.

The Adventures of Tin Tin is incredibly boring. And the characters oversized swollen heads and hands was distracting at best. I haven’t researched the tech behind this movie. But since much of the atmosphere and scenery seemed to be real, and the only CGI/cartoony images were the heads and hands, my best guess is that this was completely shot with live actors and then had poor CGI to cover their face and hands. And if that isn’t how it was done, that is how it appears. What’s worse is that some hands were not CGI’d and looked normal, and other times they were swollen cartoon hands. Some seemed 3 fingered while others 4 fingered.

Aside from the personal disappointment with the animation, this show it boring beyond belief. I fell asleep several times, and I wasn’t tired.

If this same movie was shot with the same script, but with live characters and no crappy animation effects, it would have been a far better watch.

I can’t see even the average Tin Tin fan enjoying this. Next!

3/10

Twelve (2010)

Chance Crawford (of Gossip Girl) plays a young drug dealer with emotional and social issues.

Twelve is a dark and mildly disturbing ride in White Mike’s life, as he and his friends slide down hill to even darker depths.

It’s an interesting story, on the dark and depressing side of life. Reasonably well done. Chance shows more of his acting ability in this than we ever see in Gossip Girl. In Gossip Girl we see his character as flat, boring and monotone. He stands out in this movie. Too bad he can’t bring some of this depth to his current TV series.

6/10

Android Voice Dialer Bug

I’m still using the Google Nexus One cell phone. I have two actually. Some time ago the Voice Dialling feature stopped working. Until today I wasn’t able to figure out why. I was sure it used to work.

The reason is due to a bug in the last version or two of Android 2.x, as in 2.3.6 and 2.3.7, Froyo and Gingerbread versions. There seems to be a limit to how many contacts this app can parse. In my case I have around 3000. Then the app simply crashed with a misleading error message.

This is a very short-sighted and easily found bug in a app of this type. And at the very least a good programmer would have allowed for this issue with at least a proper error message. It’s as simple as this; if contacts are more than I can deal with and impress you with, then post message of my inability to write my app better. Or something along that line.

I don’t have a phone with Android 3.x or 4.x so have no idea if this issue is resolved in newer versions. I do have a slate with Android 4.x but it’s not a phone, so I don’t think I can use that to test.

So if anyone else has been frustrated with this issue on a Gingerbread or Cyanogens OS Android phone, it’s due to you and me having “too many” contacts. Apparently engineers at Google feel you don’t need more than a few dozen contacts on your phone.

Immortals (2011)

Immortals is a Greek myth period piece.

I found that they didn’t give preferential treatment to any one lead character; the hero, the villain, or the hero’s girlfriend to be. Usually that’s a sign of a story that never works for the audience. In this case it didn’t matter. The movie is riveting even though it’s uncomplicated. The action scenes are fantastic. Battle scenes are often slowed down, and we see complex fight choreography between many duos on the screen at once that seems impossible. Perhaps the impressive and well choreographed fight sequences are pieced together, but you can’t tell, and it looks fabulous.

My only complaint may be that there are too many whispered scenes that were hard to hear. Whispered scenes in movies should not actually be whispered to the audience, we should see the illusion of them whispering, the audience shouldn’t have to strain to hear what’s going on. This was a constant annoyance, and I would rate the movie a 10 if it wasn’t for this shortcoming.

If you like this style of movie, ancient quest and battle stories, this one is absolutely outstanding.

9/10

Sinbad and the Minotaur (2011)

Poor Sinbad must be rolling in his grave (if he ever was a real person that is) cause this Sinbad adventure movie is ridiculously bad. If a high school theatre group was given a budget that allowed them to make a movie, and add some really bad special effects, this is what you would get.

The only, and I mean only thing that makes this mess worth sitting through is our Sinbad actor, Manu Bennett. Manu also plays the character Crixus in the Spartacus TV series. He is excellent in Spartacus. He has an obvious talent for playing these period characters, even aside from the muscles. But even a good actor can only do so much with a terrible script and horrible production values.

Unless you are a fan of Manu’s, pass on this painful piece. It’s akin to neighbourhood kids making a backyard movie, and doing it baddly.

2.5/10

FireFox 10 Issues

What’s the deal with FireFox 10? I have to wonder if it’s just me, or do other people also have a sluggish response to using version 10 after a couple of days.

For many version iterations, FF has had a memory leak issue, where it would consume all your system and paging memory till your entire system was slow. Now with version 10.x, on my 4 core system, FF alone is really slow and sluggish after 2 days and needs to be restarted. It no longer eats up 2 gigs of memory for itself in a few days, it says below 1 gig, but it still is unusable slow in 2 days of constant running with 20 tabs open.

Very sad. Maybe I have to go back to Chrome and live again with it’s numerous bugs. This is disappointing.

Three Musketeers (2011)

I’ve seen many versions of The Three Musketeers in my lifetime. But this is the first where some characters had Middle Age “James Bond” style gadgets or fought like Ninjas.

The Three Musketeers in all movie versions had “James Bond” style luck and above average skills. After all they are our heroes. But they went to far to endow the villainess with Ninja skills and futuristic gadgets inspired by Da Vinci.

Let’s not leave out the airships. Not one but skies full of gas filled airships. Gas filled airships weren’t even possible in that era. With gas bags only slightly larger than the actual ships below them. Yes actual sea going sized ships made from huge wooden beams. Anyone with only the slightest understanding of science would scoff at these images.

The entire movie is fantasy, and not even “believable” fantasy.

The movie is mildly entertaining, and the action scenes are fine. If they would have dropped the ridiculous fantasy gadgets, unbelievable airships and Ninja skills, and simply made a Musketeer remake, it could have been a grand movie. With the actors they had and the money they obviously spent, there was so much potential for a far better storey. The movie was ruined with these mistakes and could have been so much more.

4/10

BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0 OS Finally Here

Like all us PlayBook owners, I’ve been waiting far to long for the final version of OS 2.0. Saying and thinking OS 2.0 is weird for me. I was also one of the few people that used IBM’s OS/2 back in the day, not unlike being one of the few people with a PlayBook. So when I think OS 2, I can’t help being reminded of the ill fated desktop OS that was technologically far a head of it’s time, yet failed miserably in commercial terms. Time will soon tell if the PlayBook and it’s long over due OS upgrade will go down in history in much the same way. My guess is it most certainly will.

As for using the new OS that was pushed out to my device early yesterday, there is no change for me other than adding the new apps, since I’ve been using the beta versions of OS 2.0 since shortly after I purchased my PlayBook. And I can see no difference between this final version and the last beta.

As for the new apps, the main ones are email, calendar, contacts, and I think they added a new file manager app which I don’t remember seeing before. Up until now I was using converted Android apps to get the functionality of the main 3, email, calendar and contacts. And that finally made the PlayBook worth using…sometimes.

The email app called Messaging is on par with your typical unified inbox tablet or phone email client. Nothing special about it, it works fine and seems to be very usable.

The calendar app is somewhat disappointing. I use Google Calendar for my personal and work scheduling. The PlayBook Calendar does sync with Google’s calendar system, but only with the main calendar. I was not using the main Google calendar for much, instead I had secondary calendars for Personal and Business appointments, so I could see them in different colours. When I linked the PlayBook to my Google Calendar I saw nothing, so I had to export all my appointments from both secondary calendars and import them both into the same main calendar. I can now see them and sync with the PlayBook, but how inconvenient is that?! This is not unlike the exact same limitation in Google’s own Outlook sync app, which will also only sync the main calendar to Outlook. Of course I’ve always assumed this was due to Outlook’s lack of multiple calendars unless you had Exchange. Why is BlackBerry building this limitation into the PlayBook? It had multiple calendar functionality. Is it a Google API limitation or a BlackBerry oversight?

The other shortcoming of the PlayBook Calendar is that when sync’d to a Google Calendar, and viewing a day’s events for the first time, it seems to have to fetch the data, as there is a noticeable delay. It appears to cache the info after viewing a day, as it is faster each same day view. Why not cache the next 30 days so it’s always available for immediate viewing?

So for me other than this experiment, I’m going to likely use the browser version of Google Calendar, as there is no advantage to using their native app. It seems somewhat of an after thought in regards to users of a PlayBook wanting to sync with Google Calendar. And now thanks to PlayBook, all my appointments are the same colour.

The contacts app seems fine. Sync’s well with Google contacts, seems to have lots of fields and I believe user definable fields.

Let’s mention battery life. The battery life on the PlayBook is poor. After the upgrade yesterday, it definitely isn’t better, in fact if possible it’s worse. Or it was simply the fact I used it longer yesterday than I have since the first few weeks I had it. I may have used it for playing with the apps for at most 4 hours in total yesterday, and it went down to 12%, and by morning in standby it was completely dead. Like your typical Android phone, you can watch the power level drop in real time, and it’s less boring than watching paint dry, as killing the battery on a PlayBook with normal use is far faster than paint drying.

Overall there is nothing fantastic here. These are all basic functionality we have used and expected by default in tablets for well over a year. I’ve been using my Asus Transformer Prime over the PlayBook the last while, not because the OS is so much better, it isn’t, I have no love for the incredibly over-hyped Android 4.0 ICS, which was at best a minor incremental upgrade from 3.1. But at least it has all the functionality I was looking for and now the PlayBook as just barely caught up to. Plus the Transformer Prime has far better battery life. The PlayBook is now just become usable as a tablet, but still lacks all the 3rd party apps I’ve come to be used to. I have trouble finding reason to pick up my PlayBook now.

I see no reason the PlayBook is going to survive, unless it’s permanently on sale. And giving us “normal” functionality after all this time is simply embarrassing, and it won’t on it’s own save the company from it’s reported sales, marketing and obvious management problems.

Bad Teacher (2011)

Cameron Diaz stars as a ladder climbing, back stabbing, wallet snagging, short sighted, opportunistic pretty woman. Who is teaching till she manages to snag up the next half witted guy with some money. While we watch she matures enough to see yourself for who she is, drops some expectations and settles for a run-of-the-mill nice guy. Ya like that happens a lot. We see below average looking guys with no money in relationships with hot women all the time don’t we? But it makes for a good romantic comedy.

It’s fun and holds your attention.

7/10

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