Steve on Security

The other day I kept hearing this noise from my neighbor.  I couldn’t quite figure it out, and naturally it was annoying.  I didn’t do anything about it, but it got me thinking about some random facts about sound and noise.

• Sound travels faster through concrete than air
• Sound travels faster through most materials faster than air
• Below is a list of common materials and how fast sound travels through them (Values found at http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/sound-speed-solids-d_713.html)

• The range of human hearing is 20 Hz – 20,000 Hz, however most people can only hear between 40 Hz – 16,000 Hz
• All frequencies are not equal.  Our ears perceive certain frequencies to be louder than others (found at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour):

• Sound travels a smidge less than 1 foot per second at standard temperature and pressure.  Therefore if you need to place speakers in front of other speakers, you need to delay them based on distance… 40 feet = ~40ms of delay.
• If a speaker is placed in front of another without a delay, the sound from the speaker farthest from you will sound similar to an echo.  This is called the Haas effect.  However, most people don’t notice this until there is a 40ms gap between sounds, or roughly 40 feet.  After about 40ms of delay, the intelligibility of the sound also decreases.  I.e. it starts to degrade the quality, and you start having trouble understanding what you hear.

Mostly useless facts, but they are fun to know.

At first glance the obvious answer is no, of course not.  However, if we took away the practical aspects of both, things might be a little different.  Think about it…

In medicine there is a standard of care: keep the person alive and healthy.  This is done through years of study, years of practice, not to mention the constant need to keep up on latest drugs and treatments.  There is however one constant. 

The body, in all it’s natural wonders, only really has one specification.  One heart, two lungs, two kidneys, one liver, one stomach, one brain, etc.

Software development on the other hand, does not have one specification.  Arguably, there is no specification.

Software Development: Be able to develop anything and everything.

It’s an interesting concept.  There are similarities between the jobs (as well as between a lot of other jobs too) because both need to keep up on latest practices, abide by rules, procedures, policies, and laws, all the while doing it well.

Developers, however, do not have the luxury of being able to follow a single set of standards though.  In our world, the righteous developers don’t just stick to one platform or one language.  You aren’t a true developer if you only know one language, or can only code on one platform.

You aren’t a doctor if you can only save human lives.  Wait.  No.  That’s not right.

We are considered uninformed if we stick to one platform.

Practically speaking, being a doctor is without a doubt much harder than being a developer.  There are days though that I wish I were a doctor so I didn’t have to listen to other developers complain about platforms or languages or methodologies or…

My point being: stop telling me that your way is better.  I don’t care.  I really, really don’t.  I will use what feels natural to me.

</rant>

Interesting error found in explorer.exe.  I tried hitting [Windows] + [E] and got this message:

Kinda bizarre.  I blame solar flares.

Don’t do it!

While I am definitely not looking for a new job, I was bored and thought I would take a stab at a stylized resume to see if I could hone some of my (lack of) graphics skills.  It didn’t turn out too badly, but I am certainly no graphics designer.

What do you think?

Just a quick one here.

Have you ever been using the output window in Visual Studio, scrolled up, and then lost the auto-scroll functionality?  It’s really annoying when you have a thousand things coming out through the likes of Debug.Write, or even if it’s just a massive build.

To re-enable autoscrolling, while in the output window just hit CTRL+END.

Kinda wished I knew that a year ago…

While I was in California last week I decided to visit the new Microsoft Store in Mission Viejo.  While there, the managers graciously allowed me to take pictures of the store.  Frankly, they probably thought it was a little creepy.  But nevertheless, they said go for it, and I did.

Now, Microsoft did one hell of a job making it known that the store existed while I was at the mall.  While I was grabbing coffee in the food court, these stickers were on each table:

Following that, as you head towards the store you see two large LCD screens in the centre of the walkway.  On one side you have a Rock Band - Beatles installation running XBox 360 over HD.

On the other side was a promotional video.

Microsoft designed their store quite well.  Large floor to ceiling windows for the storefront, with an inviting light wood flooring to create a very warm atmosphere.  While there were hundreds of people in the store, it was very welcoming.

Along the three walls (because the 4th is glass) is a breathtaking video panorama.  I’m not quite sure how to really describe it.  It’s as if the entire wall was a single display, running in full HD.

In the center of the store is a collection of laptops and assorted electronics like the Zune’s.  There’s probably a logical layout, perhaps by price, or performance.  I wasn’t paying too much attention to that unfortunately.

At the center-back of the store is Microsoft’s Answers desk.  Much like the Apple Genius Bar, except not so arrogant.  Yes, I said it.  Ironically, the display for customer names looked very iPod-ish here, and in the Apple Store, the equivalent display looked like XP Media Center.  Go figure.

One of the things I couldn’t quite believe was the XBox 360 being displayed overlay the video panorama video.  The video engine for that must have been extremely powerful.  That had to be a 1080P display for the XBox.  As a developer, I was astonished (and wondered where I could get that app!)  A few of the employee’s mentioned that it was driven by Windows 7.  Pretty freakin’ sweet.

Also in the store were a couple Surfaces!  This was the first time I actually had the opportunity to play with one.  They are pretty cool.

And that in a few pictures was my trip to the Microsoft store.  There was also a couple pamphlets in store describing training sessions and schedules for quick how-to’s in Windows 7 that I walked away with.

Microsoft did well.

The other day while I was sitting in the airport in Washington, D.C., I had a random thought.  When the ZuneHD first hit the shelves people were talking about how Mobile 7 might borrow the look and feel.  It’s sleek, easy to use/easy to understand, and is very simple.  So I started thinking about what such an interface might look like.  This is something I did quickly.  Nothing was provided by Microsoft.  Nobody has said anything about Mobile 7 design (at least, not at that point, but nobody cared anyway).  This is simply something I thought the interface might look like.

Some things to notice are the list-like menu’s, and the bing search at the bottom.  Blah-blah-blah anti-trust, the point is search is easily accessible, not necessarily just to Microsoft’s own search engine.  It could be Google’s search too.  Also, there is the location-specific information at the top showing the current weather.  Also mimicking the Windows 7 interface is the idea of pinning things to the home screen such as the Internet Explorer application.

There are some things that should probably change.  It feels a little cluttered at the bottom showing current messages and the appointments color is iffy.  There may not be any need for the middle separation either.

Just a thought…