December 31, 2009
I generally don’t read all the Apple rumor prognostications, so you may file this under the “incredibly obvious/already stated” file if you like.
Last night I was in a Frank Sinatra mood. So I played Sinatra on my AppleTV whilst enjoying family game night. After the kids went to bed, Frank sang “One for My Baby” and I wanted to share my favorite version (Sinatra at the Sands) on Facebook. I searched on Google on found the version on LALA.com. I had heard about lala a while back but hadn’t explored it at all.
I decided to try it out. Lala.com scans your hard drive (or the specific folders you choose) for music you own. It then matches those songs to songs it has licenses to online. This process can take a while depending on your library. I have a mid-sized library, about 4,000 songs, and it took about 10 hours. When it was done, I logged back into lala.com and lo and behold it had essentially recreated my itunes online, playlists included. Now it doesn’t have all the songs I had, it ended up about 65% of the songs. I’m sure that aspect will take care of itself over time.
Now if Apple actually launches a Tablet device, it may not have enough hard drive space to house all of my media. Further, with all of ipods/iphones/computers my family of five has, I don’t want every device to have to house all the songs we own. But if my songs are housed on lala, or whatever Apple rebrands this as, and if the Tablet has either wifi or better yet, a Kindle-like built in EVDO, I can access my playlists wherever I want, on my tablet.
With the amount of music, TV, movies combined with the number of devices people own, the idea of having a storage online versus a ‘home server’ makes a lot of sense. This would make my AppleTV more compelling as well because the size limitations of the device will matter less.
Tags: technology
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December 30, 2009
I finally finished reading The Annotated Turing. Two enthusiastic thumbs up. The Annotated Turing’s focus is on explaining Turing’s famous 36 page work which many consider to be the beginning of computing. I would have been hopelessly lost here without the annotations, and even then, I didn’t let myself get hung up on the math or I’d still be reading. It’s the theory that Turing was positing that I found compelling and the author, Charles Petzold explains the theory nicely.
But what I really loved about the book was the first section of the book that essentially introduces number theory to the reader. Mr. Petzold should be a teacher. The story of math is an intriguing one, and in the author’s hands, not only are the actors compelling, but the math itself is as well.
Every generation tends to over-emphasize the change going on as the ‘greatest ever’, but in reading this book, I had a greater appreciation for the amazing changes in math in the first half of hte 20th century.
If you are interested in Turing, computing, or looking for a great primer on math history and number theory, I strongly recommend this book.
UPDATE: thanks to a @lwcavallucci on twitter who asked a very common sense question (that I failed to supply an answer for in my post). The question is on age appropriateness. My first answer is that is has more to do with interest than age, but think I can go deeper than that.
1. For the actual math done in Turing’s paper, there is a high degree of difficulty and it was way over my head. That said, this did not stop me from enjoying the book or understand the theory behind the math, and the whole point of the book is to annotate the paper.
2. For the other elements of the book, i.e. number theory, history of math especially around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, I would say a middle schooler who enjoys math will like the book. (Editorial: I find number theory fascinating and I it is puzzling to me why the American style of teaching math puts that off for so long, when for many students, math would be far more interesting if they could take this earlier in life, and not associate Math purely with “arithmetic.”)
Tags: Review
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December 23, 2009
I am a huge fan of the cartoons of gapingvoid.com; I even bought one of his larger posters. But today I saw one of his latest cartoons, and it has vaulted to the top of my list. Enjoy your holidays, enjoy your now.
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With the amount of music, TV, movies combined with the number of devices people own, the idea of having a storage online versus a ‘home server’ makes a lot of sense. This would make my AppleTV more compelling as well because the size limitations of the device will matter less.
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