Random Developments

Not really many upsets in this split round; things seem to be settling down. Other than Essendon beating St. Kilda and, arguably, Brisbane beating Geelong, every result was pretty much as expected. This meant reasonably good results for most strategies: 6 correct hits for “ladder”, 5 for “money” and “home”. The random pseudo-strategy did poorly, with only three hits.

Financially, “ladder” and “home” did well, with positive results, and the two other had losses. Remarkably, on aggregate, “random” is still ahead, but I don’t expect this to last (although the best possible strategy so far, financially speaking, would be to reverse the money strategy, as I mentioned before). Here are the numbers for this week:

Links:

• Round 12 (previous)
• Round 14 (next)

Is it just me, or is the available crop of desktop RSS readers really, really disappointing, with very few exceptions? After deciding to leave Bloglines I’ve tried quite a few of them, free or not, and almost every single one has at least one thing that makes it basically unusable, in my opinion. Let’s look at a few of them, leading to my current choice of reader.

Thunderbird: it was the obvious choice, being already installed in my machine and being a reasonably good e-mail client. However, the key problem with it is simple: if, by accident, you try to delete an old post by hitting the Delete key and you have the feed (and not the post) selected, it gleefully deletes the feed and removes the subscription. That’s different from what happens if you do the same thing to an e-mail folder; there’s a confirmation dialog for that. If you then type Ctrl-Z to undo the deletion, it recreates the folder but does not recreate the subscription properly. After doing that a few times by accident, I decided I couldn’t keep subscribing to the same feeds over and over. Also, it has no built-in way to deal with removing old posts automatically.

FeedDemon: (not free, I used the free trial version) very decent software, pretty interface, very usable. However, its interface has a peculiar quirk: not all feeds can be visible at all times in the feed list. Only one group of feeds (or channels, as it calls it) is visible at a time. This wouldn’t be so bad in itself, but the feeds that are not visible are also not being updated. They will be updated only when displayed. This is, in my not-so-humble opinion, idiotic, specially if you subscribe to frequently updated feeds. You will miss posts in those. I can’t imagine why the software works like that, and I couldn’t find a way to configure it not to do that.

Sharp Reader: Mortal sin: if you click on the content of a post, the space bar stops working to navigate between posts. Also, it kept showing repeated copies of old posts in a few feeds, for no reason I could discern. One other annoying thing is that all my feeds were created in a folder called “Imported from export.xml”, and there’s no way to take them out of there. And, very frequently, when right-clicking on a feed it would barf with an exception like “ContextMenu cannot be shown on an invisible control”. The only way to make it stop happening is to close the reader (exit or minimize to tray) and reopen it.

RSS Bandit: for a while, I thought this was “the one”. It isn’t. My main issue with it is an unbelievable bug: it mixes up feeds. Posts from one feed show up in another. Over and over again. This happens most often with FeedBurner feeds, but not only with them. The first time, you think “that’s weird”. After a few days, you can’t take it anymore. Also, it seems to stop updating feeds if it finds an error; and boy, does it find errors! Connection problems, parsing errors… they may well be legitimate problems, but any reader has to be more accepting of feed problems than that. Other than that, and the habit of taking CPU usage to 100% for long periods while updating feeds, I don’t really have anything to complain about; it is a decent reader with a few annoying bugs which, if fixed, will make it a good product.

Omea Reader: from JetBrains, the makers of Intellij IDEA, this is my selected reader for the moment. But get the 2.0 beta version, and not the latest “stable” version! The 1.0 version has a very strange bug that messes up with the tree-list of feeds when you navigate between posts using the space bar. To their credit, I reported the bug to them and was told to use the beta, which fixes it beautifully. They have also a Pro version, not free, which I haven’t tested. I have nothing to complain about this piece of software; it is definitely the best one I’ve tried. It also reads Usenet news, which I realize is something not many people still do, but for me it’s useful.

Of course, other recommendations would be welcome, as long as it’s not for any software that works as an add-on to Outlook…

First things first: I will refer to this sport as “soccer” to prevent any confusion with the peculiar brand of football (a.k.a “footy”) played in Australia.

As most people with any interest in the sport already know, Australia ended its participation in the Confederations Cup with three losses, having conceded a total of 10 goals (and scoring 5). Of course, in a group including Argentina and Germany, no one seriously expected the Socceroos to advance to the next round; and, in any case, they did quite well against both Germany and Argentina (especially Germany). However, the loss against Tunisia was unexpected to me; I’m less than optimistic about Australia’s chances of qualifying to the 2006 World Cup.

Of course, the other green-and-gold team (Brazil) didn’t do so well either: they lost to Mexico (hardly the end of the world, but unexpected) and tied Japan (a little more worrying), and will now face Germany in the semifinal.

In somewhat better news, the qualifying tournament for the Club World Championship (to be played in Tokyo next December) was won by Sydney FC, as predicted, and they will represent Oceania against the champions coming from the other five continents. I wouldn’t serioulsy expect Sydney to win the tournament, but it would be great if they would at least advance to the second round, where they would play against the champion of either Europe (Liverpool) or South America (still not decided).

There is talk of Australia leaving Oceania for Asia when trying to qualify for the 2010 World Cup. I’m not sure if that would also change how clubs would qualify for future Club World Championships, but I think it would be a very good move for the Socceroos: Asia qualifies for teams for the World Cup (while Oceania may not qualify any teams), and playing better teams (as compared to most of the Oceania teams) will help the Australian team to improve.

Google has quietly added high-resolution satellite images from several parts of the world outside of the USA to its Google Maps service. No street or road maps yet, but I’m sure they are working on it…

Melbourne, Australia	Porto Alegre, Brazil

As you can see, the resolution is not that high, and there is an interesting change in image quality right in the Melbourne CBD… still, very nice. The Melbourne images seem to be a few years old, as the Docklands area is basically empty (that’s the area around the stadium in the left center; the stadium is Telstra Dome); it is now filled with buildings and construction work.

It’s in the paper: Queen Elizabeth has an iPod. A silver 6GB iPod Mini, to be more precise.

Now, that’s ubiquitous. I really want to see the Queen walking out of an aeroplane still wearing those white earphones someday.

Yesterday I attended the first meeting of the Melbourne Python Users Group (this is a temporary page, soon to be replaced with a more useful and permanent one); kudos to Anthony Briggs for organizing it, getting people interested, providing a venue and giving the first presentation!

As is the case with almost all first meetings, this one consisted mostly of people getting to know each other: there was a quick round of presentations after the first few people arrived, and a larger, slightly more formal round once everyone was there. In total, some 15 people attended. After that, Anthony gave his presentation on automation, some people volunteered to give talks in the next meetings (the next one will be on Twisted, by Justin Warren), and people went out for dinner (I went home at this point).

The next meeting will be in one month (no date was actually set while I was there, but I’m betting on either the 14th or 21st of July). If anyone else is interested, there is a mailing list where you can talk to people, ask questions, or even volunteer to talk about something you like.

After many, many upsets, this was definitely the most predictable week so far, and by far. The average tipper scored 5.9 correct hits, and my strategies didn’t score too badly either. “Money”, as could be expected, got 7 correct results, equaling its best week up to now (round 7); “home” got 6, “ladder”, disappointingly, got just 5, and “random”, true to its name, got 4.

Round 13 will be a split round, which means that the next update will be in two weeks. Here are the numbers for this week:

Links:

• Round 11 (previous)
• Round 13 (next)

What I really want to know is who, at Dell, decided that the block of keys that sit on top of the arrow keys should look like this:

instead of the way god intended it to be:

It’s not really readable in the pictures, but the “new” layout has Home and PageUp in the first row, End and PageDown in the second and Delete and Insert in the last one. The “correct” layout is Insert, Home and PageUp on the top, Delete, End and PageDown on the bottom. So, Dell put the Insert key as far as possible from its original position.

And, because I use a Dell keyboard at work and a sane keyboard at home, I will never get used to it.

So, someone, just tell me who it was. I’ll take it from there.

This whole day, I’ve been listening/watching (mostly listening) to the keynote address Steve Jobs delivered at the WWDC 2005 (I have work to do, so I’ve been playing it in two-minute blocks…). That, of course, is where he broke the news of the transition Apple will do from PowerPC to Intel processors.

In the Watchmen graphic novel (by Alan Moore and David Gibbons), the “master villain”, when confronted, spends quite a lot of time talking to the two “heroes” about his plan to end all wars, like most supervillains use to do. The critical scene, though, comes up when the heroes say that they,of course, will stop him from doing that. His response is “stop me? you can’t; it’s already done; do you think I’d waste time talking about it if there was any chance of you stopping me?”. And, indeed, the plan had already been executed.

The keynote address felt a little like that. Yes, we’re moving to Intel, for these reasons (the main one being power consumption). And yes, we will need to port OS X to Intel. But… it’s already done. OS X was made from the start to run on Intel and PowerPC. And, in fact, you see this machine I’ve been using for the demos? Yup, a 3.6Ghz Pentium IV. Did you think we’d announce it before we were ready?

I like Steve Jobs. He’s a little crazy at times, but he has style.

Winter has officially arrived already (on 01/06), but the autumn colours are just now reaching their peak. The city looks very beautiful, the parks are decorated in several shades of yellow, orange and red and there are leaves all around. It’s times like these that make me happy I don’t have a backyard to clean…

The photo, taken last Saturday, shows the Fitzroy Gardens, one of the parks around the Melbourne CBD and one of the most popular places for wedding photos all year round (click on the photo for a larger version). The park was covered in leaves, lots of kids were playing around in them (sort of doing “snowball fights” with the leaves) and many tourists were taking pictures.

This week ended with slightly better results than the last two, and with a mix of results that caused all three major strategies to finish with the same number of correct hits, cumulatively: 50 out of 88. The random “strategy” has one less hit.

During this week, there was also an interesting report on news.com.au saying that the AFL season is so unpredictable that the experts are doing no better than the novices at tipping. That does make me feel a little better, but it makes me wonder whether the results of this little experiment mean anything. That also explains why the best possible strategy so far, financially speaking, would be to bet always on the team that pays the most (the one least expected to win); with my rules, this strategy would have netted $86.65 on 38 correct guesses (43.18%).

In any case, here are the numbers:

Links:

• Round 10 (previous)
• Round 12 (next)

This is very nice. The new Boeing 777-200LR planes are undergoing flight tests and FAA certification, and Boeing is writing a blog about the process.

There are only two entries so far, but it promises to be very interesting.