Technology

Laptop size dilemma

A few things have happened recently that caused me to go through available laptop offers, looking for a new one. First of all, our last desktop PC at home died. Secondly, my laptop is getting pretty old. Thirdly, I am switching to a new job, new office, new boss, and I have an opportunity to get a new laptop to sustain all of that stress.

What do I need in a laptop? Well, my current HP nx6110 has been working pretty good for the last two years. I am satisfied with its power and features. The only two things I would like to see improved are battery life (it can survive for about 2 hours without power) and screen resolution (1024×768 is sort of small for me). Other than that, it’s perfect.

Most of the newer laptops boast better battery life, despite being packed with more powerful processors, more memory, and better graphics cards. So that looks like to be taken care of all by itself.

Screen resolution, however, is a tricky issue. Usually, for higher screen resolution, I’d need to get a laptop with larger screen too. My current laptop has a 15″ screen, which seems just about right. I’d love to have higher resolution on the screen of that size, not a bigger screen with higher resolution.

Bigger screens are nice, especially considering the fact that I work a lot with pictures and use my laptop to watch DVDs. But moving around with a large laptop is inconvenient. For example, on a recent trip to a conference in Amsterdam, even my current laptop was a tiny bit too large. It was OK to bring it to Amsterdam, but it was too heavy to carry around to the conference (laptop + power supply + socket adapter + digital camera + spare batteries + the huge bag to fit all that = a lot of weight).

After considering all pros and cons for a few moments, I decided that I don’t need a bigger laptop. I should get something as close to the current size as possible, but with support of higher resolution (maybe a wide screen too). For the mobile needs (such as conferences) I should get a new smart phone with QWERTY keyboard. A combination of a good smart phone and a laptop should cover me from all sides. I’d bring the laptop to the hotel and use it to watch DVDs and browse the web on high resolution, while I can use a smart phone as a quick Web access tool and note taking device.

With that in mind, Lenovo ThinkPad T61 laptop looks just fine. There is a 15.4″ widescreen option, which boasts 11+ hours of battery life as well as all bells and whistles that I want.

What do you guys think? What’s your choice for a laptop these days? How do you solve your multimedia and traveling digital needs?

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Tomorrow morning I am leaving for The Next Web Conference, which will take place in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I spent a few minutes in Wikipedia, reading about both Amsterdam and Netherlands. Here are some interesting highlights (direct quotes from Wikipedia):

The Netherlands is often called Holland. This is formally incorrect as North and South Holland in the western Netherlands are only two of the country’s twelve provinces. As a matter of fact, many Dutch people colloquially use Holland as a synecdoche, being well aware of the widespread use of this name.
The Netherlands is also one of the most densely cabled countries in the world; its internet connection rate is 87.8%, the 2nd highest in the world.
A remarkable aspect of the Netherlands is its flatness.
The people of the Netherlands are amongst the tallest in the world, with an average height of about 1.85 m (6 ft 0.8 in) for adult males and 1.68 m (5 ft 6 in) for adult females.
There is a tradition of learning foreign languages in the Netherlands: about 70% of the total population have good knowledge of English, 55– 59% of German and 19% of French.
Amsterdam is the 5th busiest tourist destination in Europe with more than 4.2 million international visitors. The room occupation rate is the 2nd highest in Europe in 2007. Tourists can choose from 350 Hotels, 17 of which are fivestar hotels. 18,000 rooms and almost 45,000 beds are provided.
Amsterdam’s largest religious group are the Calvinists followed by Islam, mainly Sunni Islam.
Amsterdam is one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world and is a centre of bicycle culture with good provision for cyclists such as bike paths and bike racks, which are ubiquitous throughout the city. There are an estimated one million bicycles in the city (total population is 742,884 people, as per January 1st, 2006). However, bike theft is common, so cyclists use large secure locks.

Humans in image recognition

It looks like humans aren’t all that useless when it comes to technology. There are still a few areas that we do better than machines. Image recognition is one of them. TechCrunch runs the story about one company that seems to be using humans in image recognition process. Comments to that story also mention Google doing the same.

To me it feels like a problem with timing. There is a need to tag and search a whole lot of images. But there is no good automated solution available. So we are falling back on humans. It’s easy to come up with a few other areas, in which there is a need today for solutions which won’t even be here tomorrow. Technology needs help, I guess.

The art of the argument

Paul Graham wrote yet another excellent essey – “How to Disagree“.

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.
Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.

He then proceeds with identifying a hierarchy of disagreements. In his view, the forms of disagreement are:

DH0: Name-calling.
DH1: Ad Hominem.
DH2: Responding to Tone.
DH3: Contradiction.
DH4: Counterargument.
DH5: Refutation.
DH6: Refuting the Central Point.

Paul’s post reminded me of something – a course of formal logic back in college. One of the things that course covered was a list of fallacies, which are often used in arguments either intentionally or not. Of course, the complete list of fallacies is much longer and will take more time to memorize and understand. But, if you wish to win and rule online (and offline) arguments, you should at least get familiar with those.

Paul organizes hist list of disagreement forms into a hierarchy. He says:

Indeed, the disagreement hierarchy forms a kind of pyramid, in the sense that the higher you go the fewer instances you find.

It would be nice to see a similar, hierarchy organization for the longer list of fallacies. Which ones are the most frequent in online discussions? Which ones are easier to create and why? How to recognize and respond to them?

WordPress 2.5 up and running

I have just upgraded this blog’s WordPress version to recently released 2.5. I waited for this moment for a long time. WordPerss 2.5 brings quite a few improvements such as better administration (new interface, tag management, easier uploads, improved post editor), speed improvements, security enhancements (prepared SQL queries, password strength indicator, better hashing for passwords), and more.

But, as always, I was a bit worried about the upgrade path. My blog uses a heavily customized theme, plenty of plugins, and resides on a web host to which I have very limited access. It also contains more than 4,000 posts and numerous comments and attachments, which makes bakups and restores a lengthy process.

Now that I’m done with the upgrade and everything seems to work just fine, I have to say that this was the easiest upgrade so far. I didn’t need to fix one single thing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything just went through OK and simply worked.

Oh, and the new WordPress is every bit as good as it was promised and expected, and even better than that. I love the new administration. The Dashboard is much more useful now and makes more sense even out of the box, not to mention all those plugins which will appear in the next few days. I like the way the post editing has been modified (although I am still waiting for a better date picker). Especially nice to see how easy permalinks editing has become (forget the old slugs, now you have the full URL in front of you). Media management (uploads) is indeed much improved with some extra functionality, such as progress reports, multiple file uploads, thumbnail management, galleries, etc. Also, there is a way now to manage tags, which were getting out of control. In short, it’s great!

A big thank you is due to everyone who made this release possible, so – Thank You. And, for those of you who are waiting for something to upgrade, wait no longer!