Category: Life

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Computer stuff Life

Review of the Galaxy Tab 10.1

I have now played enough with the Galaxy Tab to have a reasonably comprehensive opinion of it as a portable lightweight device that does, with varying success, what I want it to do. Obviously, others will have different takes, and it is not hard to find reviews online. This review just talks about my use of the Tab for my own purposes.

Hardware

The device is very thin and light. It is more elongated than the iPad. It seems that this choice was made to make it more pleasant to watch widescreen movies. The screen is bright and easy on the eyes. It is about the same quality as the one of the iPad, and it has a few more pixels in the longer dimension, but that is not a significant difference. Battery life is good; I can get a day’s pretty heavy use with one charge. It may be that the iPad has better battery life, but even on the iPad there are Apps that eat the battery fast, such as Crosswords, which is less energy-thirsty on the Tab. The Tab is very snappy, responding to user input fast enough for any purpose.

The Tab has a cable attachment with a USB end to it. Take that, iPhone and iPad! It is very handy to have this; Kindles have it, too.

The front camera is good for video calls (see below about Google Chat) and the back camera is pretty good. Both are better than the corresponding cameras on the iPad 2, from what I read online, but the back camera of the iPhone is better than all of these.

Operating System

The Tab runs Android version 3.1, aka the latest version of Honeycomb. The older Galaxy Tab, the one that was in stores about a year ago already, had a 7 inch screen and ran Android version 2.2, aka Froyo. I learned from a friend that the 7 inch Tab has serious issues with losing WiFi access; there are long forum discussions on this online. I have used my 10.1 inch Tab heavily since I received it on Monday and I think that it does not have this issue, given my pattern of use, but I am not sure. I am keeping an eye out for this problem.

When I first started using the Tab, I had a little difficulty with the interface, as I am so used to iOS. By “little” I mean it took me about five minutes of exploration to figure out all the important elements for navigating the device. Not bad! The OS excels in notifications, as I had read all over online. It is no surprise that Apple has decided to adopt its method of notifying you of incoming emails and other events. Notifications appear in the bottom right discretely and they can be ignored easily if you are doing something else that is more important. In contrast, when I wake up my iPhone 4, I must first manually deal with each one of the notifications that have accumulated since I put it to sleep, before I can do anything with it. As a result, I have throttled down almost all App notifications on the iPhone in Settings.

It is a reasonable guess that I find the Galaxy Tab’s OS easy to deal with because I have experience running various versions of the Linux OS on computers for more than seven years. But this only becomes relevant if I want to do things under the hood. For pretty much all regular user functions, geekery of this sort is not required. It is easy, for instance, to get on the Android Marketplace to find and download Apps, free or not.

The on-screen keyboard installed by default is Samsung’s own, although options are available, including an option to dictate to the Tab. Samsung’s keyboard works well, but it has too many additional screens with symbols (three in total, one of which is exclusively devoted to emoticons). I keep activating CAPS LOCK by accident, because of the difference between the Samsung keyboard and the iOS keyboard I am used to from my iPhone. I decided not to write this review on the tablet itself, as a real laptop keyboard is still significantly faster than Samsung’s keyboard, or any keyboard on a touchscreen (but I still intend to check out Swype).

App selection

The App selection on the Android Marketplace is decent; one can also look elsewhere for Apps, as opposed to the situation with iOS, which is locked down so that one can only get Apps that Apple has approved from Apple’s App store. The Apps I downloaded have various degrees of sophistication and polish. Many are still not optimized for a large screen, so they have microscopic fonts, which are not user-changeable. This category of Apps includes the Facebook and Posterous Apps. Other Apps are better suited for the large screen and offer user customization options, including font size; the official Twitter App is an example.

One of the best Apps I have seen so far is Feedly, which offers a superb interface for reading RSS feeds and synchronizes with Google Reader. In contrast, Google’s own Reader Web App uses a small font that is not user-changeable. A good Google App, native on Android instead of being a Web App, is on the Tab to handle Gmail. This also does not offer a user-changeable font, but the font it uses is quite readable.

The Evernote and Dropbox Apps are good, although not as good as their iOS equivalents. The WordPress App is as good as its iOS equivalent; I have already made two posts here using it, the last two posts. The Youtube App works well and has a pretty interface. Instapaper does not have an Android App, but Everpaper is a good client for Instapaper. For reading and annotating PDFs, one of my primary uses for the Tab, RepliGo Read is good enough. The Kindle App is fast and beautiful. It makes me thing that I will be using the Kindle DX I bought in January only in situations of reading outside in strong sunlight, which are going to be quite rare.

The Tab comes with some preinstalled Apps, notably QuickOffice and Pulse. The first allows editing of Microsoft Office files. I have tested it a little, and it seems good at what it does. Pulse is a visual RSS reader. I found it inferior to Feedly; since it is preinstalled, it also is impossible for me to find how to update it. I can update Apps I installed myself easily. This is a deficiency of App management on the Tab.

The chat App is called Talk and it works very well with Google Chat for video calls. I looked at the Skype App on the Android Marketplace but the reviews there said it does not do video (which the iPhone Skype App does well) so I did not bother installing Skype.

Reading

Kindle and RepliGo Read are good for books and PDFs, respectively. Feedly is superb for RSS feeds (it is also superb on the iPhone and pretty good as a browser extension on computers, although there I discovered some syncing issues and the occasional crash on Chrome).

Online

The browser is very good. It offers native browsing and Apps plug in to it so that, for instance, it is easy to send a link on Twitter from the browser or to send a page link via Email or the whole page to Instapaper via Everpaper.

Music

I am surprised that the Music App that came preinstalled does not offer links to either Google Music or Amazon’s music store. All it offers is a suggestion to connect the tab via USB to a computer so you can copy music to the Tab. For Windows and Linux this requires no software on the PC side, the instructions claim; for Mac OS X, they offer a link to download an application to handle the USB side of things. I have not tried this yet.

Games

I am not much of a gamer. But Angry Birds and Angry Birds Seasons work fine on the Tab, use the large screen well, and are free. Nuff said.

Movies

Youtube clips play beautifully. I have not tried to access Netflix or Hulu yet, or to download movie files. I am also not planning to try out the HDMI cable capability, although I suspect it will work well with our TV, which is also made by Samsung.

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Life

2011 Webby Awards

You will find them here and you will probably marvel along with me that this is their 15th year already.

Random intriguing site among the (many) winners: the99percent.com with this sample article to whet your appetite.

Hat tip to David Pescovitz on Boing Boing.

Categories
Computer stuff Life

Google is developing self-driving car technology

Sebastian Thrun, Distinguished Software Engineer at Google, has a fascinating post on the Official Google Blog today. An excerpt:

What we’re driving at

10/09/2010 12:00:00 PM
Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use.

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

I want a car like this yesterday. Even more, I want every one else on the road to have a car like this the day before yesterday. Most people drive in ways that prove they do not deserve the privilege of controlling their own cars.

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Books Life

A quote from “The Infinities” by John Banville

“The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.” (page 151) Boy, does that capture how I felt when my book was published. Not that the world was amazed by it, mind you.

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Computer stuff Life

Sprint MyFi card

The hotel has both Ethernet and Wifi connections, but they cost $13 a day. So we are finally making some use of our Sprint mobile hotspot card. It gets only a 3G connection here, but the speed is passable for light internet use.

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Fun Life

Morning in San Diego

Yesterday was a long travel day. US Airways had a plane that could not come to Philadelphia from Florida due to weather; it would have been the one for us. They decided to assign another plane to our flight and this delayed departure. When we finally pushed off from the gate at about 6 pm EDT (the scheduled time was 3:45 pm EDT), we had to wait our turn for the runway, so we finally were airborne at 6:30 EDT. We did manage to land in San Diego at 9PDT. By the time we were at the hotel, we were pretty exhausted so I took one photo (to be posted here later) and then hit the pillow.

The day looks very promising today, weather wise. After a hearty breakfast, we are ready for some sightseeing, once M is back from the convention center, where she is registering for her conference.

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Computer stuff Life vacation

New Theme

OK, so I occasionally play around with the blog’s appearance. I just discovered this rather spectacular theme by visiting Amanda French’s website for a graduate course called Creating Digital History. I am gearing up mentally for some more frequent updates here, especially from our upcoming trip to San Diego/La Jolla (tomorrow to August 19). Yes, I know, I’ve promised frequent updates before. 🙂

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Life

Recovery of a technical post

The material below was originally part of a page in my economics-oriented site. Since it suddenly stopped been displayed there, I am attempting to resurrect it here as a stopgap measure.

What is \text{\Large \LaTeX}?

\LaTeX is a free software package for typesetting documents for printing and for on-screen viewing. It is particularly strong for documents that involve a lot of mathematical expressions, but it also pays serious attention to refined aspects of typesetting. Documents typeset with \LaTeX are considerably more beautiful than documents created in any word processing application. Mathematicians, physicists, chemists, economists, and many other scholars use \LaTeX to typeset their works due to its superiority and free availability.

\LaTeX is a package based on the computer application \TeX, created in 1978 by Donald E. Knuth. The original author of \LaTeX is Leslie Lamport, but now \LaTeX is maintained by others. Please visit http://www.latex-project.org/ for the history of \LaTeX and other related information. Knuth chose the name TeX because of the ancient Greek word τέχνη, which means art. People who know this pronounce TeX as “tech”, not “tex”. Knuth made \TeX freely available and it became one of the earliest and most successful open source software programs, around which there also sprang an amazingly large collection of extensions and packages, of which \LaTeX is a particularly successful example that lets you pay attention to creating content, while leaving the details of typesetting to professionally created templates.

A very good introduction to \LaTeX is the Not-So-Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e.

I have been using \LaTeX over many years to typeset papers, presentations, lecture notes, and a book.

Sources for downloading \text{\Large \LaTeX} and related programs free of charge

The version of \LaTeX you will need in order to create and typeset documents depends on the operating system you run on your computer. Here are some good choices, arranged by operating system.
TeX Live 2009 – runs on every widely used operating system (Linux, other versions of UNIX, Mac OS X, Windows).
For those who use Windows, you can instead download miktex.
For the Max OS X, the best setup is MacTeX, which adds some very good tools to the TeXLive 2009 distribution. It includes the excellent \LaTeX development environment TeXShop (\LaTeX editor with a well-integrated previewer).
For editors I recommend Emacs (see below if you are using a Mac), Kile or Emacs on Linux, and LEd or Texniccenter on Windows. Winedt is an old favorite for Windows, but is is not free (shareware) and it is showing its age. TeXLive these days comes with TeXworks, which attempts to provide a development environment like TeXShop for all operating systems. It still has some rough edges. A special ability of Emacs, when the AucTeX emacs package is installed, is the ability to show equations and images within the text document as you prepare it, sparing you the need to keep compiling your document very frequently to see the output of your work.
For the hardy souls who are familiar with Emacs, the Aquamacs version for Mac OS X is by far the best Emacs implementation I have seen, and I have tried Emacs on Linux, Windows, and the Mac. In fact, it is so well configured that you don’t really need to be a hardy soul to use it.

ADDITION: After the 3/3/2010 presentation at Temple University, Sandeep Bhaskar suggested that I should add a mention of the TeXmaker program for composing, compiling, and previewing \LaTeX documents. It has graphical ways of entering commands that you may find hard to remember and runs on every widely-used operating system.

Tutorials and Examples

You create documents in \LaTeX by editing a text file with extension .tex. It is a good idea to avoid spaces in the name of the file. It is also a good idea to avoid word processors and instead use a text editor for this; I offered suggestions of editors earlier. A particularly problematic aspect of using a word processor for a .tex document is that most of them are configured to use curly apostrophes and other special marks that are most likely going to be misinterpreted by \LaTeX. Do not worry, \LaTeX will convert apostrophes to curly ones and will make many other beautifying changes to your text automatically, according to its professionally designed templates. Another advantage of text editors specially made for \LaTeX work is that they highlight commands in color and can automatically match braces, thereby reducing substantially the number of \LaTeX-syntactical errors that you make. The editors also have boilerplate embedded in special macros (these differ by editor) to save you typing; for instance, if I want to insert a bulleted list in my document and I am using Emacs, I type Ctrl+E and then “itemize” (without the quotes), causing Emacs to insert

\begin{itemize}
\item
\end{itemize}

and to put the insertion point right after the \item command for me to type the text of the first bulleted item.

I offer now some hints for creating various kinds of documents. My examples come in two parts: the .tex file and the resulting .pdf output file.

Workflow

The typical workflow in composing \LaTeX documents is as follows.

  1. Start with a template, maybe one of my examples below.
  2. Add text and formulas.
  3. Compile it with PDFLaTeX (each editor listed above provides a simple, one-click way of doing so).
  4. If you have added citations using BibTeX, run BibTeX (your editor should provide a simple, one-click way of doing so).
  5. If you ran BibTeX, run PDFLaTeX twice now, to resolve cross-references. (\LaTeX deals with cross-reference information by writing it into a file first, which it then needs to read to incorporate that information back into the document.)
  6. If you get error messages, do not panic. You probably mismatched braces or mistyped commands. Your document is still there, no matter how many errors you got. Google is your friend as you try to figure out errors, and the not-so-short introduction to \LaTeX mentioned above has some advise on dealing with errors, too.
  7. Preview the ensuing PDF. I recommend strongly against using Adobe Reader. It is slow, unsafe, and locks the files it has open, making it hard for you to repeat this process. Foxit Reader is a good alternative on Windows, and another good one and open-source to boot, is Sumatra. The Mac OS X system provides Preview, its own PDF reader that works very well (or you can download the free Skim which is also an excellent PDF reader); of course, you can just use the integrated PDF reader in TeXShop. On Linux good alternatives are Evince, xpdf, or Okular, which is the native previewer of Kile.
  8. Repeat as needed.

Do not get worried that the compilation process will be slow. Modern computers are amazingly fast doing this. On my computers, I can typeset a 300-page book in about 5 seconds.

Composing papers

There are many choices for papers, some based on the default LaTeX article document class, others on different \LaTeX document classes. Here is an example (and the PDF output generated by compiling it with PDFLaTeX, the default variant of the \LaTeX compiler) based on some lecture notes of mine, with portions removed to make the file shorter. Even after the removals, the file shows you the use of many interesting packages, such as setspace for declarations such as \onehalfspacing or \doublespacing, fourier for a nice collection of fonts (try commenting out the line \usepackage{fourier} by typing % in front of it and recompile to see the default \LaTeX font set) and the wonderful graphics package tikz (written, like Beamer, by Till Tantau, who also wrote a fantastic manual for tikz).

Bibliographies

The creation and maintenance of bibliographies is easily automated in \LaTeX via the program BibTeX. Here is an easy introduction. There are also programs that help with the creation and maintenance of the .bib file that you will need to have to use BibTeX. A good one that runs on Java, and so can be used on many operating systems, is Jabref. It is a good idea to start work on your bibliography as you start composing the paper itself. You can then take advantage of the automation of bibliography management that \LaTeX offers when used in conjunction with BibTeX.

Making presentations

There are several presentation packages for \LaTeX. My favorite, and the one most \LaTeX-savvy economists use for their presentations, is called Beamer. A tutorial for Beamer can be found at here(PDF). I also strongly recommend the Beamer manual, written by Till Tantau, the creator of Beamer, which should be in your TeX installation (and is easily found via a Google search if it is not). It is one of the best software manuals I have encountered; do not be put off by its length, it is lengthy in order to be clear and to cover all the myriad features of Beamer.

Here is an example Beamer presentation with the source file (.tex file) and the file’s PDF output.

Lecture Notes on the Fly

I have not used \LaTeX in this way, but someone else has. The linked article has a treasure trove of good advice on how to make your creation of LaTeX documents more efficient and accurate.

List of Symbols Available in \text{\large \LaTeX}

There is a comprehensive list.

CTAN

This acronym stands for the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. There you can find an unbelievably extensive collection of informative documents, packages, fonts, and software related to all things \TeX / \LaTeX.

Categories
Life Science

Mathematical formula predicts clear favorite for the FIFA World Cup

Mathematical formula predicts clear favorite for the FIFA World Cup. OK, it’s a little hard to believe that people have been collecting this level of detailed ball-passing data, but I guess so much money is involved with soccer that it all makes sense.

Update: The prediction was correct. (I thought the final itself was a horrible match.)

Categories
Life

Few Are Coming to See Greece’s Modern Olympic Ruins – WSJ.com

Few Are Coming to See Greeces Modern Olympic Ruins – WSJ.com. So now we have the ancient ruins and the folly of 2004 ruins. Nice.