Doing product research is usually hard work and rarely fun. Not so when it comes to USB hubs! We were looking for a good USB hub the other day and came across some very funny ones. Check it out ...

Having spent hours and hours playing with Lego as a child this one immediately woke the child in me and made me want to design a USB enabled space station:

I'm sure I will wish for the next one once the temperatures pick up ...

This one just looks plain cheap and the sheer idea of having it on my desk makes me nauseous:

Not only practical but also delicious looking is this triangular USB hub. Its resemblance to a Toblerone chocolate (巧克力) bar also didn't bypass the person who put it on the Yahoo online store:

And finally, this is my favorite. If you feel a real fishtank is to cumbersome but you want to bring some life to your boring workplace, this is the one to get:

After a lot of thought how many and what kind of monitors to put on my desk, I finally ended up buying two of those:

They're 20 inch at 1400x1050 pixels and the one I've put up today looks pretty nice. I was originally planning to get a 20" widescreen (1680x1050) and an ordinary 20" (1400x1050) but it turns out (it's not exactly a surprise, come to think of it) the pixel mask is very different, so it would look plain weird in a dual screen scenario. And two widescreens next to each other might give the word "rubberneck" a whole new meaning.

I'm considering getting a widescreen monitor at home, though. With the cheap TFT prices here it's hard to stay below 22" and not to buy them by the dozen. Can you say Swordfish? :-)

In my constant hunt for better (and cheaper ;-) tools I recently came across Tunnelier. It's a great SSH/SFTP client for Windows and the best part is that it's free for non-commercial use.

The user interface seems a little weird at first but it's easy to get used to and the SFTP part is better in many respects than SecureFX, another one of my favorites. The responsiveness is amazing; these guys certainly know how to program threads, something that even IBM doesn't seem to master (hello Lotus Notes!). For example, it has an upload queue, so that you can upload and download files from different places without killing the transfer rate with parallel tasks. You can even shuffle around the priorities, which is really handy if you want certain files to be done first, so that you can start working on them.

One thing less for Windows to catch up to Linux. (And not that many left for my use ...)

In case you were wondering ... We did survive our trip to Death Valley. Unfortunately, so did our cameras, which means that I will now be spending a few hours during the next couple of days to sort the photos, upload, and tag them. I took quite many because Death Valley National Park is really interesting and offers great opportunities to take photos. So stay tuned; at least part of them should be ready by next weekend.

By the way, I came across a great tool while trying to fix the timestamps of Loïc's photos. (His camera was 12 hours off, which led to some minor problems.) The tool may not have a well-defined name (it varies between "Time Stamp Modifier for JPEG Files" and "Image Time Stamp Modifier for JPEG Files") but it is perfect for the job since it modifies both the file time stamps and EXIF data.

What does a good Logitech employee do during the first few weeks of his new job? Right. Take advantage of the employee discount. ;-)

The first item didn't actually cost me anything as it was a clear case for warranty. The Logitech Wireless Headphones for iPod that I had liked so much slowly started multiplying. (It's what I assume marketing people would call it when the headband snaps.) So, I got a pair of these instead:

Logitech FreePulse Wireless Headphones:

The first impression was not exactly good. The headband sat way too low in my neck, I felt like something was constantly strangling me and every time I moved my head it hurt my ears. So, after two days of not finding a way to adjust them and wanting to trade the new headphones in for the old broken ones and a tube of superglue, I finally came across a this review and continued trying until I found the solution: The rubber ear bands cannot be turned in place but they can be taken off and put back on very easily. New verdict: best wireless headphones I ever had. :-)

Of course, wireless headphones have their drawbacks. You can run out of battery and, due to their light design, they're not exactly great in a noisy environment. (If you've ever tried to listen to music in the BART you know what I'm talking about.) Again, Logitech to the rescue ...

Logitech Noise Cancelling Headphones:

To get a first impression of what noise cancelling technology can do I borrowed a pair of Sony ones and was heavily disappointed: the "negative noise" in a silent environment was about as loud as the noise that it tried to cancel. After reading a number of rather positive reviews of the Logitech ones I decided to go ahead and buy a pair. The ingenious part about them: once you put them on, most of the noise is already gone. The circumaural ear pads absorb already so well that the audio processing can easily remove the remaining (stationary) noise. Admitted, there is some ground noise introduced by the circuit but given the target environment--e.g. a plane or a train--that should be okay.

Having good music is all nice and great, but at the end of the day (and probably during the day, too) you still have to work. As some of you know, I've never been a big fan of mice. Nothing beats a keyboard shortcut or an editor like Vim where you can reduce any mouse user to a gasping spectator with the stroke of a few well chosen keys. So, for the few things where it's hard to avoid the mouse I'd like to be as efficient and precise as possible.

A great opportunity to test whether the new series of Revolution mice is revolutionary as promised. I decided to go for the VX notebook model and, indeed, it is very nice to handle. The movements are really precise and scrolling has never been that easy. I actually managed to scroll a 65,000 line Excel sheet from the bottom to the top with one swift motion of my index finger. Almost makes the Ctrl+Home shortcut obsolete. ;-)

Logitech VX Revolution:

In the past, the Logitech mouse drivers and applications have been infamous for their pathetic quality to the point where friends advised me not to tell people that I'm working on Logitech drivers--to avoid a spontaneous beating.

That must have been the reason why they came up with SetPoint, the successor to GrausWare (sorry, you need to know German for this one). Is it any better? Weeeelll ... At least it hasn't bluescreened my machine, which is already something. MouseWare took about one stand-by/resume cycle for that. But the software itself is still an exhibition of bugs (meaning they're so obvious, they can hardly be considered bugs) and it provides less functionality than some of the previous. Why, the hell, won't they let me assign the double click to the thumb button? I know it's lazy but I like it anyway! And browsing in the forums doesn't exactly do a lot to improve that impression.

It seems, though, that I'm not alone in my discontent. Somebody came up with an excellent hack called uberOptions that tweaks a bunch of configuration files and--voilà--more settings than you ever imagined. (Including the double click for the thumb button.) Integrate that piece of software into SetPoint, plan about a month of serious bug squishing and you have one of the greatest pointing devices available.

PS: We'll have the quality discussion again when the first product that I've worked on is shipping. ;-)

There's nothing to test a new development environment like hacking up a little application that has been long overdue. Like a decent Windows webcam application using Visual Studio 2005. It turns out that the latter one seriously rocks, which gives the former one a chance to do the same in the near future. :-)

It took me only a little more than a day to write up the following small application:

It still lacks a few interesting features that will probably take a little more time to implement but so far I'm really happy with the efficiency that Visual Studio, C#, and DirectShow allow for. It took me several weeks to write something slightly similar on Linux and it doesn't look half as good. We'll see how it goes from here--updates and betas will be posted.

By the way, why another webcam application? Well, so far I haven't found a single one that I even remotely like. They're either written in Java which usually results in them being sluggish or not working at all, or they cost money. Not that I wouldn't pay for software--I'm not a poor student anymore ;-)--but most of them simply don't deserve a single cent. So, if you know any good non-Java, non-commercial webcam application for Windows, don't hesitate to let me know. I'll be happy to steal its features. ;-)

PS: I'm also looking for a good name for the app!

It's amazing how carefully some people do research for their papers. Here's an interesting excerpt I found in a paper from the Rhodes University in South Africa that compares the Windows and Linux driver models:

"Linux is a clone of the UNIX operating system first created by Linux Travolds [Linus FAQ, 02] ..."

(Note the spelling of the name of the Linux author.) The bibliography entry reads like this:

[Linus FAQ, 02] The Rampantly Unofficial Linus Torvalds FAQ, http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/index.html, 2002.

If the authors can't even get a simple name right, do I really want to trust the rest of the paper treating the highly complex topic of driver architecture? I don't think so.

PS: Okay, he did fix it for his thesis ... ;-)

There's nothing like setting up a computer from scratch. Reinstall all drivers, software, etc. But then there's the stuff that makes it worse than it has to be.

We have one of these one-line scanner thingies for quicker payments and I needed the latest software because, let's face it, the CD that comes with the product is always outdated. (Or when's the last time you've used one of those?)

So I go to their website and what do I see? It's 98 MB. 98 MB for a simple driver with a little bit of software. That even beats our Logitech QuickCam software which can do a lot more than that (but is also still too big).

And for the looks of it it hasn't just gotten that big recently because they talk about 56k modems on their download page. (Actually it's more like 56 Kelvin Bytes but let's not go there.)

Even nowadays not everyone has fast ADSL, so why force everyone to download 98 MB of Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemmish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish language files (remember, we're talking about a Swiss site here) when the driver + app would fit in less than 10 MB?

Size matters. Not the 100 MB for one product but the fact that for each computer there's at least 10 such monsters to download before even the basics work. And even with hi-speed Internet that's a pain.

My Internet connection at home is down at the moment. So I go online (guess how ...) to check out Comcast's outage check. After about a minute of waiting, this shows up:

Ironic, isn't it?

It turns out I'm not the only one who loathes the GNU Autotools suite. One of the BasKet developers doesn't seem too delighted with their performance either like an excerpt from today's mailing list traffic shows:

"And now other good news. I got too confused trying to build the test with autotools (I HATE THEM!!!!!!!! I HATE THEM!!!!!!! I HATE THEM!!!!!!), so I just went out and wrote a cmake build for them. And guess what? It was easy, and it works great! It's so much faster than auto* that it hurts."

He's right. It really hurts. Not only does the build system slow down compilation by orders of magnitude, it has very subtle bugs (only recoverable by radical measures such as deleting all autogenerated files including those not deleted by distclean), and it is a huge pain to adapt to your needs.

I have sworn to myself more than once that the project I'm currently working on for my thesis (more details soon!) shall be the last one I'm trying to do with automake & accomplices. In less then a month it's a big fat tomb stone with "Autotools" carved in and me dancing on top of it. R.I.P.