fiat lux (cahier lukhnos)

Lately the biggest change in my house (where I live with my mom and bro) was that we canceled the cable and subscribed to a local ISP’s media-on-demand service. We now pay a fraction of the monthly fee. We have less channels, no 24-hour local news, but we get the extra. We now have things like DW-TV (Germany), TV5 (France), BBC World, Bloomberg, Arirang TV (South Korean, in English) and Aljazeera. The media-on-demand service isn’t top-notch, but it’s like what I think Taiwan should always have had 5-7 years ago. Anyway they fit into my taste, and I happen to be able to watch the German and French channels.

The other day I was watching TV5, and I noticed the program, a science and technology one, was made by CBC, the Canadian (quasi?) equivalent of BBC. It talked about transportation technology and the cityscape of Montreal came on screen.

I visited Montreal a few months ago and was in love with the city. But my affairs with cities are not confined to that North American gem. Such is the up side if you plan traveling yourself.

One thing I find, this being very subjective, about the cities I love is that they have this or that quality that I want to call it home–if I can overcome the hurdles of not just being a visitor.

That’s probably som sense that plain tourism can’t emit–the type of tourism, of joing a tour, that we are familiar with. The appeal of a place can come ironicaly from some travails you undergo on the road.

I’m not sure how those cities do it. They don’t seem to try very hard on being a places people want to call home–or if they try, collectively, they aren’t trying too hard that we see the trace.

On this I reflect on what we do in Taiwan, especially when the government and the tourism industry are calling for more visitors and more revenues generated from tourism. Now I measure the success (or not) of such endeavor by if someone recalls a good trip when s/he sees streetscape in any Taiwanese city and starts to want to call the place home, among the many choices and city affairs the person has in life.

lukhnos :: Aug.28.2008 :: bon vivant :: No Comments »

I always have problem with the various methodologies that teach you organizing your own to-do lists. I often wonder what the to-do list of an achieved artist, architect or designer looks like. I even wonder if they ever come up with to-do lists at all.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t make to-do lists or I suspect others don’t. As a programmer I can’t value the tools too much. Many professions, software development included, require team work and project management. You need all kind of techniques and measurements to ensure the things get delivered.

But I sometimes really question the philosophy of compartmentalizing your core activity, what to-do lists or what the more sophisticated (and widely marketed) schools teach you.

The problem is many activities, creative ones especially, are not the ones you can desire. There are, if you listen to yourself careful enough, I believe, moments in life when you don’t feel the pressure that you have to do this and this in order to reach the goal. There are moments when you just feel the urge to do something. And there are, sometimes, those very rare moments when you just do something, and only after its accomplishment that you realized you did it. When such moments come, be they the “feeling the urge” mode or the “post hoc realization” mode, any to-do item becomes self-evident and natural, and there is no such “I have to do this” pressure on it.

That’s why I wonder what people’s to-do lists look like. I’ve tried a few personal organizing tools and methodologies, and I was very bad at adopting them. Sometimes I even felt I was adapting myself to them, that is, by definition, modifying my own modus operandi–even though I wasn’t sure what it really was–to fit in their molds.

It turned out that I’m an organized but indisciplined person. That’s such an oxymoron. I’ve tried, twice successfully, to run a period of my life waking up every day at 7 am, jogging for 3000 meters, and starting to working in the morning, and calling it a day by sunset, to my benefits–I did a lot during those two periods. To get things done. There were a lot of to-do lists. But I wasn’t very happy because of that. Later on, I found myself organizing best when I oscillate between paper to-do lists, post-it notes, OmniOutliner, text editors (and I use four: SubEthaEdit, TextMate, TextEdit and vim) and Notes.app on my iPod Touch. Usually I run my “to-do app” on one of those tools for a while, then move on to another in the next period, and the cycle goes on. That’s what I mean by “indisciplined organization”: I’m not bound by an overarching methodology to run my own life. And I am happy with it.

But there are sometimes those periods of life where I was occupied entirely by one project, or sometimes the situation became that I was so busy and I didn’t even have time to do to-do list. I was knocked out of doing them. And many times the post hoc realization has been that I was even happier because I didn’t need to be driven by to-do lists.

That’s how I start to wonder if there are differences between “having to do”, “wanting to do” and just “doing”. In any case I become more skeptical about the promises that organizing methodologies make, because they probably don’t work well for everyone.

Yea, perhaps I’m an oddball.

lukhnos :: Aug.23.2008 :: tekhnologia :: No Comments »

I wrote a command line tool called mobilesync-inspect that can list, extract, replace and backup your iPhone/iPod Touch (hereafter I use iPhone to represent both devices) backup data.

To download the prebuilt binaries for Mac OS X and Windows, use this link.

It is well understood now that iTunes backs up the application data on your iPhone in one of your user directories. It is not yet well understood exactly how iTunes makes use of such data, and why the backup/restore process is so slow.

What mobilesync-inspect differs from other similar tools, say, from iphone-backup-decoder, is that it’s duo-platform. I have prebuilt both Mac OS X and Windows versions, in the hope that it helps Windows iPhone users out there. Although iphone-backup-decoder is written in Python, installing Python on Windows and run the script is not trivial matter for the less technically savvy (or people who are busy).

Of course there’s still a hoop to jump: mobilesync-inspect on Windows requires some DLLs from Safari for Windows. But once you have Safari installed, it’s really just four files to copy, and you’re all set. Plus mobilesync-inspect provides more than backing up backup data.

We have heard a lot about app data loss after App Store upgrades. It’s disheartening for me to learn that iTunes did not make versioned backups. If your app is zapped during the upgrade process (this mostly happens if your Internet connection is not stable between the different upgrade stages) and you inadvertently sync your iPhone with iTunes, iTunes will faithfully zap your app along with your app data. It’s quite scary if the app in question is about personal finance data (like what my app is about), to-do lists or password reminders.

One last note: mobilesync-inspect is open source. I probably won’t have too much time taking care of this side project apart from my daily work. I hope that other developers will be interested enough in making use of it to, for example, build a GUI tool for inspecting and manipulating the backup data. For those interested how and why its Windows version requires Safari, the answer is short: to be able to do cross-platform, mobilesync-inspect is written in C++ and makes use of Apple’s own CoreFoundation library to do the mdbackup data I/O (itself in Apple’s own property list format). Frankly I think Apple should put CF for Windows in circulation (currently it’s quite restrictive, tied to WebKit), because it’s a well-designed general-purpose library (think of glib with Apple flavor) and makes cross-platform dev experience far better on Windows.

Also: lukhnos :: Aug.06.2008 :: tekhnologia :: 19 Comments »