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RSS FeedJuly 31st, 2011
The move from BlackBerry to Android (or iPhone)
Moving from BlackBerry to Android (or iPhone)? There’s an app for that! But first, let us begin with Dilbert. You can also read this starter on uncommunication devices by Scott Adams.
First, the handoff issue. When you make a call using WiFi, and then you move away where you have no WiFi, your call doesn’t handoff to the 3G/4G network. It simply drops. That doesn’t happen sometimes. That happens every time, by design. Your phone even warns you that the call might drop, and you look at the phone with squinty eyes and ask in your worst possible Shawshank Redemption voice – “How can you be so obtuse?” This problem of soft handoff has been studied for a very long time – take this 1997 paper as example. The BlackBerry has an excellent handoff mechanism, you can start in WiFi, go to 3G, come back to WiFi, repeat and rinse, and keep talking. The workaround in Android is simply to disable WiFi calling until “they” figure it out.
Secondly, aah the synchronization issues. At other times I have written that in 2020, the cellphones will have no synchronization to do, since the cellphone will be the only device that will synchronize with the cloud. One thing that you learn only after you buy an Android phone is that Google really wants you to use GMail. At the least, all the synchronization options are built around Google contacts and Google calendar. Perhaps Google will eventually get it, that I just don’t want to move to GMail (email systems are like soft drinks – everyone has their own preference), but for now, I am serving Google’s fantasy. My earlier Outlook + Blackberry + BB Desktop Manager has now led to: Outlook, Google Calendar Synch, Google Synch on my android device, and the Outlook contacts are not really synchronized, they are just imported and exported. I am sure there are tons of apps that do tons of things, but that whole line of reasoning is sounding to start silly.
Thirdly, the battery life. Both iPhones and Androids have atrocious battery life. Best workaround is to keep your cellphone mobile phone wired at all times.
A few things that work very well in Android are the swype typing, the mobile access point and the camera. I have stopped carrying a camera, and the pictures come out just fine. Consider this picture from the Benjamin Franklin room at the State Department.
All said and done, Android is better than the Blackberry at thousands of things – BlackBerry is better than the Android if you actually make or receive calls. This situation is summarized in the following Russian couplet:
купил айфон а чо с ним делатьгде кнопки чтобы нажимать и
как мне позвонить сереге
а вот и он звонит и чо
That roughly translates to:
I bought an iPhone – what to do with it?
Where the buttons to press?
How do I call Sergyi?
Oh, here, he is calling and now what?
July 14th, 2011
Compacting an Outlook PST file
Migrating to a new computer recently, I observed that my Outlook PST file (sitting in C:\Users\Amrinder\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook folder) was about 4 GB. While not necessarily a problem, the folder size of Personal Folders itself was only showing up to be about 2.4 GB. (You can right click on Personal Folders -> Properties for Personal Folders -> Folder Size).
So, this begs the question, if Personal Folders is 2.4 GB, why is the PST file 4 GB? The answer to that lies in the structure of the PST file. Essentially, PST is a format that can be very easily loaded, very easily saved and very easily searched (gigabytes of information that we load when we start up Outlook, and is searchable in about 5 seconds). As the students and practitioners of data structures and algorithms will no doubt note, this requires that data files be indexed on many different columns, and then those index files stored, along with the data files. Further, whenever index files are created, they contain pointers back to data files themselves, and then when the data files are changed (for example, an email deleted, etc), data file cannot be simply modified without modifying those index files as well. So, that leads to two choices: every time you delete an email (or any element), you reprocess your index files. This would simply lead to a very non-responsive program. Other option is to let some of the changes go pending, and then run this maintenance once in a while, in which you shrink the data files, reclaim the deleted blocks and reindex the files.
Interestingly, you can run a small test for yourself. First, note the size of Personal Folders and the size of the PST file. Then, send a 10 MB file as an attachment to someone, and note your Folder size and the size of the PST file. Then, delete the email from Sent Items and check the folder size and the size of the PST file again. You will likely observe that while the size of the Personal Folders went from x to x+10 to x, the PST file only went from y to y+10+delta, and didn’t really go down to y after you deleted the email. So, read on.
This aspect of dirty records is not limited to Outlook only. Relational database management systems (such as Oracle) essentially do the same – they let delete records run without index recomputations, and then recompute the indexes (and shrink the data files) in a periodic fashion. In Oracle, you can trigger off this “data cleansing/recomputation” manually by using the analyze table queries. In Outlook too, you can do this by: Personal Folders -> Properties for Personal Folders -> Advanced -> Compact Now.
[Now, if you continue your test, you may observe that the PST file does go back after the file deletion and data compaction.]
One thing that I did observe, that even after doing the data compaction (really, there is such a verb), the file did not reach the same size as the Personal Folders was suggesting, but after shutting down Outlook and restarting it, and running data compaction one more time, it got to about 20% of the folder size.
July 10th, 2011
CS 6212 (Summer 2011) – Final Grade Distribution
Here is the final grade distribution for my CS 6212 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) class at GWU.
July 8th, 2011
Google’s aggressive Chrome positioning
As I waded through my computer migration today (a new Dell Latitude E 6510, replacing my Dell Latitude E 6500 after about 18 months of heavy use), couldn’t help but notice that Google is positioning Chrome very aggressively. Almost every program that I downloaded and installed on my comp (Skype, Winzip, Earth, PasswordSafe, SlickRun), came with the pre-checked “option” to “Include Chrome and make it my default browser”. Seems to be a bit of a desperate measure by Google, but looking at the recent performance by Chrome, it appears that strategy is working for Google. After all, how many people are going to carefully look at all program installation options. But that argument only gets Chrome on peoples’ machines. To actually get people to use it, Google is playing a slightly different game, promoting Chrome within specific uses, translation between one of them.