Last thing you'll ever read…again
Archive for July, 2009
Piracy Today
Jul 21st
The reason why piracy is so rampant is the fact that it’s so damn easy. Back during the days of dial-up, it was hard. I remember having to download ripped games (games that don’t have any music or video to cut down download size) and using download managers to auto-connect when disconnected. I left my computer on overnight for a week just to download the latest version of Roxio Easy Media Creator (?). These days it’s a simple matter of going to your favourite BT tracker, doing a quick search and voila, minutes or hours later your download is complete.
You then have shady sites like PirateBay attempting to JUSTIFY their existence on the internet as being a fair and honourable website. It’s like having a company called “Organised Crime PTY LTD”.
Okay, so we’ve all walked down the path of piracy but these days pirating apps isn’t as “useful” as it was say 5 years ago. Before people would pirate an application because it’s necessary to do something but these days there’s open source alternatives that can do the same thing if not better. There are exceptions though like GIMP but even programs like Open Office are slowly catching up to the game. The only challenge now are stuff like games and media. I own perhaps 15% of the music in my arsenal which should be substantially more than the average person. I don’t know anybody that buys music online and I for one probably won’t start either until they’re dirt cheap.
I recently purchased my first iPhone app, I came across it browsing through the app store. It’s an application that tells you your usage details for your phone/internet. I did a bit more research, had a look at the free alternatives which were non-existent or just bad, had a look at the paid alternatives (crappy reviews) and decided on a whim to just buy it. It’s called iiQuota and now I can keep track of my phone usage without having to painfully log into optus. I bought another App yesterday called Tripview which helps you catch public transport around Sydney. The timetable is all stored locally (which can also be updated) so you don’t have to go online to view the timetable.
Alternatively, I could jailbreak my iphone, install a program called “Installous” and simply get the applications illegally. Installous is actually a legitimate application designed to install custom ipa files. But then there’s Appulous which provide access to cracked applications. Now the reason behind Appulous is that the appstore does not provide a try-before-paying option for their apps. I beg to differ. A lot of decent developers provide a free alternative with some features missing or compensate through the use of ads. In the free version of Tripview for example, saving your trips have been disabled. Their reasoning behind their service is just another lame excuse to steal from developers.
On a side note I also learnt that itunes does not give you an option to “confirm” before purchasing an app. I accidentally clicked “Buy now” and it immediately processed the request. Thankfully, the amount was credited back to me after filing a report but according to Apple “this is a one-time exception”.
I’ll probably be a sellout
Jul 17th
So I went for my interview at Intersect today. It’s a not-for-profit organisation that does projects for research institutions. It went pretty smoothly in my opinion. My interview was scheduled for 9:30am and I got there just in time.
Interview started off like any other, brief run down of the company, asked some questions about myself and what I do. Finally they decided to get technical. Gave me a rather simple problem. You have a char array and you want to reverse it how would you do it?
My answer was…”Well, I’ll first look up if there’s any inbuilt functions to do so”. I was pretty sure there isn’t such function in Java but in python it’s just one line. They replied with “Let’s assume there isn’t, but that’s a pretty good place to start.”
They then left me for 5 minutes which was more than enough time to write it up.
When they got back the Director of Engineering said “It’s wrong” and then the Senior Software Engineer replied with “That’s absolutely correct”. So I’m guessing I heard incorrectly but it left me to ponder on words that could possibly sound like “wrong”.
They then showed me a simple ui diagram and asked me what I would test to try and break it. I replied with the usual stuff like division by zero, overflow and underflow, letters and symbols, rounding errors etc…
They seemed fairly happy with my replies and said they’ll get back to me after all remaining interviews have been conducted.
As I was walking home I began thinking about the upcoming months. If I do get the role it’ll be a 3 months contract. By the time it ends it’ll also be around the time that exams kick in. After exams is Internship period. Now if I happen to be working for Intersect and if they do happen to hire me after the 3 month contract with a more long-term role would I still be with them? Or would I take up the internship? It’ll probably come down to money.
It’s a decision between working for a not-for-profit organisation that’s dedicated to helping research institutions or working for the corporate money hungry giant.
On a side note I recently re-discovered this childhood anime of mine. I watched it in China and when I came to Aus, it was on Cheez TV. I could never remember the name and whenever I described it it was something along the lines of “These people have these things that they hold in their hand and then they transform into these robots…except they’re not robots but humans…”. It’s called Tekkanman Blade and it’s extremely extremely old so I doubt anybody would take interest in it. I’m watching it again to regain some of my childhood memories. If you’re interested just wiki it.
In the mountains
Jul 15th
So a lot has happened over the past two weeks or so, I was meaning to blog about it but it turned into a long-winded piece of crap that I don’t think anybody would appreciate to read. Hopefully this post doesn’t end up in the trash like the previous two.
To start off the break I went to watch Transformers 2, worst movie I’ve seen in a while. Some movies are just plain stupid so I don’t bother complaining about it, but this movie was a 200 million dollar blockbuster which made no sense and to be honest was just a bunch of senseless explosions whilst you have some hot chick in tight white pants running across the arid Sahara, she doesn’t get a single scratch on her whilst her boyfriend ends up having half his face ripped to shreds.
It was followed by Jase’s 20th Surprise Bday Party. Highlights include being pecked on the cheek by Jase, gossiping like a bunch of 12 year old school girls (no shame) and getting a 5-shot Long Island Ice Tea. Yes, kids, 5 shots…not the standard 5 half-shots, 5 full-shots. The bartender, instead of making 4 drinks, made 2 drinks which had the alcohol content of 4. Normally, after you put in the coke the drink turns into a slightly cokey colour…ours remained white. It was great though! It was a pretty good hit and made everything more entertaining.
I then had a Jay Chou concert. Half the Asian population was there along with 2 white chicks, 1 white guy and an Indian. Sam reckons they were lost. Okay…yes…the fans are loyal, gave Jay Chou lots of “face”, but people can you please be more active? They handed out these blow up sticks which you’re meant to hit together to create noise. I guess Asians aren’t loud enough so they need assistance? Come on guys. Nobody was moving, nobody was jumping. Look. The concert was great but I wasn’t tired from the concert, I was tired from standing. Experience from standing is probably not different to sitting. I originally was in the second row but I had to go pick up Diana so we ended up in the back. My original plan was to push in-front but that failed…horribly. Nobody was moving! It’s like as if they all decided to do some firm Kung Fu stance. I eventually crawled to the back and stood next to some white chicks. I don’t know why they were there but they seemed interested in the concert. Overall, it was pretty good concert, just wished that people moved a bit more. I mean god…this one guy was voice recording the concert on his iphone. The quality would be horrendously crap and in any other concert the crowd would have pushed him so hard he would have dropped his beloved iphone.
I also went to Perisher from 5th to 8th. It’s actually colder in Sydney than it was “in the mountains” mainly due to the fact that I wore a lot more. On our way there we were playing “I spy”, twas awesome. We had words such as telegraph post, sky, blue and weed. We also played 20 questions which was slightly more amusing. Poor Kelvin was sick for majority of the stay and only went boarding on the second last day. God snowboarding was hard. I had two major stacks. One going down Village 8 and just face-palmed the snow. I spent a good two minutes on the snow going “Fuck…fuck…holy fuck that hurts…fuck”. I also knocked my head on the snow after trying to turn from the edge to my heel, had problem lifting my head out of bed the next day. Honestly, I don’t think I would have survived another day of boarding. It was just too ownage. Having said that, it was a great experience and I won’t mind doing it again.
The next day after getting back from snows a package arrived! My new iphone 3g s! Excellent. However, since it was delivered the box was quite owned and I later found out that the iphone itself is dented. The screen dents into the phone. I scheduled a genuisbar appointment and managed to get the phone replaced, thus bringing the number of iphones owned by me to 5. I also listed my iphone up for sale. Today it was finally sold for $561.97 + $20 p/h. Subtracting ebay and paypal charges it ends up being $549.38.
Lets do some calculations:
Postage for new iphone: $9
Contract termination: $438
Remaining iPhone payments: $144
Total: $591
Difference: $41.62
I paid $41.62 for the new iphone 3g s. Pro Asian skills I must say. Pro Asian skills.
There’s also some other nitty gritty stuff that I want to touch on but I think I should just leave it here and save it for the next post, stay tuned I guess…although whenever I say that I don’t end up posting a follow up >.>
