First I’ll deal with the negatives. In general it would seem the detractors of the iPad fall into two different camps.

The first camp is underwhelmed. They were expecting a Macbook Pro with a touch screen. They assumed all the rumors were true and were waiting for a new jump in computing. These are the people complaining that “it’s just a big iPhone!”

The first camp can be forgiven. They failed because they got caught up in the hype and imagined that the iPad would be perfect in every way, delivered by unicorn to their doors. They failed because they don’t have the perception to see how incredible the iPhone could actually be if it had a bigger screen. They failed because they forget that every first generation product is merely a step in a direction.

The second camp is the freedom camp. They think that because it is technology it must be what they define as “free.” This usually means that it plays Ogg Vorbis files, can run any type of software, or can otherwise be hacked beyond imagination. They decry that the iPad is a “closed” platform. Some who really went rabid go so far as even to say that it has “DRM.”

The Linux versus the world argument is as old as dirt and we needn’t go into all the arguments. The fact of the matter is, you cannot expect a corporation trying to maximize profits to build a broad open platform. You cannot expect a beautiful user experience and demand an open platform. It doesn’t work that easily. This community is frustrated because no company wants to give away their innovation and engineers. Thus, Linux remains a plaform for hackers. Who are the real fanboys here? Apple has created what the armies of hackers could not (and never would): a computer that doesn’t feel like a computer. Apple can make such a device for the reason that they do control the hardware, software, and software delivery. Take one of those out of the equation, and the quality will go down from what we have come to expect from Apple.

The only question that is really outstanding is, why would I want an iPad? Why do we need another gadget? I am not certain that Apple completely solved that problem, but they made important steps at defining the mid-size portable gadget.

There are a few key shortcomings in the device itself. The first is multitasking: it seems to me that a computer of the size and power of the iPad ought to be able to run a few applications at a time. At the same time, everyone says the iPad is incredibly fast. Guess what? Your Macbook would be fast too if you only ran one application at a time. I think this design decision makes the iPad feel more like a device rather than a computer. Again, the “computery” part diminishes into the background while the actual applications come to the forefront.

The second key shortcoming is I/O. The only data port is the 30 pin dock connector. It’s a fine little connector to be sure, but lack of, say, a USB port to transfer data or plug in other devices like a printer seems to be an odd decision.

What will we do on our iPads? Who knows what developers will cook up. For my part, I immediately think of cool board games. You could have a whole shelf of games complete with instructions and game pieces in a 1.5lb package. Think of playing risk on your iPad. It would know whose turn it is, their score, armies, and suggest battle strategies. When it’s time to battle, it could swoop in Google earth style to a natural battlefield and you could watch a 3D rending of your armies battling it out. Think of medical uses. A doctor could have access to high resolution images and be able to see a lot more data than one could on an iPhone. Think of a control panel for your home. Lots of little levers and switches could control a smart home. There are so many applications where the iPhone/iTouch needs more screen. Here is that solution.

What is the iPad? Honestly, I have no idea. It could perform badly, but I think it is the beginning of a new sort of computing, where we stop thinking about windows with three buttons in the corner, top menus, and double clicking on icons. Instead we move to a more natural, organic sort of interaction with our computers. Regardless of whether you want the iPad to replace your Touch, your laptop, or be something different, it solves a unique problem in a way that every other tablet up until this point has not effectively been able to work through. I think the iPad will start a new type of mobile computing, in a similar way as the first generation iPhone did. Get ready to start having more fun with your computers.

For a little background on network security, networks are very insecure. With freely available software, anyone on the network can read the data packets of everyone else on the network. You should be extremely careful about what passes unencrypted in hotel networks and the like (for instance, logging into Gmail or shopping is probably safe, but signing into your blog might not be). This is not a big problem with wired networks, as obviously a hacker would need physical access to your network. However, with the advent of wireless networks this becomes a problem.

Wireless routers usually fall into three security camps. The first are unprotected. Anyone can join, and consequently, they are more susceptible to data eavesdropping than wired networks.

The second are WEP networks. WEP security is very basic. It essentially inhibits casual visitors, but it has no strength against anyone with a little know-how interested in viewing traffic. With freely available software someone can hack a WEP network in minutes.

The third group are WPA networks. The deal with WPA is that to steal the password you have to try them all. This can take a long time, but this new product allows you to put hundreds of computers to the task to run through a whole dictionary of passwords quickly for the low price of $17.

So what should you do to protect your network? If you live in the country, you’re probably safe. If you live in a populated are you should definitely use WPA encryption and pick a password that is NOT in the dictionary–that is, a combination of letters and numbers longer than 6 characters that do not spell a word or phrase, even in 1337 speak. For instance, “pa55w0rd” is not safe. That should thwart most cracking attempts.

:w is the key sequence for saving in Vi or Vim. I use gVim on Windows as my main text editor.

There’s an interesting plugin that applies Vi keybindings to Visual Studio, but it costs quite a bit of money. I made more money from my programming I’d probably invest in that.

I must say I never really understood Sun’s business model. Their hardware seemed incredibly specialized and overpriced, while at the same time their didn’t seem to be much compatibility with Solaris. Essentially, they didn’t seem to be creating the ideal system. They then released Java, which is designed to work on any operating system and on any hardware. Java of course became incredibly popular, but you didn’t need to use Sun’s systems at all. I happily program in Java on my Windows and Linux box and to a lesser extent, my Mac (Java support lagging because Apple does the porting). I get all the benefits of Sun’s software for free and don’t have to buy any of the hardware.

Oracle should take care of things, I think. It would be cool to see better database support in Java now that two of the major DBMSes are owned by the same company (Oracle and MySQL).

After my algorithm class last semster I’ve been interested in how algorithm research practically helps people (I’m not a pure mathematician–I’m a computer scientist). This looks really cool.

Record-Breaking Packing Algorithm

This obviously has great significance both for designing packaging for products as well as fitting objects into other spaces like standard containers. Here is a place where research can really save energy use and costs.

…a PCIe enclosure that’ll contain 1TB worth of SSD storage with maximum read rates of up to 600MB/sec and maximum write speeds of up to 500MB/sec. Oh, and the sustained write speeds are right around 400MB/sec. Essentially, this device will contain four 256GB MLC-based OCZ SSDs along with 256MB of ECC DDR2 RAM; when slapped in one’s desktop, they can choose to set it up as the boot disk or a slave. OCZ is also hoping to offer a 4TB edition by the end of the year…

Now, this device fascinates me. What are the main drawbacks of SSDs, especially on the desktop where security doesn’t matter? They’re not fast on large writes and they’re not cheap. Price is not such a big deal, as they’ve been falling like anvils out of the sky of late. When 32gb went for $1000 just a few years ago, now we can have 1TB drives for that and we have SSDs in the cheapest EeePCs.

Lets take a look at the speed. This basically uses four 256gb drives in a RAID-like formation. We’ve already solved the speed problem with RAID0 for hard drives, it makes perfect sense to do the same for SSDs! Look what else it offers. Because orientation, width, and heat aren’t nearly as big a deal, you’re not constrained into a standard drive bay. You can put it right next to your graphics card. It’s not uncommon to see motherboards with 2, 3, or 4 PCI-E slots nowadays. Most people don’t need Quad-SLI, so why not use it for a screaming-fast, super-huge SDD?

Think about it. With something like this you won’t need front drive bays, which saves on space. I think we may very well see cases that are built wider to accommodate enormous graphics cards and drives like this instead of built longer to have an array of hard drives.

With a 4TB version coming out next year, the future for SSDs on the desktop is looking very promising.

Last year my team came in second with 5/7 problems, following the first place which was also from Wheaton. This year we took first with 7/7 and 30 minutes to spare with the other Wheaton team close behind us.

The problems were fairly easy with a few exceptions. I specifically worked on a text scrambling program and implemented a given algorithm to find Egyptian fractions. The final problem took the longest. It was a checker board and you had to count the possible paths of a checker from one end to the other. There were a few other twists, but otherwise it was a basic dynamic programming problem which we’ve done in class before.

I picked up “Programming in Objective-C 2.0″ by Stephen Kochan, and its a really decent book so far. Its super easy to get up to speed coming from C and Java. Objective-C is really just an extension on top of C which provides a lot of nice OO features. Objective-C 2.0 adds some nice features from what I’ve heard including synthesizing accessor methods for fields (or, properties as they are called) and adding a dot-notation, which gives accessing fields a nice Java-esqe feel, which is really nice for someone like me.

I like the C feel coming through with pointers. Instead of saying “new” class, you first do an alloc and then an init. How cool is that? The method syntax, though very different, is fairly intuitive. When you’re done with an instance you can release it (though Apple does have garbage collection for OSX).

Overall I’m pretty excited to dig into Objective-C and Cocoa. I’ll keep everyone updated as I go.

The 18-70mm kit lens is also in great shape, includes both caps (front and back), a UV filter, and its lens hood.

Pictures on request. Contact chetmancini [AT] gmail [DOTCOM].

$260 obo.