File transfer is painful

The internet has been in existence for over 20 years yet I still can't seem to figure out a fast way to transfer files to and from the internet. Computers are beginning not to have disk drives so you can't just burn a disk and hand it to the person anymore. Did you say flash drives? They don't work well either. For one, they are pretty expensive still and I don't know of anyone who is going to return a flash drive now that they have it. Also, as flash drives dropped in price, the quality of the flash memory as well as the transfer speeds have diminished greatly. Assuming that people do return the drives, they only have a limited number of writes on them, making them useless over a long period of time.

I've tried many of these 'cloud' solutions for file uploading and downloading. They are slow. While downloading is OK, my ISP's up stream connection is so slow that it reminds of the dial up days. If I had high download and upload speeds there would still be a problem. Many of the people that I would be sending files to probably don't have fast internet connections.

Email is bad too. Gmail has one of the highest attachment limits at 25MB but that is far from enough. I need at least a 500MB upload limit before it becomes practical for me to use it. Also, not every email even supports 25MB. I've sent Word Documents that were around 22MB that got bounced back because their email had a ridiculously low attachment limit. (What makes it more interesting is that the email account I was sending to had 10GB of storage)

I do a lot of compression and multiple "part" emails to get around the attachment limits in email. I guess if I ran my own SMTP server I could have higher attachment limits but that would only be as useful as the attachment limits of my recipients still.

OK. I'm done ranting now. I've got to go give a flash drive to somebody...

Work has been going slowly

It's probably going to be a while until I actually begin working on something new again. There's so much going on right now that I'm too preoccupied by other tasks that making new apps or anything at all is going to be a challenge in my free time. We'll see, though. I hope that I will be able to do something interesting near mid-June but that would take time.

I'm adjusting the width of the blog a little. Small matter, but my mouse doesn't have a tilt wheel anymore.

Keyboard what's that?

Truth to be told, I love my dell keyboard with the strangely large space bar. It types well and accurately. The keys don't require too much force to go down and they don't seem flat. I find it to be one of the best low-end keyboards that I've used (hey, it came with the computer, I don't expect very much)

Keyboards are a thing of the past. I bet that if I didn't have to do computer work full time, I could probably get away without a mouse after the initial setup of the computer. There really is no need for one anymore. I could probably do everything with a computer that needs a keyboard with a mouse and speech recognition. (Sure, typing passwords would be a pain, but who does that anymore?) There will eventually be a generation of people who cannot type. People think of me as a fast typist with a speed of around 80 words per minute on a good day. I personally can talk very great ease at around 200 words per minute. It would be much easier for me to speak everything than it would be for me to type this blog post. (I can't find my microphone)

Just like the cassette tapes of the last decade. Keyboards will soon be sitting up in a closet collecting dust. Pretty soon nobody will know what they were used for.

End of the week came quickly

Yeah, it's Saturday :)

It's been pretty good right now. I ordered a new computer last night. It's got a quad core cpu with a 380 core gpu. It should be enough to match my computing needs for now. I intend to do some mobile app development. I probably will use this computer to finally start porting Ellipsis for Android. It may be a while though, I haven't checked how busy I am going to be for the next few weeks and there may be a few delays. No worries though, I am working on some other things which I'm trying to figure out how to market after development is mostly complete.

Yeah. It's going to be a fun summer :)

Paradox: Idle busyness

I don't understand how I could have so much work to do and yet be so bored at the same time doing nothing. I guess it does make some sense: the work that I can do right now is very limited in scope and I've already finished it. There isn't very much else I can do until later when I have the resources and an adequate length of time to do anything. This is a fascinating concept. Too bad it does not have much particular economic uses. Maybe it does. I'll think about it for the next few days...

Ellipsis for Android

As you know, Ellipsis has appeared on iPhone a while back but I intend on getting it to Android sometime by the end of the summer. Since I'm using Cocos2d, I hope that I will be able to quickly port the app using the Android form of the gaming framework. I've never used it on Android before so I hope that it will be the same as using it on iOS.

Mac or PC? Wait... aren't Macs Personal Computers too?

Working on a new app

And yes, this one will be completed, unlike the last one (which I spent far too much time in R&D)

This one will be pretty simple. I just need to get some artwork for it and then work from there. I don't think this project will be much of a challenge since I already have a good idea what it's going to be. However, I still need to port Ellipsis to Android (and maybe Windows Phone) so I don't know when I will be able to finish the app. Also, I want this on to run on Android (and maybe Windows Phone) at release time.

I'm also going to look into new ways of marketing the new app. I think I have a pretty good idea but I need time and thought to get everything done. It's going to be pretty interesting this summer.

Ironic that I need a desktop computer

Hey, me again..

My primary computer is being repaired right now so I'm using a different machine to type this blog post (this isn't the computer I talked about in my last post, this one is much much newer)

It has occurred to me that I will need a new computer, given the fact that my primary computer need to be fixed. That computer was a laptop. While the computer is quite nice to use, it's also a pain to fix and repair quickly. My solution? A desktop. It's quite strange, considering how I am such an advocate of mobile/decentralized computing. However, I use the computer far more than the average user (I'm not addicted to using computers)

Desktops are also cheaper and more powerful. On a typical day, I am literally running at least 2 or 3 virtual machines at the same time. Running virtual machines is resource consuming. They slow down my computer to less than a snail's pace, especially when I am also working on something within the main OS. I hope that visualization will become more efficient over time though; this will help me get work done while improving the performance and the efficiency of cloud computing.