I just read about Alice.com today. This is a service which lets you order household goods online. Until now, it really wasn’t easy to do this for a few reasons: shipping costs, higher prices (compared to traditional stores), and timing - it’s usually too late for online ordering when you think to get more.

the business side

Alice.com folks have worked with the manufacturers of these types of products to bring this service. They are not a typical man-in-the-middle retailer that buys large quantities of items to sell to consumers. Instead they offer companies a platform to sell directly to their customers. Because of this, the prices on Alice.com are actually competitive. Additionally, there are no shipping costs. The price you see on the “shelf” is actually the price you’ll pay.

pretty cool features

To make the shopping more convenient than going to a traditional retailer, Alice.com has a space where you can set up your own products so you don’t have to search for the right item every time. They make it easy to set up regular reminders for each item so if you only need some items every other month and other items every week, it will remind you appropriately. It actually will make an initial guess for you based on how many people are in your house and what kind of item it is. Additionally, the will very soon have automatic shipping set up so you don’t even have to go to the site. If you like to shop using coupons, they have them and you can limit your search to show only items with coupons. The same is true of “green” products; every search has the option to show just organic options. There is also a social aspect to the site; you can set up friends and choose items based on what they like. There is also an option to show a list of just the items you’re likely to need right now (based upon your reminders and the last time you ordered the item). Finally, there are budgeting tools which show how much you spend on each type of item.

referral code

Now, if you like the idea, go ahead and sign up, it’s free and they don’t share your private information (including your e-mail address) with anyone. If you click any of the links to Alice.com on this page, or if you paste E088D4E in the referral code part of the sign-up form, you can get some warm fuzzies by knowing you’re helping us out without any cost to yourself. And if you want to, you can get your own referral code when you sign up.

more info

If you want more information, you can read the corporate blog entry about the launch or the community blog entry, which clearly outlines some of Alice.com’s cool features.

I wanted to point this article out. There have been more and more of these lately. This particular one isn’t so much why linux is ready other than signs that Linux is starting to grab hold in the marketplace.

They did it. They actually did it.

I became aware of Pixel Qi a couple of months ago. They claimed to have been making a display which has all the following qualities:

• like e-paper, can display an image while consuming no power
• works well in bright sunlight (again, like e-paper)
• has video speed refresh rates
• has a separate full color mode (as opposed to the black-and-white e-paper mode)

In addition, it didn’t require the creation of new fabs, it could be done in with existing LCD fab plants. I was very skeptical; the claims they were making were outstanding. The most recent color e-paper was pretty rough and refresh rates were not even close to video speeds. In addition to that, the Company’s page at the time was very simple and template-y. They also didn’t have any specific data; what is a “video” speed refresh rate 10Hz?15Hz? 24Hz? What is full-color? 8-bit? 24-bit? Who knows?

Well, the first batch of 60 screens is out and they look amazing! Both the e-paper mode and the full color mode have video refresh rate (I’ve heard that it’s 60 Hz). You can read more about it on Tech Video Blog. Or keep up to date with Pixel Qi at Mary Lou Jepsen’s Blog.
[UPDATE: another video from JKKMobile is below]

Below is the video demo from techvideoblog:

Here is JKKMobile’s video:

I was looking forward to trying Moblin, the Linux-based operating system designed specifically with mobile devices in mind, but apparently, it’s pretty lacking in a number of areas.

The interface looks very sharp; it is mostly flat, 2d graphics with a few subtle, well done 3d shaded parts. I really love the flatter interfaces because they look especially clean. I personally use the Elegant Brit theme on my system. Moblin also uses a Clutter back-end to draw its interface. Clutter uses OpenGL to draw 2d graphics on 3d surfaces; this allows for some fancy animations which take advantage of the amazing computing power which is available on modern graphics cards. In addition to the interface looking handsome, it also functions a bit differently than a typical computer desktop.

Unfortunately, this is where Moblin falls down. JKKMobile published a video review which shows off these shortcomings of the operating system. The video is rather long, so I will discuss some of the points made.

I’ll start with the minor things. First, there seems to be a lack of configurability throughout the system. There is a web browser, but no configuration options. There is a list of recently used files on the home screen, but no way to modify the list (such as pinning down or removing items).

There are a couple of places where you click an icon to invoke a desired functionality, where it needs some information in order to complete the function (such as browsing to a website - it needs a web address). It should allow you to type this information in readily, however, it requires another click (in a textbox) before you can begin typing.

Now for the big problem: some serious user interface flaws. The main toolbar which you use to interact with the system (akin to Windows’ start menu or OS X’s dock) hides itself. To get to it, one must move the mouse to the top of the screen. “What’s wrong with that”, you ask “that’s the behavior I prefer: it saves space.” Well, it completely fails on devices with a touch screen! It is very difficult to activate that very top row of pixels on a touchscreen. It also gets in the way since the individual applications mostly have controls at the very top of the screen. When you try and click on a control, the Moblin toolbar pops up and you end up clicking on something you did not intend. But that’s relatively minor. If you want to have a laugh, skip ten minutes twenty seconds into JKKMobile’s video. The media player is just plain wierd. He clicks on an image, and thumbnails shuffle around. Then he clicks on the same image; they shuffle around again. The process continues until he finally gets to the image he wants to see. You have to watch the video to fully see just how wacky this thing is.

For an operating system designed around a user interface, it looks like there really wasn’t much thought put into the interface. It’s a shame because it seemed like it was going to be great. It is still in a beta phase, so there will be some changes before the final product. It’s possible that we’ll still end up with something good, but right now, it’s not of much use.

I would like to also point out a couple of aspects which are part of the Moblin project which are pretty interesting. It includes a data store called Mojito, which fetches items from the web and caches them locally. Examples of items it might fetch include photos from Flickr or your contacts’ updates from Facebook. Developers can write programs which use Mojito to work with the user’s web data. Another interesting data tool is Bickley, which is a metadata management system. This allows items on your system to have extra bits of data tacked on. For example, you might want to know how frequently you play a song or which contacts collaborated with a set of documents.

I love to learn! It’s one of life’s most rewarding experiences. What follows is a brief educational biography.

The beginning

When I was a child, my mom taught me to read. I am greatly thankful for this. She frequently took me to the library to check out books. According the the librarian’s records, I read 200 books the summer before my first year of school. I was reading books on a fourth grade level.

I entered school a year late. My mother tried to convince the school to start me in the first grade instead of kindergarten. They refused. So I went to class for a week or two. The class was learning about the letters using the Letter People filmstrips. Another part of the class structure included story time. I asked my teacher if I could read to the class. She permitted me, so I brought a book from my phonics set. The book was not intended to be read by the child, but by the parent. Its purpose was to expose the child to some specific phonemes. So I read the story to the class and my teacher was amazed. She immediately informed the principal that I didn’t belong in her class. I was promoted to the first grade.

A little later

I came to fall in love with science and engineering. It was very fascinating to me how things worked. Once I was tasked with cleaning the living room. When it came time to vacuum the carpet, the vacuum cleaner did not work. I decided to figure out why. I found that it was easy to remove the bottom plate and discovered that there was a brush which was driven by a belt attached to a shaft. I didn’t know there was a brush; I thought it simply sucked stuff up. I found the drive system very clever and it was obvious that the vacuum cleaner wasn’t working because the belt was broken. I didn’t have anything suitable to fix it. Learning about the belt drive system was very rewarding and I wondered what other treasures lie inside, so I continued to probe. The mechanism which held the vacuum cleaner in the upright position for storage was also very interesting. I was delighted. My mother came in the room and the vacuum was in pieces spread across the entire floor. “I’m fixing it!” I said. She wasn’t too happy because a new vacuum cleaner was not in the budget. I think she went to her room to cool off. I quickly put the whole thing together and brought it to her. I showed her why it wasn’t working. I’m sure she was very relieved.

Another delighful experience I remember is that I received a chemistry set as a gift. My dad helped me with the experiments. The most fun was getting to heat test tubes over the alcohol lamp. Some things would change from gray or brown dust to brilliant beautiful colors. Other things would sputter violently. This is one of the fondest memories of my father. Another great experience was that my father brought home a Compaq Portable which he received from a friend.

To my knowlege this was our family’s first computer. It was an all-in one kind of system: a keyboard, monitor and computer all attached. It ran DOS, was nearly thirty pounds, and had two 320Kb floppy drives and no hard disk. I believe this one eventually bit the dust when a capacitor on the motherboard popped (it was exciting!). Our next computer was an IBM PC XT. This one had a 10 Mb hard drive the size of a child’s shoe box! I still have a board from that computer which has some very impressive looking chokes. It was on this computer which I started programming in GW Basic. I also learned how to connect to bulletin board systems (BBSs). There were local magazines which had listings of BBSs in the back; some charged money, others were free. In those days, you didn’t so much go to a website address (http://…etc), you dialed a number. Most BBSs were run by hobbyists. Each BBS had its own users and content. Sometimes they would link to other bulletin boards. Some boards also had the ability to let you chat with the host. This was very exciting! It was the first time I had contacted another human through the computer. The modem we used to connect to these boards was slow enough that you saw the letters come in character by character. Some bad sci-fi graphics still show this type of behavior: screens displaying character-by-character information. Eventually, we bought a computer with a 386 25MHz(I think) processor. This was the first computer we had which could display non character-based graphics. It was capable of running Windows 3.11

After my first year of high school, the school district redrew the district boundaries, which would place me at a different school. The school I was in, however, was superior to where I would be going, so I wanted to stay at my current school. I let my father know and he found a way to get the people in charge of such things to let me stay. Part of the expense of staying at the school was that the busses no longer had a drop near my home, so I had to have my own transportation.

I am greatful to my father who would drop me off and pick me up every day. since my father had a normal job, but school let out in the middle of the afternoon, I always had a couple of hours to kill. I loved going to the library for this. Rather than doing my homework (which I hated doing and still hate to do), I read books about all kinds of subjects. There was a huge book about how stuff works; for instance, it described how a can of shaving cream works. There were another couple of books which posed interesting questions such as “Why is tennis scoring so weird?” and “Why does a parachute have a hole at the top?” then proceded to answer them. Other books I enjoyed included subjects such as cryptography, black holes, and particle physics. This time in the library after school was very enjoyable.

College

In my senior year of high school I didn’t do too well. I received a couple of bad grades (including a D and an F in my English course over a couple of the quarters). I was getting burned out with all the busy work that was necessary. In spite of the bad last year, I still finished with >3.5 GPA and was accepted to the University of South Florida. I was looking forward to a new experience and challenging courses. I was especially excited about learning more math and physics. I attempted a couple of semesters but was thoroughly disappointed with the experience; it was exactly like high school. The most disappointing thing was that I had to take first year calculus which was exactly what I had already learned in high school. I eventually simply stopped going to classes (and didn’t go through the withdraw process (a bad bad decision). I went to work several years in the restaraunt industry. I quickly stood out and worked every position, I became a trainer, a store opener, and a key (sort of like a jr. manager) and finally made the jump to management. Even though I did well, I hated the work and decided to go back to school.

Currently

I am finally finishing college; just a few credits until I earn my BS in electrical engineering. I have very much enjoyed it (with the exception of a few courses, of course!) and I will be very happy to leave school and begin real work. In addition to my formal education, I continue learning on my own. I enjoy learning from books such as Spivak’s Calculus and Fulton’s The Ruby Way. Another amazing learning resource which I have yet to take full advantage of is an enormous library of engineering classes on video provided for free by the Indian Intitutes of Technology. The videos are great and they have pretty much an entire electrical engineering curriculum.