kmod’s blog

I read (part of) an interesting paper today out of UCSD.  The main premise of the paper is that “the rate at which we can switch transistors is far outpacing our ability to dissipate the heat created by those transistors.”  The rest of paper is then devoted to describing a system they have of determining […]

One of the reasons that I haven’t switched my main browser to Chrome is the lack of extensions.  Chrome has been great for running JS-intensive web apps, but for everyday stuff it just can’t keep up with all the functionality that Firefox gains from having extensions.  This is actually the main reason I haven’t switched; […]

I attended a talk today from some of the developers on the GNOME Shell project.  I have to say, the stuff they’re doing is pretty visually impressive.  They seemed to have some pretty solid design ideas from a UX perspective.  And watching how easy it was to add extensions was really cool. Basically, they have […]

There’s a new dimension that I’ve started judging computer tools and software on: how much control I have over what it does.  There aren’t many things more frustrating than a program that you’re trying to use, that you know it should be able to do the right thing, but you can’t convince it to do […]

I did a bunch of traveling over winter break.  And there are a few things that are a constant about traveling: the first is the hassle, which I partially deal with by taking trains whenever I can instead of flying.  The other is seeing large displays of Rosetta Stone boxes.  It’s to the point that […]

Well, I hate to say it, but Avatar didn’t live up to my expectations. Probably because they were impossibly high. Personally, i found the storyline to be cliche and predictable. The graphics, as expected, were amazing, but overall the movie was missing that feeling of “oh s***” that I’ve felt in all my all-time favorite […]

Today I took part in another Topcoder SRM — only a week after the previous one.  I hadn’t competed in any since March, and now there were two in the space of a week. Anyway, the competition this time was fairly easy, so it seems like they were (over-)compensating from the hard tournament last week.  […]

I recently took part in a TopCoder Single Round Match (SRM), which ended up being very difficult.  You can see the overall statistics here — out of 557 people that opened the easiest problem (ie took a look at the problem description), only 223 (40.0%) got it correct.  In my (limited) experience, that’s a very […]

Google comes under a lot of fire these days for “controlling” too much of the information of the internet.  A lot of this criticism comes from the dying old-media types that’d rather blame someone else than innovate, and a lot of this criticism is (rightly) deflected.  Google doesn’t own any data; even with Google Books, […]

Disclaimer: I am now an employee of Dropbox, and though I see Mozy and Dropbox as providing distinct services, some may see them as competitors. I’ve started to think about backup again lately, since I have more and more files that would really suck to lose.  Until now I’ve used a combination of Dropbox and […]