May 11, 2004
Come on, Sony
Almost three years ago, after having dinner with some friends in Shibuya, I was going towards the JR station to head back to the homestead when I decided to pop into BicBic. Low and behold there was the Sony D-EJ1000. It made all other CD-Players look like absolute junk in comparison. Heck, most of the CD Player still sold in the US weight 3 times as much, are 3 times as thick, and still use AA batteries. The sound quality on the D-EJ1000 is amazing and it's shock protection is superb. I know I don't use my adjectives sparingly, but the Sony D-EJ1000 deserves it all. It's the impulse purchase that I've been most proud of since I discovered coke vending machines.
Over the years, I've bought a lot of Sony merchandise. I know they have reliability issues, but their stuff just looks too good. However, since Wes bought his first Sony MediaStick MP3 player, I've been completely unimpressed by their MP3 players. Let's just put it this way, they suck.
Gizmodo shares some of their thoughts on the Sony VAIO pocket. They basically hit the nail on the head about what's going to be the main problem with the Pocket VAIO and what has been wrong with all of their MP3 players up until now. Basically, someone at Sony refuses to license the MP3 codec so all the media has to be converted into the ATRAC format. The problem is that the software that used to come along with the MP3 players for converting all the MP3s into ATRAC3 is absolutely terrible.
Anyway, the Pocket VAIO looks great, but there's absolutely no way that I'd use it for my MP3 player. For now, I'll just keep burning my music to CD to listen on my wonderful D-EJ1000.
Update: BoingBoing goes into detail why Sony is slowly screwing up their electronics.
Almost three years ago, after having dinner with some friends in Shibuya, I was going towards the JR station to head back to the homestead when I decided to pop into BicBic. Low and behold there was the Sony D-EJ1000. It made all other CD-Players look like absolute junk in comparison. Heck, most of the CD Player still sold in the US weight 3 times as much, are 3 times as thick, and still use AA batteries. The sound quality on the D-EJ1000 is amazing and it's shock protection is superb. I know I don't use my adjectives sparingly, but the Sony D-EJ1000 deserves it all. It's the impulse purchase that I've been most proud of since I discovered coke vending machines.Over the years, I've bought a lot of Sony merchandise. I know they have reliability issues, but their stuff just looks too good. However, since Wes bought his first Sony MediaStick MP3 player, I've been completely unimpressed by their MP3 players. Let's just put it this way, they suck.
Gizmodo shares some of their thoughts on the Sony VAIO pocket. They basically hit the nail on the head about what's going to be the main problem with the Pocket VAIO and what has been wrong with all of their MP3 players up until now. Basically, someone at Sony refuses to license the MP3 codec so all the media has to be converted into the ATRAC format. The problem is that the software that used to come along with the MP3 players for converting all the MP3s into ATRAC3 is absolutely terrible.Anyway, the Pocket VAIO looks great, but there's absolutely no way that I'd use it for my MP3 player. For now, I'll just keep burning my music to CD to listen on my wonderful D-EJ1000.
Update: BoingBoing goes into detail why Sony is slowly screwing up their electronics.
Posted by Dudley at 09:04 PM
Subversion
We've been using Subversion on and off for a while. Since the 1.0 release, we've used it as our primary source code control solution. It works with well with my other favorite pieces of software: Python and Apache.
O'Reilly has a really nice introduction to Subversion by the authors of Subversion. The O'Reilly Subversion book is also really handy, thorough, and free.
Subversion comes as both a client and a server portion. The client is a command line based which is fine for some, but on Windows I certainly prefer something a little more integrated. Thankfully, there's TortoiseSVN which allows you to do all the source code management by right-clicking on Windows folders.
At this point SVN is already a great solution, but you can get more bang for your buck by installing Trac. Trac is a web-based service that allows developers to collaborate on Wikis, track change sets in your SVN repositories, and do bug reporting / ticket requests. To boot, it has a really nice interface and of course it's written in Python. My only complaint with Trac is that it doesn't allow me to just view all the changes at once for a single file. You can only view the diffs for all the files in a change set. Anyway, it's only at version 0.6.1 so there's plenty of time to get things polished. Here are some nice looking Trac screenshots:
We've been using Subversion on and off for a while. Since the 1.0 release, we've used it as our primary source code control solution. It works with well with my other favorite pieces of software: Python and Apache.O'Reilly has a really nice introduction to Subversion by the authors of Subversion. The O'Reilly Subversion book is also really handy, thorough, and free.
Subversion comes as both a client and a server portion. The client is a command line based which is fine for some, but on Windows I certainly prefer something a little more integrated. Thankfully, there's TortoiseSVN which allows you to do all the source code management by right-clicking on Windows folders.
At this point SVN is already a great solution, but you can get more bang for your buck by installing Trac. Trac is a web-based service that allows developers to collaborate on Wikis, track change sets in your SVN repositories, and do bug reporting / ticket requests. To boot, it has a really nice interface and of course it's written in Python. My only complaint with Trac is that it doesn't allow me to just view all the changes at once for a single file. You can only view the diffs for all the files in a change set. Anyway, it's only at version 0.6.1 so there's plenty of time to get things polished. Here are some nice looking Trac screenshots:
Posted by Dudley at 07:52 PM
