the brook

A company in India, Infibeam, has introduced Pi, an e-ink based book reader for the Indian market, with support for local languages and a very Kindle-like look.

Lesser base storage than the Kindle, but you can extend the memory with an SD card. It can read PDFs, ePubs, HTML, DOC, JPG and some other stuff, which is awesome. Doesn’t have a keyboard though, so while you can bookmark stuff you can’t make notes; which is a bit unfortunate. Like the Kindle, it can play MP3s.

It has a built-in version of Sudoku, and they claim they’ll add more apps.

Given the price (10K, lower than the Kindle), and the reading culture in India, I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes a decent hit. I love the Indian language support, which the Kindle lacks. If you go to the link, they show a mixed-language book with both English and Sanskrit text. They claim to carry 100,000 books for now, which is a goodly number, given that the Kindle, introduced long ago, so far carries about 400,000.

I’m not sure if this comes with a built-in cellular data connection like the Kindle, but it doesn’t really matter. I’ve always thought that was a bit of an overkill, I’m happy to sync a book reader via my computer for purchasing books.

I wonder if someone couldn’t produce a cheaper version of this for the poorer schools in India which have such a hard time providing access to books. Yes, 50 of these would be very expensive compared to buying 50 books — but you can just have 50 of these in a class and every student of every grade and subject could use exactly the same device in the classroom. Lots of saved paper, and maybe saved money in the long term too.

As long as I live
I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing.
I’ll interpret the rocks,
Learn the language of the flood, storm,
And the avalanche.
I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers
And wild gardens,
And get as near the heart of the world as I can.

— John Muir

Amazon recently pushed a firmware update to the 2nd generation Kindle which allows it to natively read PDF files. I can now drag and drop files to the Kindle from my computer, and the Kindle displays them perfectly; something that should’ve been the first feature Amazon thought of in a book reader.

Such “generosity”, I suppose, is the direct result of someone at Amazon noting that it’s competitors — the Sony eReader, the Barnes and Noble Nook and others have native PDF compatibility and were boasting about it. Not only that, people were listening.

They say competition helps the consumer. And they are right.

From the PostgreSQL documentation of the EXTRACT function’s century field:

The first century starts at 0001-01-01 00:00:00 AD, although they did not know it at the time. This definition applies to all Gregorian calendar countries. There is no century number 0, you go from -1 to 1. If you disagree with this, please write your complaint to: Pope, Cathedral Saint-Peter of Roma, Vatican.

This was faster than I’d expected. Starting soon, the Kindle will ship in an international wireless edition allowing downloads to the Kindle from outside the US as well as within. This is really good news.

I like how the Amazon kindle page now says “Kindle: Hello World”.

[via Wired]

Even Obama wouldn’t have been able to beat this one. From the BBC:

The other countries made proposals. We presented a heart and a soul.

I confess to you if I die right now my life would have been worth it.

Kindle on my table

My friends gave me a Kindle as a farewell gift as I left Singapore (thanks!), and it has been a lot of fun. As an avid reader, I’d thought long and hard about e-book readers, but with so many options and such new technology, never had the nerve to pick one up.

To sum it up, I’ll just say — next to my camera, it’s my favourite possession. And I certainly use it more often.

This is a bit of a surprise, even to myself. While I was pretty much thrilled at the idea of having a Kindle, I had my reservations and didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I am. Especially since all the downsides of the Kindle that I was worried about very much exist, and there are more that I didn’t know of. But the sheer pleasure of using it outweighs all of that. I’ll try and explain why.

The Kindle is one of the few gadgets that focuses your mind instead of distracting it. Jeff Bezos says the goal of the Kindle is to disappear in your hand while you read. And indeed, the Kindle does a remarkably good job of staying out of the way and letting you enjoy your book. The all-white design and the subtle buttons (I’ve got the non-DX 2nd edition Kindle) ensure that your focus stays on the screen. There are no LEDs of any kind. Most importantly, unlike almost all modern gadgets, it’s cool in your hand, even after hours of use. While the Kindle has built-in wireless and some web-browsing capability, all this is safely tucked away where it is hard to access. And thank God. The last thing you want in a book-reading experience is email popups!

I like the idea of (potentially) having a ton of books on one small device that’s still pleasurable to read. That vision’s still far though, a point which I’ll get to when I talk about the things I don’t like about the Kindle. For now, I’ll just say it’s useful to have multiple books with you without having to physically carry them around.

Also unlike most modern gadgets, the Kindle can last for more than a week without charge. Displaying a page takes no battery, only page-turns cost power. As long as you have wireless off, you can easily take the Kindle with you on vacation and forget about that charger. Also, on the couple of flights I’ve taken the Kindle on, nobody’s asked me to turn it off at takeoff.

Now, to move on to some of the things I wish were better.

E-Ink is nowhere close to paper. Read the Kindle right after reading an actual book and you realize that while the screen may be an amazing technical achievement, it’s far from achieving the stark contrast that black text on white paper can get. Though if you read the Kindle for a while you get used to it. Hopefully the technology will get better.

Many good books are not available. This was the biggest disappointment. I went looking for my usual favourites — Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), Illusions (Richard Bach), Revenge of the Sith (Matthew Stover), India: A History (John Keay), The Tamuli (David Eddings), Uncle Fred in the Springtime (Wodehouse). Nothing available for the Kindle. That’s quite annoying and it should really be Amazon’s first order of business to fix this. A number of good books are available though (Asimov, Douglas Adams for example).

The DRM sucks. It’s stupid that I can’t read books I paid for on my computer though I can read them on an iPhone. It’s scary that Amazon can pull books off my Kindle whenever it wants, without my knowledge. It’s bugging that even with the presence of such hefty DRM, I can’t do something as simple as lend a friend my copy of the book (shouldn’t it be easy enough to pull it off my account for the temporary period of the loan and add it to another person’s?).

You cannot organize your books on the Kindle. Did I hear a “What the…?” Yes, it’s true. The Kindle has a capacity to store (according to Amazon), 1500 books, but you cannot tag them or put them into folders. You can sort them by name, author or last accessed (and the Kindle screen shows 10 at a time). You can search, but the search includes everything in every book, and not just the title. I dearly hope they fix this not just in future versions, but via some kind of firmware update on my device as well. Meanwhile, you can hack around it in a rather inelegant manner.

As I pointed out earlier, start reading a book on the Kindle and you still tend to enjoy the experience immensely. This post was long due, but wasn’t written because I was too busy reading, and now if you’ll excuse me I’ll get back to my Kindle!

So, the new Fedora 11 Leonidas is finally here. I stayed up to install it on my brand new laptop. Everything works out of the box, except wireless, and that only because Fedora insists on open source purity, so they won’t ship a binary driver. I did have some problems, though, so I’m just documenting them here.

My wireless device is a Dell 1510 card shown in lspci as:

Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller

Usually, you would just enable the RPMfusion repo and follow the instructions here (or here). Now I don’t know whether its a change in the broadcom-wl package contents, or just a missing dependency, but the broadcom-wl package only installs a modprobe blacklist file and some documentation, and NOT the kernel module wl.ko which is required for the driver.

After breaking my head over this a few times and trying unsuccessfully to compile Broadcom’s own source for the driver, I tried ‘yum install kmod-wl’ and magically, wireless started working. Hallelujah.

Pretty sensitive issue this – whether man should be allowed to play God or not. I was a debater once, and I’ve pretty much debated this with dozens of arguments from each side. One thing you can’t argue with, though: playing God is fun.

I was playing around with Scheme today (for the uninitiated and/or the young, that is a programming language). I was pretty uninitiated too, which is why I had never bothered to try out Scheme before… but this is the closest to playing God that I have come. Here’s why.

Weird but cool syntax: Almost everything in scheme feels like it must have been created around the beginning of time. Scheme is to C++ what Sanskrit is to Hindi. For instance, here’s how you add two numbers in Scheme:

(+ 2 3)
5

This seems simple enough to follow at first – but then you realize everything in Scheme follows this rule – and so if you want to write an absolute value function, this is how you do it:

(define (abs x) (if (< x 0) (- x) x))

It all goes downhill from there.

Warp the world: The scheme book I was reading unwisely told me that anything and everything in Scheme was changeable. I did not read a sentence further and went ahead and wrote this out:

(define (+ a b) (* a b))
Setting compiled read-only variable+ can yield to incoherent state
+

This basically tells the interpreter that I want addition to mean multiplication. Despite the warning that I was entering a demented world, I was overjoyed that this appeared to work. And, sure enough:

(+ 5 10)
50

Bending the fabric of reality: Upward to enlightenment, I realized that + was just a name, and could really point to anything. We often hear these days that "everything is an object". But really, in Scheme, "everything is what you want it to be". And so, after turning my world upside-down, I turned it inside out.

(define + 2)
Setting compiled read-only variable+ can yield to incoherent state
+

Which says I want + to be a variable with value 2. For an ideal God, of course, the world would just carry out orders without cursing, but hey, I was just playing God! And was indeed bending the world to my will. And so I can now enter this, which looks positively alien, but is perfectly logical and returns a nice round figure:

(* + (- + +) (/ (* + +) +))
0

By this time, of course, subjects of the now-warped-and-bent-beyond-recognition world were, as you can imagine, feeling like Neanderthal man presented with the supernova of the Crab Nebula (or bash users presented with the Windows command line), and I thought it was about time to un-warp the world again. Even without restarting the interpreter, this is quite easily done:

(define (+ a b) (- a (- b)))

...and there was light :D (though of course the original + procedure can take any number of arguments, I'll figure that out someday)

If you're feeling down, I heartily recommend an episode of playing God to get you feeling on top of the world.