Steve

Technology

Thursday, 21. September 2006, 07:29:26

As a former Math teacher, I'm always interersted in calculators. I have ... well, must be 25-30 of them, though a few no longer work.

I remember when the HP-41C was considered "top of the line". It really wasn't all that special in today's terms, it had memory for up to 63 numbers, though some of that memory could be converted to usage for programs. In real terms, that comes out to 441 bytes. Today your typical scientific calculator can do most of what that could ... and of course at a fraction of the price.

In fact, that's what prompted this. I have just found a calculator which has some features I've previously only seen in models costing $100 (US), and this one costs $18.

I can't show "proper" math here, the forum doesn't support MATHML or something similar, but this calculator can do that to a certain degree. It can write fractions and square roots and exponents (okay, I can do exponents here), and it can display its answers with fractions and square roots in them. Okay, something like the TI-89 or the HP-48G can do some things this won't - but those both cost over $100. And this will fit in your pocket.

By now you're asking "Okay, but what is it?" It's a Casio fx-115ES. Actually, I have a hard time saying that, back when I was teaching the Casio models were somewhat behind the similar Sharp and TI models, to me this is like a "quantum leap" over what they were then - and over the competition.

But ... there's something to be said for the old ways too. When this calculator is set to "MathIO" mode, you have to use the cursor keys to make sure everything is in the right context. You can't just type "SQRT 3 / 4" (where SQRT represents the square root key) because it isn't clear whether the editor should put the division sign inside the square root or outside. I'm familiar with that sort of system from my more expensive calculators (and some computer programs), your typical high school kid will probably be completely lost. Well, for a while anyway.

A conscession to the old ways then - yes, you can set this into standard "LinearIO" mode, but if you do then it displays answers like any of the other calculators. When you're in MathIO mode, you can enter something like "SQRT 8" and it will display an answer of 2 SQRT 2. It can simplify square roots and rationalize denominators (as long as the numbers aren't too large), in LinearIO mode you'll just get the decimal 2.828427...

Of course, to be able to display stuff like that you need a graphical display, it looks to me like the display here is 100x31 pixels. But though it has a graphical display, it does not graph formulas.

This model can also do integration and derivatives (numerically, of course) and has an equation solver, though the prior version also had that. Other new features include an actual table editor for statistical data (though the table is limited to a total of 80 values), and vector and matrix calculations (up to 3x3).

Would I recommend it? I don't know. If you're an engineer or some other professional, you probably need one of those $100+ models. If you're a high school student, it may be too hard to learn - at first anyway. If you're a college student studying to be an engineer, well then you need what an enginner needs. Though then again, there may be times when that $100 calculator is just too big, and you need something handier. So I'm not going to say no, but it shouldn't be your primary calculator. Oh, and I suppose that high school student could put it into LinearIO mode and use it as if it were a standard 2-line calculator, until he or she does get the hang of MathIO mode. If you're going to be working with vectors and matrices, then it would still be worthwhile.

But I'm still amazed by it. I know technology has progressed a lot since I taught math (10 years ago), but other than the 2-line display and the "multiline replay", there really haven't been many changes in the low end scientific calculators.

I wonder what they'll look like 10 years from now?

4 comments

The neighborhood

Wednesday, 20. September 2006, 05:09:03

I was driving the other day from Vanlue to Fostoria (okay, those may not mean much to many people here ... Vanlue is a small town about 10 miles from here, and Fostoria is a city maybe 15 miles from here - and about 15 miles from Vanlue) when something just hit me.

I always know where I am and where I'm going, but that in itself is sort of like just having a good compass - I know that I need to go in that direction to get where I need to go. But ... I've delivered papers along about two-thirds of the roads within this county. And I remember everything along those roads - all the turns, and of course which houses get the paper (as of the last time I was on that route anyway).

At the time, I was trying to decide what would be the easiest way to get there, when I realized that just half a mile in front of me was what we call "route 780". As soon as I got there, I'd know exactly how to get where I was going, though in the process I'd also be crossing through the area of route 799.

I was trying to think of a way to describe that, and I came up with the this ... basically, it's like your neighborhood. Even the bumps in the road are familar to you and in that sense comforting. Not comfortable of course, but they feel like they belong. You expect them, and the fact that they - and everything else - are where you expect them to be is reassuring.

By coincidence, I just got off the phone with my supervisor - yes, at 12:30 in the morning my time. The lady who does route 780 is sick, in a couple of hours that's what I'll be doing. I know her - I trained her myself - and she does a good job, but sometimes these things happen. But that's what makes me so good at my job - I can remember the last time I did that route as if it were last week, though in fact it's been 2-3 months. Throw in the other routes I know, that's well over 1000 miles of roads (and I'm not even going to try to guess at how many subscribers to the paper). Okay, that's a pretty big neighborhood. But it is my neighborhood.

(Though hopefully they've finished replacing that bridge they were working on 3 months ago, having to detour around that added about 3 miles.)

2 comments

More speed tests

Saturday, 26. August 2006, 23:00:34

browsers, Firefox

Seeing as I now have a different computer, and Opera and Firefox have new versions, I should update my earlier post comparing them.

First of all, my "new" computer ... it used to be my brother's computer, he got it about 3 years ago. He finally decided to get internet service, but as his antivirus was 3 years out of date and he had no firewall, his computer lasted about a week before the various worms and adware caused it to grind to a halt. Being who he is, he doesn't try to fix stuff - he looked at it as a good excuse to by a new computer. Since I was still using a 6-year-old computer, he gave me his old one for free.

It's a 1.5 GHz P3 system (my old one was a 500 MHz K6-2) with 512 MB RAM (448 on my old one) and nVidia graphics card. It originally had Windows XP, but as I had to format the drive anyway I installed Linux (Mandriva 2006.0 Free). Obviously the results will be at least 3 times as fast, maybe even faster if they involve graphics.

I'll also note that the website I used in my previous test no longer logs previous results, the results listed for "Last results" are dated back in early July.

Anyway ... I also observed that settings for popup and tab handling could change the results dramatically (for test 2), so I now have several sets of results (besides different versions of various browsers).

So here's my first set of results - Opera 9.01, with various settings for tab/popup handling:

popups as windows    popups as tabs
                   foreground   background   maximized
     1.702            1.673        1.724       1.696
     4.11             5.927        4.271       1.757
     1.612            1.793        1.833       1.641
     0.704            0.726        0.725       0.673
     0.2              0.189        0.205       0.213
     4.944            4.879        4.96        4.721
     0.844            0.846        0.899       0.855

There is considerable variability in the tests, even if you rerun the same test; I think we can treat all the results except test 2 as the same. Note that using "Open windows instead of tabs" (referred to as SDI mode by us experienced users) is actually somewhat faster here than opening them as tabs - I was surprised by that. Though setting New tabs as "Maximize all, including popups" was the real surprise. (Note that in this test the content of the popups is injected by the script, there is no loading time for any of them.)

Okay, next set of tests ... Firefox has just released 2.0 Beta 1. I had 2.0 Alpha 3 and 1.5.0.6 installed originally, I added the new beta for completeness:

   popups as windows               popups as tabs
1.5.0.6  2.0 a3   2.0 b1      1.5.0.6  2.0 a3   2.0 b1
  7.11    7.021    6.582        7.281   7.192    6.264
 19.629   7.893    7.88         4.652   2.543    3.044
  3.415   3.019    3.083        3.464   3.097    2.95
  5.481   1.384    2.153        5.668   1.36     2.122
  0.582   0.566    0.53         0.619   0.561    0.518
 13.74    9.45     9.282       13.83    9.435    8.915
  1.883   3.123    2.848        1.874   3.118    2.801

Okay, Firefox 2 is better overall than 1.5, and markedly better at opening new windows and at the layers test (where it assembles a sentence out of floating letters). Oh, and the image swapping test. For some reason, the new version is quite a bit worse at date calculations (test 7 computes day of the week for the next 10,000 Christmases). There actually seems to be (at least, as far as I can tell given the variability of the test results) some improvement from Alpha 3 to Beta 1 in the loop test (Test 1, which shows that progress bar as it counts to 10,000) and also in the date calculations, but they actually lost ground on the image swapping test.

Note if you're trying to compare this with the earlier results that Firefox tabs are always maximized, there is no way to display a popup as a floating child window like there is in Opera. So the first 3 columns compare to Opera's first column, the other 3 columns should be compared to Opera's fourth column.

So how's Firefox 2.0 look? If you're a Firefox user, it looks like it is going to be good. Of course none of your extensions are available for the new beta yet, best wait a little while for the extension authors to update them. I don't use Firefox regularly (in case you couldn't guess), I really can't say how stable the new beta is. Still nowhere near as fast as Opera at these tests, seems like Opera is 2-3 times better on pretty much all of them, but we knew that.

(Oh, of course the statements I just made imply that Firefox 2.0 is running with no extensions installed. The extensions I have shouldn't really effect javascript anyway, and the tests wait until the page is loaded so my installed extensions shouldn't really matter here.)

No comments

More on life ...

Friday, 2. June 2006, 18:21:52

In a recent animated version of the Batman series, the character of the Riddler made a comment "If life were equitable, I'd have my old job back." Of course given the character of the Riddler, that was actually a clue. But it's also half appropriate to me - I'll reserve judgement on whether life is fair.

I've worked for a newspaper named The Courier for about 6 years now, in one way or another. For the last two of those I was actually a private contractor, but that changed a couple of months ago. I'm now a full-time employee again, with what was my job as of two years ago.

I have certain skills which make me just about uniquely suited for this job. Some of which you may have also seen in use in the forums here ... first of all, I remember stuff forever. I don't quite have a photographic memory, but I recall which houses got the paper on routes that I did 3 years ago. (Well, of course there may be some new subscribers since then, or some people may be on vacation or have stopped receiving the paper for some other reason, but I can tell you who used to be getting it.) When you consider that I've been working as a substitute carrier for the last two years and have delivered probably 100 different routes - well, you see how useful that can be.

How I ended up doing that in the first place though, I can rearrange a list of subscribers in my head, I know how the addresses are laid out in this county, and I never get lost. You know the old stereotype of guys who never ask for directions, they just drive around until they find the place they are looking for? Well, I do ask for directions, but in those cases where no one knows where something is I really can drive around and find it. Though then again, my background in math means I don't drive around randomly - I actually am using a search pattern. Knowing where I am and running a search pattern, I really will find whatever it is.

Put that together and what have you got? Someone that can handle any motor route that they need done when no one else can. That makes me too valuable to give me a regular route, if I had to do a specific route every day then they couldn't call me for other routes as needed. Like yesterday, one of our motor route carriers was in an accident (not while on the job), I got a call at 1 AM that they needed me to come in at 2 AM and deliver his routes. Two routes, 331 customers total along 140 miles of country roads that I'd never seen before.

Of course, being a substitute isn't exactly a full-time job. I did work for them full time in various jobs between 2001 and the middle of 2004. But the truth is, I really wasn't very experienced as a driver. I had a few more accidents with company vehicles than their insurance company could accept (generally minor, but you know how insurance is) and so they had to choose between trying to find a non-driving job for me and using me as a contractor. And of course, I wasn't very useful to them in a non-driving position. But I knew (and I'm sure they did too) that if I was able to keep a clean record for a couple of years they'd take me back - and they did.

You may be asking "Okay, if driving isn't a full-time position, then what else do you do?" Oh, lots of things. I seem to be the only person in the office who doesn't mind doing collections - and I do that extremely well too. I do well at getting people to subscribe, or at recruiting carriers. And one of these days I'll have to sit down and straighten out their route lists. Having driven - and still remembering - well over half of their motor routes, that won't be too hard.

Anyway ... you may have noticed that I'm not spending quite as much time in the forums as I used to. When I was only part-time at my real job, I was able to put as much effort into the forums as other people would a full-time job. But now that I'm back to full-time at my real job, the forums have to become just a part-time job for me. I take my work here very seriously (even if I don't get paid for it) and I'll try to do the best I can, but if it takes me a little longer to get back to a particular thread I hope you understand.

But as far as life goes, I'm in the enviable position of having a job where I really am irreplaceable. Not that they can't get along without me, of course they can, but no one can do it as well as I do. It is nice to be appreciated.

3 comments

Next great thing?

Wednesday, 16. November 2005, 20:19:39

Firefox, browsers

A few days ago, I noticed that Firefox 1.5 was finally out[*]. I do like to keep up-to-date, so I installed it over RC1. Yes, I had installed Beta 2 and RC 1 also ...

I suppose I should say something about upgrading from Beta 1 to Beta 2. You hear people in the forums talk about it all the time - they call it "extension hell". When B2 came out, most of my extensions wouldn't work with it, it took about a week for most of them to be upgraded so that I could get a version that worked with the updated browser. They did better with RC1 and the final - in RC1 I only lost one extension; in the final one extension had to be updated but it updated itself.

There are a couple of things I like in Firefox, don't get me wrong. In Linux, Firefox seems a bit more responsive when you click a link or button. The text entry speed is actually too fast, if I use one of the cursor keys I have a hard time stopping it at the right point. But Opera will still be my primary Linux browser.

The most disconcerting thing for me is how slow the menus are. In Opera, if I click on the menu bar, the menu pops up very quickly (for a 500 MHz PC anyway), in Firefox there's a quite noticeable delay. And it's even worse for context menus, there were several times when I right-clicked on a page and decided nothing was going to happen, then it finally did.

Also disconcerting, I had a popup get by their popup blocker. Opera (9.0 PR1 anyway) blocked the popup no trouble, there it was in Firefox.

Also, of course Firefox is not an MDI program. You only have two choices when it comes to desired popups - they open in a full-size tab, or they open in a separate window. Of course, you also can't "Restore" your tabs, they always occupy the full browser (excluding space for toolbars and panels). I don't like that ... though you can open a link in the panel without bookmarking it, something Opera may want to look into.

I was curious how they did on that javascript speed test BenchJS. I've previously compared Opera 7.x to some of the early versions of Firefox (search the forums if you want to see that). Keep in mind, this is on a 500 MHz PC running Mandrake Linux 10.0 and with no video acceleration to speak of. Opera on Windows runs faster. Anyway, here's the results:

                    Firefox 1.5        Opera 9.0 TP1
TEST 1 time:         32.115 sec.         13.784 sec.
TEST 2 time:         94.832 sec.         28.723 sec.
TEST 3 time:         28.262 sec.         14.927 sec.
TEST 4 time:         19.307 sec.          8.429 sec.
TEST 5 time:          5.478 sec.          1.862 sec.
TEST 6 time:         56.62 sec.          49.455 sec.
TEST 7 time:         14.06 sec.           4.862 sec.
Total:              250.67 sec.         122.04 sec.

The only test where the two were anywhere near comparable was test 6 (the layers test), the worst example was the popup test where Firefox took 3.30 times as long (though I'd attribute some of that to the popups being opened outside the browser window). Note that I use KDE as my desktop, perhaps Firefox would improve some in a GTK-based environment. (Both Opera and KDE are based on Qt.) Looks like they still have a ways to go, though.

Addendum: I should add, though I've said it before in the forums - no, I don't really consider BenchJS a test of anything meaningful. It's out there, it wasn't written to show off Opera (though it does so extremely well) ... but what does creating 8 red popups mean in terms of doing anything useful with javascript? Animating about 80 letters across the screen? Cute (if it weren't so slow here), but not very practical. And as those two are the slowest tests on my system, they overwhelm the tests which might be meaningful. But it's a test which is out there, and judging by the list of results page fairly popular, so I'll use it.

[*] As is now apparent, that must have been RC2 but the auto update notification only listed it as "Firefox 1.5" and left out the rest of the identification. Needs some work, then ...

2 comments

State of the art?

Sunday, 2. October 2005, 02:07:54

Those of you who follow my posts in the forums know that I have a dual-boot system here. It came (in 1999) with Windows 98 SE, which I have reinstalled once (one year later). Early in 2000 I got involved with a cross-platform programming language called XBasic. I'm an old BASIC programmer (and I mean old, 1979 or thereabouts) and ... well, QuickBASIC (for DOS) just didn't cut it in WINDOWS. XBasic was the first BASIC-like language I found which was inexpensive (actually free), powerful, and fast, and it coincidentally existed in both Windows and Linux. So in mid-2000 because of my involvement with XBasic I got a copy of Linux (Linux Mandrake 7.0 to be specific) and also installed it to my system. On the other hand, since Linux upgrades are generally cheap (cost of CDs and internet time), I'm only about a year out of date on Linux - Mandrake 10.0 now.

Anyway, in Windows, of course that ships with Internet Explorer. I have no particular plans to remove it, but other that Windows Update I have no plans to use it. Linux comes with several browsers, some Gecko-based (Mozilla, Firefox, whatever Gnome calls their version), Konqueror (which Safari is derived from), and a few smaller browsers like Dillo and Lynx.

I have no plans to ever install a Gecko-based browser in Windows. But I thought it might be interesting to see what the latest Firefox looks like, so I installed it in Linux.

First of all, those of you who run Opera on Windows should know that the installer for my version of Linux is a bit larger than the Windows installer - my specific version is listed as 4144 KB (just under 4 MB). Firefox 1.5 B1 as an installer lists as 8.6 MB. The link they had where I could initially find it wasto an archive instead of an installer, the archive is only about 8.1 MB. Second, as many of you know Firefox comes without a lot of features, but you candownload extensions to add features to it. I should note that since 1.5 is a beta version, many extensions aren't available for it yet. But to get most of the features I'm used to in opera required 9 extensions, as follows:

All-in-one Sidebar
Back/Forward Dropdown (arrow) remover
dotCOMplete (domain name completion)
Duplicate Tab
Javascript Options
Mouse Gestures
Open link in ... (adds some other options to the link context menu)
Stop-or-Reload button (normally FF has two separate buttons)
Paste-and-Go

Missing from this list, because they aren't available for 1.5 yet, are "Next, Please" (their version of Fast Forward), Snap back (their version of Rewind), Back IS Close (okay, not a standard Opera feature, but one I added to my own system and use all the time), and probably a few others. They have a couple of RSS extensions which I didn't touch as I don't use RSS. Oh yeah, Add bookmark here also.

Not anywhere on the list were things like Create linked.

Of course, maybe a Firefox user wouldn't care about most of those. Or maybe they'd point out the other 200+ extensions - but how many of those can we easily do in Opera now? Like that Back IS Close one, I came up with that for Opera on my own, I just redefined the Back button on my mouse (button6 as listed in the Mouse setup) as "Back | Close page, 1". Yeah, some of those 200 other extensions are things I couldn't do myself - I don't know javascript and so can't write userJS. And there's actually a few which can't be done in Opera, like a weather button or the Google toolbar. (Though I'm not completely certain there, if you're going to steal space from the page to add a toolbar, we might actually be able to put the toolbar inside the page with userJS.)

But there's a bit more to it here. When I was looking at the changelog for Firefox 1.5 B1, every one of those items they listed was things we've had in Opera for years. And when I actually had Firefox 1.5 B1 running, the first thing I noticed was a problem that new Opera for Linux users tend to have - blurry or distorted letters (a problem which somehow I've avoided all these years, just lucky I guess). And if I hover over the horizontal scrollbar to scroll left and right, nothing happens.

I don't know, I guess what I'm really saying is it was just such a "let down". Their great and wonderful next generation of Firefox, and we seem to have much the same thing in Opera. (What's the smiley for "disillusioned"?)

Honestly though, Firefox is not the enemy. We know that, and I think they know that (other than perhaps Asa Dotzler). If we spend our time fighting them for 10% of the browser market, we've both lost. There are a few things in Firefox which do surprise me. When I'm typing in this form here, the cursor just seems a bit more responsive. And yes, it actually does load pages quickly. (I've seen a comparison that in Linux they load pages faster, in Windows Opera does. Linux is pretty much their native environment, and it does show.) Opera does better with Back or Forward still - which bothers me slightly, since FF 1.5 was supposed to have major improvements in that category.

I actually am posting this using Firefox 1.5, so that I could look up the list of what extensions I added. It isn't a bad browser by any means, but I guess I'm just spoiled.