I recently installed Skype on my work PC. When I tried to exit, I found that I had to jump through hoops to close Skype. It isn’t the most favorable experience. Here is how it went:

In most Windows applications, pressing the large red X button on the top right closes that window. If that window is the last window left of that application, the whole application exits and you don’t see it in the start taskbar or in the notification area. You can assume that Skype on windows should behave the same way. Right?

Wrong! Pressing the X just collapses the window into the taskbar. That is the exact same behavior that is observed when you press the minimize button. I don’t get it. Whey even have the X up there if it does the exact same thing as the minimize button?

At this point, I am tempted to just ctrl+alt+del and kill the process, but instead I give Skype a chance and right click the icon on the taskbar to see if it gives me any options. And there it is! The elusive option to actually quit Skype.

I click the option and guess what! Skype pops up a dialog box asking me if I actually want to exit. Really? You think I right clicked the icon on the taskbar, and then clicked “quit skype” all on accident?

This sort of stuff really bugs me. Why is Skype ignoring already established patterns? Why is Skype making it so annoying to use their product?

It still isn’t sinking in that a man who was such a phenomenal force in the industry has passed away. Steve Jobs was an inspiration to me. His successes stand to show how creative thinking can lead to spectacular results.

Steve, You will be missed.

Since this week was super busy, I didn’t get a chance to take too many photos.

Vinny and I started the week by doing a massive problem set for Advanced Logic Design. We had Che Bella for dinner. It was my first time getting anything other than pizza there. I was satisfied.

Vinny and I grossly underestimated the amount of work that it would take to finish the problem set. We ended up spending all night doing it.

On Wednesday, I went to the YCombinator Q & A session at the Hunch.com HQ. It turned into a great networking event afterwards since there was free pizza and drinks. You can see the video from the event here.

Hunch has a MakerBot Cupcake CNC! I think they were still in the process of building it.

YC Fellow Harj Taggar and Reddit.com founder Alexis Ohanian answered questions and led the event. I think the purpose of the event was to spark interest in YC and in startups in general.

Friday was the Engineering Consortium Career Fair. IMHO it was the best career fair at Columbia so far. There were many startups that were looking for interns and full times. In addition to picking up a few leads on possible internships and full time jobs, I got a free shirt from Google! Google gave a shirt to anyone who could solve one of the puzzles they were giving out. Too bad that solving the puzzle doesn’t make it any easier to get a job there.

On Sunday I discovered that M2M sells jelly soda drinks! They were delicious, but unfortunately on the expensive side.

It seems that as time goes by, my netbook keeps collecting stickers. See if you can name them all!

I’ll start off this week’s post with a picture of my daily wear watches.

The watch on the left is the Casio G-Shock GW9200-1 Riseman. It is a solar, atomic watch that gives temperature, altitude and pressure readings. I like it because it looks futuristic like a Gundam. The watch on the right is a Seiko SNK809 that was modified by a guy in Hong Kong called Yobokies.  I bought this watch because of its affordable price and similarity to the Sinn 656:

Justin and I spent most of Tuesday studying for out midterm on Wednesday.

Vinny noticed something funny about a business card I picked up at the local STA Travel. They should probably change that caption.

On Thursday, David Y., Sean and I went to midtown for a Microsoft tech talk.

The offices looked really nice, but the talk fell short of a real tech talk. It was more of a presentation of the features in the Bing search engine.

When Sean and I got back, Vinny, Sean, and I played a few hours of pick up sticks with the set we got at the tech talk.

A beautiful sunset I captured on Friday while waiting for the elevator in EC:

Friday evening was Dim Sum night that Jim and Tim organized. We had authentic Dim Sum dishes and live performers. The event was a success. People really loved the variety of foods we had.

Saturday was the start of the HackNY fall hackathon. It started with talks by almost a dozen startups. They showed off their APIs and datasets and suggested how we could work with them.

We then went to the 13th floor of the Courant Institute at NYU where we would be hacking all night.

Columbia had a great showing and we ended up taking up most of the space in a class room.

After spending more than 12 hours in the same room:

Our project ended up getting really complex and taking up 6 boards:

The sunrise over the NYC skyline:

One of the buildings nearby had pipes on its roof that made it look like an organ.

The project that Ryan, Hans, Jacob, Andrew, Vinny and I worked on was called “BarFight”. It was a location based rock paper scissors game. The game would pair up challengers based on the venues that they checked into on Foursquare. I worked on the icon, graphics and UI. Jacob and Ryan wrote all the server side code using SQL and Ruby on Rails. Hans and I did the UI using jQueryTouch. Vinny worked on some jQuery for the buttons. Andrew helped with rules and text. This is what the app looked on the iPhone home screen:

This is what the app looked like:

Unfortunately, we could not get the app to work. We didn’t have a good enough variety of abilities and hit a few major setbacks. I can’t wait to try harder and make something that works when the next hackathon comes around.

I was watching the first episode of the new season of “Chuck” when I noticed something. The show is set in Burbank, Ca. Look at what the bus that Chuck and Morgan get on says.

Any New Yorker would know that BxM4A is a Bronx to Manhattan bus run by the MTA in New York City. Looks like someone went crazy with the stock footage.

Around a month ago, I won an MSI Wind U160 netbook on MSI’s Facebook page. I didn’t have much use for a netbook. Therefore, I listed it on eBay as Buy It Now Or Best Offer. After two weeks of being on eBay, no one had bought it and the best offer I received was around 40% of MSRP. I realized that the netbook is probably worth more than that to me and decided  to keep it.

Ever since the release of the First Asus Eee PC that started the netbook craze, I have always wanted a netbook. I think it is because I liked the idea of an inexpensive, ultra-portable laptop that is just powerful enough to perform day to day tasks.  The Wind U160 fits the bill. It has a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom N450 “Pinetrail” processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 250GB of HD and the usual netbook fare like 10″ LED backlit display, Bluetooth, 802.11N, etc. It also came with a large 6 cell battery that protrudes from the back and props it up when set on a desk. This battery is supposed to give this netbook 14 hours of life on one charge. I only got 9 hours while browsing the internet and 6 to 7 while browsing and watching videos.

The form factor is pretty nice. It isn’t too small like the 7inch netbooks, but it is still small enough to be considered ultra-portable. Here it is sitting on my 4 year old MacBook Pro.

This netbook arrived with two partitions and Windows 7 Started pre-installed on one of them. Since, I knew that I probably wouldn’t be using Windows, I resized the partitions and installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Netbook Edition which is the latest LTS release. The installation process was relatively painless. Then, when I booted up, I couldn’t get the wireless to work. After some googling, I found out that 10.04 didn’t come with wireless drivers for the chipset found in my netbook. I had to add a 3rd party repository and download the drivers. I used Lucid Lynx for a week, but found it a little too clunky for my uses.

I downloaded the newly released 1.0 version of Jolicloud, the Ubuntu Jaunty based netbook OS and installed it over Lucid Lynx. immediately, I noticed that Jolicloud started up much quicker and has a slicker interface. As the name suggests, Jolicloud takes advantage of cloud based applications. The whole front end is built on HTML 5 and is very fast. Here is what the home screen looks like after start up and login.

All the applications are presented in an iOS-esque page system with large, beautiful icons. Some of the apps are native Ubuntu apps like Gimp.

Most are webapps. They are basically browser windows with toolbars absent. The Reddit “app” is below. As you can see, it is just the normal desktop version of the Reddit site.

Adding apps is as easy as it is on the iPhone. After clicking the large “+ Add” button on the top left, you are presented with a list of apps that is easy to sort and search through. When you want to install an app, you just click the add button and the OS takes care of the rest. When you go back to the home screen, the newly installed application will be there waiting for you.

The 250GB of storage and 10 inch screen make this a great portable video machine. I have been watching 720p episodes of Firefly and Gundam 00 on it.  As you can see, Gundam looks pretty good at the netbook’s native resolution of 1024×600.

There are a few complaints I have. First, for some reason USB drives did not automatically mount. I had to remedy the problem by editing the file system table. Also all utilities and built in apps are hidden away. I didn’t really care because I usually launch terminal by pressing atl+f1 and launch other apps through terminal. It was only when Caroline called asking me where terminal went (she had the beta version when terminal was easy to find) that I noticed that this may be a problem. For some reason, I cannot find any way to add any of these built in applications to the home screen. That is why you see the folder icon on my menu bar. It is a shortcut to the folder full of built in applications.

Other than these minor problems, the netbook experience has been much better than expected. I was expecting to be constantly frustrated by its small form factor and weak power. It isn’t going to replace my MacBook as my daily use computer anytime soon, but it will probably be my travel computer from now on.

Do you know what I hate? I hate it when people try to determine what is the “best” without establishing standard by which to measure how good something is.

For example, somewhat frequently on Reddit, a person will post something like, “I am going to college and I need a laptop. Here is what I want to do with it…” At first, the posts are all really well thought out. One guy will say get a mac if you want the support. Another guy will point to a deal on a cheap Acer. Then, it quickly devolves into a fanboy hatefest. Everyone starts listing reasons why one make or model is better than the other, or how everyone else is a bunch of idiots.

I have to admit that I am guilty of once acting like this. Until recently, I was a devout Apple fanboy and never wanted to touch a PC again. Now I have a Mac and 2 PCs running Linux and Windows. Each one is good for a different purpose. No one computer is the best.

The same thing goes for athletes. No one can be the “greatest” or “best” athlete. You can be the richest or the fastest or the tallest, but not the best. Best is meaningless. Without a benchmark, how can you prove that something is the best?

So in the future, before you say that something is the best, reconsider what you mean. Maybe you actually mean to say that something is your favorite or that it is the best based on a measurable standard.

I know today is April Fools Day. I just don’t understand YouTube’s logo.

It is even called logo_april_fools-vfl157034.png

Does anyone know what this is about?

Update: It looks like some YouTube videos have an ASCII version in edition to the various resolutions like 420p and 720p. It is very similar to VLC’s ASCII filter.

Someone working on Wednesday’s Columbia Daily Spectator must really love copy and paste. Also the editing staff must have been sleeping. Read the first eight paragraphs. Notice anything funny? I can’t believe this was printed on the front page.

Listen closely at 0:49. HAHAHAHAHA. Ironically, the song is titled “Tasty Love.”