Thoughts, ramblings and other stuff

I just updated to Lollipop and I don't like it. I liked all the previous versions of Android and I was very happy with KitKat when I got S5 but this update is all kinds of irritating. The worst part is white background on the notifications and settings and all the phone stuff (phone, contacts, messaging). It was so much better looking and easier on the eyes in black. It's the new Material Design thing that's supposed to give more freedom to designers and bring 3D looks but just looks bad and too bright. Also now screen uses up noticeably more battery. Luckily for me TouchWiz still uses transparent background for App Drawer.

Another deeply annoying thing - the app switcher (Overview) screen. The one when you can look at and close the open apps. You can still use it to close and switch between apps (although I like the old list version better then the new wheel one) but I can no longer go to the home screen by taping the background. It was so much more convenient when I could chose between any of the apps and the main screen in the same place. Why? Why would they remove that?

Samsung Apps updates for Lollipop are also not an improvement. As I mentioned before I used the Health app to track my movements and it just became much less useful. We get the attack of white background again and a lot of less, badly designed information. The screens are much more cluttered and I can no longer check how many steps I did in every 20 minute interval (the graph is smaller and without any scale and you cant move the check point). Also map tracker is pretty much usless now that it's no longer a real map. And a lot of cool statistics got lost too or switched to small pictures instead of something that you can touch, zoom and check at different points. But there whole bunch of stupid, useless awards. YAY! (I'm being sarcastic here).

I could install dark Materials but I would have to root the phone and there are some default things I want to keep so I'm contemplating going back to KitKat. Or I could try different launchers. But the fact that there are already options for darkening available shows I'm not the only one who hates this. As far as I can tell this is a very common complain.

Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded for cell package delivery system - vesicles. Membranes not only separate cells from outside but also create separate compartments inside the cell - most notably nucleus and mitochondria - but there is also long series of something that looks almost like a tube system. Ribosomes stick to part of it and produce proteins. Those proteins end up inside and can be transported inside but the system is long and twisted. Just like it's faster to take a ferry from Gdańsk to Stockholm then drive all around the Baltic Sea it is faster to send a stuff packaged from one compartment to the other. In a vesicle. That transport is highly regulated and used for many different things. That's how cells absorb the food from outside, how they spit out and absorb hormones and how they transport transmembrane proteins. All the countless ours I spent learning how the phagocytosis and endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi apparatus worked I never thought about people who made all those discoveries. It's funny how at some point things like that become basic knowledge of the subject - something you just know.

Prof James Rothman, from Yale University, found proteins embedded in the vesicles which act as the docking mechanism meaning the cargo is released in the correct location. Prof Randy Schekman, from the University of California at Berkeley, discovered the genes which regulated the transport system in yeast. He found that mutations in three genes resulted in a "situation resembling a poorly planned public transport system". Prof Thomas Sudhof, originally from Germany but now at Stanford University in the US, made breakthroughs in how the transport system works in the brain so that neurotransmitters are released at the precise time.

I was disappointed at the journalist disappointment because this is a very important system in the cell and the basic science Nobels are the ones touching the most important subjects.

Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to people who theorized existence of Higgs boson - Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and François Englert of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, have won for developing the theory of how particles acquire mass. The theory is 50 years old but the experimental confirmation is brand new - not even a year old - so the delay in the announcement wasn't that surprising. Ever since few spectacular mistakes at the beginning Nobel committee has preference for waiting long enough to see that no one disproves it and that multiple sources can repeat the results. Still this was a big thing in physics and a long awaited one. And if they didn't do it now there might've not been another chance. Both laureates are in their 80s and Nobels are not given to dead people. I'm most disappointed in comparisons of the problems of finding Peter Higgs for comment during his vacation with the search for Higgs boson.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to theoretical chemists for devising computer simulations to understand chemical processes. Michael Levitt, a British-US citizen of Stanford University; US-Austrian Martin Karplus of Strasbourg University; and US-Israeli Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California will share the prize. Modelling molecules is becoming a bigger and bigger thing in drug production where new molecular compounds are first tested for possible uses and molecular interactions before spending money on costly synthesis. It can also help predict protein shape and function which helps to understand how cell processes actually work. Those programs use the equations of quantum physics to simulate reactions as closely to reality as possible. It of course requires vast amounts of computing power to describe every electron and atomic nucleus so these detailed models are limited to small molecules with just a few atoms. To model larger molecules we still need to use classical computer models but they do not include descriptions of molecules' energy states, which is vital for simulating reactions. Still they both allow us to sift faster through the possibilities then any RL experiment and concentrate on most plausible possibilities making discoveries faster and drugs (just a little) cheaper.

Everyone knows about the Leap Year and most even know why we get the extra day every four years. However in our times of atomic clocks and addiction to extremely precise time measurement we need other corrections. Each day has a little different length and from time to time we have no choice if we want to keep with the planet's rotation we need to adjust the time. It comes in the form of Leap Second - an extra second added to the day at midnight GMT that is the Universal Time everything else refers to.

It happened yesterday and the internet failed. Remember all the panic of Y2K - if you were to young - everyone were afraid the internet servers would fail and the whole world would get disconnected because they only used two digits for year in old OS and keep doing in upgrades so with dates rolling over everything was about to fail. However, this never happened as everyone was talking about it and system got upgraded and the word didn't end. It seems we didn't talk about leap second often enough.

Many of the word's biggest sites - Reddit, 4Chan, LinkedIn, The Pirate Bay, Yelp, Meetup, Gawker, Mozzilla, Foursquare - experienced problems and shut down when leap second struck. It seems that all that was affected was either based on Debian Squeeze Linux servers or running something based on Java/Cassandra. Luckily, the world didn't end from this either. Maybe because, unlike so many others, Google was prepared and didn't fail.

Let's hope we'll do better with next one.

I almost missed that Linux is 20 years old today. The first announcment was published on minix newsgroup by Linus Torvalds on 25th of August, 1991. The operating system that's maybe not that popular for desktop use but which versatility and superior safety features means it secretly runs the world (or at least the internet). It's the OS of supercomputers and servers. Governments and schools like it because it's free and can be customised by anyone (or at least someone can customise it for you). It is the flagship for GNU and Creative Commons movements. It also shows that people can and do work for projects they are not paid for and can create communities to improve what they like instead of destroying public property. This is the thinking that spawned wikipedia and countless other projects that changed our life (it doesn't mean lack of moderation but that's the difference between democracy and anarchy). Most people who are not into programming or not part of academia don't have much contact or even know about it. or rather didn't have contact with it as the rise of android system based smartphones and tablets means you may carry it with you every day. It may not be a true Linux (and not truly as free modifiable without binaries but much closer then any other OS) but what really is? The versions are may and it is like life - constantly evolving.


Windows is ubiquitous and OS X is pretty but it's Linux that really makes world go round. And you don't even realise how many of it features have been incorporated into the bigger players (Macs even run its version by default). It's one of those things that makes me feel better about human race. Here's for next 20 years for the penguin.

I dislike the HP printers. It's not that they are bad. In fact my problem isn't the printers themselves. It's the software. It's big, clunky and it makes the installation of a printer into a chore.

I just spent today trying to make the printer work properly. It finally got an IP number and was connected to the network. So all I needed to do was to get it working. There was an installation CD with the printer but it didn't have the Windows 7 driver. That's because there is no Windows 7 driver for the Color LaserJet CP 2025dn printer. The instruction and the site say one needs to download and install the Universal Driver. This is untrue. I mean sure it does make the printer work and even print in duplex but not in colour.

To make the printer print in colour you need completely different driver. You need the Color LaserJet CP2020 Series PCL6 driver. But then the printer looses the ability to print in duplex. It's because the drivers installs with option for duplex set as Not Installed. One needs to go to Printer properties then to the Device Settings and manually change the Duplex to Installed.

Then I went back to another building were the printer just like this was in use for about a year. I was told when I arrived it was without duplex. This was untrue of course. I wonder how many people out there I convinced they got the version without duplex even though it's untrue. All those trees.

In my previous work we had XP on computers. The installation disks for that HP printers should be working just fine. The installation always crashed couple of times before it went through. It was better to allow Windows to just find the driver. Especially since once again it sometimes installed without duplex option. More randomly in this case.

I don't know who writes those driver installation programs but if installing your printer needs an someone who is tech savvy to make it work properly then there is some very serious problem with your software. This is something that installation software should be able to detect.  You write for people whose ability ends at putting the right disk in and clicking through setup program. If making the device work involves wading through misinformation and obscure options it's not user friendly. It's a puzzle to solve. And most people won't even be able to do it.

If I'd ever decide to buy printer for myself it won't be HP.