Technology

I’m (really) trying to buy a subwoofer

13 December 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 15 Comments

I have a decent home cinema at home. For many years, I did not use a subwoofer for low frequencies but I’ve just decided to get one. I’ve chosen the Sony SA-W2500 (pictured above) as it seems to be ideal for me: powerful yet cheap.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll manage to get one in Mauritius. I’ve been to many “electronic” shops and I have not been lucky.

In one shop in Rose-Hill, they had another (excellent) brand. Unfortunately, they were selling it at around 4-5 times more than it costs on Amazon.com…

In another shop at Phoenix, the vendor told me that they don’t sell subwoofers as a separate component but rather as part of a complete 5.1 system together with an amplifier. He did seem aware that Sony had a number of standalone subwoofers in its catalogue…

I think I’ll have to continue my quest until the 24th… Anyone knows where I can find a shop selling subwoofers at realistic prices in Mauritius?

Why?

Some people have asked me why I’m looking for a subwoofer even though they felt that my existing speakers were good enough. The reason is this:

My amplifier features an automatic calibration system which automatically equalizes each speaker to (try to) produce a relatively flat response. The EQ above is for my front left speaker. The amplifier has determined that 40Hz should be boosted by 6 dB while 125Hz reduced by 6 dB. This looks very bad to me. The first rule of EQ is that thou shall never boost too much. Therefore, it is evident that there is something missing in the equation: yes, a subwoofer! The cheap Pioneer speakers that I use, simply, can’t reproduce low frequencies!

I really need a subwoofer! But will I ever get one?

Flickr now has a built-in photo editor

7 December 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 1 Comment

Flickr has recently announced that it has partnered with Picnik to allow users to edit (e.g. crop, resize, rotate, correct colors, remove red-eye, add borders, etc.) within their browser.

I’ve tested the application in the latest version of Apple’s Safari browser and it works great. To launch it, navigate to one of your photos and click on Edit Photo:

Have fun!

Learning part of CS does not make a CS?

5 December 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 15 Comments

I came across an interesting article called Should Java be banned from schools?.

The most interesting part were the comments. One of them rang a bell:

Also, no CS study is complete without some messing with machine level instructions, compilers & interpreters, algorithms, etc. Forget about learning a language: a good CS student must be able to design and build language + tool set from scratch. Here’s a CPU manual, go implement language foobar for it. Don’t come back until its compiler can bootstrap itself.

The problem is that many so-called universities don’t teach all this stuff. These second rate universities are popping up all over the world. They’re called universities but they are just processing mediocre programmers into cubicle occupying, php/Java/VB hacking zombies.

There is a lot of truth in that. Discuss.

PS: My favourite anti-Java article is The Perils of Java Schools – mind you, I like (and teach) Java…

PPS: The above image shown Emacs, my current Erlang IDE. I teach Erlang to my Concurrent Programming & Parallel Processing students.