Residential Internet in San Francisco

I'm getting overcharged by Comcast for Internet access and since they generally are on the evil side, I researched and wrote a little knol on home Internet providers in San Francisco.

separate profiles on Chrome on Mac

Google Chrome has a command-line flag --user-data-dir that makes Chrome store all its settings and preferences in the specified directory. By default, the directory is something like Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome in your home directory, so the following command will bring up a pristine instance:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --user-data-dir=Library/Application\ Support/Google/ChromeMySecondProfile

You can run several Chrome instances concurrently this way, saving cookies and history in each -- that's something you can't do with incognito mode.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a profile manager like the one Firefox has. I haven't bothered yet to figure out how to wrap the command-line above in a script with an icon etc.

Illy is called Amici in Switzerland

Another curiosity from Swiss supermarkets: there is a Swiss coffee brand called "Illy" or "Jlly", which is not the Italian Illy coffee we are used to in the rest of Europe and the US. The Italian Illy coffee is sold under the name Amici in the same packages as Illy coffee elsewhere.

The Amici web site explains why Illy is called Amici in Switzerland (translated via Google; German original) -- the gist is that in the sixties Illy's founder sold the Swiss branches, thereby conceding the trademark to the new local owners.

I bought the Italian Illy coffee after an unpleasant experiment with espresso coffee from Migros.

Cannabis Ice Tea

We saw this hemp-based iced tea in a supermarket in Switzerland. Apparently it's legal in the US as well but not readily available.

Rotating Android Videos

Android phones have been able to take videos since Android 1.5 launched early this year. However, if you take a video in portrait orientation, it is exceedingly painful to get the movie rotated to display correctly, e.g., when uploaded to Youtube. I wrote a knol on rotating 3gp videos (hello knol, this page still hasn't made it into Google web search!?) but I hear that the iPhone 3GS actually solves this the way it should be solved: on the phone.

Clock reads 5:30 when it should read 9:30

One of the LEDs in the seven-segment displays on our oven clock broke. Interestingly enough, the failure maps two valid numbers to two other valid numbers and that's as bad as it gets for a single permanently-off segment.

The segment that broke is denoted by "B" in the diagram on the left. The seven segments can represent any 7-bit string and the Hamming(7,4) code is capable of encoding 16 values with error correction for any single-bit error, so the common representation of the digits is sub-optimal from a fault-tolerance perspective. Can this be improved while maintaining human readability?

A wet weekend

Martin after the sailing race
Originally uploaded by Hein

Last weekend was rather wet -- first I got drenched on Saturday bicycling back from the climbing gym at 40% chance of rain and Sunday I sailing with Martin. I only took a single picture because most of the time we were either busy with the boat or busy getting rained on. Finally a good excuse to put all that mountaineering gear to test :-) (It was definitely a time for hard shells.)

To round things up, it hailed on Sunday night but now the sun is shining again for a clean start of the week.