NPR Saves The Day
February 01, 2005 @ 03:15 AMYou always learn something new when you listen to NPR in the morning.
For example, did you know that the town of Preston, Washington still has to pick up their mail at the postoffice? More importantly, that they shot down an attempt to add mail routes because they LIKE picking up their mail at the post office?
And that wasn’t even the most shocking revelation of the morning. NPR finally dived into the topic we’ve all been waiting for. The topic on the minds of millions. They’ve finally answered the question that nobody’s been able to answer. And what question is that, you ask? "Is my iPod’s shuffle feature REALLY random?"
We’ve probably all noticed that our iPod’s shuffle features tend to play some songs way more than others. My iPod tends to like Caedmon’s Call, even tho I only have one album in there from them. Anyway, so after interviewing many iPod owners, Steve Jobs (who says Apple even looked in to their randomization function to verify that it IS truely random after user complaints), and finally brought in a mathematician and cryptologist. And what did they conclude?
It’s the user, stupid. The human brain has a hard time grasping the concept of randomness. THerefor, it’s constantly attempting to build order out of the processes around it. It’s because of this that we tend to feel our iPod is prefering one thing over another. Their conclusion was, yes, the iPod’s random feature is REALLY random.
What am I working on…?
Today I’m ripping into a screen to solve some performance problems. Over the last couple days we’ve actually made GREAT progress. Utilizing some code one of the other guys here wrote, and building a new transfer object, I was able to get a 4 minute process down to about 5 seconds. Impressive, yes? But this screen has two things going on, that was just step #1. Now I’m working on basically doing the same thing with the second bottleneck.
... which is what I’m working on today.