audibleCode

It’s been over six months since my last post. I have been fully engrossed in my grad school applications. I just want to write down these thoughts before delving what I have for this year. I will be starting a series on CakePHP in the coming months.

Just yesterday, I was looking for a media player for my Nokia E71. I needed one that could play the popular video formats such as .avi, .mp4 etc. I did not want to have to always convert it into a mobile compatible format like 3gp. Not only is converting it time consuming, but the image quality depreciates and it also take space which I am not willing to spare.

I found DivX Mobile Player for Symbian phones. I was really excited to find this program, in fact, it was exactly how i wanted it to be. After using it for sometime I noticed that after the video had played for a few minutes, the images and sound gets out of sync. There were settings for that so I adjusted it. After all that, the synchronization wasn’t even close to perfect.

Another issue I encounted with the DivX player was that anytime I tried to seek to another time location, it was really slow and it only allowed 1second at a time. I did not like that at all.I was really pissed.

I searched for another player. I got one named PowerMovie. I was a little hesitant to try it initially because I did not know the developers but I later did. After using it for just 10mins i loved it completely. The seeking was perfect, the video was smooth and it consumes less power.

The question that kept sounding in my mind was, it’s the same hardware, but how come this runs way better? This bring me to the subject of this post. The problem of the world is not an issue of hardware. With the level of hardware that is in the market now. We have not even utilized 1/4 of the power available. I personally believe that software has a very long way to go in allowing us to fully benefit from the existing hardware.

I agree that software along can only go so far. Without the underling hardware to support it, software can’t do much. Let me elaborate, let say you have mobile phone without built in GPS hardware, no number of lines of code can provide you with that facility. What I am saying it that assuming the phone in question has a built in GPS receiver, Are the current tools, techniques and more importantly existing theories enough to completely exhaust the benefits and uses of this piece of hardware? That is what this post is about.

More resources should be dedicated to research in software solution. Not only should the research make but they should be implemented. Also, concentration should be placed on the biological and psychological science with emphasis on their relation to natural sciences like mathematics and physics. With goals like efficiency and effectiveness in mind, the possibilities are infinite. With existing infrastructure we can easily achieve what we hope to achieve in the next 100years now.

The bottom-line is we need well suited software. Software that meets needs, I understand that as programmers we want to include features that are “cool”, but are they really necessary? Are we ignoring the rather weightier issues?