Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

The single greatest feature of the iPad is the fact it cannot receive phone calls. Despite being a telecoms engineer by training, I despise phones, and it seems the millennial generation shares my disdain, as it favors less intrusive means of communication like texting.

The iPad is an essential device for me. I am on a 2-year upgrade cycle (at best) for phones, a 5-year cycle for my desktop Mac Pro, and have stopped using laptops altogether, but I will get every single iteration of the iPad. Now, even though my jacket has a pocket sized large enough to hold my full-sized iPad, the weight and bulk means I seldom did so, and kept it in my bag, which I rarely take out with me when going out for lunch. When I saw the iPad Mini and how lightweight it was, I bought one and started carrying it with me all the time.

The Mini is not a replacement for my Retina iPad, as my worsening eyesight makes it a strain for sustained reading, which is why I kept my grandfathered unlimited AT&T data plan on the full-sized iPad and got a limited Verizon plan on the Mini.

No, the device that was displaced is actually my iPhone. The iPad Mini weighs barely twice as much, is thinner, fits in my jacket pocket but has a screen 4 times the size while remaining single-hand-holdable, and is actually usable as a web browsing device or eBook reader, unlike the iPhone’s cramped screen. I don’t believe in the 5-inch phablet form factor, which combines the cramped screen of a phone with the the bulk of a tablet, i.e. the worst of both worlds. I find I never use the iPhone as anything else than a dumb phone any more. I consume less than 60 minutes of voice per month, and if my wife and my startup’s co-founder would let me, I would ditch mobile phones altogether.

Alas I am unable to cut the wireless phone tether, but there is no point in my spending $100 a month on an unlimited data plan for my Verizon iPhone 4, so now that my contract ended, I ported my number over to my old unlocked AT&T iPhone 3GS with a prepaid plan from Airvoice (a MVNO that has the cheapest rates I could find online). At $0.10 a minute without any exorbitant cellco taxes or spurious surcharges, I can expect to spend $6 a month, or 94% savings. That more than covers the $20 a month I pay extra for the iPad Mini’s data plan. The only reason I still use an iPhone instead of switching to a dumbphone is the automatic address book synchronization with my Mac and iOS devices.

Months ago I showed my father how to take screen shots on his iPad and iMac, and he routinely takes them while using FaceTime video conferencing with my 1 year-old daughter. Due to poor bandwidth at home (we live in San Francisco and are subject to the tender mercies of AT&T’s not-even-third-world-grade DSL), the image quality can be described as blurry VGA at best. Yet he is happy with the results, and even made a photo book featuring many of these screenshots, showing the wide range of fleeting expressions she displays. When printed at passport photo size, the fuzziness is surprisingly passable. He has also gotten my technophobe mother in the game.

I spend a lot of time obsessing over the finer points of camera and lens technology, and how to wring the best technical quality out of my photos, but my parents show how content trumps presentation.

Despite my hatred of all things Sony, I purchased two of their cameras in the last few months: a RX100 for my wife, and a RX1 for myself. the bragging rights of a full-frame sensor with a Zeiss 35mm f/2 prime were too much to resist.

• This thing is built like a tank. It feels very dense.
• The mode, AF and exposure compensation knobs, while not locking, have tight detents and are impossible to knock off their settings by accident.
• The big lens means limited handholds, and the lack of a textured grip means it is quite slippery. I dropped mine on a concrete floor, entailing expensive repairs (it was still functional, but the focus ring was no longer spinning smoothly). A wrist or neck strap is a must-have with the RX1.
• It is not compact by any means, comparable to the Sigma DP2 Merrill in bulk. Due to the lens protrusion, it is less pocketable than my Fuji X100.
• The lens, while excellent in terms of sharpness and vignetting, has very severe barrel distortion. Lightroom can correct for that, but you lose resolution in the process.
• Unfortunately it is merely a Sonnar, not a Planar or better yet a Biogon. I don’t remember the 35mm f/2.8 Sonnar in the Contax T3 having this much distortion, though.
• Autofocus is only so-so.
• Image quality at high ISO values is outstanding, as you would expect from a full-frame sensor from the leading manufacturer today.

This is a popup the iOS6 App Store shows me when I try searching for a Google Maps app.

The WordPress instance running this site was no longer able to automatically update plugins (and presumably not the core either) after I upgraded from a 32-bit to a sparkling fresh 64-bit PHP install at Joyent. It would start the update, and show a spinning logo and then just hang.

After much debugging, I found out the problem is that the class-pclzip.php that is responsible for unzipping was failing silently with the message:

Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/yet-another-related-posts-plugin.3.5.2.zip…

Unpacking the update…

Abort class-pclzip.php : Missing zlib extensions

This isn’t terribly helpful, but digging in, it turns out that class depends on the PHP zlib module, and on 64-bit operating systems (more precisely, operating systems with 64-bit large file support enabled), zlib.h #defines gzopen to be gzopen64. PHP does not protect itself adequately and thus the PHP function gzopen gets renamed gzopen64 as well, this throwing class-pclzip.php for a loop, along with a number of other systems like PEAR.

Fixing this requires recompiling PHP. Ubuntu Karmic includes a work-around, but I run Solaris and build from source, so I contributed a patch filed under bug #53829.

Automattic should probably patch class-pclzip.php to deal with gzopen/gzopen64 as there are a great many broken PHP installs out there (the PHP bug has been open for over a year and a half without what I would consider an acceptable solution), and it is surprisingly difficult to find a solution online. I guess a great many WordPress installs are still 32-bit, which is kind of sad.