Tag: mac

Siri Apps

So now that Apple has opened up Siri to third party developers (starting with iOS 10), I hope that app makers make use of this features clearly.

There are some apps, for example, that require inputs from time to time. My wife, for example, recently downloaded an app to track our daughter’s inputs and outputs.

The problem was that each time our daughter either input or output something, my wife had to unlock her iPhone, go to this app, and then use 3/4 more clicks to enter the necessary information. The complexity was so much that within a day she (wife) had stopped using it, and presently uninstalled the app.

This kind of app that needs frequent inputs seems ideally placed to get Siri integration. Imagine saying “Hey Siri. My baby just shat”, and the app gets immediately updated, and stuff. Given how powerful Siri already is, I don’t see any technical challenge in implementing this. The challenge, though, is on the product front, for apps to be able to use this judiciously.

PS: I just updated my laptop to MacOS Sierra, and so now have Siri on my Mac as well. only problem is that Siri on phone is so much more responsive than Siri on Mac. So when I want to call the Mac Siri, the phone Siri responds first, annoying me!

R, Windows, Mac, and Bangalore and Chennai Auto Rickshaws

R on Windows is like a Bangalore auto rickshaw, R on Mac is a Chennai auto rickshaw. Let me explain.

For a long time now I’ve been using R for all my data management and manipulation and analysis and what not. Till two months back I did so on a Windows laptop and a desktop. The laptop had 8 GB RAM and the desktop had 16GB RAM. I would handle large datasets, and sometimes when I would try to do something complicated that required the use of more memory space than the computer had, the process would fail, saying “fail to allocate X GB of memory”. On Windows R would not creep into the hard disk, into virtual memory territory.

In other words it was like a Bangalore auto rickshaw, which plies mostly on meter but refuses to come to areas that are outside the driver’s “zone”. A binary decision. A yes or a no. No concept of price discrimination.

The Mac, which I’ve been using for the last two months, behaves differently. This one has only 8GB of RAM, but I’m able to handle large datasets without ever running out of memory. How is this achieved? By means of using the system’s Virtual Memory. This means the system doesn’t run out of memory, I haven’t received the “can’t allocate memory” error even once on this Mac.

So the catch here is that the virtual memory (despite having a SSD hard disk) is painfully slow, and it takes a much longer time for the program to read and write from the memory than it does with the main memory. This means that processes that need more than 8 GB of RAM (I frequently end up running such queries) execute, but take a really long time to do so.

This is like Chennai auto rickshaws, who never say “no” but make sure they charge a price that will well compensate them for the distance and time and trouble and effort, and a bit more.