BumpTop

Check out this video of BumpTop, yet another physics-based desktop paradigm. Things are getting interesting, weird, and more weird. There is also more Beryl demon in this post.

I guess this is the actual bumptop site: http://www.bumptop.com/

Quote of the Day

From today's AWAD:

The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much.

—Germain G. Glien

Mouse Message

Nice! My mouse froze again a few minutes ago on my Edgy Eft - Gnome - Beryl desktop. I thought it was a driver problem or some instability from the above. However, after killing the X session and restarting it, someone (Xorg?) or more likely the mouse driver, told me that my mouse power was getting low and it needed to be “recharged.”

Of course! My Logitech wireless mouse neede new batteries!

A trip to the supply cabinet with help from Jim K solved the problem.

Linux Disk I/O

Here's a very nice description that drills all the way down into the kernel I/O code for a Linux read() call.

Actually the whole document by Andries Brouwer is worth reading.

Where's the Text??

Okay, I want to learn something new. I want to find out about something. More and more lately, I find web sites with links to information about a topic that are videos, flash animations and such. Okay, those are fine but Where is the Text?? Usually I want to READ about a topic. It's faster and I can skip around. I usually don't want to watch a video!!! Lately, I keep coming upon cases where I can't find any text but only video.

The most recent example was this morning at Sun's web site. All videos. Argh!

Maybe the text is there somewhere but it sure is getting harder to find. At least it is in some cases, which are way too many for me.

Real Estate Plot Roller-Coaster

Okay, here's a new idea for plotting data. Taken from the Freakonomics Blog, this is real estate data from 1890 to about the present, plotted as a roller-coaster ride. This is just cool! (It's a 3m41s video).

How Do You Pronounce CentOS?

Since we plan to use CentOS4 on the compute nodes of the new cluster, the various pronunciations I hear in our phone conferences keep bugging me.

I found this discussion which doesn't shed any true light but only confirms that multiple pronunciations are in popular use, and there isn't an official version.

I pronounce it like SIN-toss and continue to prefer that version.

Supercomputing Comes to the Rust Belt

An interesting article on rust belt companies converting to a new business.

Three years ago, when Michael Garvey began looking for ways to revive his family's 85-year-old manufacturing business in down-on-its-luck Youngstown, Ohio, he settled on a surprising solution: supercomputing. For much of a century, the tiny company—originally Trumbull Bronze Co. but renamed M-Seven Technologies—specialized in casting bronze parts for steel mills. But now, it has started making money by collecting and analyzing vast storehouses of data to help larger manufacturers improve their operations.

203 Milllion Linux Phones by 2012

This article in Information Week by Eric Zeman reports on a prediction by ABI Research of 203 million Linux phones by 2012!

Linux Mint

Hmmm. Another distro. This is Linux Mint, based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian, .... So why another distribution?

Here's a summary of what I read.

• Slightly different look and feel. Green/blue instead of orange/brown.
• Multimedia already installed including support for MP3s, video, flash, DVDs, etc.
• Ready Wi-Fi support (they say).

Here's the Linux Mint Home page and this is a brief review.

Linux MCE

Linux MCE (i.e., Media Center Edition, a la Windows) looks very cool. Today, as I post this, their site is down from being, uh, Dugg. However, Digg is pointing to a semi-entertaining and semi-annoying video demo. Actually I continue to be more impressed with MythTV, etc., every time I see it.

Pournelle Comments on Global Warming

Jerry Pournelle comments on global warming in his 5 March View. Excerpting:

There's a lot more gas about Global Warming, but none of it causes me to change my view: yes, the Earth is warming, as apparently is the rest of the Solar System. The warming trend is hardly alarming: we have had warmer periods in historical times including the Medieval Warm Period. Yes, CO2 levels are rising, and since warm water holds less dissolved gas than cold water, any trend that warms the seas will accelerate that. The levels are high, but we don't really know the effect -- CO2 isn't a very efficient greenhouse gas. Water vapor is.

As the seas rise the surface areas become larger; this increases evaporation, which increases water vapor. Water vapor is a rather efficient greenhouse gas. Higher water vapor content usually means more clouds. Clouds are bright and tend to reflect received sunlight, reducing the insolation reaching the Earth. Models reflecting (no pun intended) this are in a very primitive stage and are not incorporated into the computer models that predict doom (doom now being 17 inches of sea level rise rather than Al Gore's 17 feet).

Enough clouds can produce cooling trends.

Ice ages are far more destructive than periods like the Medieval Warm (many say we should be so lucky as to get something like the Medieval Warm). The polar bears seem to have survived the Medieval Warm (proof: there are polar bears).

Pogonotrophy

It's no secret that I've engaged enthusiastically in pogonotrophy for 29 years!

Happy Vernal Equinox

Happy Vernal Equinox which was last night at 20:07 EDT = 0:07 UTC!

Publish a Google Spreadsheet Chart

Okay, after reading the previous links, here's a very cool tool that lets you publish a chart (that automatically updates) on a web page from a Google spreadsheet! It's very cool. The app downloads the data, allows customizing the columns used, colors, etc., and generates the code that you can paste into a web page!

Here's a sample I just made!

Google Speaks Emacs!

Amanda reports on this fascinating set of modules in the Google Web API that provides access to Google services from Emacs! Cool!

Related:

Google Apps APIs

Jim W. Backus, Inventor of FORTRAN, Dies

At the New York Times, Jim W. Backus, 82, FORTRAN Developer, Dies.

Here are some excerpts.

Fortran, released in 1957, was “the turning point” in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian.

In an interview several years ago, Ken Thompson, who developed the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in 1969, observed that “95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.”

After the war, Mr. Backus found his footing as a student at Columbia University and pursued an interest in mathematics, receiving his master’s degree in 1950. Shortly before he graduated, Mr. Backus wandered by the I.B.M. headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where one of its room-size electronic calculators was on display.

When a tour guide inquired, Mr. Backus mentioned that he was a graduate student in math; he was whisked upstairs and asked a series of questions Mr. Backus described as math “brain teasers.” It was an informal oral exam, with no recorded score.

He was hired on the spot. As what? “As a programmer,” Mr. Backus replied, shrugging. “That was the way it was done in those days.”

In 1953, frustrated by his experience of “hand-to-hand combat with the machine,” Mr. Backus was eager to somehow simplify programming. He wrote a brief note to his superior, asking to be allowed to head a research project with that goal. “I figured there had to be a better way,” he said.

Mr. Backus got approval and began hiring, one by one, until the team reached 10. It was an eclectic bunch that included a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee on loan from United Aircraft, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar College.

Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. “We were the hackers of those days,” Richard Goldberg, a member of the Fortran team, recalled in an interview in 2000.

After Fortran, Mr. Backus developed, with Peter Naur, a Danish computer scientist, a notation for describing the structure of programming languages, much like grammar for natural languages. It became known as Backus-Naur form.

UCAC

So what is the UCAC? I wasn't even familiar with this catalog. It's the USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog. From their web site (and I've added some brief, explanatory comments [in italics]):

This is an astrometric, observational program, which started in February 1998 at CTIO [Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory]. All sky observations were completed in May 2004. The final catalog is expected not before mid 2007. The second data release (UCAC2) became public in 2003. Positions accurate to 20 mas [milli-arcseconds] for stars in the 10 to 14 magnitude range are obtained. At the limiting magnitude of R=16 [red magnitude = 16] the catalog positions have a standard error of 70 mas. Proper motions [apparent motion of a star across the sky] are provided using various earlier epoch data. Photometry is poor, with errors on the order 0.1 to 0.3 magnitudes in a single, non-standard color.

Occultation by Pluto!

There will be in occultation of Pluto of UCAC 25823784 on Sunday morning 18 Mar 10:56 UT (6:56 EDT). It will be astronomical twilight for us, so I don't know if it will be possible to see Pluto in the Southeast. In the Southwest US, it should be visible.

IOTA Page
Space.com

Sky and Telescope doesn't even mention it in this weeks pages!! What's that about??

The picture is from IOTA. Go to their site to see the full image.

UFO Sightings

Hah! This Ask Yahoo question (Why do most UFO sightings happen in the United States?) popped up on my Gmail Clips this morning which I found completely fascinating! Particularly this paragraph:

The National UFO Reporting Center lists thousands of "close encounters" submitted by users. According to its database, the United States has far and away the most reported UFO sightings. In fact, California alone has reported more than China, England, India, and Brazil combined.

Girl Scout Cookies

The thing I like best about Girl Scout cookies is that each serving is individually wrapped!

How Does DST Work in Linux

I've been working on answering this question since yesterday afternoon. I'm close to an answer but don't have a complete one yet.

Here's a Slashdot posting on the subject.

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/03/06/0229232.shtml

Optimus Keyboard

What's this I hear about an “Optimus keyboard?” Ohhhh, after looking at their site, now I see. It's something I imagined at one time—a keyboard where the key symbols change! Very cool.

“ Every key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at this very moment.”

(key image from http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/)

Linux Time Notes

Here's a nice tip sheet on Linux time (note that it's pretty RedHat-centric).

Quote of the Day

From today's AWAD…

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.

—Christopher Morley,
writer (1890-1957)

Lunar Eclipse

I looked at the lunar eclipse last night for a few minutes between 19:00 and 20:00 EST. By the time the moon was above the trees it was well past totality and was into the partial phases. It was in the clouds the whole time I looked at it. The view was not very ideal.

I was using my 7x50 binoculars on the camera tripod (an ideal arrangement!).

Here's an AP posting via Space.com.

Binocular Image Stabilizer --- Brilliant!

Sky and Telescope has an article by Alan M. McRobert on his new binocular image stabilizer made from some simple wood pieces. Brilliant!

Total Lunar Eclipse This Weekend

There will be a total lunar eclipse this Saturday night. Binoculars are best for observing!

Amazing Ubuntu Conversion!

Okay, we have these cool new workstations. They are Sun Ultra 20s with

• Two dual-core AMD Opteron 1218 (four cores total) at 2.6 GHz (Santa Ana 90nm)
  
• 2 GB RAM
• Two 250-GB SATA drives (Hitachi HDS7225S)
  
• RW DVD, etc.

Of course I quickly installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft and I'm now turning it into my workstation.

Here's the cool part. I copied all of my files over from the old system.

cd
scp -r oldhost: .

Since this copied all files including window manager and Gnome configs, this brought over my complete environment! I'm done! The whole conversion consisted of that!

Of course I had to log out and log back in.

Perl, Minimal and as a Beginning

So here's a post regarding a new book, Minimal Perl by Tim Maher (and a Slashdot review).

This is a cool idea, a way to look at a usable and easy to learn subset of Perl if you already know tools like sed, awk, etc. This is, in fact, a large part of how I learned Perl.

The thoughts that this leads to, and which really interest me, regard using Perl as a First Programming Language. Teaching and learning to program is a topic that interests me and I've watched the parade of programming languages used for this purpose with amusement, joy, and more recently, horror.

We used to have BASIC and Pascal (Blissful Sigh), but then moved to C (Incredulous Gasp!), then to Java (Hesitant, Lesser Gasp). Some schools seem to be using Scheme, an offshoot of LISP (Faint to Unconsciousness).

I believe that I understand the reasons for all of these choices at the time they were made. I get it. But, I'm not convinced that some of them are the best First Programming Language. Java is probably okay and, thank goodness, gets out out of using C. C++ was an improvement over C as well. I believe Java is an improvement over C++.

I'm not sure how I feel about teaching beginning programmers about object oriented programming or LISP-based functional, non-procedural programming.

What I've wondered about is trying to use Perl as a First Programming Language. It could only excel in that role if you leave a lot of parts out and focus on a simple, BASIC-like subset of Perl. But is there still too much inevitable wierdness (the weirdness that I love!) in Perl to make this a bad idea? I've thought about a book, Perl as a First Programming Language, along these lines, but I'm not sure I'm convinced yet.

Here's an important example.

Life with Perl used in simple mode is good up to the point you need to write a counting loop. Here's how to do it in BASIC (sort of) and it's typically one of the first things you learn in BASIC.

FOR I = 1 TO 10
PRINT I
NEXT I

or something like that.

Now, think of what we need to do in Perl.

for ($i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++) {
print "$i\n";
}

Hm. Well, a Perl aficionado might point out you can do this:

foreach $i (1 .. 10) {
print "$i\n";
}

I'll keep thinking about it.

The Gyroball

Here's an article on what is said to be the first new baseball pitch in 30 years, the gyroball.

Google Apps Premier

Hmm, Google Apps Premier.

But possibly the most compelling aspect of Google Apps -- at least from the standpoint of potential customers considering a switch from Microsoft products -- is the price. Google is offering the whole package for just $50 per user, per year. Microsoft does not publish volume licensing prices for the Enterprise Edition of Office 2007, its latest entry in the office productivity market. The price of a standalone copy of the Professional Edition is $499.

Some analysts believe Google Apps could save businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in IT support and personnel costs alone. "You could buy 1,600 Google Apps licenses for the cost of one IT worker," says Nucleus Research analyst Rebecca Wettemann, who notes that because Google Apps is Web-based it greatly reduces the need for deskside support.

LED Light Bulb

I've heard predictions that they are coming. Well, one is here! An LED-based “light bulb” that is said to output the light equivalent to a typical 70 watt bulb using only nine watts of input power. The cost is between $60 and $70. That's a bit expensive but I expect that they will have a very long lifetime—much longer than a compact flourescent lamp, for example.

The IT Crowd

Mike told me about this series the other day. This British sitcom is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time (as he said)!

The IT Crowd (on YouTube).

There are six episodes and most are uploaded to YouTube in three parts. Be sure to watch the first episode and don't miss the first part of the second episode (the commercial is my favorite scene of the series).

To find some parts I had to search on “The IT Crowd Ep3” or “The IT Crowd episode5”, for example. There seem to be six episodes overall.

Enjoy!

Which Linux (For My Business)

This article is a decent answer to the question, Which Linux should I choose for my business?

Using the Macbook Pro

A series of blog posts on ZDnet Hardware 2.0 by Adrian Kingsley-Hughs on using the MacBook Pro.

Visible Proper Motion of Stars at Galactic Center

Amazing! Visible proper motion of stars at our galactic center!

CHARA Measures Size of Exoplanet

The CHARA array was used to measure the diameter of the planet's primary star HD 189733 and thus infer the diameter of the orbiting planet!

Interesting QM Interpretation

This is an interesting interpretation of quantum mechanics. Hm. My first reaction is to be old-fashioned and think that our traditional explanations are good enough, however there may be something of value here.

Shuttleworth Talks About Granny's New Camera

This is an insightful, brief post on Mark Shuttleworth's blog about hardware support on Linux.

Shuttleworth's blog: Here Be Dragons.

Who is Mark Shuttleworth?

iPhone and Beyond

Okay, I actually watched the entire MacWorld keynote about the iPhone. It's the first time I've ever watched the whole thing (that I can remember). I have to admit, it's the coolest thing I've seen in a while.

I think they are getting closer to a converged, single, personal device that does all of what you want to do. There is amazing technology built into this device. Apple has raised the bar to a new level and I think others will quickly follow (as they did the iPod) and as closely as they can without violating the 200 patents Apple mentioned.

The biggest question for me is, How well does the touch screen keyboard actually work? It looks pretty good, but I'd have to actually hold one in my hands and try it. For pointing (not typing) I personally don't mind the stylus approach. It's very precise, cleaner (not rubbing my greasy fingers on my display!), and is using a familiar tool in a familiar way. (BTW, I don't mean that my fingers are abnormally greasy, but all human fingers are. Thus the fingerprints made famous in crime fighting…).

The next question is the browser. It's fantastic to have a full-featured browser on that platform. But I wonder if the little zoom feature would become tiring and bothersome after a while. There's no question that an iPhone for on-line web work and browsing would be **great** if you had nothing else available. That's not the same as having an alternative that you happily use all the time.

Also, IMHO the iPhone is too expensive to buy, but it will bring interesting things to the market that are significantly cheaper. Look at all the MP3 players that follow the iPod and Windows Vista's GUI chasing after Apple's OS X.

Here's one fascinating project that's already in the queue: Moko. The really interesting news here is that's it's an open platform that developers can, uh, develop on. Now that will be interesting.

Comet McNaught C/2006 P1!

Comet McNaught C/2006 P1 is getting very bright! It's low in the dawn sky just before sunrise, and a little tricky to see. In spite of that, recent predictions have it as bright as Venus!

(The top picture is by P-M Heden and was published in skytonight.com. The below diagram is from January's Surprise Comet by Roger W. Sinnot, skytonight.com).

6174

Amanda sends a link to this article about the mysterious number 6174. Hah.

What Really Happened on Mars

This is a story about troubleshooting a system-level computer problem.

This is a fascinating article by Mike Jones about the Pathfinder system resets that occurred. The problem was a race condition around a mutex. The article is a quick read and interesting story. It also describes a very typical system problem and what it's like to figure it out.

The Lessons Learned section is the best part!

Goodbye Pegasus Mail

It looks like development of Pegasus is coming to an end. Pmail brought desktop-friendly email to many users as our campus evolved to desktop PCs, connected by LANs and file servers (Novell) which were then connected into a campus-wide internet.

As time went by, Pegasus (actually Mercury probably), became a source of annoyance with issues like only being able to forward email to an IP address and not a host name (and thus not being able to take advantage of our DNS round-robin balancing and DNS fail-over processes at the time).

How To Survive the First Week At Work

This interesting article popped up on my Gmail web clips.

Mozy On-line Backup

Jim told me about Mozy Friday evening. Here's an article pointed to by Tech Web. The offer on-line storage that is free up to 2-GB and then $5/month after that. Very interesting. Your files are encrypted.

Map an IP Address!

Wow, use this site to map (on Google maps) an IP address. It works pretty well. It was off by several buildings at Emory but did get the campus (for my desktop system).

Realistic Android

Here's a pretty realistic android. I also found this video.

D Programming Language

I read an article on this new programming language, D, by Walter Bright, the main developer of the original Zortech C compiler.

Falling Sand

For a lot of fun (and wasted time) try Falling Sand.

Text To Speech

Okay, this is a pretty good text to speech translator.

Here Come Plastic Chips

The Financial Times reports on plastic electronics. Quoting from the article:

By using a cheap and simple set of processing operations to build up layers of circuitry on plastic “substrates” – the material on which circuits are formed – rather than silicon wafers used in conventional microchips, the developments promised to slash the cost of making semiconductors.

The initial products from the factory will be pieces of plastic about A4 size. The basic plastic substrate will be polyethylene terephthalate, a form of plastic used to make drinks bottles.

By 2009 the Dresden plant should be producing 2.2m units of A4-size semiconductor sheets a year. They will initially be used as flexible “control circuitry” for large displays the size of a piece of paper that can hold large amounts of information – equivalent to thousands of books.

Tidal Power

I've always been fascinated with the rotation of the earth as a source of energy. There is a lot of energy stored there that we could use. Of course the environmental impact, eventually, could be quite huge. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation one time and there was indeed an immense amount of energy to be had if you only slowed the earth enough to extend the length of a year by one second! The earth is already running that much slower than our standard time as illustrated by the leap seconds we now have to add sometimes twice a year!

The easiest way to use the earth's rotation as a source of energy is based on tides. Tidal forces extend the water surface of the earth into an oblong, extended shape which in cross-section looks like a big cam. Let something float up and down on that cam to drive a generator and you're done!

Most real-life approaches more efficiently use the in- and out-flow of water during tides. The New York Times has a video of a recent installation of such generators. Wikipedia also covers tidal generators quite well.

I'm still curious about the details of the energy transfer here. During normal tides (see the Wikipedia article) energy is transferred from the earth's rotation to the moon's orbit. The moon slowly moves to a higher, longer-period orbit and the earth slows down. So the earth is already slowing.

Thus the question is, when we steal tidal energy, where does it come from? Are we slowing down the earth more than normal, or are we just stealing some of the energy that would have been transferred to the moon. I suspect it's a combination of both.

If we are just stealing the energy that would have been transferred to the moon, then I think the environmental impact is inconsequential. Who cares if the moon's orbit doesn't get larger! If that's an important natural process, then I suspect no human has discovered what it is yet.

If we are slowing the earth down more, then that's a different matter and my opinion is that we just use caution and don't get carried away to the point that we end up with a 48-hour day. That might be a problem.

Figuring out where tidal energy comes from is an interesting problem to think about. I'll have to dedicate some cycles to it from time to time.

Where does the energy we use end up?

I suspect that most of the energy that we “use” ends up being radiated into space as electromagnetic energy of one form or other. Some of it goes into chemical changes on earth, including, unfortunately, in the atmosphere in some cases (but with questionable significance).

We increase the entropy of the universe in this way, particularly since much of that energy is thermal in nature.

However, as has been pointed out, the entropy of the universe is already nearly maximum due the cosmic microwave background. These other changes are insignificant, tiny steps closer to the max.

(The illustration above was drawn by me using Windows Paint).

Moon over Andromeda

From the Astronomy Picture of the day here's a wonderful composite of the moon and M31, the Andromeda Galaxy by Adam Block and Tim Puckett.

Most folks don't realize the immense apparent size of this galaxy, i.e., how big it is on the sky! Note how much larger it is than the moon!

Sadly, this also points out that galaxies are simply dim. Really dim! We can barely see our own and we are inside of it. The same goes for more distant galaxies.

The space scapes with bright galaxies glowing in the sky or the space craft view port simply don't exist in real life.

HDTV Resolution Explained

I was looking for a simple mapping of HDTV resolutions to screen/pixel resolutions, and found this excellent summary of HDTV resolutions at Cnet.

Here's the Wikipedia article on HDTV which has plenty of information, I think.

Then there is this nice list of LCD misconceptions at the LCD Buying Gude.

A Major Award

It's a major award! Maybe a bit late for this Christmas, but maybe next time.

Google-NASA Partnership

From CNN: Google Teams up with NASA

MOFFETT FIELD, California (AP) -- Google Inc. and NASA Ames Research Center said Monday that they have finalized an agreement to deliver more of the space agency's imagery and information through the Internet's leading search engine.

The collaboration marks another step in a partnership announced 15 months ago when Google unveiled plans to build a 1 million-square-foot campus at the NASA center, located a few miles south of the company's Mountain View headquarters.

Linux Memory Allocation

This is a very nice article on Linux memory allocation at O'Reilly.

Snowflake Magnified 36000x

This image, purportedly of a snowflake magnified up to 36,000 times takes a long time to load but is quite fascinating.

Raising Skinny Elephants is Utterly Boring!

Nice! Here are a couple of ways to reboot (as gracefully as possible) a hung Linux system. Just remember, Raising Skinny Elephants is Utterly Boring!

Patents On-Line!

Google has now put the US Patent collection on-line! When I was at Ga Tech, I used to enjoy looking up patents in their collection. One of my favorites was 3,359,678.

Music Video Amateur by Lasse Gjertsen

Here's the music video Amateur by Lasse Gjertsen made entirely by editing. He says he can't play. I think there's an interesting philosophical argument there…

Interview About Steve Wozniak

In this webzine interview with Gina Smith who co-authored Wozniaks recent book, here's an interesting excerpt.

GS: When I first started interviewing Steve, I said to him, “What should this book say?” And he’d say, “I hate reading anything about Apple. It’s all wrong. It’s all wrong!” And I’d ask what was wrong, and he’d just kind of brush his hand and say, “It’s all wrong! Everything ever written about me is wrong.” So I did a lot of research and I’d bring him stories and articles from throughout the years — “Is this wrong? Is that wrong?” And, in fact, a lot of the stuff out there that had been written about him was wrong. One common myth is that he was kicked out of the University of Colorado. He wasn’t kicked out. He’d run up so many fees from computer usage that he was afraid to tell his dad. So he chose not to go back the next semester and instead went to De Anza community college… With his 200 IQ and the perfect college board scores…

Another misconception that bothered him was the idea that he and Steve Jobs had designed the Apple I and the Apple II together. The sole designer of both those computers was Steve Wozniak. The sole designer. And that’s not to say that Steve Jobs isn’t an engineer in his own right; he may be. But he had nothing to do with the design of those two computers. He was the business guy there.

RU: And then there’s the myth that it was developed in a garage.

GS: It wasn’t done in a garage — that was HP. HP was started in a garage several decades earlier but not Apple! Steve Jobs worked in his bedroom of his parents’ house and Steve Wozniak was on the kitchen table.

RU: I guess some final tweaks were done in a garage.

GS: I think at the very end, when they have their first order of a hundred some units; they were actually just popping chips into sockets — some of that was done with Steve Jobs’ sister, and Dan Kottke, an early friend. Dan Kottke is a good example of one of the early employees who had everything to do with the success of these first computers — the Apple II, the first personal computer with color and sound.

Gmail Can POP Mail From Other Accounts

Now Gmail can POP email down from other accounts.

NASA World Wind 1.4

A video demo of NASA World Wind 1.4 on YouTube.

Here's an official link that seems to only feature version 1.3.

Servers, Hackers and Code in the Movies

This is another Slashdot pointer to an article on Servers, Hackers and Code in the Movies. It's mildly entertaining and a couple of nice lists. They certainly are not complete (e.g., the Colossus from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) is missing) . There are no computers from Star Trek.

Frybid

An interesting article on Slashdot, RV Processes Own Fuel on Cross-Country Trip.

I have to say, the very top picture in the article does look a little like a flux capacitor…

Quoting the Slashdot quote:

“Frybrid has realized the dream of Dr. Emmet Brown's Delorean: putting garbage directly into your vehicle, and have it be turned into directly into fuel. This past fall, Frybrid installed a system into a 40' luxury RV that sucked up waste vegetable oil from the back of restaurants, removed the water and filtered it, and then burned the dry and cleaned vegetable oil as fuel. The family drove their converted RV from Seattle to Rhode Island on $47 worth of diesel fuel. Plans are underway for a smaller version of the system to fit in the bed of a pickup truck.”

Email Ideas

Here is a smattering of ideas (not originally mine!) on email approaches that avoid spam and offer other advantages.

White list only

I've used this for years now with great success. You only receive email based on a white list. Period.

Sender stores email

All that is ever emailed is a link and the email client/recipient retrieves the email from the sender at the time they read it. There's no (or not necessarily) local storage of messages and sender validation is inherent. Also you have the added benefit of being able to modify (including fully retracting) a message after sending it. Storage is also ultimately efficient, only one copy in the universe. (Of course recipients can save their own copy). Downloading attachments integrates nicely and easily with pretty much no need for a size limitation.

Security is also nearly trivial! To secure the email, make the retrieval channel SSL. You're done.

If you want to limit delivery to authorized individuals, require authentication to retrieve the message. This could be made “invisible” in the background by employing certificates and doing the authentication on the fly.

Fully closed systems

For an organization's internal email (which I propose accounts for a large percentage of work-related messages), use a closed system like a forum/BBS with no connection to the outside world. Messages are stored once, organized into topics, security is inherently (approaching) perfect. Messages can be edited and retracted after sending. There is no spam, at all, ever. This is what LearnLink would be if it was disconnected from the Internet. I've been using a forum in this way for more than a year or two and have found it works extremely well.

I like the idea of a closed system for internal email and a separate email system for external messaging, perhaps Google- or Yahoo-based.

Also note that MySpace is exactly such a system on a vast scale, combining also the above white list idea with their implementation. I've noted that my kids, and their friends and family are using Myspace for communication more than email.

Update on James Kim

Alas, he didn't survive.

http://news.com.com/2009-12-6141617.html?tag=cnetfd.ld1

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/16180700.htm

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-na-family7dec07,0,471422.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Ubuntu Groff A4 Paper Size Problem

This gets me every time! (Well, it did twice). By default, groff on Ubuntu is configured for the A4 paper size. This means that printing man pages, e.g.,

pod2man mydoc.pod | groff -man -l

prints out pages that are missing the top header line. The solution to this is to make sure the string “letter” is in the file /etc/papersize.

echo letter >/etc/papersize

It's just that simple!

Disk Stats and Utilization

Here is an excellent article by Adrian Cockroft, “What does 100% Busy mean?” regarding disk stats and utilization.

Fantastic Solar Videos

Here are fantastic videos of solar surface activity including developing prominences. If you look carefully, you can actually see how the plasma in the prominences is moving down toward the sun along magnetic field lines.

More on prominences.

http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/filaments.html

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/sun/prominences.html

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/sun/prominences.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_prominence

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040725.html

James Kim Missing

This is disturbing news that Cnet senior editor James Kim and his family are missing. I only know of him because he did the video review on the Sansa e250 MP3 player that we bought.

Super Hi-Res Mars Pictures

HiRISE, Noted on the Bad Astronomy Blog.

Swiss Army USB Knife

In case you need more USB flash memory:

http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/review/victorinox_swiss_memory_knife_review

Hidden XP Goodies

Cool, Sixteen hidden XP goodies.

I like this one: The XP installer music is at:

Start > Run > "C:\Windows\system32\oobe\images\title.wma" > Ok

First Gamma Ray Clock

This story of the first gamma ray clock found keeps popping up in various places, so it finally got my attention.

Quoting astronomy.com:

Astronomers using the H.E.S.S. telescopes have discovered the first ever modulated signal from space in Very High Energy Gamma Rays -- the most energetic such signal ever observed. Regular signals from space have been known since the 1960s, when the first radio pulsar (nicknamed Little Green Men-1 for its regular nature) was discovered. This is the first time a signal has been seen at such high energies -- 100,000 times higher than previously known — and is reported November 24th in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Sniffer Bees!

Here's an article about the new (bomb) sniffer bees. This is incredibly clever and fascinating but also hilarious!

Unlike sniffer dogs which require three months training, it takes 10 minutes to train the bees.

After training three or four bees are put in a shoebox-sized "sniffer box", held in position on plastic mountings. Air is sucked by a fan into the box via plastic tubes and wafts gently over the bees.

If they detect explosives in the air, the trained bees all stick out their proboscises together.

A miniature video camera in the box is trained on them and is connected to a computer programmed with movement recognition software. As soon as the movement of the proboscises is detected, an alarm sounds to alert the security operator.

To avoid false alarms from rogue results, a single bee sticking out its tongue does not set the system off.

Google Using Domain Key Signatures

I just received an email message from Google (since I signed up for Google Base yesterday) and noticed it was signed with a DomainKey-Signature header entry.

DomainKey-Status: good (test mode)
Received: from zps36.corp.google.com (zps36.corp.google.com
[172.25.146.36])
by smtp-out.google.com with ESMTP id kAT49pg2026142
for ; Tue, 28 Nov 2006 20:09:52 -0800
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; s=beta; d=google.com;
c=nofws; q=dns;
h=received:to:from:subject:x-mailer:message-id:date;
b=TP7wvOxr2uytSzFXTNxFV3qDCWXlmhYZHx189gsyc/q2VtyAE4e
NBSPLE4PgveOe37/IE/11kQXrGNexE8G6ig==

In the “extended header” it said:

Sent by: google.com
Signed by: google.com

The “test mode” designation is interesting, too.

Well, looking further at Wikipedia, Google has been using Domain Keys since 2005 and actually went live with them shortly before Yahoo (who developed the concept).

Cool, so here's show you look up the public key to verify (the above) message. The s=beta is the selector. You prepend that to the _domain subdomain, and that to the sending domain d=google.com.

nslookup
> set query=any
> beta._domainkey.google.com
...

Non-authoritative answer:
beta._domainkey.google.com      text = "g=\; k=rsa\; t=y\;
p=MFwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADSwAwSAJBAMs93oc95ObA7OEQEbqjIy6YvR
j1u3yVGTzQ3wkwRQTWx1fhvNQenPNFklaL+Tw9XFYUc3f8eY0hs3WUNQ+t+I0
CAwEAAQ=="

Here's a nice slide show from Eric Allman.

Install MythTV on Ubuntu Edgy Eft

Supposedly the best guide for installing MythTV onto Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft according to Digg.

In the Digg comments, people list others, too.

http://www.parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php

http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php

Thanks

These are all about Thanks. There are two interesting links here. One is the link to a Thank-you from Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy Blog. Then he, in turn, links to this really cool video thank you by Ze Frank on his blog.

Okay, Ze Frank's video blog is funny. I just watched the 27 November entry about Scrabble. Hah!

(But caution, there is some PG-17 language and maybe more).

Python Tutorial

I am first and foremost (these days) a Perl programmer. Nonetheless, here is a nice Python tutorial pointed to via Digg.

Update on Leonid Meteors

I didn't enter an update here regarding the Leonids. I watched the sky from about 23:30 to 0:00 EST and didn't see a single meteor. Granted, I was standing and looking up (the worst mode for observing meteors) instead of lying in a lounge chair.

Actually the time period was early for meteors since the radiant had barely risen at that point, i.e., we had barely rotated around to the side of the earth that would encounter the meteoroids.

NanoSilver

This story on Slashdot about nanosilver prompted me to read more about it. I've never heard of nanosilver which apparently serves as a disinfectant, even in antibacterial socks! Fascinating.

Leonid Meteor Shower

Don't forget the Leonid meteor shower.

http://skytonight.com/observing/home/4663951.html

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/061117_leonid_guide.html

http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/

http://skytour.homestead.com/met2006.html

From space.com...

In North America, for the Maritime Provinces of Canada, New England, eastern New York and Bermuda, the Sickle of Leo (from where the Leonids appear to emanate) will be above the east-northeast horizon just as the shower is due to reach its peak. But because Leo will be at a much lower altitude compared to Europe, meteor rates correspondingly may be much lower as well. However, this very special circumstance could lead to the appearance of a few long-trailed Earth-grazing meteors, due to meteoroids that skim along a path nearly parallel to Earth's surface. Seeing even just one of these meteors tracing a long, majestic path across the sky could make a chilly night under the stars worthwhile.

Unfortunately, for the central and western United States and Canada, the Leonid outburst will likely have passed before Leo rises; at best, nothing more than the usual 10 or so Leonids per hour will likely be seen.

Keep in mind that for New England and U.S. East Coast, the peak is due locally on the previous calendar day, Saturday, Nov. 18, at 11:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (For the Canadian Maritimes and Bermuda, the corresponding time is 12:45 a.m. on Sunday, the 19th. For Newfoundland it is also on the 19th, but at 1:15 a.m.).

Sun BME and HME Interface Names

Where did the names BME and HME for the Sun interfaces come from?

Amanda says:

Actually, it *is* a Sun engineer joke. The 10 Mbps predecessor was a chip called the "Big MAC Ethernet" -- in this case, it was a mere pun, since MAC stands for Media Access Control, i.e. the Ethernet data-link layer. When they designed the 10/100Mbps chip later on, they decided to turn the pun into a full-out joke, and they called it the "Happy Meal Ethernet."

On a Solaris machine, the interfaces are named by the driver type, so instead of "eth0" you'll see something like "hme0" instead.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/542/2085

China Responds

More about the submarine incident has surfaced. In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu says, “China has always had a defensive national defense policy.”

Nice Chinese Surprise

Here's a nice little surprise from China (from the Washington Times).

A Chinese submarine stalked a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Pacific last month and surfaced within firing range of its torpedoes and missiles before being detected, The Washington Times has learned.

The surprise encounter highlights China's continuing efforts to prepare for a future conflict with the U.S., despite Pentagon efforts to try to boost relations with Beijing's communist-ruled military.

Machine Gun Robot from Korea

Also on Slashdot this morning, a machine-gun bearing robot in Korea. And you thought Samsung just made things like cell phones.

As far as I can tell from the video, they've developed a robot that will shoot Big Foot.

Dolphins Sing Batman

From Slashdot, scientists teach dolphins to sing the Batman song…

Video4Linux2 Series at LWN

This is an interesting series of articles at Linux Weekly Newsletter on Video4Linux2. This master page links to subsequent articles as they are published.

Your editor has recently had the opportunity to write a Linux driver for a camera device - the camera which will be packaged with the One Laptop Per Child system, in particular. This driver works with the internal kernel API designed for such purposes: the Video4Linux2 API. In the process of writing this code, your editor made the shocking discovery that, in fact, this API is not particularly well documented - though the user-space side is, instead, quite well documented indeed. In an attempt to remedy the situation somewhat, LWN will, over the coming months, publish a series of articles describing how to write drivers for the V4L2 interface.

V4L2 has a long history - the first gleam came into Bill Dirks's eye back around August of 1998. Development proceeded for years, and the V4L2 API was finally merged into the mainline in November, 2002, when 2.5.46 was released. To this day, however, quite a few Linux drivers do not support the newer API; the conversion process is an ongoing task. Meanwhile, the V4L2 API continues to evolve, with some major changes being made in 2.6.18. Applications which work with V4L2 remain relatively scarce.

V4L2 is designed to support a wide variety of devices, only some of which are truly "video" in nature:

• The video capture interface grabs video data from a tuner or camera device. For many, video capture will be the primary application for V4L2. Since your editor's experience is strongest in this area, this series will tend to emphasize the capture API, but there is more to V4L2 than that.

• The video output interface allows applications to drive peripherals which can provide video images - perhaps in the form of a television signal - outside of the computer.

• A variant of the capture interface can be found in the video overlay interface, whose job is to facilitate the direct display of video data from a capture device. Video data moves directly from the capture device to the display, without passing through the system's CPU.

• The VBI interfaces provide access to data transmitted during the video blanking interval. There are two of them, the "raw" and "sliced" interfaces, which differ in the amount of processing of the VBI data performed in hardware.

• The radio interface provides access to audio streams from AM and FM tuner devices.

Buying a DSLR

Here's a slashdot article on buying a digital single lens reflex camera. Here are my comments on their main points. Granted, they suggest that a DSLR is not for everyone.

My experience is based on my Olympus D-40. (Not a DSLR).

Also note that I write this as a former SLR user for more than 25 years. I loved my Olympus OM-1 and miss it in many ways. (I still have it, I just don' t use it any more). Still, I think the digital medium has advantages that don't require going back to the old SLR format. I

Creative Control

My camera has all the controls mentioned, aperture, shutter speed, in camera sharpening, white balance, flash sync. I'm not sure it has a contrast setting. These all require using menus so I bet a DSLR may make some of these easier, but I can do them.

Superior Sensors

I'm not sure that I buy that a larger sensor (CCD?) is necessarily better. It will inherently have more pixels, but I definitely have enough pixels already with my 3.8 Mpx. My smaller sensor means my lens and camera can be smaller. Larger might be better but I'm not convinced.

Less Noise

I'm not convinced of this one either. I would need to see an objective spec on what the noise actually is. I have not experienced noise as a problem except in very low light situations. My camera does have a low noise setting.

Accessories

I concede this point. I really wish my camera at least had a way to attach and/orat least synchronize a flash. (I know you can sync with a slave of some type). I don't really feel the need to have lenses outside my zoom range (which is roughly equivalent to 35mm camera 35mm–100mm). A longer zoom range on a camera would be nice.

No shutter lag

This is huge and my greatest complaint about my camera. Newer, non DSLR cameras solve this problem though. A lot of it, I believe, has to do with the time it takes to unload the CCD and write to the memory device. So I don't think this is an advantage exclusive to DSLRs, but just to newer cameras.

Instant Startup

Maybe. This isn't that important to me. My camera starts up in three our four seconds. That's probably equivalent to taking a D/SLR out of a bag and removing the lens cap. (My camera fits in my pocket).

Higher Build Quality

Maybe. My camera does have a lot of plastic. It probably wouldn't withstand some abuse a more professional camera would. Still, it's pretty sturdy.

Viewfinder

My viewfinder zooms to match the lens. I grant that it's not perfect. The LCD provides a perfect match and I think the LCD is very useful as a viewfinder (though I typically don't use it unless I need to). An D/SLR viewfinder is a beautiful thing, but mine works pretty well.

Ergonomics

You need to learn my technique for holding a small digital camera. Thumbs up with your left hand. This creates a very stable platform with your left hand to support the camera. It also keeps your fingers from blocking the lens. Control the shutter, etc., with your right hand.

Price

No way. DSLRs are cheaper that DSLRs used to be, but always more expensive than the other digital cameras.

Diet Coke and Mentos: The Domino Effect

Diet Coke and Mentos: The Domino Effect from the Official Google Blog.

500 l of Diet Coke and 1500+ Mentos.

Wii Inventory Mapper

This is kind of cool. Find where the Wiis are.

Steampunk Jetpack

Steampunk Jetpack

Enough said.

Another Angle on the Web as Desktop

No sooner do I publish my own descant on the web OS, desktop, etc., than Digg points to an article that expounds a similar view from a different angle.

The Next Big Thing

I remembered! I think. The other day I thought I had an epiphany of what the next big thing would be. Maybe it's not that big but I think this may have been it:

With LEDs becoming absurdly bright, with high-resolution display technology becoming absurdly small and cheap, and with more powerful devices in our pockets, I expect that in the near future, the device in our pocket will become quite powerful video projectors.

Imagine that you take out your pocket device (assuming you ever actually put it away), check your email and voice mail, make a call, and then it's time for the meeting to start. You tap on a couple of spots on it's interface, set it down on the table and a large, bright display is projected on the wall. It's corrected for the geometry of the projection and the wall so there's no distortion. You don't have to worry about all the tilting, propping, focusing, and repeatedly pressing a keystone button.

You advance your slides, control your movie, or perhaps live video feed from another conference room with either someone else's hand-held device, or a remote of some kind that's IR or BlueTooth. Or with voice commands.

Parakey Web OS

Hmm. Parakey Web OS. Interesting at Slashdot. Reading the Slashdot comments on this one is interesting because Blake Ross, the young guy the article is about, is fully engaged in the discussion there. (Or at least someone that says they are him). Fascinating!

BTW, I think this is on the right track. From using Google apps (the word processor and spreadsheets) I can see this. Your world is on the web and is accessible from anywhere. Folks that say “Bah!” to the idea of a Web OS are missing the point. Yes, it's true the Web OS is not about interfaces to hardware and interrupt handlers. But this is about what's on the screen in front of your face. What's on the screen moves from being housed in the box on or under your desk to the cloud that's the web.

That's initially a fearful thought, but consider that the box on your desk is already part of that cloud, so it's not that much of a shift as you might think. With easy encryption of data, it can be protected and just as protected as it is (and should be) on your desktop computer.

With Google and Microsoft rapidly converging on this idea of a web-based OS, the idea of network computing and the network as the system is about to happen with a vengance that exceeds the wildest dreams of Sun Microsystems.

With Google apps I've already experienced the one-click sharing of stuff and it's very cool, along with the capability of collaboration.

Whither the desktop computer? I think the desktop computer may be soon on it's way out. Maybe not the screen and keyboard. The screens will probably get bigger (wider and taller) and flatter (thinner). I guess they'll ultimately just be “paint on the wall.” But the thing the screen and keyboard talks to will become portable. We'll carry them in our pockets and they'll connect to the screen and keyboard when we need them to. They'll handle phone calls, news articles, Slashdot, blogging, picture taking, music and movies, etc. They'll also project our images (movies, whatever) on any reasonable white wall or surface we can find—large screen anytime!

Based on this article, if they pull off Parakey, it will be open-source Parakey vs. cool Google vs. the dying Microsoft (trying to hang on as the world changes underneath it) in this so-called Web OS world. Microsoft will be too old and unable to change quickly enough to keep up. Microsoft will hang on to it's entrenched corporate user base for a while as Google and Parakey invade from the bottom up the way Linux and Firefox have.

In that future, I imagine that (sadly) Google will become the giant, evil corporate entity that we love and hate, (“No one ever lost their job by choosing Google”) , and someone, perhaps Parakey, will be the cool, new open source solution that competes.

GConf configuration system

GConf configuration system

This is a configuration system for user config data. It's probably worth keeping in mind. Apparently there's a daemon running on one of my Sarge boxes, at /usr/lib/gconf2/gconfd-2.