Getting Things Done

For the past few weeks, I've been deep in the process of fully adopting David Allen's Getting Things Done.

• The book
• A video (recommended)
• The web site

It was a bit of adjustment to leave behind (at least for now) a system that has served me well for decades, but I've moved everything over to Gmail Tasks, am reorganizing my office, and changed my daily work process. So far it's still working well and quite enjoyable, too.

Here are some details.

What is it?

GTD is another of those approaches to organizing your work, your life, and accomplishing tasks efficiently. This isn't something I thought I needed. In fact, I've been using Alan Lakein's approach for over 20 years and it has served me well. If you wonder whether I've always had control of my time and my life, the answer is certainly, No. But, I've always known what I needed to do when I wanted to have full control and needed to be maximally efficient.

However, GTD was highly touted by people around me so I finally watched one of David Allen's videos and became further intrigued. Then I read his book and decided to give it a try. Usually, IMHO, the only proper way to give something a try is to follow all of the instructions, completely.

Jumping in

With that idea, I've jumped headfirst into the new process.

There is one important and critical way that GTD differs from any other time management scheme that I've seen or heard. If it's not a difference, at least it's something that just escaped me before now. Mr. Allen claims that it's important to write down or record everything in your action-tracking system and keep nothing in your head. The reason is that, any action item in your head that is not recorded “in a system you trust” maintains a constant psychic drain on your mind, and adds a source of stress. It's not until you get everything out of your mind and into the system that your mind can totally relax and think freely. He claims you can never be free of mental stress (and thus physical stress, if they can be differentiated at all), until you reach this point.

That idea was new to me. I don't know if it's true or not, but it certainly seems plausible and seems worth giving a shot.

I drove over to the Borders and bought the book and read it over the next several days. Then a couple of weekends ago, I started my first collecting and processing effort at home. I also did one at work, but the effort for that was quite minimal since most of my information at work was already highly organized in my old system.

Todo list software and Tasks

A big change for me has been moving from the Lakein style of todo lists to the GTD style of next action lists. I've been maintaining todo lists in Lakein's format for over 20 years. For most of those years, I've used software that I wrote myself and that has been re-written a number of times. The first version was in C and used pointers to pointers to implement a list of strings. The most recent re-write was in object-oriented Python. I've also used a pad on my desk or a little steno book with dated pages. Anyway, leaving the old format and process behind (that was familiar, much loved and working!) has been a big step for me.

GTD isn't specific about what tool to use for tracking your next actions, projects, and such, though it makes a number of suggestions and provides good guidance. There are also many updated suggestions and tools on-line today. When I sat down to decide on a tool, I considered re-writing my todo list again to work in the GTD way of doing things. However, Tasks had been there in Gmail for a while and I'd played with it a bit, even used it a little. It seemed marginally adequate for tracking things then, but I took as second look and simply started using it. The gradual process of just trying it out more and more ended up being a full commitment to moving everything over.

Tasks Features

One nice feature of Tasks is that it's quite simple and somewhat flexible. You can easily drag tasks up and down in a list to reorder them. You can have multiple lists and it's easy to move tasks between them. Finally a task can have a due date (which automatically puts it on your calendar) and it can have a large set of textual notes and web links attached to it.

You check off completed items and you can clear all completed items so you don't see them any more. Then you can view a separate list of all your completed items on a list by list basis. You can also indent items under a leading item. That means you can move that whole indented group as a unit. You can have multiple levels of indentation and, thus, of structure. Finally, you can easily add an email message as a task from Gmail with one click.

So, with many of these added improvements, Tasks turned out to be quite powerful when I started using it in earnest.

How I'm using Tasks

Given all of those features, the path of my evolution of usage, and as I grok more of GTD, here's the way I'm currently using Gmail Tasks.

I keep a number of separate lists. These include all of my next action lists, a project list, and a calendar lists.

Any item that has a date assigned goes on the Calendar list. Since, from your Gmail calendar, you can only choose one list at a time, I always leave the Calendar list selected and that makes those items appear on my calendar. They are associated with a day but not specific times on that day, as GTD suggests.

GTD defines a project as any task with more than one action, so my Projects list has a project and indented under it are the actions. I always keep the next action at the top, by dragging tasks around if needed. I sometimes drag a whole project around to reorder them in the list.

Since my lists were rather long, I organized my next action lists into context-based lists. So I have an At Computer list, At Home list, an Agendas list for conversations with folks. My Read/Review list either has book or article titles to read, or frequently has links to on-line items to read.

One of the best parts of Tasks is that, because it's in the cloud and because it's accessible from my Android phone, I have access to my lists all of the time. (You can access tasks from a phone browser at http://gmail.google.com/tasks). This also makes it easy to add new tasks and ideas directly into the system.

If I'm driving, I call my Google Voice number and leave a message for myself. It gets automatically encoded into text and emailed to me so I can enter it later. (Granted, the voice-to-text doesn't work that well for me now).

There are two completely separate instances of Tasks for work and home, but it's easy to move items between them. Also I can enter actions into each whether I'm at work or at home, and have access to reviewing them as well.

When on an actual computer, it's important to pop out the Tasks list and make it into a larger window. That's the only way it really becomes usable.

Documents, check lists and filing

For some of the other check lists that GTD recommends, I've been using Google Documents so far. I created a GTD folder there to keep them all in.

Unfortunately I'm haven't quite reached the paperless state at home. Fortunately, Allen recommends a filing system for all of one's reference materials—that's stuff that doesn't require any actions but that you may need to refer to later. In a nutshell, he says to use simple file folders and a label maker, and to file everything alphabetically in one system. He also recommends not using Pendaflex hanging folders because they slow you down too much, and there's a strong emphasis on keeping it all simple and easy to do! So, I got a Brother P-Touch label maker on sale at Office Max, and I've been purging my old hanging files and re-processing everything into a new system. This even lead to emptying out and purging files form an old file cabinet I have at home and dedicating it to the new system.

Is it really faster and better to use the old manilla folders? For me, the jury is still out on this one. At least you don't have to worry about those little hooks that stick out of the hanging folders.

He also says, don't hesitate to file a single piece of paper in a folder with a label. The justification is that, if it's important enough to keep, it's important enough to file. Makes sense. So using the cheap folders definately makes that easier to do.

I've nearly made it through all of the paper in my office and now it's on to the many other boxes of stuff which is another level of purging and reorganizing, but I'm on a bit of a role.

Finally

So, I'm still settling into the process. It's been about three weeks since I migrated all of my Todo items to Tasks and about two weeks since I began the Big Collection process in my office at home. Though I've fully committed to giving GTD a spin, my experience with Lakein's (and other's) approach is still present as a source of insight and practical how-to skill. In fact, there is a lot of overlap between these two approaches, more than they are different.

I highly recommend Getting Things Done, and will post here later on how it's all going.

I'm Paperless

If you just want the punchline, skip down to “The Punchline.”

My past, paperful existance

Well, at least at work. For years, spanning previous employers and jobs, I've been moving more and more to a paperless office.

My paperful existence hit a maximum probably sometime maybe in the mid 90s. At that time I think I had either two or four lateral file drawers of files that I carted around everytime I moved offices or desks. In addition to that was a too-large collection of magazines, journals and books.

There was a while on the Emory campus when a friend of mine had stuffed away a large portion of this stuff in a storage room on the fourth floor of the Candler Library, when I moved into a smaller cube arrangement. (And note that the “smaller” cube was a generous 10x10 = 100 square feet!).

Eventually another friend delivered those old boxes and cases to me on several hand carts and I went through and cleaned them out. I finally eliminated almost all of that paper, retaining only some of personal, historical interest.

Paper starts to decline

By the early to mid 2000s, people were generally sending documents as email attachments meaning that there was no reason for paper. During those years I used paper as a presentation medium. I might print something to take to a meeting then throw it away. If anyone gave me something on paper in a meeting, I still threw it away after the meeting (with only rare exceptions). My expectation was that they could always give me another copy if I needed one, and would somehow share or make it available electronically if it was important. I don't recall that ever actually causing a problem.

(For anyone shocked at this use of paper and worried about trees, I reminded them that paper is a major industry of Georgia and that trees are grown on vast tree farms solely for the purpose of making paper. Good grief!)

In my last job at Emory I basically had no paper documents at all. There were just a few in a handful of folders, probably five or less.

The Punchline

In my current job the amount of paper I use is zero. On very rare occasions I print something out to look at it with a highlighter and not on the screen, but usually destroy that copy pretty quickly. Anything important is always on-line.

The nice thing about this is that there are no papers on my desk. Period. I have no file folders and nearly nothing in any drawers. In fact my desk is pretty much empty except for a couple of astronomical pictures stuck up and one or two bits of interesting detritus folks have insisted on giving me. In fact, I could move to another desk with nearly zero effort.

Except for Notebooks

There is one exception of note here. For nearly 20 years I've taken notes in, believe it or not, notebooks. I don't ever use legal pads but always some kind of bound notebook with pages numbered and dated. At the time I began that practice, it mercifully eliminated the unending stacks of miscellaneous pages from legal pads, and whole pads, that I somehow never got around to filing.

At Emory and for most of those years I not only used those notebooks for meetings but for all the work I did. Later, I only used them for meetings and moved other note-taking on-line in a practice I still follow today.

Having on-line notes searchable and available is of almost immeasurable value! (Of course, accidentally deleting a chunk of them is of almost immeasurable damage! Since, uh, that event, I've used a version control system to make snapshots so I can always step back through any changes. Currently I use Bazaar for this and all personal version control).

As a result, I only take occasional notes during meetings, and sometimes notes about ideas and such that are more graphical than textual. When I left Emory I had reached 85 notebooks of accumulated information, though the most recent was always the most important and useful—one reason that notebooks work so well for this. Now, I barely use one composition book per year.

The Apps I use

Even a few years ago, the number of products available from Google seemed dizzying and hard to keep up with. The flow of new stuff (and the deprecation of old stuff) hasn't slowed down and may even have picked up some.

Because of conversations with some folks about the apps that are around now, it seems like a good time for a quick inventory. Here are the Google apps that I use the most, that are most important, and that I'm most excited about. At least they are sorted by some product of those, roughly.

Also, please note that this isn't a complete list of everything that I use, but just those that are highest on the list given the above sorting criteria.

• Search - Mostly taken for granted now, I use it probably hourly and it actually continues to evolve and improve rapidly.
• Gmail - Though I think email should die and is, in fact, well on its way out, this is still one of Google's best apps and I rely on it completely and continuously.
• Android phone software - My phone is probably The Computer I Use nearly 50% of the time, not counting desktop programming and such at work. Use means reading, reference (looking things up), communication (email, messaging), task and calendar tracking, notes.
• Chrome browser - I use it on all platforms now (Windows, Linux and Mac) almost exclusively.
• Wave - Though I've been using it for real work for weeks, it's now brand new to the public. It hits a lot of my targets squarely in the center, while bringing along a huge mass of features.
• Gmail Tasks - Now that I'm fully emerging in GTD, Tasks fits the needs there very nicely. I use it nearly hourly.
• Maps - I use them daily, to find restaurants and such, and every time I'm going somewhere new. In combination with GPS on Android, I use Maps while driving sometimes. At home I use a combination of satellite, map and street view to plot a course to somewhere new or for a trip. I use the Terrain view pretty often, too. I use the traffic view daily, too.
• App Engine - I don't create or need them much, but this is a wonderful environment, I'd say *the* way, to develop and deploy a web app.
• Picasa - For pictures.
• Google Documents - About the only word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation environment I ever use now. Period. I fire up Open Office for something maybe once every six months. Microsoft Office: never, and not for maybe four years.
• Apps for my domain - I have a number of instances for domains I own. It's the only email solution I use.
• Google voice - We've dumped Vonage and GV is now our only family/home number.
• Sites - This is about the only solution I use now for non-app web sites. I wish it had more themes but those it does have are good enough for my needs, and I'd rather use Sites than do the extra maintenance and customization. It's just not what I want to spend my time on. I have so many sites for so many purposes, I don't even know what the number is.

Stats for Nerds

Wow, while using the Chrome Browser (which I now use nearly 100% of the time on all platforms, Windows, Mac and Linux, at home and work) and while looking at the Task manager, I just discovered Stats for Nerds. It shows memory statistics similar to what you can see on a running Linux system. Excellent!

You can get the same information by putting about:memory in the search bar.

Computing Luminaries

Someone put together a nice set of pictures of some computing luminaries. This is translated from Portugese to English by Google Translate. Here's the original site.

Mt. Wilson Fire Updates

After a couple of web site relocations while power and servers were down on the mountain, the main reporting website has moved back to http://www.mtwilson.edu/fire.php. Hal McAlister and his wife spent several days on the mountain top with other observatory staff and the fire crews.

The accounts are riveting and the photographs amazing. Recommended reading!

(Note that links to many of the photo albums appear in the second posting near the top of their blog page).

Station Fire Threatens Mt. Wilson

The Station Fire in the LA area has been on Mt. Wilson for many hours now. Most media are reporting the threat to the cluster of TV and radio transmitters there but Mt. Wilson is also home of the Mt. Wilson Observatory which includes the 2.5-meter/ 100-inch telescope.

This was the telescope used by Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason in the 1920s to observe the redshift in galaxies.

Today, Mt. Wilson is also the site of Georgia State University's CHARA array, an optical interferometer. CHARA is the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy at GSU. Hal McAlister is the director of CHARA and, according to the LA Times, also director of the Mt. Wilson Institute.

From the LA Times:

The top of the 5,712-foot mountain, which sits above Altadena, is home to multimillion-dollar astronomy projects for UCLA, USC and UC Berkeley. Georgia State University also operates a $20-million facility and a powerful telescope array at the Mt. Wilson Solar Observatory.

“A lot of people think of an observatory as one dome, but Mt. Wilson Observatory is actually a 40-acre tract of land with 50 to 60 buildings on it,” said Dr. Harold McAlister, director of the nonprofit Mt. Wilson Institute, which runs the observatory. “None of that stuff is portable, and to move telescopes out of there takes many weeks. We’re strictly at the mercy of nature and the great competence of the firefighters.”

• Sky and Telescope updates
• Dr. Harold McAlister's blog updates
• LA Times article
• Twitter search for Mt Wilson

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is also nearby. Here's video of firefighters battling flames from the air just behind JPL.

Lifehacker Desk

This Lifehacker desk looks pretty interesting.

How to Design A Social Sight for Sign-Ups

This is a brief article by Guy Kawasaki that highlights a presentation by Joshua Porter that

designer Joshua Porter explains how to solve the three big problems of social software:

1. Getting people to sign-up for a service.

2. Making their first-time use a positive and engaging experience.

3. Keeping them engaged on an ongoing basis.

NFS on Mac OS X

These look like helpful tips from James Gosling regarding NFS on Mac OS X, and changes in Snow Leopard (sigh).

Natural Logs

Also the topic of natural logs came up. I was looking for a way to explain clearly why natural logs are “natural.” Here's a pretty neat explanation of the natural logarithm and the base e.

http://betterexplained.com/articles/demystifying-the-natural-logarithm-ln/

N-Body Simulations and Big-O

I did a little class session on Big-O notation at work today and we looked at a galaxy N-body problem just briefly. After the fact, I found this really nice web site.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/N-body_simulations

Eight-bit

Okay, this is really neat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qsWFFuYZYI

My favorite part is Press Play on Tape.

Ogg Theora

Ogg Theora looks interesting.

The free, patent-unencumbered video codec now works in over 24% of the world's web browsers with no plugins required. The latest 1.1 release of the Theora encoder is coming out any day now. And when it does, the huge improvements in quality and functionality made over the past year with support from Wikimedia and others will percolate out into the major GNU/Linux distributions, arriving at the fingertips of those who build and maintain the world's biggest video sites.

Chrome

I switched over to using Chrome almost exclusively on MS Windows a few months ago with great satisfaction. For the past week or two, I've also been using Chrome on Linux and the Mac version. They are all working pretty well now. I'm now using Chrome nearly all of the time on all platforms.

It's important to note that neither the Mac or Linux versions have actually been released, so they are not in their final form and don't have that level of usability.

However, the Mac version seems to be extremely stable. It supports Flash (Youtube videos) and I haven't experienced any problems with it at all.

The Linux version is a little less stable and doesn't have Flash support yet. Still, using it through most of every day, I only load Firefox for the occasional video.

Eclipse of Jupiter's Moons

Eclipses among Jupiter's four large Galilean satellites aren't that rare, but I've never seen images like this. Scroll down to about the middle of the page to see the animation of Io's shadow transiting Ganymede. Recall that Io is roughly the size of the Earth's Moon, and Ganymede is roughly the size of the planet Mercury.

PubSubHubBub on Blogger

Blogger is publishing PubSubHubbub automatically.

S&T Report on the Perseids

Here's a nice Sky and Telescope report on the Perseid meteor shower.

UPDATE: The Perseids still hold surprises! According to IMO observers' data collected worldwide, the shower showed not just one peak, not just two, but three! The third, a day after the show was supposed to be mostly over, is unexplained. Meteor scientists are trying to reverse-engineer their prediction models to see where it came from.

Pictures of Comet McNaught

These are amazing pictures from Comet McNaught C/2006 P1 from back in 2006.

More About PubHubSubBub

Here's more about Pubhubsubbub in a blog post by Dave Winer.

So What Is Caffeine?

Cade Metz at The Register interviews Matt Cutts about Google Caffeine.

What Makes a Quality Tweet

On Mashable, Twitter Talkback by Soren Gordhamer writes about What Makes a Quality Tweet. It sounds like good advice.

ISO 8601

So what is the actual ISO date format? It's ISO 8601.

Basically, the current time would be: 2009-08-15 23:53:00 -0400

Wikipedia Page
ISO Article

More Perseid Information

Newbury Astronomical Society

Amazing Youtube video of Perseids

On Twitter: #meteorwatch

Perseid Meteors Tuesday and Wednesday Nights

The Perseid meteor shower will be happening Tuesday night 11 Aug and Wednesday night 12 Aug. The actual, theoretical shower peak is Wednesday 12 Aug at 14:00 EDT. Conditions aren't ideal since the moon will be a waning gibbous.

Information is here at Sky and Telescope.

Here's a general observing guide at Sky and Telescope.

The main thing is to go outside, in the darkest location possible, lie on the flattest thing you can lie on (lawn chair, adirondack chair, ground) and watch the sky, the whole sky or as much as possible. The shower will be best after midnight or 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, when we are on the side of the earth encountering the meteors head-on.

How I Learned to Quite the iPhone and Love Google Voice

RT TechCrunch How I Learned To Quit The iPhone And Love Google Voice http://tcrn.ch/4IFB by @arrington

Bokodes

Mike sent me this interesting article on Bokodes, an idea from the MIT Media Lab for replacing bar codes. It' s an interesting idea with interesting optics. Their paper is linked to at the site.

Now that I've read the paper, the optical idea is pretty simple. They put a tiny lens in front of their pattern (say, on a product). The lens acts like the objective of a microscope. It focuses light from the code as parallel rays. (I suppose that's actually un-focusing the light!). When you point a camera at this, even from a large distance, it acts like the eyepiece of a microscope and, when focused at infinity, focuses an image of the bokode onto the camera's sensor.

This very long microscope is very sensitive to angle. A focused image is insenstive to distance though the size of the image will vary with distance.

Fascinating!

Jupiter Impact Image

This is an excellent image of Jupiter and the impact site by Mike Hood at Spaceweather.com.

Dixie Dregs, Steve Morse and What If

I just realized that the below piece by Camel, “Ice”, reminds me of “Night Meets Light” by the Dixie Dregs, performed here by the Steve Morse band.

(And you have to watch the following guitar solo).

Camel

Also I guess I never posted that, also while listening to Slacker, I heard Camel for the first time. How did a progressive rock group that goes all they way back to the 1971, apparently with quite a bit of success, get past me?!

Roy Buchanan

While listening to the Jeff Beck channel on Slacker yesterday I discovered Roy Buchanan. I don't remember if I knew of him before.

Solar System in Gainesville

For a while I've wanted to go see the Millenium Project of the North Georgia Astronomers which is a scale model of the solar system. Yesterday, we were in Gainesville and I manged to find the Neptune marker.

The planet body sizes and their distances from each other are to scale in this model. The sun is a sphere on the downtown square. Of course most of the inner solar system is located there as well.

Star Chart Software: Cartes du Ciel

Question: What good start chart software is out there?

An answer: Cartes du Ciel.

It covers all of the basics. You can set the sky for a particular location and time, navigate around, zoom in and out, pick different projections, change the appearance, add and subtract features (like constellation boundaries or the Milky Way), and print charts. You can even control a GOTO telescope with it.

You can change from the colorful star representation to black stars on white (though the dim stars are a bit too small pixel-wise and hard to see). As you zoom in, more stars appear and that feature works well.

A huge collection of deep sky objects are indicated. Most importantly, you can download and add additional catalogues so that you get to a huge number of objects, down to those probably beyond your instrument.

And it's completely free.

The first thing I wish was different is that the program runs on Windows only. That's a disadvantage which I think will grow over time.

The next thing I missed is a feature of other similar programs: when you zoom into a deep sky object, the symbol turns into an actual image of the object so you can see what it looks like (and zoom into the image further). Yeah, this isn't really a property of star charts, but just something that I find I actually expect. I think you may be able to add this to the program yourself, but I'm not sure.

However, if you want that feature, just use Google Sky. Google Sky doesn't work great as a replacement for star charts (IMHO), but it's fun to look at the pictures.

So, I think Cartes du Ciel can act as a replacement for my SC01 and SC02 Sky Publishing charts, Norton's, Tiron 2000.0 or Becvar, and even Uranometria. You can either print ad hoc charts (I haven't tried this, though) or take a laptop to the telescope.

Apollo 11 Source Code

To commemorate [the Apollo 11 moon landing] the Command Module code (Comanche054) and Lunar Module code (Luminary099) have been transcribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC…

Star Image Out of Focus for Collimation

Here's an excellent video of an out of focus star image being used to collimate a telescope.

The diffraction rings and the little dot in the center (not the star!) are all optical effects. This is all light from a single star but everything you see is caused by the telescope optics or atmosphere.

The dark hole in the center is caused by the secondary mirror obstruction. The whole image is the light filling the aperture of the telescope.

The shimmering and bouncing of light is all atmospheric seeing effects.

The fact that the central hole and the rings are all concentric show that the telescope is well-collimated.

Seeing the Invisible

Wow, these shadowgrams in the New York Times are amazing! They were made by Gary Settles, director of the gas dynamics laboratory at Penn State.

I really like picture 3 of the AK-47 shooting a bullet. The bullet is supersonic and has a nice double-shock cone along with a little trail of turbulance. It's clearly outrunning the spherical shockwave from the main explosion from the gun muzzle. It's also extremely interesting that there is no sound or anything else coming from any other part of the gun than the muzzle.

There's also that dark puff of gas that's moving very fast out in front, leaving it's own cone-shaped trail of turbulence behind.

I'm curious about the spherical shock wave that's a bit in front of the main spherical shock (they look like circles here of course) but only inside the bullet cone. It joins the front of the double supersonic shock where they intersect.

There's also a faint horizontal line in front of the bullet and along its path. What in the world is that? Is it some artifact from the picture making process?

Picture 4 of a revolver shooting is a great contrast to picture 3. Here the bullet is clearly subsonic, and behind the main shock. There's a shock from the back of the gun as well as from the muzzle. The things that I find fascinating here are (1) how the center of the main muzzle shock comes from in front of the muzzle and (2) how the spherical waves from the back of the gun seem to be retarded by the muzzle explosion. They are pulled back and distorted there.

Note how much comes out of non-muzzle parts of the revolver compared to the AK-47.

All of these photos (except for the last one of the insect) show how senstive light travelling through air is to disturbances. This is one of the main problems that astronomers worry about when using a telescope. Any disturbances in the atmosphere in front of the telescope (all the way to the edge of the atmosphere) and inside the telescope have similar effects. They aren't as pronounced but, then again, the high magnification involved, well, magnifies the effects. Pictures 6 and 7 of the hair dryer and candle, though dealing with unusually hot air, illustrate this well. In both picutres take note of the less extreme turbulence in other parts of the room that's still visible.

Telescope users are plagued by warm air rising from people (in front of the telescope), buildings, warm pavement, and then of course the weather. You can easily see the effects in a very similar way, but live!, if you rack a really bright star like Sirius or Vega out of focus. A hand in front of the telescope will have a smoky pattern rising from it, clearly visible, just like the effects in these pictures.

Addendum: Hah! Well, reading the attached article, Prof. Settles discusses how the images are made with a light source, curved mirror, (lens), and a razor blade. That sounds exactly like a Foucalt tester which is used when grinding and figuring a telescope mirror!

Futurescapes

While looking on Youtube I found this interesting video of futurescapes. I think the superimposed adages could have been omitted, and some are a bit unclear.

Many of the images seem to come from WhiskeySierra Graphics.

Astronomical Seeing

Since I recently did a brief class/talk on telescopes, I was poking around looking for examples of astronomical seeing. Here are a couple of videos I found that serve the purpose. In both, you can pretty clearly see the “underwater” effect of seeing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kEXMCQw6VY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vytMN7RBlE

Observing (B)log

I've decided to try logging my observing with a blog and Twitter. The blog is at the location shown here and the tweets will be on stargate149.

http://starrycl.blogspot.com/

Largest Telescopes

What are the world's largest telescopes (currently)?

http://astro.nineplanets.org/bigeyes.html

LIVE FROM THE MOON

Well, it was 40 years ago (actually yesterday) that men first set foot on the moon.

Asteroid Impact on Jupiter

There has apparently been another asteroid impact on Jupiter.

http://tinyurl.com/nxthg4

http://tinyurl.com/ox79yg

http://tinyurl.com/lw2zoo

Steve Eve's 1/10 Scale Saturn V Launch

Steve Eve built and launched a 1/10 Saturn V rocket. I'm just as impressed by the parachutes and landing! That's a seriously reusable launch vehicle.

Youtube

Article

Milky Way Rise

This is a beautiful video of the Milky Way rising over the Texas Star Party by William Castleman. One thing is clear: We are sitting on a rotating planet inside a spiral galaxy! (… that has a dusty, active plane!). Oh, and we are near a very bright star, too!

I also suspect that you can see the zodiacal light in the middle frames as that faint triangular band of light extending upward from the horizon, toward the right. Zodiacal light is scattered sunlight from the faint, dusty plane of the solar system and can be seen from very dark skies well after sunset.

Slide Rules and Calculators

I came across this message I had posted in 2007 in another location.

We learned to use slide rules and were required to use them in high school physics (which I took as a junior). Or, it might have been in chemistry which I took as a sophomore. In the physics class, we also had a four-banger calculator at the front of the room that we could use, until someone dropped it. It was large with plasma-segment digits for the display (the big, glowing, orange ones).

We understood well what two- and three-digit precision was. Slide rules also made it pretty easy to understand logarithms. I still think about a slide rule scale when estimating the log of a number from 1 to 10.

My slide rule was a relatively cheap Sterling model, but I was a high school student after all.

When I was a senior, I was given a TI SR-51 calculator as my first calculator. Of course the SR meant ``slide rule.'' It had all of the functions found on a slide-rule and also did hyperbolic trig functions.

The next year, when I was a freshman at Ga Tech, there were still people on campus with slide rules on their belts. Of course, we carried our calculators on our belts, too. The cases had a loop for that purpose.

My roommate, who was an older PhD student, used a slide rule throughout my time at Tech, even in the late 70s. I don't think he actually had a calculator, but I don't remember for sure.

P.S. The SR-51 died before it was two years old and I bought an HP-25 and then upgraded to an HP-25C soon thereafter.

Chrome OS?!

What's this I hear about Chrome OS?

To me, this is simple. Everyone in my family sits down at the computer or picks up a laptop, logs on and runs Firefox. That's pretty much it. There are only rare exceptions where they do anything else. I don't think anyone plays any games on computers that aren't on-line. The biggest exception to this I know of is some music editing like Garage Band.

I personally only use the browser, Chrome on Windows or Firefox 3, and a terminal program. That's more than 90% of my computer usage. The occasional exceptions are Fritz chess and MS Flight Simulator. At work, I use Firefox and xterm windows. That's it.

For me, if there's a good terminal app that runs inside the browser, then I'm pretty much done.

Thus, it makes perfect sense to shave off everything else and make a system that's only the browser and nothing else. That's all. And at the same time, make it faster and more secure.

This is not going to be a server OS. I'll personally still need Linux boxes for that.

The implications for the corporate desktop are huge. Hopefully everyone is already using on-line email and probably most corporate apps are on-line. If you can get everyone to use on-line office apps for word processing, spreadsheets and persentations, then you're done. Desktop maintenance as a function is gone. Everyone has a Chrome OS system, or something like it. The IT Crowd fix, “Did you turn it off and turn it on again?” will literally become the only solution to a problem except for replacing the computer.

And no, there's no reason you can't do this now with careful paring down of a Linux distribution.

I think the biggest dilemma may come for someone like me. I have this suspicision that Chrome OS may be so much better as a browser, I'll have to choose between booting/running it and regular Ubuntu which I might want for some other purpose. Yes, I know Chrome will run on Linux but I have this idea that the user experience will be different enough to make, uh, a difference.

Telescopes in National Geographic

Here's a nice article in National Geographic on today's large telesopes by Timothy Ferris.

Ant Megacolony Takes Over the World

It's bad enough that an ant megacolony is taking over the world, but they have surrounded my house and are attacking. Yes, it's the same ants!

Project Euler

Project Euler is a fascinating set of problems.

Making a Demo Video

I recently made a short software demo. There were several tools that were useful for doing this on Windows XP. I used CamStudio to record the screen action and it worked extremely well.

Then I used Windows Movie Maker to record a narration track. It saved the narration as a WMA file. Later, I decided I'd like to add a music track (after some tough negotiations with my daughter to let me use one of her original guitar pieces). Since Movie Maker only allows one audio track, I needed to mix the music and narration externally.

So, I downloaded and installed Audacity. Adding a WAV file of my daughter's music was easy, but the WMA narration file could not be natively imported into Audacity. So, I found a program called SUPER which would pretty much convert any audio and video formats into any others. It's main selling points are that it's free and it already includes the codecs you need.

With the audio mixed, it was easily imported back into the movie. Some titles and credits were edited in adn that was it. I exported it to a WMV file and then uploaded it to YouTube.

Actor Model and Carl Hewitt

I just heard a fascinating tech talk by Carl Hewitt on actor model and semantic integration.

Common sense for concurrency adn strong paraconsistency using unstratified inference and reflection

Opera Unite

Well, this is interesting. Opera has implemented a web server on their browser called Unite so that users can share files from their desktop. Here's a tutorial on setting it up.

This could really faciliate sender-stored email (SST-Mail)!

I'm curious about the security of it, but apparently Opera operates a site that acts as a sort of gateway. The browser connects to that site and access tunnels through NAT-ty firewalls and such. This is all speculation from me, but, if that's close to how it works, that's not bad and it's a lot better than the disaster of Windows running IIS on every workstation.

Since there's a gateway, you can impose access control and specify (via Opera userids) who can access your site. (Wow, that's even better for sender-stored email!) The more I think about it the more brilliant this seems. Surely someone has done this before but, if so, it probably didn't get the kind of public visibility that this implementation will get.

Twitpocalypse

Twitter has hit an interesting limit in their software. They used the four-byte, signed integer representation for their message ids. That means 31 bits to count messages. (Four bytes is 32 bits but you need to save one to use for the plus/minus sign). How much can you count with 31 bits?

Well, you can count to 2³¹ - 1 = 2,147,483,647. Computer users who have been around for a few years will recognize this as the two-billion, e.g., two-gigabyte limit. On old UNIX systems, file sizes were limited to 2-GB. On many systems, memory was limited the same way. It's even the source of the year-2038 limit on the UNIX time stamp. That's when it will have been two billion seconds since 1 Jan 1970, the UNIX epoch.

The prediction was that many Twitter clients wouldn't handle the roll-over. (This is like your odometer hitting its limit and rolling over to 1 mile again. That makes it a little harder to figure out, for example, how far you've driven if you started before the rollover). That seems to have come true.

Since I pretty much just read Twitter from their web site and don't really use a client, I haven't experienced the problem directly.

Other articles:

Tech Crunch

How Google Wave Will Change Your Business, Career and Life

This blog post, Six Ways that Google Wave will Change Your Business, Career, and Life by Ryan Carson is an early but interesting take on Wave.

Insights about Twitter

Hey, I've just had more insights about Twitter.

It's synchronous!  That's the “real-time” aspect that's touted.  This is in strong contrast to the highly asynchronous nature of email and BBS/forum messages.  (And that asynchronous property is highly useful, by the way).

It's UDP!  Twitter messages are like packets broadcast out to the world.  There's no ACK.  You don't care if they aren't received (mostly).  However, just like a broadcast time service has useful information that a computer can pick up when it needs to, Twitter is a highly useful stream of information you can dip into.

Eary Impressions of Wave

Here are some of my early impressions of Google Wave.

• It addresses many of my technical concerns about communication almost perfectly.
• But then the federation approach, while completely appropriate and I think a good thing, may dilute it's effectiveness  in meeting my communication goals.
• But maybe not.  The federated approach may give you a single closed system for corporate communication.  The problem is that it's not sender-stored but, instead,  there's a lot of information exchange.
• There are **lots** of bells and whistles.  Granted, they are all amazing.  Still, they don't quite align with my personal preference for minimalism and simplicity.  8-(
• Ah, a major concern:  The data interchange between clients is very rich and heavy.  Well, it seems so.

More to come.

Migrating Google Notebooks

Back in January, Google announced they were stopping development on Notebooks, though the application would continue to work and be accessible.

I personally found Notebooks extremely useful.  Yahoo had a notebook feature and, when Yahoo Mail was my main email application and Yahoo was the primary platform I used, Yahoo notebooks was a place where I kept a lot of information.  When the time came that I decided to migrate everything over to Gmail and Google, notebooks was one of the services I was concerned about losing.  I was delighted when I discovered that Google had a notebook service, too, and in fact, it was even better (of course!).  The ability to share notebooks was quite useful.

Now, as Google has decided to move away from Notebooks (effectively) since much of the functionality is available in other services, e.g., Google Documents, I finally got around to moving all of my notebooks off.  I deleted some of them and migrated over 34 to Google Documents.  I don't think the sharing came over, i.e., I'd have to re-share any of them.  That's not so bad since none of the sharing was critical.  Most of my shared notebooks were shared to a Google userid that I don't really use on a daily basis any more.  Some others were for specific activities and projects that have ended.

So Google documents is adequate for the task and may even have some advantages.  Still, I did enjoy the Notebooks app.

Graphene

This is an interesting article on graphene research at Ga Tech.  

Graphene apparently owes this enhanced mobility to the curious fact that its electrons and other carriers of electric charges behave as though they do not have mass. In conventional materials, the speed of electrons is related to their energy, but not in graphene. Although they do not approach the speed of light, the research team found that unbound electrons in graphene behave much like photons, massless particles that also move at a speed independent of their energy.

Google Wave

Yes, Wave is here!

http://wave.google.com/

I'll have more to say later.  I've been using it some.  They hit nearly all of my concerns square on target!  (See Email should die, classifying communication, sender stored, and ideas).  

I'm a little concerned about the complexity of the interface and the fancy features  I'm sure it's significant.

It's number two on Twitter (last time I looked).

Twitterfeed

I just signed up for Twitterfeed.com to use it to cast my Google Reader shares onto Twitter.   Since Twitterfeed uses OpenID it was very easy to plumb everything together.

Logging in with OpenID

Google accounts have OpenID automatically.  Here's the URL to sign in:

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

Bose-Einstein Condensate NOVA

A friend at work told me about this NOVA show about Bose-Einstein condensates.

Famous Fonts

This is an interesting site with famous fonts from various sources listed.

Star Trek

Well, last night I finally saw Star Trek.

Here are some initial impressions.

The movie is good.  I think that message has been pretty consistently communicated from every direction.  If anyone had any doubt about going to see it, they should definitely go!

The movie treats the Star Trek mythology well, particularly the original series and (maybe with even more focus) the following movies.

The casting was pretty good.  The Spock character is probably the best cast, in my opinion.  McCoy may be the next best.  The Kirk character is good and well-played but, looking at him, I can't see the William Shatner Kirk.  Uhuru, Chekov, and Scotty were farther off the mark but all well-played.  Chekov's role in the movie was surprising to me and entertaining.

I have to say, though there were many old, familiar aspects and plot mechanisms (approaching cliche) throughout the movie, the story never stopped surprising me.  It was delightfully unpredictable.

There were many tributes to Star Wars and I wonder if they were intentional or unconscious.  Hm, J.J. Abrams was born on 27 June 1966 and Star Trek first aired on 8 September 1966, when he was a bit over two months old.  Fascinating.  Star Wars was released on 25 May 1977 when Abrams was nine years old.

Anyway, I couldn't help expecting to see Kirk to look out over the Iowa landscape and see twin suns setting.

The space craft were beautiful and the space scenes were nicely done.  I've heard the problem posed before:  How do you make a modern Star Trek about technology that predated the original series without everything looking better.  In this movie, they didn't worry about that problem even a little.

In contast to other aspects of the film, the interiors of the Enterprise paid only the slightest tribute to the original shows.  Everyone was sitting in the usual positions on the bridge, there was a captain's chair, science station, navigation console, etc., transporter room, sick bay, but the similarities pretty much ended there.  The interiors were completely believable and certainly well done.  I kept wishing for more of a nod to the past onboard the ship.

The bridge was particularly cold and hospital white.  (Okay, the way hospitals used to look!).  At least that's the impression I took with me.  The instruments and techology served it's function but there was nothing delightful, notable or nostalgic about them, and I find that a little disappointing.  Abrams' take on the engineering decks gets credit for being quite interesting and different, but almost seemed over the top in some ways.

One notable exception was the shuttle deck.  It was very well done, a joy to watch, and was a nice tribute to the past.

The movie moves fast and the visuals are also fast so it will take multiple viewings for most of it to sink in.

I do have this specific complaint about the technology.  Every filmmaker feels compelled, it seems, to completely reinvent the transporter effect from scratch.  It's almost like a rite of passage.  Again, I didn't see the need to depart so far from the look of the original series.  I'd like to have seen more of a nod to the old show there, mixed in with the obligatory updating.

On the other hand, Abrams payed wonderful tribute to the sound effects of the original series.  They were included in subtle ways but you couldn't miss them if you knew them.  That's what I'm talking about.

And there in the credits, Majel Barrett for the ships computer voice!  She died in December of 2008.  I wondered if she had already recorded voice parts for this movie, or if they lifted them from stock or other movies.  Anyway, that was a delightful surprise.

Finally I'll note this.  Most plot lines introduce a series of tangles and then work to unravel them all by the end.  This story left a big tangle unresolved.  Big.   I'm interested to see whether they simply use it as the canvas for an ongoing series of stories, or if they devote the next movie to fixing it.

Speaking of the future, as my old friend and I got up to leave after the credits  ended, I couldn't help thinking about how Star Trek has been going strong for 43 years and wondering what would be done with it over the next 43 years.

Wolfram Alpha

Okay, this morning I'm trying out Wolfram Alpha for the first time.

About Alpha

I've read about it already and I've been a Mathematica user over the years.  I've also heard Wolfram speak (I think at Georgia Tech a few years ago), so I already think I get what Alpha is supposed to be.  I think search engine is not the most descriptive name for Alpha.  I notice it calls itself a “computational search engine.”   It's really more like a very intelligent calculator connected to a very specific knowledge base or encyclopedia of sorts.  As I understand it, the Wolfram folks have carefully compiled the knowledge base.

Alpha is to a calculator or computer (in the traditional sense of the word) as Google is to the encyclopedia or library.  That's my first approximation to describing it.  Alpha will be good at answering questions that would, in the past, have been answered by an expert if the expert would probably take out a calculator to answer your question.  That means it should be great for the physicist, astronomer and computer scientist in me.  It will initially be confusing to folks in general, but I think they'll catch on over time.  Students will probably pick up on it's usefulness pretty quickly.  

Any rumours of Alpha replacing Google are simply wrong.  It's a different kind of information from a different source.  Both will be interesting sources of information.

That said, there is some overlap between them.

Cities

The first thing I typed in was the name of the city I live in.  That worked well.  It listed the population, showed it as a dot on a world map, listed the current temperature and weather, and the nearest cities.

I tried Macon, GA and it said it's only 77 miles from Atlanta.  That's a surprise.  Having grown up there, Macon was always from 85 to 95 miles to Atlanta, depending on starting points.  I'm surprised at 77.  Maybe that's city limit to city limit and they've changed that much.

Astronomy

The next thing I tried was Saturn.  Good again.  It showed a lot of nice information as well as a solar system diagram (to scale!  Extra points for that!) with the planets in their current positions.  Very nice.

I tried Orion and Ursa Major.  Then I thought I'd pursue a question that's been bothering me.  I'd swear that, when I look up at the Big Dipper, the star Delta Ursae Majoris looks dimmer than I remember.  I recall that it's a variable star  so I wonder what type of variable it is, what it's period is if it's periodic, and where in the period it is.  In other words, is it getting dimmer?

The Ursa Major page on Wolfram Alpha looked nice enough.  But finding out about this individual star was hard.  The star wasn't labeled on the constellation diagram.  The mouse pointer turned in to a hand/finger meaning it was something that could be clicked on, but clicking on it made nothing happen, as far as I could tell.  And I tried it several times because the hand/finger insisted that something would happen.

So there was no way to figure out what the name of that star was.  There were a number of stars listed below, by name, so I thought I'd just click on some of them, guessing, and maybe a diagram would pop up so I could tell when I chose the right one.

But clicking on any star in the list simply popped up a window of selectable text representing the whole list.  That's weird, IMHO, and way less then useful, at least to my current way of thinking.  I certainly wasn't any closer to finding the star.

So I went back to Google which went to Wikipedia which had a better diagram with Delta labeled.  Okay, I went back to Alpha and typed in Delta Ursae Majoris.  That certainly worked and a page with basic star info popped up.  It definitely listed it as a variable and magnitude at about 3.3 I think, and even noted it's the dimmest star in UMa.  However, there was no more detailed information.  Nothing like you might get from the old Burnham's Handbook.

At this point, going back and searching on Google and going to several sources including Wikipedia yielded pretty much the same, in some cases the same verbatim, i.e., from the same source, information.

Relativity

My next question was a major failure.

I wanted to know how long it would take to travel to Alpha Centauri, in relativistic terms, with an acceleration of one g, one Earth gravity.  What I really meant is that you accelerate for half the distance, then turn around and decelerate the rest of the way.  That's the only practical way we know of to travel to another star system.  That would be for extra credit, but I would have accepted the less sophisticated answer of simply accelerating the whole way and watched Alpha Centari streak past at high speed when you got there.

It's also a perfectly simple problem if you know special relativity and requires little bits of knowledge like the distance to Alpha Centauri, the value of one g, etc.  It should be a perfect problem for Wolfram Alpha to solve.  Alas, I couldn't find any form of my question that Alpha could understand.  I finally resorted to terms like simply “relativity” and “delta-t” but I got no where.  Granted, the problem is hard to express and maybe I just never hit on what Alpha was expecting, but I don't think it should be too hard for Alpha to handle.

So I was hugely disappointed in that failure.  It would have been nice to be able to go on and ask Alpha about how much fuel would have been required for the trip, what percentage of light speed would have been reached at mid-point, etc.  The usual follow up questions for that interesting problem.

It's good at Math

Okay, I have to give Alpha credit for being good at math.  I typed in  “sin(x) / x” and “sin(1/x)” and  it spewed out more than I ever saw about those two expressions.  I'm sure it exceeds my CRC Mathematical Tables book.  Of course Mathematica pretty much already did that.

What about statistics?

Since I've been dealing with them at work lately, I tried “hazard function” and “failure rate” but to no avail.  Alpha didn't understand them.

A better calculator?

So, Google already functions as a calculator (most folks probably don't know that), but where it is less than useful is in building up results.   I'd like to use my previous result in a new computation, and that's hard to do.  The best you can do is to put parens around your previous expression or cut and past the previous answer.

I wondered if Alpha would do better.  So far, it doesn't.  It outputs the results in many different forms, enough to make any math teacher happy, but I don't see a way to get them into the next computation.

Here's my simple example.  What is the period of one rotation for the frequency 33 1/3 RPM?  As weird as it sounds, that was a question on my mind when I woke up this morning.

So, I'd like to take 3 and invert it to get 1/3, then add 33, then invert that.  That's simple and it's easy to do on my RPN caculator (which is now a Python program I wrote).  Alas, I could only do this in Wolfram (like Google) via  (1 / ((1/3) + 33)).

Twitter Responds to #twitterfail and #fixreplies

Twitter has responded.

On Mashable

Original Twitter Blog post
Whoa Feedback! post
We Learned a Lot Post

Remembering Distributed Name and Directory Services

Since it came up in conversation today, I'm trying to remember the distributed naming and directory services that have gone by. Some are still with us.

• Novell NDS
• NeXT Netinfo
• Sun NIS
• Sun NIS+
• LDAP
• DNS
• Active Directory
  

I'll add more as I think of them.

What's All This About Twitter Failing?

What's all this I hear about #twitterfail…on Twitter?

Everyone is up in arms about a feature change.  This article at Read Write Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick explains what's going on and this comment really clarifies things.  (Give the comment part of the page a few seconds to load).

First of all, I didn't realize the difference between a reply on Twitter where the @userid appears at the beginning of the tweet, e.g., 

@otherguy I absolutely agree with you!

and a mention on Twitter, where the @userid appears somewhere else in the Tweet.

I have to say that @otherguy seems to have a handle on this.

It seems all of the brouhaha is over replies appearing on your home page.

As the above articles point out, this is a feature that I don't think I ever had turned on in the first place and I was already confused about why I wasn't seeing replies on my Twitter home page.

I had sort of punted and was relying on Twitter Search to find posts and replies, but that is a more awkward, per-user-target type of approach.

Why they would remove a feature that only 2% of their users have turned on in the first place, at the cost of such an uproar (even if it's misplaced) is unclear to me.  At least a lot of us are learning more about how to use Twitter in the first place.

Cosmological Dark Energy

Sigh.  Supernova observations leading to the conclusion that the cosmological expansion rate is currently increasing instead of decreasing has lead to models of so-called “dark energy,” sometimes called “quintessence.”

There's a new paper by Dutta, Hsu, Rreb and Scherrer outlining a new dark energy model that has observable results, both in the astronomical-cosmological domain and in the particle-physics, collider domain.

Quoting directly from their paper:

In this paper we present a quintessence scenario in which the dark energy field can be coupled strongly enough to Standard Model particles to be detected in colliders, and which allows for a significant time variation in the equation of state. This time-varying w = w(z) has a characteristic form which depends on only a single parameter, and can thus be excluded by cosmological observations in the near future. Our model only requires a singlet scalar field (or, alternatively, a small gauge sector like SU(3) Yang-Mills theory; other possible realizations are also briefly outlined at the end of the paper) and a new energy scale on the order of milli-electron volts.

This article summarizes their results.

Here's my current question:  These symmetry-breaking ideas as an explanation for “dark energy” with a false vacuum and such sound exactly like the same types of models for inflationary cosmology from the 80s.  How does symmetry-breaking as an explanation for “dark energy” fit with symmetry-breaking for inflation?  I guess the answer will be something similar to:  Since this is a new form of energy, it's a different phase transition from the one that's typically associated with the currently known forces and inflation.  Maybe?

Jawbone-2

My old Motorola bluetooth head set was becoming harder and harder to hear and didn't handle car noise very well.  After looking around I finally settled on a Jawbone-2 which was the current Jawbone head set until the Jawbone Prime was just released.

The best price I found, at the time I ordered, was at Newegg.com.

So far it works well from my side.  While I'm in the car I've left voice mail messages with car noise including the AC on high and the radio on.  I listened to the messages later from home and they seemed clear enough.  It seems to work well.  

I selected the replaceable pieces (ear loop and ear piece) that gave the best fit.  I'm trying the (leather?)-covered ear loop now.

MFT Records in Windows NTFS

While scanning a hard drive (which contains a damaged NTFS) I'm seeing the errors “Unexpected MFT record” and I wondered what that was.

The MFT is the master file table in NTFS which is described in the web page Master File Table is being like a relational database with an entry for each file (and directory).

This page and the accompanying ones seem to be an excellent resource.

Twitter Tech Talk at Google

This was an interesting talk on Twitter at Google last Thursday by Laura Fitton.

Android 1.5 Cupcake Demo Video

Here's a pretty good demonstration of Cupcake on Android at Engadget,  in spite of the droning, monotonic voice-over.  8-/

More MBV Videos

My Bloody Valentine - I Only Said 

Come In Alone

My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When

My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When

Android Cupcake First Impressions

My phone announced it had a system update this morning and, with permission, proceeded to download the new release code-named cupcake.  Since I have a developer phone, I could have downloaded it long ago, but was waiting for the push since I wasn't that interested in being that much of a beta tester.  This is my actual personal phone that I need to work!

The Upgrade

There was a download that took a handful of minutes, then a reboot, then a picture of a big yellow arrow going from a package to a phone, then a picture of a big  yellow arrow going to a chip (firmware upgrade?), then a reboot, only a few seconds, then another reboot.

The first thing was, during boot, the animation was no longer the little pulsating, green android (which I sort of miss) but the word android with animated highlights moving across it.  It does look neat.

It says it's now Linux kernel version 2.6.27 and build CRB21.

First Impressions

The first thing I noticed was the presence of transparent items on the main screen.    Now the lock display and the unlock screen appear transparently over your normal background.

The second thing is that I would swear the screen is higher resolution.  I'm not sure if it really is higher-res, or if some of the icons are higher res images, or if it's just clever artwork.  Some icons, notably the browser and Gmail, which are on my home screen are different.

On Screen Keyboard

If you don't have one of these phones, you may not realize why this is important.  To me, the flip-out keyboard is essential.  I want to be able to type quickly and accurately with two thumbs and it works well enough.  However, when you just need to type a word or short search term, flipping out the keyboard and rotating the phone is bothersome.  It's nice to just be able to immediately type on the screen at that point.

So far, the on-screen keyboard works surprisingly well.  The ribbon of suggested completions is good.  You just start a word then tap on a matching suggestion if it appears.  Typing is not too bad and it is effective, but it is, of course, slower than the physical keyboard.

At first I had no idea how to access the keyboard.  (Answer:  Tap a text box, only once and lightly!)  Fortunately, under Settings there was a System Tutorial which was really only a tutorial for the keyboard.  That was perfectly helpful.

Camcorder

Now it has a camcorder.  At first I wondered if it would already be downloaded in the upgrade, but it was right there in the Apps.  It works, the controls work well, and it knows how to upload a video to YouTube, essentially with one click.  

The CCD (or whatever it has) on this phone is notoriously slow.  Still pictures are easily blurred and, for the same reason, the frame rate of video is ~low and the frame images are easily blurred.

Snappy Speed

Everything seems snappier and faster.  That's completely subjective, of course.  Menus scroll faster.

Find on page

The worst thing about the older browser was there was no find-on-page function!  You can hardly use the web without this function.

For example, you search for the word “android.”  A page comes up that's many screens long.  Somewhere on that page is the word android.  Where is it?  I'm certainly not going to read through screens of text to find it.  You need find-on-page!

I use it constantly.  Now it's on the browser menu, right there on top.  The implementation is well-done, too.

Voice Search

Google voice search seemed to work better.  I don't know if this is because of Cupcake, because I read that you should hold the phone at a normal distance and maybe I was holding it too close, or if the phone is learning more about my voice.  In any event, voice search has been mostly terrible before now.  This morning I said “android cupcake” and it got it just right.

What's really important, I think, is that Jamie Dupree was talking on the radio in the background, and the volume was pretty loud, and that didn't seem to interfere much at all.

Okay, I just tried it again, saying “italian food” and the name of our town.  It thought I said “italian food snowbowl”.   Hm.  Then I just tried “italian food” and, of course, it knew where I was and listed all of the local restaurants.

Gamma Ray Burst at z = 8.2

A gamma ray burst (GRB) has been observed at redshift z = 8.2.  Ignore everything people say about distance since those numbers are model-dependent.  What you can say unquestionably, is that the universe is now z + 1 = 9.2 times larger than it was when this burst occurred.  That means the universe was about 11% it's current size.

This is GRB090423A observed by the Swift satellite gamma ray observatory.

University of Texas blog

High Precision Strontium Clock

Rick U at work first told me there was some interesting work being done with a strontium lattice.  Then was this recent story from NIST regarding work on a high-precision atomic clock based on strontium.

Here's the actual story on work being done on ultra-cold strontium in the Ye Group at Colorado.

Now on Twitter

This blog is now on Twitter.  Sigh.

http://twitter.com/stargate149

A Good Review of Star Trek

Chris Tookey of the UK Mail Online likes the new Star Trek movie. From the review, it sounds good.

Email Should Die

Here's one example of why email should die, IMHO.

Consider four users A, B, C, and D sending messages in a discussion, maybe to a list they are on.  A sends original message x.  B sends y in reply.  C sends message z and D sends message t.

In a typical scenario, here are what inboxes and sent folders look like after A sends x.

• A
• inbox: 
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x
• sent: 
• C
• inbox: x
• sent: 
• D
• inbox: x
• sent: 

Now B sends reply y.  Note that the message will typically have x quoted at the end.

• A
• inbox: yx
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x
• sent: yx
• C
• inbox: x, yx
• sent: 
• D
• inbox: x, yx
• sent: 

Next, C sends message z, quoting the first two.

• A
• inbox: yx, zyx
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x, zyx
• sent: yx
• C
• inbox: x, yx
• sent: zyx
• D
• inbox: x, yx, zyx
• sent: 

Finally, D sends message t.

• A
• inbox: yx, zyx, tzyx
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x, zyx, tzyx
• sent: yx
• C
• inbox: x, yx, tzyx
• sent: zyx
• D
• inbox: x, yx, zyx
• sent: tzyx

Note that message x has been stored on disk 16 times.  This is just with four users, each sending one messagse.  Imagine a group of 20 to 100 users, and a thread that goes on for a dozen messages or more.

Even if each person is careful about not quoting the previous messages, you have this best-case scenario.

• A
• inbox: y, z, t
• sent: x
• B
• inbox: x, z, t
• sent: y
• C
• inbox: x, y, t
• sent: z
• D
• inbox: x, y, z
• sent: t

There are still N users * M messages copies stored.  Granted, these may be stored on different email systems.

Now, compare a BBS or forum system.  All users post to and read from a particular topic in the forum.

A posts message x.

• Forum topic: x
  

B posts message y.

• Forum topic:  x, y
  

and so on…

• Forum topic: x, y, z, t
  

Previous messages are easily read without quoting.  The storage implications are obvious.  Consider also the disk I/O bandwidth and even network bandwidth implications.

When the first scenario above occurs in an enterprise with hundreds or thousands of users, thousands of message threads, and millions of messages, the storage and bandwidth load is massive.

Add to that the idea that the email system they are using is open to the Internet with an influx of spam and other security attacks, and it's no wonder that such systems barely survive.

There are some email systems that implement message storage with one copy and pointers in each user's inbox and folders.  That certainly helps, but I argue that one may as well move to the simpler BBS, forum and topic model in the enterprise.

Apple Trumps Windows PC

From the Apple Insider: Apple trumps Windows PC makers in customer experience study.

Google Voice

I just signed up for Google Voice last night.  Very slick!

That gives me a “permanent, personal number” which I can point at any phones I want to.  You can have filters so that particular callers go to particular phones.  I could have anyone from work that is calling forward to my work cell, while friends and family go to my personal cell.  You can block callers or have some go straight to voice mail.

I you enable it, it transcribes voice mail messages into text like email and  you can read your voice mail just like email.  There's a little button where you can play the message, too.  You can send a reply via SMS (TXT) or call back if you are using the web interface from a cell phone.

There's a listen-in feature, so when your phone rings, the computer voice tells you who is calling.  You can then listen in to their voice mail just like an old-fashioned answering machine and “pick up” on the call if you wish.

If you are talking to someone, say on a desk phone at work, you can press * and transfer the call to another phone in your list, like your cell phone.  Your cell will ring and, when you anwser, the call is transferred, and the caller doesn't even know (except they may hear your cell ring).

Classifying Communication

Okay, these ideas just became clear to me.  Classifying communication with the following scheme helps to sort out all of the options a little.  Let's see how this goes.

One definition:  When I use “BBS,” I mean an on-line bulletin board system, typically with messages organized into topics and fora.  Examples are implemented using phpBB, phpNuke, vBulletin, etc.  You can make a good argument that Facebook and MySpace are fancier instances of BBSs and I think that's right.

When I use Facebook, I'm implying MySpace as well in most cases.  I'll note the exceptions if there are any.

One to all

Apps:  blog, Twitter

This is where one person wants to post messages to the world.  A blog is the next to most recent way this is usually done and Twitter is the newest.

One to many

Apps: BBS, Facebook, subcription blog, Twitter with closed account

In this case, one person wants to communicate to a closed group of people.  Everyone else is excluded from the conversations.

This is a mode I find myself using and it's where the BBS, Facebook and MySpace usually fit.  In the email paradigm, the mail list filled this need.

It just occurred to me that a subscription blog, where the blog is limited to a set of registered users, may fit this instance much better.  The discriminating factor concerns who does the posting.  If everyone posts messages, usually, then the many to many model fits better.  On the other hand, if I'm the one doing nearly all of the posting, then the subscription blog may be better.  Subscribers can comment on the postings and they can even be given permission to post.

I and a small group of friends tried this in a brief experiment with Blogger but there was one feature lacking that made it unusable in my opinion.  If someone went back and added a comment to an old posting, that new information wasn't indicated in any way.  The old post didn't move itself to the top of the list or a notification wasn't sent.  (Hm, there actually may have been a way to receive notifications of new comments).  Just browsing the blog didn't make new comments obvious however.

There's a subtle continuum transition from the one-to-many to many-to-many.

Many to many

Apps: BBS, Facebook, Twitter with everyone using closed accounts

This is when you have a group of people that want to have closed communication, limited to the group.  Everyone sends messages and those messages usually go to everyone else in the group or to a large subset.

This is where the BBS  and Facebook, etc., are a big win, especially over the email model (which I claim is nearly obsolete).  Single storage of messages, history of communication, limitation and control of who is in the group, and even in subgoups, makes such a system easily manageable and programmable.

I also think this spot is where there is the biggest potential for the biggest win.  

Trying to manage this type of communication with email, especially at the corporate level, is now at disaster status.  Any success at all is a result of huge effort and expense.

Using a closed BBS or Facebook (-like app) should represent a corresponding huge reduction in cost and effort with  increased functionality and success.

All to one

Apps:  web form, email

This is the answer to the question:  How do I contact you?  Most sites seem to have discovered the solution to this that I implemented years ago:  the web form.  You put up a web page with a form to fill out that allows anyone in the world a way to send you a message.  But the content is controlled and it requires filling out the form as opposed to just sending email, which subjects the recipient to the spam problem.  You can even use some of the mechanisms to verify that a human is filling out the form, like the so-called captcha schemes.  (By the way, I really hate the name “captcha”).

One to one

Apps: email with white list, Facebook inbox, BBS private messages

This can be done with special features in each of the applications.   Email with a white list handles this pretty well.  The private message features in Facebook and BBS applications also do this.

Twitter allows one person to address another, as does the Facebook wall, but in a very public way.  That's sort of a weird hybrid that's one to one with everyone listening.  That type of public communication seems to be pretty popular, and seems to indicate some sort of declining interest in privacy.

If I did this right, I'd probably have seperate categories for  one to one private and one to one public.

So…

Facebook seems to be a solution to all of these except one to all and all to one.  (Sounds like the Three Muskateers, doesn't it?)  Sure, you can accomplish one to all if you open up your Facebook site so that it doesn't require adding you as a friend, but then you lose the one to many and many to many modes.

The all to one problem in Facebook is only solved by someone requesting that you add them as a friend, and that grants too much just so someone can send you a message, maybe only a one-time message.

For me

What does this mean for me?  

One, I may be putting a lot of effort into maintaining many to many solutions when, in fact, one to many is the problem I need to solve.  I should consider moving to a subscription or hidden blog.  A subscription requires a user account and permission to access the blog.  The hidden case means the blog's URL is obscure and not listed or indexed.  Anyone that knows the URL can access it, but they shouldn't be able to know it unless someone tells them.

This also includes a couple of email lists I've maintained over the years.  Maybe I should move those to subscription blogs.  I need to simplify things some how.

Two, I've already given in and started using Facebook.  Email is more and more like the old hangout that is now empty.  You walk in the door and there's no one there except some weasely sales guys here and there talking to each other and the email administrator behind the counter, wiping it with a cloth, with a sad look on his face.  Or maybe he just looks tired.  When you go looking, you find that everyone is down at Facebook.

Other conclusions and topics

It's time for email to die.  I'm more and more convinced of this.  I'll say more about this later, though most of the reasons are above.

The archival problem.  Everyone is putting so much effort into Facebook and that record of their lives is now stored there.  What happens as Facebook completes its arc and begins to fade.  How do you personally archive all of your Facebook life?  Do you even care?  Maybe not.  I think Twitter has an even shorter arc and of course no one is sure what will come next.  As each of these (probably shorter and shorter) arcs occur, some of us will worry about how to archive each one.  Some will worry too late and some won't care.  It would be nice if there was some homogeneous medium to put it all in and make it searchable.  Please find something better than XML before we go to far down that road!

More About Area 51

Slashdot has a pointer to an LA Times interview with some former workers from Area 51.  

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in “What Plane?” in LA's March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton “T.D.” Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels.

And...

And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy.that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one's pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's tita-nium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO.

In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while Slater was in charge. “That's a lot of UFO sightings!” Slater adds. Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and “when they'd land in California, they'd be met by FBI agents who'd make them sign nondisclosure forms.” But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of Area 51's UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to log each claim.

The A-12 OXCART was the single-seat (except for a trainer) predecessor to the SR-71 Blackbird.

More about the A-12 OXCART

One interesting story I read (I'll have to go back to find the citation) said the Blackbird was originally called the RS-71 but Lyndon Johnson flubbed the name in a speech, so they went back and changed all occurances of the name to the SR-71.