News from Great Castle Wilson

Category: Tech

Anything technology related that isn’t covered by one of the sub categories.

  • Gerald, how could you?!!?!

    It’s the end of an era, for the Knights of the Lambda Calculus. 🙁

    Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python

  • 6 out of 10

    Here’s something to give you pause:

    60% of world’s population now has cell phone, highest ever

    (and, of course, that link no longer works)

  • Rubik’s TouchCube

    I saw this over at Engadget…

    Rubik’s TouchCube splashes modern day onto timeless classic

    The post describes a new variant on the Rubik’s Cube with no moving parts, which uses a microprocessor with embedded LEDs to display colors on the faces, and touch sensors to recognize gestures that allow you to “rotate” those colors. Here’s a picture from the Engadget post:

    Now, at a purely pragmatic level, this doesn’t make a lot of sense; why would you replace a perfectly good $5 toy with an electronic version that will cost ten times as much. [ed: Gizmodo is reporting that it will cost $150.] However, It did get me thinking again about intelligent devices…

    One way to look at it is that this device is just as a “middle ground” between a purely physical object (i.e. the original toy) and purely virtual expressions of that toy — something like Erno’s Cube for the iPhone:

    There’s more to it than that, however.

    I don’t know whether the TouchCube would be as satisfying to use to actually play Rubik’s Cube as the original is, but assuming they got the responsiveness right, it’s probably close. The thing is though, once you’ve separated the physical gestures from the resulting visuals, you can then start looking at other uses for it.

    Obviously, the TouchCube could be used to play different games; you could, for example, play memory games (à la Simon) on it. If nothing else, this gives it more long term play value.

    Now, imagine building in a little more awareness of its surroundings, then you could do things like:

    • dim the colors so you can play in bed at night
    • play competitively, with feedback from other nearby TouchCubes
    • or how about having all faces on the cube flash red when your cell phone gets a call — I could just see it, sitting on my desk, warning me when I forgot to take my phone out of silent mode, with send to voicemail being connected to stroke the top.

    The possibilities are endless, but there are pitfalls. If we were going to live in a world where intelligent devices like this are common, we would have to ensure that they followed a common grammer for communication so that we didn’t end up increasing the cognitive overhead unboundedly (“So, my chair just jiggled. Does that mean the phone is ringing, or that I have to lose weight?”). They would also have to communicate with each other to allow the most capable device to provide the information (but also just to avoid being blinded when everything in the room simultaneously flashes at you).

    Anyway, there’s nothing new in this ramble; people have been talking about this stuff since the ’60s. The TouchCube just got me thinking about it again, and hopefully this post did the same for you. 🙂

  • NAS

    I have been using a Linksys NSLU-2 with a couple of USB drives attached to it as my home backup/file server, but…

    1. both of the drives are getting old — one 3 and one 4 years — something not good for a system where you are backing up important data (like this website 🙂 )
    2. The NSLU-2 (commonly known as a “slug”) has been very slow to access from XP with the latest service pack — Dennis and Deb were both hit by this.
    3. I wanted more storage space. No, I didn’t actually need it yet, but I was down to my last 150Gig or so.

    Given all this, it seemed like it was probably time to look for a new network attached storage (“NAS”) box. After a certain amount of wandering around on the web, I narrowed the choices down to three boxes, each of which provides two internal drive bays:

    Linksys NAS-200
    Somewhere around $150 locally in Ottawa; comes with 2 USB ports that would allow me to plug in my existing drives; but by all accounts the slowest of any of the available devices
    D-Link DNS-323
    Approximately the same prices as the NAS-200, but significantly faster; only 1 USB port which can be used to control a printer or UPS, but not a drive
    Synology Disk Station DS207+
    Faster and more powerful than either of the others; around $400 in Ottawa.

    Now, you know that I would normally go for the most powerful box, even though it was more expensive, but my normal dealer, PC Cyber [“Hey, man, you got da stuff?”], did not have any in stock, so I ended up getting the DNS-323 and one 1 terabyte drive. (I actually picked up the DNS-323 at Best Buy, because I had been given a gift certificate there for my birthday.)

    Installing the drive was trivial — no screwdrivers or wiring required. Just lift up on the front cover and pop it off, slide the drive into the bay, close the lid. Booting, formatting the drive, and configuring it with separate storage areas for Deb, Dennis and I all went without a hitch.

    I then started copying everything from the drives on the slug to the DNS-323, whereupon I learned two interesting lessons:

    1. Copying files between two fileservers by transferring them back-and-forth across a network with a wireless-N bridge in the middle of it, is somewhere between 4 and 5 times slower than doing it on the other side of the bridge. I learned this when I mounted both servers on my G5, dragged a massive backup directory from one to the other and had it say “estimated time to completion: 29 hours“!
    2. The slug is really slow. I didn’t do a lot of testing, but by my count, copying from an internal drive on a Mac to the DNS-323 was >10x faster than copying the same file off the slug.

    Everything is now copied across to its new home. Deb is happy because I removed three devices, each with a power brick, plus a power bar from her study, and replaced it all with one; I’m happy because we now have more than double the storage we had and can access it much more quickly; and Dennis is happy… Well, actually Dennis isn’t happy because next week is exam week, but that’s another story.

  • Slingbox Solo

    Yesterday was my birthday, and members of my extended family got together to buy me a Slingbox Solo. This was something that I had strongly hinted would be a good gift, not just because it’s the kind of tech toy I enjoy experimenting with, but also because I actually have a particular problem I wanted to solve…

    You probably remember that this summer I moved my home computer space from the basement to Dennis’ old bedroom upstairs. Unfortunately, Dennis’ room doesn’t have a cable hookup, so I couldn’t use the eyeTV that was hooked to my G5 any more.

    The Slingbox would solve this problem by taking the video and audio feed directly from the PVR in the livingroom, encoding it as a digital stream and transmitting it over an ethernet connection. Running the Slingplayer software on a Mac or PC allows you to capture that stream and display it; to use the vernacular, it placeshifts the content. The player software also provides a fully functional remote control that looks (and works) just like the one on the PVR.

    To cut to the chase, I hooked it all up yesterday, and it works exactly as described. I can now watch my TV, complete with digital cable connection and PVR functionality, from anywhere in the house (via wifi). The picture quality is perfectly acceptable and the sound is good — although I sometimes notice some slight synchronization issues.

    Now, when you first install the Slingbox, it makes you configure various things related to setting it up to transmit over the internet, so for grins today I thought I’d try to figure out how to set up the Slingplayer software so I could watch my TV at home, while not on my local LAN. I figured there would be firewall problems, and even if not, there would be various settings I’d have to enter to make the software connect home, etc. In any case, I started the software on my Mac and then began looking through the menus for a hint about what to do, when lo and behold, I got this:

    Yup, just starting the software was all it took. That’s video from my home TV, being displayed on my laptop at work. [And yes, I tested it during my lunch break.]

    Oh, and did I mention they will have an iPhone version of Slingplayer sometime this quarter. 🙂

  • Palm Pre and the iPhone

    The CES reveal of the new Palm Pre certainly was compelling. Apparently, the markets thought so too, as Palm’s stock went up a something like 35% over the course of the day (oh those damn insider trading laws).

    In watching the Pre being demo’ed, it was clear that Palm’s designers had learned from Apple how to build a compelling UI for a phone, and if anything, they had taken the concepts even further than Apple had. All I can say is, if they can just avoid the brain-dead ways that they have failed in the past, Palm will have provided Apple with it’s first real competitor.

    The thing is, delivering on the promise will be hard; early on in the CES presentation, Ed Colligan made a point of saying “We only do mobile” like this was some kind of evidence that they knew what they were doing. Bah! The only reason they needed to even be thinking about the Pre was because Apple, who absolutely did not start out as a mobile company, showed them what people actually want in a modern phone.

    Time will tell. With a hardware keyboard, a fast processor, a removable battery, a better camera and A2DP bluetooth audio, the Pre’s hardware is up to snuff. If they can match that with a flawless rollout and buy-in from the developer community then it looks like they may actually have a chance.

  • MacWorld

    So another MacWorld keynote has come and gone. There was plenty of coverage in the Mac community, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but here’s a capsule summary of the announcements:

    • New versions of iLife and iWork, both of which have enough features that I’ll have to buy the upgrades. From my p.o.v., the most interesting enhancements are:
      • facial recognition and geotagging support in iPhoto
      • (what looks to be) a much improved version of iMovie
      • in GarageBand the ability to learn to play songs by particular artists as taught by the actual artist using video, on screen keyboard/fretboards and control over playback speed, etc.
      • Support for remote control of Keynote presentations via iPhone/iPod Touch
      • MathType and EndNote built into Pages — Dennis will love that
      • Online support for viewing and commenting on iWork documents via a new “iWork.com” site, which is currently free in beta, but eventually will be a pay service. (I’m actually not sure how interesting this is in practice — Now, if you could edit them online…)
    • A new 17″ MacBook Pro, with a non-removable, 8 hour battery life. (Of course, they used to claim 5 hours, but I never got more than 3.5, so this effectively means a real-world battery life of 5 hours — definitely not too shabby.)
    • A new pricing model for iTunes: songs can be $0.69, $0.99, or $1.29. That’s in the U.S., of course, so it remains to be seen what happens in Canada.
    • All iTunes music moving (by the end of Q1) to be DRM free. This is great for people buying new music, but it should be noted that they did not wave the fee for upgrading your existing tunes to the new format. When I checked today, they already wanted >$60 to upgrade my existing purchases, and that can only climb as more tunes get converted. Oh well.

    Some cool stuff there, but I was disappointed that there was still no word on new Mac Minis. My G5 PowerMac is getting pretty long in the tooth now, and since I basically just use it as a server (for this site, among other things) I’d love to replace it with a new Mini with a current C2D and a Gig of storage. Particularly since it now looks like Apple is phasing out support for the G5 processor.

  • iPhones and the need for responsiveness

    There’s a pattern I fall for, about once a day, while browsing the web on the iPhone. It goes something like this:

    1. follow a link to a new page
    2. as the page starts filling in, read the first screenful
    3. do the “scroll up” gesture to make more content visible
    4. watch as the iPhone randomly does one of three things:
      • ignores the gesture completely.
      • waits about a second and then scrolls a few pixels
      • starts loading the page pointed at by the link you happened to be over when you started the scroll up gesture

    Ok, so it’s not like I don’t understand what’s going on here: The poor thing is busy painting the page, and it just can’t deal with the added processor requirements of recognizing all of the events that make up the gesture. It either misses them all, or gets just a few of them, which leaves it either scrolling “a bit” or treating the gesture as a click on the link.

    The thing is, it really doesn’t matter to me whether this is processor limited, or a bug in the OS (i.e. events get lost), or it’s just a bad design (i.e. input handled in the same thread that does the drawing), but the end result is that because I can’t trust what the phone will do in response to my touch, I have to wait until the page fully “settles” before I start scrolling. On pages that have lots of content and go off to ad services to fill in side bars, etc., this means I wait for a long time.

    I mean, c’mon Apple; do I really have to tell you about the need for responsiveness?

    Anyway, as frustrating as this is, the only real reason I started ranting about it is because it got me thinking about Eclipse, the UI thread, and the multi-core CPU trend. We’re pushing more and more work into multiple threads, drastically increasing the contention at the glass. The Jobs framework and UIJobs are interesting, but don’t address issues like recognizing when multiple jobs are attempting to paint conflicting (or even exactly the same) information in the UI… Anyway, there are aspects of the e4 “modeled UI” that are related to this, but it’s not clear that we’ve thought enough about it yet. Hm…

  • The Mojave Experiment is a total failure

    The Mojave Experiment is an attempt by Microsoft to show that if people don’t know they are running Vista, they like it. Essentially, people are given an overview of a “new” operating system called Mojave, and then given a brief chance to try it. Afterwards they are told it’s Vista, and they say things like “Wow! This is much better than I thought it would be.” Sheesh. How shallow do they think we are?

    Here’s the thing: Vista looks shiny, and if you get told that it runs all your old programs but gives you the security you need, then of course you’re going to like it. But if you actually installed that OS on the home machines of all those noobs, and made them live through the constant, irritating security prompts, crashes, and incompatibilities, I’m guessing that it wouldn’t take long for reality to set in and the average rating for Vista of 4.5 out of 10 to once again be the norm.

    God, I’m glad my real computers are macintoshes.

  • Eclipse 3.4

    With a heartbeat that would make a pacemaker envious, another awesome Eclipse release is out. You can get it at the Ganymede home page.

    I am very proud to have had the opportunity to work with such dedicated and absolutely professional people once again on this release, and I’m very much looking forward to getting started on our new challenges in R3.5 and e4.

    I would like to call out the unrelenting effort of the p2 team in particular this year. They did everthing necessary to make p2 a successful part of R3.4, going above and beyond the call every day for many weeks. As a result, I believe we now have the basis for a truly world-class provisioning story, something that will help the whole Eclipse community.